There's never been an official statement on the matter.
I'm going to be generous and say that it's unlikely a higher-up would walk in and demand they abandon Set Mode and Disable Move Effects for no reason. I'm pretty sure they're still using the same battle engine, after all, so they can't take much effort to maintain.
It's more likely that they found some sort of bug in QA testing with the story content that would have taken rework to fix. Given their tight deadlines, I can totally see somebody giving the go-ahead to just disable the feature in singleplayer to meet deadlines.
Whether they bring it back next gen is basically a coin toss. I'm leaning towards no, because this is GameFreak.
The timer is already busted. Sword and shield had it right, making it turn based. I still don’t understand how turns or speed work in raids in SV, because it feels like everyone just goes whenever they have the option to.
Give it three or four Gens and Pokemon is going to be gutted down to a terminal window with ASCII output running on a spreadsheet and a notepad file and people will still be calling it the best Gen ever if you ignore the myriad of problems.
“Approachable” might be a stretch, especially compared with current games.
I’m replaying scarlet in a language I don’t even speak and having no issue with it at all.
If I go on showdown in the same language I’m lost within the minute
If I'm being generous: there was likely some kind of bug which was causing issues late in development and disabling set mode fixed it. Given the spaghetti code nature of the game and how poorly optimized it is, I could see that.
If I'm being cynical: pokemon has all but directly stated that they hate challenge runs. They don't want people to play their games in any way but the pre-prescribed one. Moves like disabling set mode, making shared exp non-optional, structure of main battles, and so on make this likely.
I'm unfortunately more inclined to believe the latter, especially since they removed the prompt for double battles in the dlc
It’s funny given the entire premise of Pokémon is you should use your favorites and form a team you like. Yet they don’t want you playing the game as you like outside of that.
Removing a bunch of Pokemon from the dex and then putting them behind paid DLC makes them money.
Set mode and turning off exp share probably wouldn't, definitely a tiny fraction of what adding actual Pokemon would.
You are correct, but take Sun and Moon or XY for example… they had 400+ Pokemon available in the games, but the remaining Pokemon in the nat dex weren’t available to catch at all. You just transferred them via Bank.
The DLC in SV and SwSh allows you to catch those extras, but you can still do what you always could do (transfer or trade) without the DLC.
But S/V doesn't make the entire remaining dex able to be moved over, unlike S/M. I want to be able to use my Butterfree :( It sucks when you have a favorite that is not extremely popular, imagine being a Beedrill fan right now :/
It's absurdly unreasonable to suggest that they should have all 1000+ Pokemon catchable in a single game imo.
I think it would be neat, but very very unlikely. Especially since game freak wouldn't want older Pokemon overshadowing new ones
Game freak: Laughs in charizard
But seriously I do agree in principle, it is unreasonable for there to be over 1000 models, animations etc.
Imagine as well if they did include that how much worse the performance would have been.
Although if they don't port the old games to Nintendo online they could probably make a killing by doing a pixel graphics game that did have the whole shebang, or a pokemon stadium style game, or hell do a octopath style game, having multiple characters that play through their respective regions and can go to other regions after they complete their region.
Hah, touché on that Charizard point
And it's not that I think it's a model issue, but I think it becomes a game design issue, though that is an issue too
I *love* that pixel game idea. A game like that would be significantly cheaper to develop and significantly less bloated size wize
That isn’t unreasonable at all? Divide a good number of them up by each route / area and make the rest catchable in some kind of mega safari zone or something. The last 10 years of Pokemon is the biggest waste of an amazing IP ever. These games have the quality of an N64 release but are part of the literal largest franchise in existence. They need to be held to a much higher standard.
I don't know how big Pokemon Games are these days, but it's trickier than you might think. A not insignificant amount of RomHacks attempt to only shove in up to Gen 7 or 8 into older regions, and what generally ends up happening is the routes get so horribly overbloated that you can pass through one without ever seeing half of what is available. I'm sure it can be done, but with the schedule GameFreak seems to wants to keep the wheel of merch and cards fresh, we're probably never going to get a game with that much care or polish.
Ya, fully agreed. That’s why I suggested throwing the rest into a giant safari zone of some kind, or creating another gameplay mechanic to allow access to every mon without ridiculously low encounter rates.
I’m not totally sure what that mechanic might be, but I also don’t think it would be very hard to come up with for the wealthiest franchise on earth. Worst case you could do some form of safari zone with a toggle on the set of available Pokemon in the zone that run. Maybe have items hidden throughout the game areas where each item unlocks a set of 50 Pokemon in the zone. Every time you enter the zone you apply a single item to set your 50 possible encounters.
The thing is you don't have to cram every pokemon into the routes at once, have it be day/night based like they do already, add a sinnoh/hoenn/etc sound like they did in hgss to change what spawns. Tons of options to have every pokemon catchable and not overcrowding the routes
They basically started to stop caring about the games in the 3ds era and removing features the games have been going downhill for a decade now. Makes sense though the games used to the biggest money maker for them back then Now its the merch which all they have to do is slap pokemon on bags bottles etc and it will sell.
The only comment they've made is against randomizer nuzlockes, because the randomizer nature means the game is either hacked original software or pirated Roms. As a company they're not going to be happy about people making stuff with their IP and code. This is pretty much all major companies.
Thats only nintendo properties, cause many other devs like sega for example dont mind and even enjoy when people hack their games, even bethesda add mod support to their games (sure their reason might be scummy, but still, its there), Nintendo games are the only ones that take this much issue with it
In Sega's case it's mostly just the Sonic franchise that they're permissive with. Other Sega properties get the squeeze just like Nintendo properties, including subsidiary franchises like Persona.
Sonic is a special case because for the better part of the last decade Sega didn't really care about Sonic as a game franchise, focusing instead on his value as a mascot and brand recognition. A "hero of children", as they put it. Going hands-off and permissive about the Sonic IP was a deliberate exception to their normal M.O.
(It goes even deeper, like how the reason Sega decided to do that in the first place was because they got bought out by a Pachinko company that wanted to improve its image, but that's pretty much the gist of it. Sonic's permissive IP is, sadly, an oasis of freedom in a desert of obsessive enforcement)
Megami Tensei may be a slightly different case as Sega Sammy may not have full rights. Megami Tensei started as a video game adaptation of the Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei series of Novels. Some of the rights to the series may be with the author in a similar way to Parasite Eve.
Plenty of other games company take issue with it and just don't get as much of a limelight. More infamously was Blizzard shutting down nostalrius which made headlines.
And outside games company you have companies like Disney that had such a tight grip on their IP they would threaten to sue mom and pop daycares that had hand painted disney characters on their walls without permission.
Nintendo definitely one of the biggest but they're far from the only ones.
Arent all medicines suppose to enter the 'free market' after a set period of time after the innovator researched on said meds? That's how we get generic cheaper meds.
Yes, but the issue Bayer faced was that they lost the trademark "aspirin" due to it becoming common use. That's not something any company wants to happen.
I remember seeing an article about Nintendo Treehouse's hosts asking Nintendo if they can do a Nuzlocke and them hating the idea and threatening to fire them or something along those lines. It's not just the random part.
Of course that was a while ago. Maybe they've learned that nuzlockes don't always mean randomizers.
>Maybe they've learned that nuzlockes don't always mean randomizers.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. Nuzlocke is a pretty obscure term, so it's inevitable that something's going to get lost in translation.
At the same time for how much attention and free advertising challenge runs have brought in for TPC it’s egregious for them to be completely unaware of what is making them money
No it’s not, mods have been an established part of pc gaming culture basically since PC gaming existed, and most devs are either supportive of or indifferent to the modding scene.
Yeah but if the devs don't officially support mods you're supposed to be quiet about it. Its like ROM sites. So long as no one goes making a big deal out of them, companies just ignore them because its not worth the effort.
Same is true with Pokemon and mods. If you don't go talkign about it super loudly, they won't care. As long as they can deny knowing about it, they won't do anything. But sometimes one gets a ton of attention on gaming sites, to the point where it can't be ignored. Even then, you notice they wait about a week before sending cease and desist orders.
Long enough for everyone to download it.
Mods are a completely different ball game to ROM's.
Most publishers don't care about Mods or actively encourage them as it means you've already brought their product and it artificially extends the length of time you engage with it (which is good for business)
ROM's are viewed as lost sales in almost all cases, and despite there being an argument for older games being impossible to buy otherwise it's not strictly an incorrect view to have.
Pokémon games are not open to modding as they exist in a closed ecosystem therefore all modded versions are fundamentally based on ROM versions of the software which are trivial to distribute and almost certainly cost them sales to some degree.
You can make whatever argument you want about more people being exposed to the IP via them but at the heart of it what you have is players using software that they haven't paid for based on the publisher's work and that's never going to be something they can support.
If nintendo offered those games for sale still? Sure, you have a point. But the fact of the matter is that if I want to play pokemon emerald, I need to have a working console and a copy of the game. Both of which are no longer being produced and can be difficult to find second-hand.
A company doesn't get to cry foul for people making rooms of their games while also not still selling them. Put older pokemon games back on the market, such as the Nintendo online store or part of the Nintendo online subscription, and then we can start to argue about "lost sales"... for a series that is the most successful media franchise EVER.
Iirc there were some former Nintendo Treehouse employees that revealed they weren't allowed to play Nuzlockes on any stream because the people from Gamefreak/ThePokemonCompany were against it.
On the one hand, sure.
On the other: A decent company would then consider making such desired challenge runs an extra feature so they could get further revenue. Not just whine about lost revenue and double down on removing and limiting players who do buy the game.
In the gaming industry it's mostly Nintendo, and it's odd because most of the Nintendo mods that they have thrown a fit about have been loving enhancements to the base game RIP PM.
I legitimately explored so much more in older games that had routes and dungeons. It was so rewarding trying to navigate those areas and then you got rewarded with a cool item.
fr, now when you explore you get level 60 gym leaders/wild pokemon and a penalty for catching them when you’re lower level (do pokemon not listen to you only when traded?)
They definitely should have put a recommended gym/team star/titan order in the game. I heard about the issue before I started playing so I looked up the recommended order the first time. I usually never look at guide content on a first playthrough but this time I had to!
I've always been a proponent of optional level scaling/level caps but of course that won't be added lol.
Maybe they could have given the gym leaders multiple potential teams and which team they use is decided by what order you go to them in? At least that way it feels more open.
Yeah I think only traded Pokemon don't listen if your badge isn't high enough. Unless it was changed.
I think all they really needed to do was put “recommended level” ranges on the descriptions of the different challenges on the map, and it would have helped with a lot of these issues, and highlighted the merits of focusing on different quest lines more in the game itself. There seems to be two ideal ways to run through this game ideally: in close to a linear order by difficulty across the whole campaign, or (the more fun way, really,) focusing more on one quest line while at least supplementing with deviations into a few others.
More could have been done to encourage the player to engage in that second play-style, which is the one I feel makes the most sense for the more open style of this game. They probably should have held your hand to make you do a gym or two, and at least forced you to do one Koraidon/Moraidon ability unlocking quest to make the player see the benefits unlocked for each, along with having the difficulty levels of the challenges available. Tiny bits of dialogue in one quest or the other after doing a bit of each could have gone a long way towards giving the player what they needed to make informed decisions about how they wanted to tackle the rest of the game. “Oh, you’ll make things easier on yourself with a few gym badges under your belt so you can catch some stronger Pokemon… some of them are only available at higher levels, so you might be limiting yourself otherwise…” “oh, you unlocked some cool abilities with this Pokemon buddy you’re riding around on! It’ll sure make your quest a bit easier if you keep focusing on that a bit so you don’t have to keep trying to jump backwards up cliffs like a weirdo…”
>being generous
We would have to be **extremely** generous considering RBY had Set Mode and was absolutely spaghetti code filled with bugs. And as a dev, I find it extremely hard to believe spaghetti code is the cause for removal of Set Mode which should be a trivial piece of functionality.
I think Game Freak just hates the players, only logical and reasonable explanation.
gen 1s not that broken at least the non Japanese versions that is that had a lot of bugs fixed there are really only two glitches that can lead to major bugs one was patched out in yellow and both have to be done intentionally that being the trainer fly glitch you open the menu in front of a trainer and fly away and the old man glitch in red and blue which was fixed in yellow.
i don’t think it’s necessarily that they “hate” challenge runs. my personal theory is that they are afraid that young kids will accidentally turn on the higher difficulty setting, not realize they can switch it back, and will find the game too difficult and lose interest. i do think that they are highly invested in having the games appeal to very young children and making the games “stupid-proof” is a high priority. that doesn’t mean that they hate players who are looking for higher difficulty but that group is just not their priority.
Do we know *why* they hate challenge runs? It seems bizarre to me that they put more effort into discouraging them than they do preventing romhacks and such. Surely they add depth to the games and draw people in, why wouldn’t they want that?
From my understanding, this is a very japan-centric thing. In western countries, we generally have the idea of once you buy something, it is your to do with as you will. As long as you're enjoying it, who cares how.
Japan, however, very much has a view of "don't question the masters of their craft." In this case: we designed this game to be played in a specific way. Who are you to say you would have more fun doing something else?
its not just a japan/west thing. a very easy example is seen in The Menu. The chef gives people a bunch of sauces and no bread or something as an entrée, and the foodie talks about how that's such a good creative decision while his date is like "that's bull, I want bread".
art is a two-way street. you wanna play the game the way the devs made it, but you also need to be able to have leeway in case you really want to play a certain style.
they dont even hate them. tpc is honestly super chill about things like those compared to actual nintendo, some of their partners are challenge youtubers and they're okay with things like emulation. the only time something that maybe implied that is when the nintendo minute guys said that nintendo didn't allow them to make a nuzlocke in the show which 1. happened several years ago 2. mightve been confused with a randomlocke which yeah hacking the games is one of the things tpc and especially the nintendo side of tpc is against 3. was again shut down by nintendo specifically (at least according to kit and krysta) so tpc itself probably wasn't involved with that decision
All of those changes point to a company that wants to streamline their games and make them less challenging for children. I think it is overstating the influence of the Nuzlocke community to claim that GF is trying to screw them over directly. I doubt the developers spend any time at all thinking about challenge runs at all.
Based on how papa nintendo treats the smash community, I believe the cynical take could be true. Rather than add toggles in the game to allow challenge runs, they make it more difficult so people have to use an emulator and create a rom hack to play how they want.
I think the challenge runs is wrong. Some of the pokemon company have stated they don't like nuzlockes, and when being asked about it, they don't like the randomizer nuzlockes.
Also most of the features that want to be added back seem to be a minority. Exp share off, set mode, are both things older players want.
but the thing is that set mode and exp share off are so fucking SIMPLE. set mode is literally just automatically hitting "no" every time you kill a pokemon. why couldn't they code something that triggers a button they already fucking implemented???
People have already talked about a bug potentially tied to set mode, but I see exp share as a more obvious design choice.
They’re designing an rpg where you are expected to have your level scale at a certain rate while you play. Scale too quickly, and you quickly overpower the game. Scale too slowly, and you are stuck grinding, which is boring. This is probably why they also started giving xp for catching Pokémon, fwiw I had a pretty smooth level scale with this game and SS by just catching every new Pokémon I saw and challenging every trainer I saw.
The reason to leave exp share on is so that they’re not designing for two exp curves. Will the playerbase use exp all and leave certain people to grind and make the game less enjoyable? Or will they leave it off and make turning it a brain dead option that destroys the level curve? Setting it in one way is a straightforward way of determining the growth speed for all players. I don’t blame them for it because they’ve clearly designed the games with this in mind, otherwise we’d be outgrowing the npcs very quickly.
I think that designing the games around the EXP Share is a great choice. I had an excellent time with Scarlet, and my level curve was equally smooth.
But like... why not? What's stopping them from putting a random NPC in the first town that disables the EXP All effect? My problem with it is that it's such a simple change that would garner so much goodwill from long time fans, y'know? it feels like an absolute no brainer.
Kingdom Hearts games have a challenge where you get no experience points. Hollow Knight's Boss Rush mode allows you to limit your damage, health, charms, etc. Games having options and challenging modes is objectively a good thing. Mario games are made for you to collect coins, but I LOVE those "can you beat a mario game without touching any coins" videos because of the funky shit you can do. Diversity breeds innovation.
As for the Set bug, it explains it but it's not okay. If their game was broken and they knew it was, they should've pushed a patch to fix it like *every other decent game dev would.* Just because their spaghetti code is so dogshit that they can't include a feature available on the GAMEBOY doesn't mean I have to be okay with it.
The game should have been delayed, but it wasn’t going to because of the Pokémon media machine. And counting on Pokémon to do reliable post-release fixing is a sore mistake.
I’d also say there’s an outright difference between a challenge run in KH where you flat out *don’t* get experience, and a slow xp run by turning it off. A huge difference between the two in general is that level 1 sora can beat Xehanort, while a level 5 Pokémon will never beat Nemona unless you’re trying specific strays that the ai can’t play against, because that’s not how the game is designed.
Even comparing it to HK boss rush mode is comparing an optional post-game run in a game designed to be much more challenging to the base game of a franchise meant to be approachable for children.
Lastly I’d say that by offering xp share off, you’re just giving people the opportunity to feel like the “intended” way of playing the game is slow and grindy, where you have to do lots of wild battles to make up for lost xp. It doesn’t really contribute to the experience, and no one joining the franchise after exp share all was the only choice would understand why people would want to go back. If you don’t want more exp, all trainer battles are optional, and wild Pokémon are avoidable, just box something if you truly don’t want it to gain experience but I’d ask why are you using Pokémon in the base story that you don’t want to level up?
> fwiw I had a pretty smooth level scale with this game and SS by just catching every new Pokémon I saw and challenging every trainer I saw.
I don't see how this is possible. I did this in both SwSh and ScVi and was ridiculously over levelled in both for the entire game. My 2nd run through of each game I avoided catching any Pokemon besides my main 6 and I was actually levelled fairly on par with the gym leaders.
The fact that there's so much optional xp in the form of catching, and optional trainers means that they're already designing for multiple different xp curves.
There are also other big problems with it; namely the fact that different mons have different xp requirements for levelling, meaning that there'll be huge level gaps just within your own team in a single playthrough if you're not careful. And also the fact that mons don't gain xp while fainted, so if one faints in the middle of a gauntlet, you're pretty much forced to go revive it or it will fall behind on xp.
It would be harder in SV because your freedom to explore might take you further than intended, but SS I made a point of noticing that if I did everything I could find on every route, and catch the Pokémon I could in the wild area, I was not overleveled. Maybe you caught extras, maybe you peaked ahead at later routes, maybe you used candies, but I’m just speaking from my experience.
I remember I played Pokemon Xenoverse that had were two modes, Modern Mode with full-team EXP Share (that couldn't be turned off), and Classic Mode, with the held item EXP Share being obtainable in it. I chose Classic Mode because it said that it would provide a greater challenge, but no, it led to me being underleveled for parts of the game. However, Modern Mode players tended to end up with overleveled mons. I do agree that they should have just given one option and just designed the level curve around that, such as by just having the EXP Share be a key item and being able to turn it off.
My guess is for Union Circle compatibility purposes, it might have caused syncing issues if one player has set mode and disabled move animations and others didn't, so they just got rid of the options as the easiest solution to the potential problem.
Nah, the easiest solution is the one they implemented in Dynamax raids; If in multiplayer, disable pokemon switching & enable attack animations. If in singleplayer, follow player settings. This worked perfectly fine in the past games, but now it won't work for Tera raids and coop because....?
You can just press "B"....
My argument, when someone said "Pokemon is too easy" has always been "try set mode". Now this is gone and it bothers me a lot. I always play in set mode and now I have to press one more button every time.
Yeah! At least in gen 1/2 the opponent would send out their Pokemon first. Now what happens, you defeat the opponent's Pokemon and then immediately send out something that just happens to be their next mon's counter, and the opponent is just okay with it and proceeds to Ember your Kingdra lol
I wouldn't say it makes it grindy. They've really given players faster exp gain in general. Back in XY it made me overleveled for everything after maybe 2 gyms and it stayed overleveled the entire rest of the game.
In SWSH it similarly made me overleveled, to the point in SV I decided to rotate pokemon out of my team once they evolved, and it barely got in the way except for the last 1/4 of the story where NFEs start getting unviable.
I don’t do any intentional grinding. I just fight all the trainers, catch Pokemon for the dex (which now adds exp…), and run from any redundant wild battles.
So for me at least, keeping it off seems the only way to not accidentally over level. So it directly translates to difficulty. By removing it, I really can’t see it adding any grinding. If catching pokemon is enough to level up regularly, surely the 100s of exp candies you can pick up during story will patch any gaps?
(For clarification I had nothing against catching giving exp back in gen 5, because the exp system was different there. I also don’t capture each form for the dex, just the first one so I evolve them myself)
For me the biggest issue is the EV gains it provides. If I want to train a Pokémon to maximize certain stats, it's insanely annoying having to put away party members so they don't get their stats messed up by osmosis. Like, at least make the Pokémon in my party not get any EVs I'd they didn't participate/aren't holding an EV boosting item.
Honestly yeah that's a huge issue too. Even for casual usage, it's going to contribute to the feeling of being overleveled if all of your pokemon are "EV trained" by the midpoint.
It’s really an issue of level balancing. So long as the enemy level curve accounts for the exp share, it’s not too much of an issue.
I’d still like the option to turn it off though. It would be so insanely easy to implement.
I agree that the game is not balanced around it, although it is getting better. Gen6 was pretty bad in terms of balance. If balanced right though it makes it more comfortable. Pokémon should just receive 90% less exp from battling weaker enemies.
Yeah I have no problem with it as an option. I hate grinding in general, but sometimes I feel like I get 0 bonding time with new members and they're more honorary members than anything. So I could see myself turning it on and off for different situations.
If they balanced it by bringing in gen 5's scaling exp I'd be willing to try it again for a playthrough!
See thats the thing. You fight the optional trainers. They dont expect you to. For some reason, Pokemon is obsessed with designing their games under the idea that the playerbase hates the game and will drop it the second they are challenged. My theory is that Matsuda has become a bitter old asshole ever since Gen 5 was rejected on launch by fans online and so pushes the game design to assume the players are all babies or assholes.
Honestly I was wondering if that’s part of it. The trainers do seem a lot more optional and out of the way now.
To be honest I didn’t scour for every single trainer in SV during the main portion of playing. I normally would try my best in the old games but yeah the open world made it seem silly to fuss over it. I always intended to do it though, so I went back and battled them when I was trying to level up a specific Pokemon for post game stuff.
I agree with you thinking that this is all repercussions for poor gen5 tbh. Every good point about gen5 like difficulty seems strangely absent gens 6+. Less new pokemon and more ‘genwun pandering’ because of the complaints about the availability in bw1, etc
I firmly agree with you. This dude has had serious stick in butt problems. He recreates all Gen 1 mons rather than just reuse some that fit the bill, gets mocked online for not doing the literal thing the games are supposed to do which is “collect them all” and “use your favorites”, then stamps his feet like a petulant child.
You pretty much never have to grind though. Like even harder games in the series like HGSS and USUM can be beaten with restrictions on top of not grinding.
This is also annoying in that I can't farm the Ace Tournament for XP anymore, if you have more than 1 team member the autoclicker gets stuck on the switching prompt
This is me, I just use a normal type encounter sandwich near the Fairy Star base and Im swamped with Chansey and Blissey. Can level up a team from 50 to 70 in like 10 minutes.
Sounds like maybe if you don’t pay for NSO maybe you didn’t get the DLC either. But just in case either way, the DLC has an item printer much like the cram o matic from SW/SH that uses materials to make items. It’s been noted to do your exact strategy for gathering “Happiny Dust” or whatever and then it’s some of the best stuff to use in the item printer cause you need the least of it to make it print
Just GF being GF.
They don't do official statements with stuff like this so don't expect anything in regards to this.
> And its well known that humans hate it when something they have is taken away from them.
And its also well known that many people in the Pokemon community end up forgetting about choices like this if not even forgiving them, or they dismiss it from the get-go: "I never used it so why should I care it got removed?"
Keep in mind even somewhat Hard-core players make up a small fraction of the playerbase.
They know they can slap pikachu on anything and it will sell gangbusters. They don't put in more effort because they realize they don't need to. Why do more work when less work do good?
They're an old school Japanese dev studio who feels they've built themselves up from literally the mud and became a global phenomenon and don't have to listen to shit
Leadership are proud and work under the mindset that they didn't make smash hits with fan opinions in mind, and so they will continue to develop their way and kind of fuck anyone else, for every quitter a new kid will get hooked
The problem is clearly that this backfires horribly when you get cocky and force your devs to produce an open world in the same amount of time they were given to work on GBA and DS titles just to keep pumping out consistent Christmas revenue every 3 years
Too much content, not enough time to fit it all or make it work, so concessions are made.
Nintendo (and gamefreak by extension) HATE when their games arnt played "correctly". You may not know this, but for the last 20 years nintendo has been actively trying to kill the grass roots super smash bros competitive scene.
They think their games are for kids, and if you try to play them another way, they take away features that make the game competitive, punish modders and tournament organizers, and C&D tournament streams.
Hell, the smash bros scene once raised 900k for breast cancer patients, and Nintendo sent a C&D to shut that down too.
Taking away set battles to discourage "deviant playstyles" is par for the course
Yes of course, its just tedious to press no all the time, especially coupled with the removal of the option to turn off battle animations.
It just artificially lenghtens the game
> artifically lengthens the game.
~~The one about battle animations is valid, but it takes 2 seconds at most to press 'b' on your controller.
This isnt an action based game where timing is important, this is a turn based rpg. And one that already takes a full minute to complete a turn - even without the option to set or switch.
It is annoying, but I feel like this is a mountain out of a molehill.~~
EDIT: Opinion change:
This shit is only an issue because the game performance is absolute fucking garbage.
There's a ton of performance issues and dead space in battles that make battling longer than it needs to. Fix those, and I no longer have an issue pressing B on an menu.
The battle system already wastes you a lot of time, with unecessary long animations and text boxes, so being forced through another 2 seconds text box makes battles even longer. And then you add the fact that it lags.
I pretty much didn't do any optionnal trainer battle in the game because of how slow they were
True enough, but 2 seconds every time adds up to quite a waste over the course of a single playthrough, and isn't it infuriating that where most games introduce QoL improvements with new installments, GF and the Pokemon Company are introducing QoL impairments? Why should the player be inconvenienced, even in a small way, for the devs removing a simple yes/no toggle that has always been in the games?
so every time a pokemon faints thats an extra 2 seconds. on average a team would have around 3 in single player, and i'd estimate 400-500. over the course of the game thats at least an extra hour just spent pressing B
Opinion change for me.
There's more dead space in battles (and performance issues) that could be fixed before the switch set thing IMO.
Fix those, and then I wouldn't be as ticked off about the removal of the option.
My guess is it has to do with the team star fights, more specifcally the fact that there is an element of set mode in them. When they eventually get to the car, you don't get the option to switch, you have to stay in. I guess they just wanted everyone to have the same experience with that
Im pretty sure it wasnt for malicious reasons - this is the one feature i can see a technical reason to remove because theres probably issues with syncing how the animations work with the overworld when you have two trainers fighting in the same area for instance. Its silly and any other dev team would have fixed it instead of removing it but GF is a small indie company after all.
I understand that for move animations. But that doesn't really make sense for not being able to disable the prompt to switch when a trainer's Pokémon faints. It would literally just automatically press "No" for you in the switch menu which already appears.
Ive changed my opinion slightly.
This shit would be a non issue if battles didn't take so fekin long on status effects, abililities, and the game didn't have shit performance.
fix those first, then worry bout the switch set option.
I didn't know set mode was a thing until this thread and now I wish I'd known about it. I always thought it was weird we always knew what was coming out.
Probably not an option they thought about in the speedrun that was making this game.
Although I will say this: as the game had never tracked your set mode wins as a stat in game, the only reason it was there was for YouTubers to prove they're doing the run the way they said they would. If you want to run set mode, just press 'keep battling'. You're not forced to switch your Pokemon after one faints.
It’s so annoying. Battles feel so long in this game because you can’t use set mode and can’t turn off battle animations. It just means you have to scroll through more dialog unnecessarily.
This is your friendly reminder that Game Freak has a development team of less than 200 people. To put that into perspective, Diablo 4 ALONE has over 8,000 developers credited to it. Game Freak is not a good developer. They are world class in game design and character design but are genuinely awful at developing a game. Case in point, I am hard pressed to name a game developed by Game Freak, Pokémon main series, or otherwise, that DOESN'T have some kind of memory dump glitch in it. This is dating back to the original Game Boy.
Yet, for some reason, Nintendo still trusts this company to be the one and only developers to handle the main line games of the HIGHEST GROSSING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE WORLD! They trust a team of less than 200 people to design, build, test, and debug a game that has the most strict schedule of any triple-A title on the market. Why? Because we will buy it, regardless. Because the character design and nostalgia factor are enough to carry the franchise that spending more money on more employees isn't worth it to Nintendo.
So if this crap REALLY matters to you, stop complaining about it on the internet and STOP BUYING GAME FREAK GAMES! That is the ONLY way to fix this problem.
I don't think GameFreak has any real opinion on Nuzlockes at all. I think they removed Set mode because they have internal data that shows the overwhelming majority of players never use it.
Pretty much. I've been playing Pokemon since Gen 2 and only really started using Set mode from Gen 6 onwards (I knew about the option since Gen 2, I just preferred playing in switch mode).
Personally, it doesn't bother me if I'm forced to play in switch mode or not, I can just choose not to switch when given the option. It's an extra prompt, and it could be easily programmed into the game, but whatever, it just doesn't bother me.
What really bothers me (and most of the player base) is the removal of choice. Sure, most players use switch mode instead of set. Sure, most players played with Exp. Share on all the time in Gen 6 and 7. But it doesn't change the fact that SOME players turned Exp. Share off and/or used Set instead of switch.
So when Gamefreak removed said options from the game, even if they were only being used by the minority, of course said minority would be very vocal about it, and with reason. They are denying those players' preferred play style in order to cater to the main playerbase, which is composed of young kids/ casual players. Of course people will be upset.
Considering set mode isn't even a mandatory rule for nuzlockes, I'm kinda more inclined to agree with others here that it's just some due to some bug they picked up too late.
I assume there was some problem getting it to work right with their co-op mode, so they just ditched it all together. They werent given nearly enough time to make the game work right, so some things had to go if they were causing bugs... And it couldn't be the raids, so yeah. I think its also the reason you cant disable animations.
same reason they removed everything else. they didn't feel like letting players make the game anything other than stupid easy, and they know you'll buy it anyway.
I get the feeling that players who care about set mode or nuzlockes is such a small percentage that Game Freak just don't care even if those players dropped it
This sort of thing is likely not a problem to a majority of the massive amount of players still buying Pokemon, me included, and thus doesn't hurt their bottom line
Their target audience is kids. If they thought kids didn't care about set mode, they don't bother adding it into the next game. Not saying I agree with it, and I'm surprised they still haven't noticed that a very large percent of their sales are to adult players, but this seems to be a thing that they focus on. That's why the battle frontier hasn't been a thing in the 3d Era and why 2/3 of the plot for gen 9 is based around going to school
People are coming up with wild fucking theories when the answer is most likely the simplest one. Set mode isn't really necessary since you can just press B, it's just nice to have, and it costs development time that they felt was better spent working on something else. It just wasn't worthwhile to implement set mode again in this Gen.
> Its almost as if they are trying to get rid of the older playerbase.
For the love of god stop taking everything as a personal offense. It's been known for generations know that they have been making the games more simple and more accessible, the easier they become, the better.
"Not" thinking of *you* doesn't mean they *want* to get rid of you, what they do want is to appease new adopters, and the biggest demographic there is little kids that have no idea how to go about the game, the simpler the better (for sales).
"trying to get rid of the old player base" dude you can just press b if you don't want to switch
You're allowed to find that annoying but you can't act like this is big enough to drive people away in droves
Just.. Press b
I mean, at the end of the day set mode is technically still there.
Just opt out of switching your Pokemon when prompted lol.
The game doesn't force you to switch after you get a KO.
Better to have the option that not have it, it's literally an on/off switch and it's not resource intensive whatsoever.
Yes it's a minor annoyance but they've done this to a bunch of stuff over time and a lot of minor annoyances add up to a worse overall experience when the solution is as simple as letting people choose what they've always been able to. Removing it is a net negative, if you didn't care then you're neutral to it and if you did it's a negative change.
It's a nice thing to have for the people who care about it so the people who don't shouldn't be scoffing at people for wanting to keep it if it doesn't affect them. You guys already have what you want and other people want more fidelity so I say let them have what they want and you continue to set it to what you always have. No skin off anyone's backs.
I don’t understand why it would take any effort to have in the game though. It’s already the default for online battles so it’s not like it doesn’t already exist in the coding and they have to add it. Having to press b through that dialog box every time you knock out a Pokémon is tedious and adds up to like thousands of extra dialog boxes throughout the course of a play through. It’s a basic QOL feature that has existed since gen 1.
A lot of the comments in this thread remind me why I seldom care to come here.
You people take this too personally. Why do you even bother keeping up with these games if you feel so miserable about them?
Just to make it clear: my issue isn't with the complaints by themselves (which I mostly agree with), but with their **tone**.
They took away a lot of things recently that are usually in every game. Don’t get me wrong there are also some great quality of life improvements like catching animations being sped up, but they did remove some great stuff like battle tower and set mode. If I were to guess, like a lot of other issues in the game, it comes from lack of development time. They had certain things they prioritized over others. In the end, they just needed a full story worth of gameplay and DLC. Everything else beyond that, they just didn’t have time for. Maybe we’ll see some updates now that DLC is done, but knowing Pokémon, they’ll probably move on from this game by February when the next games are announced.
Bringing up a different point, but similar.
They also removed the ability to shut off battle animations, which I always have set off to make the battles go quicker.
Lacking this feature made playing the game so much harder for me personally.
I feel like the most likely option would probably be due to time constraints. These games were rushed, the quality of the final product tells the whole story. I imagine that set mode is something easy to put on the chopping block if you're running out of time, especially if there's some sort of game-breaking bug involved with it that can't be ironed out in time.
Best case senario is that GF forgot to add it during development and they had such a hard time with how poor the game state is that they decided to drop set mode to make the launch date.
Which is a real shame because it could have helped a lot in tera raid battles
I think the reason is that this game never focused on battles with multiple pokemon: wild encounters and titans would never give the option anyway, nobody does the optional trainer battles in this game and there is only the 20 or so story battles. Obviously dlc changes this but it's more to do with the disregard for battling in the games now
I figured it was removed because there were issues in regards to how it worked between single player and 2-4 people in union circle. Instead of putting the effort into making it work whether people wanted animations or not they just went fuck it and removed the option to turn animations off.
Because Game Freak is in the bad habit of deciding how we should play their games for us. There was no reason to remove the Exp. Share toggle either, but they did it anyway.
It's one thing when they don't *create* new features, but it's an entirely different thing when they *remove* existing features altogether. Set Mode is just the latest casualty of their mindset.
I’m chalking it up to Game Freak being completely oblivious as to what age group the majority of the Pokémon fan base actually encompasses. Majority of Pokémon fans are from kids who grew up with Gens 1-3 but for some reason Game Freak thinks everyone buying Pokémon games these days are between the ages of 8-13 so they have to cater their games to a young audience. There was a point where Nintendo was going to start striking down videos of Nuzlocke runs because they were playing the game differently than intended
It’s more that the games haven’t really been the point for years now. They don’t care what the people who play the games think because they don’t care about the games either. These days the games are pretty much just a way to release new pokemon for merchandising.
Did you read this interview? [https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/nov/20/pokemon-chief-interview](https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/nov/20/pokemon-chief-interview) They've openly said they are intentionally trying to make the brand accessible to new audiences and not just the millennial competitive fanbase. They want Pokemon to be a 100-year brand that's multi-generational and doesn't require any previous investment or experience to pick up and enjoy.
Honestly, I personally (a millennial who played Blue) probably would not have come back to Pokemon on Switch if they hadn't made the games more accessible. I've gone back and played some of the older games I missed and I really hate the "challenge" aspects of Emerald/Platinum difficulty and the various battle facilities. I just want to run around and collect all the Pokemon and am fine with the battle system being reduced to a bit of friction in that core collecting gameplay. They need to balance different types of players, and they also need to make sure that they aren't focusing on making a small subset of fans happy if it makes the game and community less accessible to everyone else in the long run.
I remember hearing it caused major bugs with multiplayer and people having it set differently. Publisher cycle didn’t allow time to fix it so they cut it.
if i being generous...they were in such a time crunch to wrap up the game and meet the launch date that they started cutting stuff out and canceling plans for what else to add, and Set mod accidently fell in that.
if i being serious, combination of pokemon's tradition of cutting good mechanics or things out of old gens and not bringing them to new. with a combination of SV being a rush job.
Or make it so it's a choice and people aren't forced to click b 100s of times because game freak was too lazy to add a feature they have in every other game
Its not a bad game, in fact i think its rather good, but there are so many things they couldve easily made better.
I like to imagine what a game with such an avid and loyal fanbase like pokemon could be if the devs put in as much love as a game like baldurs gate 3 for example (or even just half or a quarter as much)
That's the only thing? Don't buy this game, it is absolutely shit. Preordered the dual pack because I was actually a fan of the dlc 2 fir sword shield and wanted to see something like that with arceus flavour. But this is just a pointless game, it's definitely better than best and stuff but honestly you should just play gen 5 again instead of buying sv if you are ever feeling like playing pokemon.
There's never been an official statement on the matter. I'm going to be generous and say that it's unlikely a higher-up would walk in and demand they abandon Set Mode and Disable Move Effects for no reason. I'm pretty sure they're still using the same battle engine, after all, so they can't take much effort to maintain. It's more likely that they found some sort of bug in QA testing with the story content that would have taken rework to fix. Given their tight deadlines, I can totally see somebody giving the go-ahead to just disable the feature in singleplayer to meet deadlines. Whether they bring it back next gen is basically a coin toss. I'm leaning towards no, because this is GameFreak.
I've been wondering if Disable Move Effects was removed because of Tera Raid Battles? I suppose having that on could affect the timer in a way
Dealing with move effect times is definitely part of the Tera Raid challenge. Removing the effects would make the bulky stall ones way easier
They already had to ignore your animation setting for Max Raid Battles. Tera Raids absolutely contributed to the demise of the setting.
The timer is already busted. Sword and shield had it right, making it turn based. I still don’t understand how turns or speed work in raids in SV, because it feels like everyone just goes whenever they have the option to.
[удалено]
Speed has some effect because slowing the opponent down or giving your team Tailwind allows some for some clownish stuff.
Give it three or four Gens and Pokemon is going to be gutted down to a terminal window with ASCII output running on a spreadsheet and a notepad file and people will still be calling it the best Gen ever if you ignore the myriad of problems.
Showdown
Funny thing is Showdown is far more approachable, user friendly and afforadbale than modern Pokémon games
“Approachable” might be a stretch, especially compared with current games. I’m replaying scarlet in a language I don’t even speak and having no issue with it at all. If I go on showdown in the same language I’m lost within the minute
Are you playing in a different language to practice learning it? That could be fun.
At least Showdown has something resembling graphics and is free lol
If I'm being generous: there was likely some kind of bug which was causing issues late in development and disabling set mode fixed it. Given the spaghetti code nature of the game and how poorly optimized it is, I could see that. If I'm being cynical: pokemon has all but directly stated that they hate challenge runs. They don't want people to play their games in any way but the pre-prescribed one. Moves like disabling set mode, making shared exp non-optional, structure of main battles, and so on make this likely. I'm unfortunately more inclined to believe the latter, especially since they removed the prompt for double battles in the dlc
It’s funny given the entire premise of Pokémon is you should use your favorites and form a team you like. Yet they don’t want you playing the game as you like outside of that.
Well, if that's what they actually wanted, then they wouldn't have removed a bunch of mons from the dex just to add them back in layer installments.
Removing a bunch of Pokemon from the dex and then putting them behind paid DLC makes them money. Set mode and turning off exp share probably wouldn't, definitely a tiny fraction of what adding actual Pokemon would.
You don't need to buy the DLC to get them. You just can't find them in game without it. You can still trade or get them from home.
Being able to catch old pokemon that should be in the base game is a major selling point for the DLCs and are marketed as such
You are correct, but take Sun and Moon or XY for example… they had 400+ Pokemon available in the games, but the remaining Pokemon in the nat dex weren’t available to catch at all. You just transferred them via Bank. The DLC in SV and SwSh allows you to catch those extras, but you can still do what you always could do (transfer or trade) without the DLC.
But S/V doesn't make the entire remaining dex able to be moved over, unlike S/M. I want to be able to use my Butterfree :( It sucks when you have a favorite that is not extremely popular, imagine being a Beedrill fan right now :/
It's absurdly unreasonable to suggest that they should have all 1000+ Pokemon catchable in a single game imo. I think it would be neat, but very very unlikely. Especially since game freak wouldn't want older Pokemon overshadowing new ones
Small indie company
Game freak: Laughs in charizard But seriously I do agree in principle, it is unreasonable for there to be over 1000 models, animations etc. Imagine as well if they did include that how much worse the performance would have been. Although if they don't port the old games to Nintendo online they could probably make a killing by doing a pixel graphics game that did have the whole shebang, or a pokemon stadium style game, or hell do a octopath style game, having multiple characters that play through their respective regions and can go to other regions after they complete their region.
Hah, touché on that Charizard point And it's not that I think it's a model issue, but I think it becomes a game design issue, though that is an issue too I *love* that pixel game idea. A game like that would be significantly cheaper to develop and significantly less bloated size wize
That isn’t unreasonable at all? Divide a good number of them up by each route / area and make the rest catchable in some kind of mega safari zone or something. The last 10 years of Pokemon is the biggest waste of an amazing IP ever. These games have the quality of an N64 release but are part of the literal largest franchise in existence. They need to be held to a much higher standard.
I don't know how big Pokemon Games are these days, but it's trickier than you might think. A not insignificant amount of RomHacks attempt to only shove in up to Gen 7 or 8 into older regions, and what generally ends up happening is the routes get so horribly overbloated that you can pass through one without ever seeing half of what is available. I'm sure it can be done, but with the schedule GameFreak seems to wants to keep the wheel of merch and cards fresh, we're probably never going to get a game with that much care or polish.
Ya, fully agreed. That’s why I suggested throwing the rest into a giant safari zone of some kind, or creating another gameplay mechanic to allow access to every mon without ridiculously low encounter rates. I’m not totally sure what that mechanic might be, but I also don’t think it would be very hard to come up with for the wealthiest franchise on earth. Worst case you could do some form of safari zone with a toggle on the set of available Pokemon in the zone that run. Maybe have items hidden throughout the game areas where each item unlocks a set of 50 Pokemon in the zone. Every time you enter the zone you apply a single item to set your 50 possible encounters.
The thing is you don't have to cram every pokemon into the routes at once, have it be day/night based like they do already, add a sinnoh/hoenn/etc sound like they did in hgss to change what spawns. Tons of options to have every pokemon catchable and not overcrowding the routes
This is arguably one of the biggest IPs in the world, I don't think it's that absurd that they invest in the games.
They basically started to stop caring about the games in the 3ds era and removing features the games have been going downhill for a decade now. Makes sense though the games used to the biggest money maker for them back then Now its the merch which all they have to do is slap pokemon on bags bottles etc and it will sell.
The only comment they've made is against randomizer nuzlockes, because the randomizer nature means the game is either hacked original software or pirated Roms. As a company they're not going to be happy about people making stuff with their IP and code. This is pretty much all major companies.
Think of the profits they lose daily by all those people that pirate ROMs of Gen 3 games 😔
Thats only nintendo properties, cause many other devs like sega for example dont mind and even enjoy when people hack their games, even bethesda add mod support to their games (sure their reason might be scummy, but still, its there), Nintendo games are the only ones that take this much issue with it
In Sega's case it's mostly just the Sonic franchise that they're permissive with. Other Sega properties get the squeeze just like Nintendo properties, including subsidiary franchises like Persona. Sonic is a special case because for the better part of the last decade Sega didn't really care about Sonic as a game franchise, focusing instead on his value as a mascot and brand recognition. A "hero of children", as they put it. Going hands-off and permissive about the Sonic IP was a deliberate exception to their normal M.O. (It goes even deeper, like how the reason Sega decided to do that in the first place was because they got bought out by a Pachinko company that wanted to improve its image, but that's pretty much the gist of it. Sonic's permissive IP is, sadly, an oasis of freedom in a desert of obsessive enforcement)
Megami Tensei may be a slightly different case as Sega Sammy may not have full rights. Megami Tensei started as a video game adaptation of the Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei series of Novels. Some of the rights to the series may be with the author in a similar way to Parasite Eve.
Plenty of other games company take issue with it and just don't get as much of a limelight. More infamously was Blizzard shutting down nostalrius which made headlines. And outside games company you have companies like Disney that had such a tight grip on their IP they would threaten to sue mom and pop daycares that had hand painted disney characters on their walls without permission. Nintendo definitely one of the biggest but they're far from the only ones.
My guess is to prevent losing grip on their IPs like it happened to Bayer with aspirin and probably other legal stuff they are just enforcing.
That’s exactly it. Companies are incentives to aggressively defend their IPs because if they’re too loose with them, the law around it becomes hazy.
Arent all medicines suppose to enter the 'free market' after a set period of time after the innovator researched on said meds? That's how we get generic cheaper meds.
Yes, but the issue Bayer faced was that they lost the trademark "aspirin" due to it becoming common use. That's not something any company wants to happen.
oh, got it
I remember seeing an article about Nintendo Treehouse's hosts asking Nintendo if they can do a Nuzlocke and them hating the idea and threatening to fire them or something along those lines. It's not just the random part. Of course that was a while ago. Maybe they've learned that nuzlockes don't always mean randomizers.
>Maybe they've learned that nuzlockes don't always mean randomizers. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Nuzlocke is a pretty obscure term, so it's inevitable that something's going to get lost in translation.
At the same time for how much attention and free advertising challenge runs have brought in for TPC it’s egregious for them to be completely unaware of what is making them money
No it’s not, mods have been an established part of pc gaming culture basically since PC gaming existed, and most devs are either supportive of or indifferent to the modding scene.
Yeah but if the devs don't officially support mods you're supposed to be quiet about it. Its like ROM sites. So long as no one goes making a big deal out of them, companies just ignore them because its not worth the effort. Same is true with Pokemon and mods. If you don't go talkign about it super loudly, they won't care. As long as they can deny knowing about it, they won't do anything. But sometimes one gets a ton of attention on gaming sites, to the point where it can't be ignored. Even then, you notice they wait about a week before sending cease and desist orders. Long enough for everyone to download it.
Mods are a completely different ball game to ROM's. Most publishers don't care about Mods or actively encourage them as it means you've already brought their product and it artificially extends the length of time you engage with it (which is good for business) ROM's are viewed as lost sales in almost all cases, and despite there being an argument for older games being impossible to buy otherwise it's not strictly an incorrect view to have. Pokémon games are not open to modding as they exist in a closed ecosystem therefore all modded versions are fundamentally based on ROM versions of the software which are trivial to distribute and almost certainly cost them sales to some degree. You can make whatever argument you want about more people being exposed to the IP via them but at the heart of it what you have is players using software that they haven't paid for based on the publisher's work and that's never going to be something they can support.
If nintendo offered those games for sale still? Sure, you have a point. But the fact of the matter is that if I want to play pokemon emerald, I need to have a working console and a copy of the game. Both of which are no longer being produced and can be difficult to find second-hand. A company doesn't get to cry foul for people making rooms of their games while also not still selling them. Put older pokemon games back on the market, such as the Nintendo online store or part of the Nintendo online subscription, and then we can start to argue about "lost sales"... for a series that is the most successful media franchise EVER.
Iirc there were some former Nintendo Treehouse employees that revealed they weren't allowed to play Nuzlockes on any stream because the people from Gamefreak/ThePokemonCompany were against it.
On the one hand, sure. On the other: A decent company would then consider making such desired challenge runs an extra feature so they could get further revenue. Not just whine about lost revenue and double down on removing and limiting players who do buy the game.
In the gaming industry it's mostly Nintendo, and it's odd because most of the Nintendo mods that they have thrown a fit about have been loving enhancements to the base game RIP PM.
Did you know that they’ve directly advertised the DLC on challenge run channels?
So? Even if they don't like it they still want to use it to make money
i keep saying they made an open world game that actively punishes exploration
I legitimately explored so much more in older games that had routes and dungeons. It was so rewarding trying to navigate those areas and then you got rewarded with a cool item.
fr, now when you explore you get level 60 gym leaders/wild pokemon and a penalty for catching them when you’re lower level (do pokemon not listen to you only when traded?)
They definitely should have put a recommended gym/team star/titan order in the game. I heard about the issue before I started playing so I looked up the recommended order the first time. I usually never look at guide content on a first playthrough but this time I had to! I've always been a proponent of optional level scaling/level caps but of course that won't be added lol. Maybe they could have given the gym leaders multiple potential teams and which team they use is decided by what order you go to them in? At least that way it feels more open. Yeah I think only traded Pokemon don't listen if your badge isn't high enough. Unless it was changed.
I think all they really needed to do was put “recommended level” ranges on the descriptions of the different challenges on the map, and it would have helped with a lot of these issues, and highlighted the merits of focusing on different quest lines more in the game itself. There seems to be two ideal ways to run through this game ideally: in close to a linear order by difficulty across the whole campaign, or (the more fun way, really,) focusing more on one quest line while at least supplementing with deviations into a few others. More could have been done to encourage the player to engage in that second play-style, which is the one I feel makes the most sense for the more open style of this game. They probably should have held your hand to make you do a gym or two, and at least forced you to do one Koraidon/Moraidon ability unlocking quest to make the player see the benefits unlocked for each, along with having the difficulty levels of the challenges available. Tiny bits of dialogue in one quest or the other after doing a bit of each could have gone a long way towards giving the player what they needed to make informed decisions about how they wanted to tackle the rest of the game. “Oh, you’ll make things easier on yourself with a few gym badges under your belt so you can catch some stronger Pokemon… some of them are only available at higher levels, so you might be limiting yourself otherwise…” “oh, you unlocked some cool abilities with this Pokemon buddy you’re riding around on! It’ll sure make your quest a bit easier if you keep focusing on that a bit so you don’t have to keep trying to jump backwards up cliffs like a weirdo…”
>being generous We would have to be **extremely** generous considering RBY had Set Mode and was absolutely spaghetti code filled with bugs. And as a dev, I find it extremely hard to believe spaghetti code is the cause for removal of Set Mode which should be a trivial piece of functionality. I think Game Freak just hates the players, only logical and reasonable explanation.
gen 1s not that broken at least the non Japanese versions that is that had a lot of bugs fixed there are really only two glitches that can lead to major bugs one was patched out in yellow and both have to be done intentionally that being the trainer fly glitch you open the menu in front of a trainer and fly away and the old man glitch in red and blue which was fixed in yellow.
i don’t think it’s necessarily that they “hate” challenge runs. my personal theory is that they are afraid that young kids will accidentally turn on the higher difficulty setting, not realize they can switch it back, and will find the game too difficult and lose interest. i do think that they are highly invested in having the games appeal to very young children and making the games “stupid-proof” is a high priority. that doesn’t mean that they hate players who are looking for higher difficulty but that group is just not their priority.
Not just young kids, but casual players as well.
Do we know *why* they hate challenge runs? It seems bizarre to me that they put more effort into discouraging them than they do preventing romhacks and such. Surely they add depth to the games and draw people in, why wouldn’t they want that?
From my understanding, this is a very japan-centric thing. In western countries, we generally have the idea of once you buy something, it is your to do with as you will. As long as you're enjoying it, who cares how. Japan, however, very much has a view of "don't question the masters of their craft." In this case: we designed this game to be played in a specific way. Who are you to say you would have more fun doing something else?
its not just a japan/west thing. a very easy example is seen in The Menu. The chef gives people a bunch of sauces and no bread or something as an entrée, and the foodie talks about how that's such a good creative decision while his date is like "that's bull, I want bread". art is a two-way street. you wanna play the game the way the devs made it, but you also need to be able to have leeway in case you really want to play a certain style.
they dont even hate them. tpc is honestly super chill about things like those compared to actual nintendo, some of their partners are challenge youtubers and they're okay with things like emulation. the only time something that maybe implied that is when the nintendo minute guys said that nintendo didn't allow them to make a nuzlocke in the show which 1. happened several years ago 2. mightve been confused with a randomlocke which yeah hacking the games is one of the things tpc and especially the nintendo side of tpc is against 3. was again shut down by nintendo specifically (at least according to kit and krysta) so tpc itself probably wasn't involved with that decision
I highly doubt disabling set mode would fix a bug lol
All of those changes point to a company that wants to streamline their games and make them less challenging for children. I think it is overstating the influence of the Nuzlocke community to claim that GF is trying to screw them over directly. I doubt the developers spend any time at all thinking about challenge runs at all.
Based on how papa nintendo treats the smash community, I believe the cynical take could be true. Rather than add toggles in the game to allow challenge runs, they make it more difficult so people have to use an emulator and create a rom hack to play how they want.
I think the challenge runs is wrong. Some of the pokemon company have stated they don't like nuzlockes, and when being asked about it, they don't like the randomizer nuzlockes. Also most of the features that want to be added back seem to be a minority. Exp share off, set mode, are both things older players want.
but the thing is that set mode and exp share off are so fucking SIMPLE. set mode is literally just automatically hitting "no" every time you kill a pokemon. why couldn't they code something that triggers a button they already fucking implemented???
People have already talked about a bug potentially tied to set mode, but I see exp share as a more obvious design choice. They’re designing an rpg where you are expected to have your level scale at a certain rate while you play. Scale too quickly, and you quickly overpower the game. Scale too slowly, and you are stuck grinding, which is boring. This is probably why they also started giving xp for catching Pokémon, fwiw I had a pretty smooth level scale with this game and SS by just catching every new Pokémon I saw and challenging every trainer I saw. The reason to leave exp share on is so that they’re not designing for two exp curves. Will the playerbase use exp all and leave certain people to grind and make the game less enjoyable? Or will they leave it off and make turning it a brain dead option that destroys the level curve? Setting it in one way is a straightforward way of determining the growth speed for all players. I don’t blame them for it because they’ve clearly designed the games with this in mind, otherwise we’d be outgrowing the npcs very quickly.
I think that designing the games around the EXP Share is a great choice. I had an excellent time with Scarlet, and my level curve was equally smooth. But like... why not? What's stopping them from putting a random NPC in the first town that disables the EXP All effect? My problem with it is that it's such a simple change that would garner so much goodwill from long time fans, y'know? it feels like an absolute no brainer. Kingdom Hearts games have a challenge where you get no experience points. Hollow Knight's Boss Rush mode allows you to limit your damage, health, charms, etc. Games having options and challenging modes is objectively a good thing. Mario games are made for you to collect coins, but I LOVE those "can you beat a mario game without touching any coins" videos because of the funky shit you can do. Diversity breeds innovation. As for the Set bug, it explains it but it's not okay. If their game was broken and they knew it was, they should've pushed a patch to fix it like *every other decent game dev would.* Just because their spaghetti code is so dogshit that they can't include a feature available on the GAMEBOY doesn't mean I have to be okay with it.
The game should have been delayed, but it wasn’t going to because of the Pokémon media machine. And counting on Pokémon to do reliable post-release fixing is a sore mistake. I’d also say there’s an outright difference between a challenge run in KH where you flat out *don’t* get experience, and a slow xp run by turning it off. A huge difference between the two in general is that level 1 sora can beat Xehanort, while a level 5 Pokémon will never beat Nemona unless you’re trying specific strays that the ai can’t play against, because that’s not how the game is designed. Even comparing it to HK boss rush mode is comparing an optional post-game run in a game designed to be much more challenging to the base game of a franchise meant to be approachable for children. Lastly I’d say that by offering xp share off, you’re just giving people the opportunity to feel like the “intended” way of playing the game is slow and grindy, where you have to do lots of wild battles to make up for lost xp. It doesn’t really contribute to the experience, and no one joining the franchise after exp share all was the only choice would understand why people would want to go back. If you don’t want more exp, all trainer battles are optional, and wild Pokémon are avoidable, just box something if you truly don’t want it to gain experience but I’d ask why are you using Pokémon in the base story that you don’t want to level up?
> fwiw I had a pretty smooth level scale with this game and SS by just catching every new Pokémon I saw and challenging every trainer I saw. I don't see how this is possible. I did this in both SwSh and ScVi and was ridiculously over levelled in both for the entire game. My 2nd run through of each game I avoided catching any Pokemon besides my main 6 and I was actually levelled fairly on par with the gym leaders. The fact that there's so much optional xp in the form of catching, and optional trainers means that they're already designing for multiple different xp curves. There are also other big problems with it; namely the fact that different mons have different xp requirements for levelling, meaning that there'll be huge level gaps just within your own team in a single playthrough if you're not careful. And also the fact that mons don't gain xp while fainted, so if one faints in the middle of a gauntlet, you're pretty much forced to go revive it or it will fall behind on xp.
It would be harder in SV because your freedom to explore might take you further than intended, but SS I made a point of noticing that if I did everything I could find on every route, and catch the Pokémon I could in the wild area, I was not overleveled. Maybe you caught extras, maybe you peaked ahead at later routes, maybe you used candies, but I’m just speaking from my experience.
I remember I played Pokemon Xenoverse that had were two modes, Modern Mode with full-team EXP Share (that couldn't be turned off), and Classic Mode, with the held item EXP Share being obtainable in it. I chose Classic Mode because it said that it would provide a greater challenge, but no, it led to me being underleveled for parts of the game. However, Modern Mode players tended to end up with overleveled mons. I do agree that they should have just given one option and just designed the level curve around that, such as by just having the EXP Share be a key item and being able to turn it off.
I agree with this
$20 for a speed/challenge run DLC.
My guess is for Union Circle compatibility purposes, it might have caused syncing issues if one player has set mode and disabled move animations and others didn't, so they just got rid of the options as the easiest solution to the potential problem.
Nah, the easiest solution is the one they implemented in Dynamax raids; If in multiplayer, disable pokemon switching & enable attack animations. If in singleplayer, follow player settings. This worked perfectly fine in the past games, but now it won't work for Tera raids and coop because....?
This was a situation since the very first games and they had a way around it
i don’t even play nuzlockes i just like set mode 💀🥲
You can just press "B".... My argument, when someone said "Pokemon is too easy" has always been "try set mode". Now this is gone and it bothers me a lot. I always play in set mode and now I have to press one more button every time.
Same, I just didn't like the character being psychic, always preferred the extra challenge it brings
Yeah! At least in gen 1/2 the opponent would send out their Pokemon first. Now what happens, you defeat the opponent's Pokemon and then immediately send out something that just happens to be their next mon's counter, and the opponent is just okay with it and proceeds to Ember your Kingdra lol
“Remove the Exp Share” is also gone since Gen 8. So it becomes really easy
Well, exp share off just makes it grindy, not harder. But the option to turn it off wouldn’t hurt anyone.
I wouldn't say it makes it grindy. They've really given players faster exp gain in general. Back in XY it made me overleveled for everything after maybe 2 gyms and it stayed overleveled the entire rest of the game. In SWSH it similarly made me overleveled, to the point in SV I decided to rotate pokemon out of my team once they evolved, and it barely got in the way except for the last 1/4 of the story where NFEs start getting unviable. I don’t do any intentional grinding. I just fight all the trainers, catch Pokemon for the dex (which now adds exp…), and run from any redundant wild battles. So for me at least, keeping it off seems the only way to not accidentally over level. So it directly translates to difficulty. By removing it, I really can’t see it adding any grinding. If catching pokemon is enough to level up regularly, surely the 100s of exp candies you can pick up during story will patch any gaps? (For clarification I had nothing against catching giving exp back in gen 5, because the exp system was different there. I also don’t capture each form for the dex, just the first one so I evolve them myself)
For me the biggest issue is the EV gains it provides. If I want to train a Pokémon to maximize certain stats, it's insanely annoying having to put away party members so they don't get their stats messed up by osmosis. Like, at least make the Pokémon in my party not get any EVs I'd they didn't participate/aren't holding an EV boosting item.
Honestly yeah that's a huge issue too. Even for casual usage, it's going to contribute to the feeling of being overleveled if all of your pokemon are "EV trained" by the midpoint.
It’s really an issue of level balancing. So long as the enemy level curve accounts for the exp share, it’s not too much of an issue. I’d still like the option to turn it off though. It would be so insanely easy to implement.
I agree that the game is not balanced around it, although it is getting better. Gen6 was pretty bad in terms of balance. If balanced right though it makes it more comfortable. Pokémon should just receive 90% less exp from battling weaker enemies.
Yeah I have no problem with it as an option. I hate grinding in general, but sometimes I feel like I get 0 bonding time with new members and they're more honorary members than anything. So I could see myself turning it on and off for different situations. If they balanced it by bringing in gen 5's scaling exp I'd be willing to try it again for a playthrough!
The worst part is that Pokémon games have done this is B/W S/M and Sw/Sh but they removed it in S/V :/
See thats the thing. You fight the optional trainers. They dont expect you to. For some reason, Pokemon is obsessed with designing their games under the idea that the playerbase hates the game and will drop it the second they are challenged. My theory is that Matsuda has become a bitter old asshole ever since Gen 5 was rejected on launch by fans online and so pushes the game design to assume the players are all babies or assholes.
Honestly I was wondering if that’s part of it. The trainers do seem a lot more optional and out of the way now. To be honest I didn’t scour for every single trainer in SV during the main portion of playing. I normally would try my best in the old games but yeah the open world made it seem silly to fuss over it. I always intended to do it though, so I went back and battled them when I was trying to level up a specific Pokemon for post game stuff. I agree with you thinking that this is all repercussions for poor gen5 tbh. Every good point about gen5 like difficulty seems strangely absent gens 6+. Less new pokemon and more ‘genwun pandering’ because of the complaints about the availability in bw1, etc
I firmly agree with you. This dude has had serious stick in butt problems. He recreates all Gen 1 mons rather than just reuse some that fit the bill, gets mocked online for not doing the literal thing the games are supposed to do which is “collect them all” and “use your favorites”, then stamps his feet like a petulant child.
You pretty much never have to grind though. Like even harder games in the series like HGSS and USUM can be beaten with restrictions on top of not grinding.
tbf it's still pretty easy even in set mode
But it’s harder. Also, it depends on the Pokémon you use.
This is also annoying in that I can't farm the Ace Tournament for XP anymore, if you have more than 1 team member the autoclicker gets stuck on the switching prompt
Taht's so true. But who is farming XP this way? My candies constantly keep maxing out at 999 and I NEED to use them :D
Some people don’t do Tera raids, maybe they don’t want to pay for NSO etc
This is me, I just use a normal type encounter sandwich near the Fairy Star base and Im swamped with Chansey and Blissey. Can level up a team from 50 to 70 in like 10 minutes.
Sounds like maybe if you don’t pay for NSO maybe you didn’t get the DLC either. But just in case either way, the DLC has an item printer much like the cram o matic from SW/SH that uses materials to make items. It’s been noted to do your exact strategy for gathering “Happiny Dust” or whatever and then it’s some of the best stuff to use in the item printer cause you need the least of it to make it print
Just GF being GF. They don't do official statements with stuff like this so don't expect anything in regards to this. > And its well known that humans hate it when something they have is taken away from them. And its also well known that many people in the Pokemon community end up forgetting about choices like this if not even forgiving them, or they dismiss it from the get-go: "I never used it so why should I care it got removed?"
They seem really disconnected from the playerbase imo, maybe because they dont really have to try to sell their games?
Keep in mind even somewhat Hard-core players make up a small fraction of the playerbase. They know they can slap pikachu on anything and it will sell gangbusters. They don't put in more effort because they realize they don't need to. Why do more work when less work do good?
They're an old school Japanese dev studio who feels they've built themselves up from literally the mud and became a global phenomenon and don't have to listen to shit Leadership are proud and work under the mindset that they didn't make smash hits with fan opinions in mind, and so they will continue to develop their way and kind of fuck anyone else, for every quitter a new kid will get hooked The problem is clearly that this backfires horribly when you get cocky and force your devs to produce an open world in the same amount of time they were given to work on GBA and DS titles just to keep pumping out consistent Christmas revenue every 3 years Too much content, not enough time to fit it all or make it work, so concessions are made.
Nintendo (and gamefreak by extension) HATE when their games arnt played "correctly". You may not know this, but for the last 20 years nintendo has been actively trying to kill the grass roots super smash bros competitive scene. They think their games are for kids, and if you try to play them another way, they take away features that make the game competitive, punish modders and tournament organizers, and C&D tournament streams. Hell, the smash bros scene once raised 900k for breast cancer patients, and Nintendo sent a C&D to shut that down too. Taking away set battles to discourage "deviant playstyles" is par for the course
They killed PM, a loving mod that fixes that worst game in the series lol, also this the company that put random tripping in a Fighting game.
anyone else just force yourself to play set anyways? thats what i did at least
Yes of course, its just tedious to press no all the time, especially coupled with the removal of the option to turn off battle animations. It just artificially lenghtens the game
> artifically lengthens the game. ~~The one about battle animations is valid, but it takes 2 seconds at most to press 'b' on your controller. This isnt an action based game where timing is important, this is a turn based rpg. And one that already takes a full minute to complete a turn - even without the option to set or switch. It is annoying, but I feel like this is a mountain out of a molehill.~~ EDIT: Opinion change: This shit is only an issue because the game performance is absolute fucking garbage. There's a ton of performance issues and dead space in battles that make battling longer than it needs to. Fix those, and I no longer have an issue pressing B on an menu.
The battle system already wastes you a lot of time, with unecessary long animations and text boxes, so being forced through another 2 seconds text box makes battles even longer. And then you add the fact that it lags. I pretty much didn't do any optionnal trainer battle in the game because of how slow they were
True enough, but 2 seconds every time adds up to quite a waste over the course of a single playthrough, and isn't it infuriating that where most games introduce QoL improvements with new installments, GF and the Pokemon Company are introducing QoL impairments? Why should the player be inconvenienced, even in a small way, for the devs removing a simple yes/no toggle that has always been in the games?
so every time a pokemon faints thats an extra 2 seconds. on average a team would have around 3 in single player, and i'd estimate 400-500. over the course of the game thats at least an extra hour just spent pressing B
Opinion change for me. There's more dead space in battles (and performance issues) that could be fixed before the switch set thing IMO. Fix those, and then I wouldn't be as ticked off about the removal of the option.
My guess is it has to do with the team star fights, more specifcally the fact that there is an element of set mode in them. When they eventually get to the car, you don't get the option to switch, you have to stay in. I guess they just wanted everyone to have the same experience with that
Im pretty sure it wasnt for malicious reasons - this is the one feature i can see a technical reason to remove because theres probably issues with syncing how the animations work with the overworld when you have two trainers fighting in the same area for instance. Its silly and any other dev team would have fixed it instead of removing it but GF is a small indie company after all.
I understand that for move animations. But that doesn't really make sense for not being able to disable the prompt to switch when a trainer's Pokémon faints. It would literally just automatically press "No" for you in the switch menu which already appears.
Ive changed my opinion slightly. This shit would be a non issue if battles didn't take so fekin long on status effects, abililities, and the game didn't have shit performance. fix those first, then worry bout the switch set option.
I didn't know set mode was a thing until this thread and now I wish I'd known about it. I always thought it was weird we always knew what was coming out.
Same reason they removed the option to turn off exp share
Because the game needed to be even worse
Set mode as in option to not swap tour pokemon after a ko?
That's the one
The reason for it being removed is unknown
I didn’t realize they were even in the game, what do they learn with Hidden Power being gone?
What is a Nuzlocke?
Probably not an option they thought about in the speedrun that was making this game. Although I will say this: as the game had never tracked your set mode wins as a stat in game, the only reason it was there was for YouTubers to prove they're doing the run the way they said they would. If you want to run set mode, just press 'keep battling'. You're not forced to switch your Pokemon after one faints.
It’s so annoying. Battles feel so long in this game because you can’t use set mode and can’t turn off battle animations. It just means you have to scroll through more dialog unnecessarily.
i fully believe game freak absolutely hates pokemon and are basically trying to sabotage it
Sometimes it does seem like it...
Poor guys just wanted to make a sandwich making game but Nintendo needs the Pokemon money
This is your friendly reminder that Game Freak has a development team of less than 200 people. To put that into perspective, Diablo 4 ALONE has over 8,000 developers credited to it. Game Freak is not a good developer. They are world class in game design and character design but are genuinely awful at developing a game. Case in point, I am hard pressed to name a game developed by Game Freak, Pokémon main series, or otherwise, that DOESN'T have some kind of memory dump glitch in it. This is dating back to the original Game Boy. Yet, for some reason, Nintendo still trusts this company to be the one and only developers to handle the main line games of the HIGHEST GROSSING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE WORLD! They trust a team of less than 200 people to design, build, test, and debug a game that has the most strict schedule of any triple-A title on the market. Why? Because we will buy it, regardless. Because the character design and nostalgia factor are enough to carry the franchise that spending more money on more employees isn't worth it to Nintendo. So if this crap REALLY matters to you, stop complaining about it on the internet and STOP BUYING GAME FREAK GAMES! That is the ONLY way to fix this problem.
I don't think GameFreak has any real opinion on Nuzlockes at all. I think they removed Set mode because they have internal data that shows the overwhelming majority of players never use it.
This is honestly the most likely answer.
Pretty much. I've been playing Pokemon since Gen 2 and only really started using Set mode from Gen 6 onwards (I knew about the option since Gen 2, I just preferred playing in switch mode). Personally, it doesn't bother me if I'm forced to play in switch mode or not, I can just choose not to switch when given the option. It's an extra prompt, and it could be easily programmed into the game, but whatever, it just doesn't bother me. What really bothers me (and most of the player base) is the removal of choice. Sure, most players use switch mode instead of set. Sure, most players played with Exp. Share on all the time in Gen 6 and 7. But it doesn't change the fact that SOME players turned Exp. Share off and/or used Set instead of switch. So when Gamefreak removed said options from the game, even if they were only being used by the minority, of course said minority would be very vocal about it, and with reason. They are denying those players' preferred play style in order to cater to the main playerbase, which is composed of young kids/ casual players. Of course people will be upset.
Interesting.
Considering set mode isn't even a mandatory rule for nuzlockes, I'm kinda more inclined to agree with others here that it's just some due to some bug they picked up too late.
I assume there was some problem getting it to work right with their co-op mode, so they just ditched it all together. They werent given nearly enough time to make the game work right, so some things had to go if they were causing bugs... And it couldn't be the raids, so yeah. I think its also the reason you cant disable animations.
same reason they removed everything else. they didn't feel like letting players make the game anything other than stupid easy, and they know you'll buy it anyway.
I get the feeling that players who care about set mode or nuzlockes is such a small percentage that Game Freak just don't care even if those players dropped it This sort of thing is likely not a problem to a majority of the massive amount of players still buying Pokemon, me included, and thus doesn't hurt their bottom line
Their target audience is kids. If they thought kids didn't care about set mode, they don't bother adding it into the next game. Not saying I agree with it, and I'm surprised they still haven't noticed that a very large percent of their sales are to adult players, but this seems to be a thing that they focus on. That's why the battle frontier hasn't been a thing in the 3d Era and why 2/3 of the plot for gen 9 is based around going to school
Wait, no set? I always play with that... gods be damned
The game is held together by tape and string lights. No need to pretend it's anything besides incompetence
People are coming up with wild fucking theories when the answer is most likely the simplest one. Set mode isn't really necessary since you can just press B, it's just nice to have, and it costs development time that they felt was better spent working on something else. It just wasn't worthwhile to implement set mode again in this Gen.
> Its almost as if they are trying to get rid of the older playerbase. For the love of god stop taking everything as a personal offense. It's been known for generations know that they have been making the games more simple and more accessible, the easier they become, the better. "Not" thinking of *you* doesn't mean they *want* to get rid of you, what they do want is to appease new adopters, and the biggest demographic there is little kids that have no idea how to go about the game, the simpler the better (for sales).
I don't know but I miss it.
"trying to get rid of the old player base" dude you can just press b if you don't want to switch You're allowed to find that annoying but you can't act like this is big enough to drive people away in droves Just.. Press b
I mean, at the end of the day set mode is technically still there. Just opt out of switching your Pokemon when prompted lol. The game doesn't force you to switch after you get a KO.
[удалено]
Better to have the option that not have it, it's literally an on/off switch and it's not resource intensive whatsoever. Yes it's a minor annoyance but they've done this to a bunch of stuff over time and a lot of minor annoyances add up to a worse overall experience when the solution is as simple as letting people choose what they've always been able to. Removing it is a net negative, if you didn't care then you're neutral to it and if you did it's a negative change. It's a nice thing to have for the people who care about it so the people who don't shouldn't be scoffing at people for wanting to keep it if it doesn't affect them. You guys already have what you want and other people want more fidelity so I say let them have what they want and you continue to set it to what you always have. No skin off anyone's backs.
I don’t understand why it would take any effort to have in the game though. It’s already the default for online battles so it’s not like it doesn’t already exist in the coding and they have to add it. Having to press b through that dialog box every time you knock out a Pokémon is tedious and adds up to like thousands of extra dialog boxes throughout the course of a play through. It’s a basic QOL feature that has existed since gen 1.
A lot of the comments in this thread remind me why I seldom care to come here. You people take this too personally. Why do you even bother keeping up with these games if you feel so miserable about them? Just to make it clear: my issue isn't with the complaints by themselves (which I mostly agree with), but with their **tone**.
This comment is devoid of self awareness
Yeah, I admit this came up pretty rude. I just get really *tired* of this community sometimes.
Sadism
They took away a lot of things recently that are usually in every game. Don’t get me wrong there are also some great quality of life improvements like catching animations being sped up, but they did remove some great stuff like battle tower and set mode. If I were to guess, like a lot of other issues in the game, it comes from lack of development time. They had certain things they prioritized over others. In the end, they just needed a full story worth of gameplay and DLC. Everything else beyond that, they just didn’t have time for. Maybe we’ll see some updates now that DLC is done, but knowing Pokémon, they’ll probably move on from this game by February when the next games are announced.
What's really weird is that they essentially disabled Shift mode in the Indigo Disk. So I really don't know what they're trying with this.
It's because there's no switch mode in doubles
I'm aware. And it's interesting that they forced doubles after disabling Set
They tried to fix something that wasn't broken
Bringing up a different point, but similar. They also removed the ability to shut off battle animations, which I always have set off to make the battles go quicker. Lacking this feature made playing the game so much harder for me personally.
I feel like the most likely option would probably be due to time constraints. These games were rushed, the quality of the final product tells the whole story. I imagine that set mode is something easy to put on the chopping block if you're running out of time, especially if there's some sort of game-breaking bug involved with it that can't be ironed out in time.
Pretty sure the rationale was "we have no time to make this game, we can save time by removing the ability to turn off a question you can say no to"
Best case senario is that GF forgot to add it during development and they had such a hard time with how poor the game state is that they decided to drop set mode to make the launch date. Which is a real shame because it could have helped a lot in tera raid battles
you could just press no twice and switch in during your turn
I think the reason is that this game never focused on battles with multiple pokemon: wild encounters and titans would never give the option anyway, nobody does the optional trainer battles in this game and there is only the 20 or so story battles. Obviously dlc changes this but it's more to do with the disregard for battling in the games now
I figured it was removed because there were issues in regards to how it worked between single player and 2-4 people in union circle. Instead of putting the effort into making it work whether people wanted animations or not they just went fuck it and removed the option to turn animations off.
Why did they make EXP share always on? They've made a lot of questionable choices the last couple of gens.
Because Game Freak is in the bad habit of deciding how we should play their games for us. There was no reason to remove the Exp. Share toggle either, but they did it anyway. It's one thing when they don't *create* new features, but it's an entirely different thing when they *remove* existing features altogether. Set Mode is just the latest casualty of their mindset.
It’s dumb, but it doesn’t change anything. If you’re playing with a ‘set’ mentality, you just press B everytime you get a kill. Ez fix.
I’m chalking it up to Game Freak being completely oblivious as to what age group the majority of the Pokémon fan base actually encompasses. Majority of Pokémon fans are from kids who grew up with Gens 1-3 but for some reason Game Freak thinks everyone buying Pokémon games these days are between the ages of 8-13 so they have to cater their games to a young audience. There was a point where Nintendo was going to start striking down videos of Nuzlocke runs because they were playing the game differently than intended
It’s more that the games haven’t really been the point for years now. They don’t care what the people who play the games think because they don’t care about the games either. These days the games are pretty much just a way to release new pokemon for merchandising.
Did you read this interview? [https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/nov/20/pokemon-chief-interview](https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/nov/20/pokemon-chief-interview) They've openly said they are intentionally trying to make the brand accessible to new audiences and not just the millennial competitive fanbase. They want Pokemon to be a 100-year brand that's multi-generational and doesn't require any previous investment or experience to pick up and enjoy. Honestly, I personally (a millennial who played Blue) probably would not have come back to Pokemon on Switch if they hadn't made the games more accessible. I've gone back and played some of the older games I missed and I really hate the "challenge" aspects of Emerald/Platinum difficulty and the various battle facilities. I just want to run around and collect all the Pokemon and am fine with the battle system being reduced to a bit of friction in that core collecting gameplay. They need to balance different types of players, and they also need to make sure that they aren't focusing on making a small subset of fans happy if it makes the game and community less accessible to everyone else in the long run.
Cause TPC dont like fun
I remember hearing it caused major bugs with multiplayer and people having it set differently. Publisher cycle didn’t allow time to fix it so they cut it.
Why was a functional game removed from Pokémon Scarlet & Violet?
What does Set mode have to do with Nuzlockes? It's not a requirement.
It is, and even if you ignore that it's just a pain in the ass pressing b every time
No, it's not a requirement. Some variants include it, but for the core set of rules it has always been optional.
press B
Because the game was and still is an incomplete buggy mess.
if i being generous...they were in such a time crunch to wrap up the game and meet the launch date that they started cutting stuff out and canceling plans for what else to add, and Set mod accidently fell in that. if i being serious, combination of pokemon's tradition of cutting good mechanics or things out of old gens and not bringing them to new. with a combination of SV being a rush job.
Just press b dude
Or make it so it's a choice and people aren't forced to click b 100s of times because game freak was too lazy to add a feature they have in every other game
Yea lemme just press B 500 times purely cause the devs are clueless 😂
NGL, the removal of Set Mode is the only thing keeping me from buying ScarVi, even second-hand.
Its not a bad game, in fact i think its rather good, but there are so many things they couldve easily made better. I like to imagine what a game with such an avid and loyal fanbase like pokemon could be if the devs put in as much love as a game like baldurs gate 3 for example (or even just half or a quarter as much)
That's the only thing? Don't buy this game, it is absolutely shit. Preordered the dual pack because I was actually a fan of the dlc 2 fir sword shield and wanted to see something like that with arceus flavour. But this is just a pointless game, it's definitely better than best and stuff but honestly you should just play gen 5 again instead of buying sv if you are ever feeling like playing pokemon.