Topic: Pokemon Sword & Shield

If you, for some reason, don't want your Pokemon to gain more experience you can now access the box from almost anywhere. You can just swap out team members you think are getting too strong.

Sure, maybe that'll take like, 10 seconds longer than going into an options menu and turning something off, but to me, this is such a non-issue it's beyond silly.

@Heavyarms55 But it's just a stupid convoluted solution to a problem they created themselves.

Besides, it's not like you can access your PC during battle, when you probably want to switch Pokémon more than any other time. I don't understand why they just don't make it optional, especially when they're aware of the demand. Let the players decide how they want to play the game.

@Heavyarms55

Besides it being annoying and a chore (10 seconds 100 times is several minutes of tedious menus), it makes the game easier by removing a major challenge mechanic. If I want to train a new, weaker Pokemon, I no longer have to force it to participate in battle, then switch it out and make one of my other pokemon subject to a free attack. Then, somehow I screw up and my strong Pokemon faints, I either have to try to run away or I'll end up losing the fight.

This is a big part of the challenge in permadeath runs and nuzlockes.

Gamefreak seems to want to insist that everyone have an easy experience with their game

To be honest, i play Pokemon games casually. Don't really get into grinding but still try to finish the game as possible with favorite looking Pokemons. If i already reach post game, i will try to grind some Pokemons slowly so i can play the game without under pressure.

@Snaplocket That's exactly it. I feel like no one at GameFreak has actually sat down and thought about what they want Pokemon to be from the ground up.

To be fair they wouldn't have the time even if they did, because they are making this game with a pretty short development cycle, but that's another part of the problem.

I believe the autosave is just optional now after they backtracked. It's good thing too as it would have made shiny hunting impossible.

As far as I know it was always optional, people just assumed it wouldn't be. Because Pokemon.

In either case I don't see it affecting shiny hunting, since it's highly unlikely the game would go around auto saving in the middle of battle or something like that, and manual saves are still a thing in the era of auto saves.

What's gonna be more annoying is the possible lack of a soft reset function.

About the PC. You can access it at any times, right? Does that mean to can store and retrieve Pokemon after every fight to heal them?

@Snaplocket what

The "what" was meant for the message directed at me. I should've probably quoted it instead.

Good point, does anyone know?

So, it seems that experience earned isn’t properly nerfed. A streamer was avoiding trainers, did zero grinding, and still ended up five levels above the rival. This means the game is easier than gens 6-7. This is a problem, because this time the exp. share cannot be toggled off.

Even more interesting: backgrounds are often inappropriate for the location a battle is being taken place in. Some are just colorful voids of nothing, like you’d see on the old games. This is interesting, because LGPE had extremely accurate backgrounds.

Someone caught a water type by fishing on a dock, and the background became a grassy plane with zero water anywhere.

You could try swapping out pokemon as you play.

Replace older ones with newly catched mons at wild levels.

I did that in let's go for a while. The box made it quick and easy to swap out the pokemon.

@StableInvadeel

That doesn’t gel well with how I’ve always played Pokemon though. Pokemon, for me, was always about finding a team of six friends you fought an ever increasing uphill battle to the top with every step of the way. That’s always the way every game before Generation 6 was designed to be played.

Now I have to rotate two teams? That means I spend less time with the team I actually want to spend time with. Even if I just decide to only use one like I want to, there’s hardly anyway that it’ll be even a slight uphill battle, as the option I had used for the last two gens (turning the experience share off) isn’t even available anymore. They fixed something they had already fixed before, and it wasn’t even broken to start with. I don’t want the game to be hard for everyone, I just want to have options back so that we can all happily go about with our own playstyles like we used to.

Not really rotating two teams. You just get to try different Pokémon before finalizing your main team.

It helped me enjoy the last few games. And no, I didn’t really do it through the whole play throughs, it just lasted until I was comfortable with the current team.

It is a rushjob. Game Freak has been on a yearly release schedule under the Pokemon Company since Sun and Moon in 2016. 2019 should have been an open year and I think a better Sword & Shield would have come out of Game Freak under less pressure.

You know what, I'm just done with this toxic cesspool of a thread. Completely done. You've all made your points a thousand times over and this has become an echobox of resentment. You win, it's all yours. Have "fun" or whatever you call it.

You're entitled to your opinions. And you win. I pity any new members of this site who don't know what they are walking into, if the come to this thread with a simple question.

Don't reply to me. Just ignore me.

Fully agree. I definitely won't be picking up Sw/Sh (the Exp share was the nail in the coffin), but I remain hopeful and excited for what the future may hold.

Come on people, try harder!!!

I'm almost there myself. The new Pokemon designs have appealed to me enough for me to at least check out a few live streams before I come to a definite conclusion on these games, but it is more likely that I skip them.

I too have a problem with how experience is handled now. It sounds like the exact same system they had for Let's Go, which made the game easier, less personal and trivialized the satisfaction of finally getting a favorite to level 100. Before Let's Go, I think I only went that far with 3 Pokemon: Blastoise, Kyogye and Rayquaza. In Let's Go though, I'm sitting on around 30+ and it just feels empty reaching that peak in that game. I imagine that will be the feeling in Sword & Shield.