Topic: Pokémon Winds and Waves

What I said days ago is just my opinion. But I'm just used to the traditional real-time clock in the older gen games. I dunno why & I don't really feel like explaining...but playing Arceus, S/V, & Legends ZA...their in-game day/night progression or whatever...just feels REALLY off to me. Probably why I didn't click with those games much after that. Only BD/SP are the exceptions considering they are GEN 4 remakes, that's a given.

For Winds & Waves...why not let folks switch between real-time & in-game time? I think that's a really good balance.

@gcunit
I think Harvest Moon style time cycle is the best option by making 1 minute in game = 1 second in our real life and we can speed up the process by sleeping like Legends Arceus.

I feel like for a game like Animal Crossing, getting rid of the real time clock- or making it to where people could bypass it will ultimately remove the one feature that makes the game stand apart from others in the genre. Not every game is going to be for every person. I wish more people would understand that it's perfectly fine not to want to play a game because of a real time clock- rather than demanding that the game removes it.

As for Pokemon, it's one of those instances where nothing is really lost if you got rid of the real time clock. These games haven't had it since PLA- and they've been better off for it. Pokopia is the only outlier, and that's because the game is meant to be similar to Animal Crossing in the first place.

One of the other major concerns I have is if they're finally going to do level scaling. They really... can't make it a proper open world experience without one. Yes, SV nominally let you challenge gyms in any order, but without level scaling it wasn't really all that feasible to challenge whichever one you want because you were facing Pokemon whose levels were drastically different from yours and sometimes you needed to use niche strategies to win. So other than that you were pretty much forced to follow SV's scripted, completely insane progression through the world (seriously, who would naturally follow the sort of criss-crossing path through the region that SV's level progression encouraged?). If they truly want to make this a game that lets you explore the world in any order you want the battles need to adapt to your chosen order (if the whole game is too much at least the gyms should scale, it's totally reasonable to have gym leaders have multiple teams based on how many badges you currently have).

Speaking about the Legendaries, what will be looks like for both of them.
One is represent Wind elemental, the other one is represent Water elemental.
Maybe we will see the Legendaries on the next Pokemon trailer.

@Bolt_Strike I agree, both the lack of level scaling and borderline insane correct badge order hindered Scarlet and Violet immensely. It's possible that they'll go the Z-A route and just remove the option to tackle challenges in any order entirely, but if they keep the system, level scaling for bosses is an absolute must.

As far as wild Pokemon go, I could see Game Freak just giving Pokemon spawns level ranges, probably determined by how evolved the Pokemon is, and then just mixing the differently leveled Pokemon around in one area (For instance, there could be an island with a bunch of Level 10-28 Sandile, some Level 30-39 Krokorok, and a few Level 42-64 Krookodile). This way, players can find wild Pokemon suited to their level wherever they are. Also, Exp. Candies have been pretty abundant on Switch so an underleveled Pokemon wouldn't be terribly difficult to train up.

If there's badges, I'd rather they just have different teams and levels depending on how much badges you have if it's still open world.

No level scaling on wild pokemon please. I don't understand why people want it in any game tbh, but I'd rather something more like xenoblade series... Have an area a certain level range, with a few more dangerous pokemon situation.

Hot take: level scaling will not be good for Pokémon. It would just make the game way harder then it needs to be. I prefer to grind and get stronger without the foes I've already fought constantly powering up too.

@Nep-Nep-Freak

In all seriousness though, level scaling would probably be badge based, so gym leaders wouldn't be matching your level necessarily. Rather, any one gym leader would basically have 8 different teams---one for each amount of badges the player may have. Since these teams would be set, you could still over level your team if you absolutely had to (though Pokemon isn't the most difficult series so you should be fine).

@Bolt_Strike I definitely didn't follow the planned path because I randomly walked towards high level pokemon pretty quickly. I used silly but fun strats to capture high level pokemon and then I had Pokemon for quite awhile who rarely obeyed my commands 😆 I think I did the gyms in random order but I was pretty over powered by the time I did more than 2 gyms so they were all easy.

@UpsideDownRowlet, I suppose that is fair, having different teams for every gym leader depending on your badges you have is a fair compromise. I just don't like the idea of wild Pokémon level-scaling, unless it's just one place like the Wild Area in SwSh doing it in the post-game or something like that.

Yeah, badge based level scaling should be the way to go, it's simple enough that you don't have to code a zillion different teams or rely on automated team building that may not provide a proper challenge, and it's also not unprecedented as some past games have used badge count to determine rematch teams. This would just be expanding that to the main story.