Topic: Pokemon Sword & Shield

@Harmonie you know the southeast has mountains like the blue ridge and smokey mountains they be nice for more ice types and stuff like that due to they more temperate but it subtropical at the coast also the key deer could be a grass/fairy or grass/water type

@Bolt_Strike I think Gen 8 will be closer to Skyward Sword out of the 3D Zelda games.

Would be neat if you could have online beach sessions where you send your team out and then pick out a swimsuit. Then your character changes in classic Pokémon style in the anime. Be neat if there was a pose your trainer struck. Be neat if this were made into a city in alola you visited in the postgame

I was just thinking. It might be more realistic for Game Freak to go back to 2D. Counting forms(like the different Rotom forms and the genies and Giratina and mega evolutions), there are over 1000 Pokemon already. What other game has that many distinct 3D models? 2D sprites might be the way to go.

2D-HD can look pretty good. What do you guys think?

It’s undoubtedly a heck of a lot of work to create them all fully in 3D buuut if ever there is a game series nailed on to sell by the truckload then this is one of them - that alone plus the fact they’d be reusable (along with animations) going forward for a long time (inevitable upgrades aside which shouldn’t affect the pipeline too badly if built properly), I reckon it should be eminently doable for them?

That said i quite like HD-2D stuff too so guess i’m easy on the graphical front - it’s the ‘what’ I want revamping in the pokemon games more than anything - give me pokemon battles anywhere near as good/challenging as some of the boss fights in Octopath (easy recent example) & i’d be drooling!

As long as they keep out Octopath's "Yes let's not have EXP Share exist" feature out of it, I don't mind some harder battles.

I end up giving up on Octopath's last 3 Chapter 4 because the bosses gave me that this is BS rather than "Oh yeah I can defeat them". Probably just me, but hey, I play games for fun.

Back to Pokemon, hopefully it'll be more interesting than USUM/Let's GO then since I end up skipping buying those two :/

Multiple difficulty levels could fix that problem really easily i reckon? If nothing else it could toggle trainers between having say 2, 4 & 6 pokemon. Pretty sure they did that on one of the gens didn’t they? But you had to transport an item between games to do it? Or am I asleep and dreaming this?

Will quickly add, even if a trainer has six pokemon, if they’re too easy or so frequent that you have to run back to a PC every 2 minutes then that’s even worse... Maybe make it so you can choose your battles?

Black and White do have that kind of feature yeah, although I'm a little sketchy how 'easier' and 'harder' it was.

Tbh rather than difficulty levels, I can imagine that it's probably easier for them to have some sort of setting to increase your EXP gain, makes it easier to grind if you want, or you can just turn it to normal for the 'intended' experience.

Difficulties have always been a touchy subject since everyone has different threshold for it.

But I said it's a toggle :V

So if people turned it up to like, idk, 10x and said it's too easy, guess what, that means they are... well... stupid. It's like using the Assist mode in Celeste (the Infinite Air Dash for example) and say it's easy.

An experience toggle seems like the most straightforward way to adjust the game difficulty to me. The games do become fairly challenging if you're under levelled.

Trickier AI could maybe be left to the post - game? Or gym rematches?

Difficulty levels in Pokémon may as well be a meme, especially with what Gamefreak considers giving ‘good’ options.

You all do realize that the EXP share item is already a difficulty toggle that does what you're discussing, right? With it turned off, the 7th gen games were pretty well balanced in difficulty.

Well I mean... Exp share isn't exactly the toggle I said?

I was saying increasing exp gotten, not... Sharing it. Although I'm still glad that it exist of course

Exp share does multiply it though. You get 6x the EXP total with it on now.

EXP Share leads to a weird situation where you don't have to use half your team, and they will still level up. I don't think that's a great solution. Plus, the old EXP Share was kinda useful for training, since the experience was still the same; and that's gone too.

I mean Exp Share is like how people say Dark Souls has multiple difficulties with its classes.

Pokemon is going on to gen 8 but has yet to just implement difficulty options or different modes.

Black 2 and White 2 had difficulty settings.
Hard mode, however, just raised enemy levels and gave trainers more Pokemon... making you level up faster and making the game easier.

Gamefreak never understood difficulty settings, apparently.

Being satisfactorily difficult is hard in Pokemon because a lot of the time, Gamefreak just shoves the most basic pokemon into teams without thought as to how they work together. Raising their levels or increasing the level jumps is cool on paper but makes it come down to more grinding. Which while this is a RPG, I doubt many would see as being fun.

Sun/Moon and Ultra S/M did put more effort into the make-up teams for the Totem pokemon. Which while making them difficult made them fun and memorable. I would prefer if increasing difficulty meant trainers had more than just higher levels but also more interesting and unique teams that work well.

I want a open world Pokemon game. On the issues of levels and linear story line, they can just have areas that you have to be a certain level to go in.

I personally would love a UK region as its very different all over. England more urbanised with their own spin on the houses of parliament would be cool with some kind of pokemon law. Wales has a lot of vallies and and hills to explore, find more grass types. Scotland would have more of the colder climate pokemon up in the highlands.

Been a while since I’ve posted here, but honestly I’m kind of in a mix of excited and expecting mediocrity from this game. My dream (yes I’m aware that I don’t matter ;; ) would be that they actually try to build on the living aspect of Pokémon more. As of late, Pokémon has felt very stiff and lifeless in how the environements and characters feel. It takes away a lot of the charm when the characters and even Pokémon feel like animatronics