Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

To me, it doesn't look like Pokemon SwSh is doing much to change the formula. The wild area is the big change, but I can't tell yet how good that'll be. It may be an impressive open world area with lots to explore, but I'm worried that it'll end up being a fairly boring and empty area with not much going on other than the wild pokemon walking about. Pokemon appearing in the wild might be a revolutionary thing for pokemon, but in this day and age it's not really impressive.

Sun and Moon felt like a bigger change. They replaced the usual gyms with the island trials, and replaced the standard evil team trying to use a legendary to accomplish their goals with less serious thugs Team Skull. Plus the sunny Alola region has a much brighter and different vibe to the previous regions.

In regards to past main series games, my favourites are Platinum, Hg/Ss, and B2/W2. These had a lot of areas to explore and didn't feel as linear as some of the more recent games. There were also plenty of side activities to do in them.

I wasn't very keen on B1/W1, mainly due to those games being very linear, and I didn't care for the story.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy I wasn't a huge fan of Z-moves and Megaevolutions, personally. It all felt a bit too elaborate, too Digimon-y for my liking. Gigamaxing is kind of silly, but it retains a simplicity to it that I like.

RE: DQVIII vs DQXI, there are some very notable differences between the two. Primarily in terms of how progression happens. VIII feels very open throughout, and has a large world map that you can sort of wander at your leisure. There's still an order to events, of course, but the game doesn't really push you in the direction of where you need to go. DQXI, on the other hand, doesn't have a world map that you can traverse on foot, but much more linear zones that funnel the player toward the next story location. It's very much like FFI vs FFXII. The blacksmithing is ostensibly similar to alchemy, with the key difference that alchemy in DQVIII is very much about random experimentation, whereas you can only smith items in DQXI if you have the recipe. And recipes are found on bookcases, in chests, as side-quest rewards, etc. Smithing is also a minigame on its own that requires some level of skill and planning (and a smidge of luck) if you want to make +3 items. In pretty much every respect that it differs from VIII, I vastly prefer XI. But, yes, it IS extremely old-fashioned, and the feel of the narrative does echo VIII quite a bit.

@crimsontadpoles The biggest accomplishment of SuMo, imo, was the move toward much more realistically scaled environments. No longer did the player character feel like a giant who was 1/4 the size of the Pokemon center.

I really liked Lumiose City in X/Y, though. That was the Novigrad or New Vegas of the Pokemon universe. It was nice to explore an actual large city for once.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Gigantamaxing is, a bit. But, like Dynamaxing, it only seems to be something that's triggered in specific special locations, so you can't really rampage through the game with it like you could with Z-moves. In that sense, it'll be more setpiecey than anything, I think.

Just saw the leaked Pokemon. A few are stupid looking (like the one you described), but I'm liking most of the new designs.

Some of the leaks are contradictory, so it'll be interesting to see how things pan out RE: the post game.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy To be fair, I confused the terms a bit earlier as well, and they sound stupid in the first place. Basically, Dynamaxing is when the Pokemon get BIG for a few rounds. Gigantamaxing is the one that feels sort of like mega evolutions, because the Pokemon actually change forms. Also, I think any Pokemon can Dynamax, whereas only a few specific types of Pokemon have alternate, Gigantamaxed forms.

It's going to be interesting to see how these games are received once, for better or for worse, copies are out in the wild. Pokemon Sw/Sh AND Death Stranding landing within a week or so of eachother is going to make this a pretty wild November for the industry.

I'm definitely avoiding all spoilers from now on. It's neat going in blind for once.

Will Misty be in this one? I always had the hots for her if I’m honest.

(Like, when I was young. Come on.)

@kyleforrester87 What gaming character do you have the hots for these days?

@JohnnyShoulder Brock

@JohnnyShoulder @kyleforrester87 Clearly a bit of Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelesen. If they are good enough for Kojima...

Eh. I get that some people like to drag along their collection of Pokemon from one generation to the next in order to keep a living dex, and fully understand the frustration there, but I genuinely don't understand why people care otherwise. The regional dex is roughly on par with other Pokemon generations, so it's not like you're encountering fewer Pokemon than usual throughout the game. If anything, this game will have the most representative sample of Pokemon in any generation, given no favoritism seems to have been shown to any one generation, as is usually the case.

It would go a long way toward making people more accepting of this if Pokemon Home has actual gameplay elements to it and, more importantly, is included with NSO, I think.

It’s akin to realising you don’t, for the most part, play MGS2 as Snake.

The event where you can unlock a Pokemon SwSh theme should be live in Tetris 99.

Just watched a friend play the Switch version of Witcher 3 in person. I mean, it's obviously not as pretty as the PC version on ultra settings, but, I have to say, in handheld mode, it is damn impressive. The game doesn't look like it should be running on the system.

I think what helps is that the game's art direction is so vibrant and gorgeous that you're distracted from the low resolution textures. Honestly, what distracted me way more than the graphics was the framerate: going from looking at the game running at nearly locked 60fps to 30-ish is a bit jarring at first. But all the console versions target that framerate.

@Ralizah My mate showed it on his Switch in work a couple of weeks back too, and I came away with similar impressions as you. I couldn't tell if there was any wonkiness when he was playing, however he was only wandering around. I imagine it starts to struggle when there are various enemies/lighting effects on screen.

I tend not to notice the difference in frame rates. It's when there are sudden changes whilst playing, that is when I find it jarring.

@JohnnyShoulder I didn't notice any issues when he got into combat. Maybe it bogs down in really busy encounters, but I doubt it. I've heard Novigrad is basically fine, and that is, far and away, the most demanding part of the game in terms of performance.

I'm not really a fan of a consistently low framerate, either. It's why I struggle to enjoy games like the first 3DS SK game and older 3D games like Ocarina of Time and Shadow of the Colossus these days.

So GameFreak confirmed that the EXP All is always on, no option to turn it off. And they suggested that if you want to play it the normal way, by training the Pokémon you use in battle, you should box the rest of team.

I mean, FFS, how difficult is it to make it optional? Let the players decide how they want to play the game. And they realise it's a thing people want, which makes it even worse.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yeah, it's just so weird, and kinda stupid IMO. It wouldn't be difficult to implement either. We shall see. I've seen someone post on Reddit that they've avoided grinding and even trainers, yet they were still severely over-leveled during important fights (they mentioned 6-7 levels above the rival for example). That sounds like an unbalanced game, but like I said, we shall see.

No wonder that the fan-made hacks and games are so popular. Because people play the games for different reasons, and they've slowly shifted the games ever since gen 1, so people have different expectations, most of them can easily be solved with the ability to turn on or off certain mechanics, or different difficulty modes. In a way, it feels more restricted than the GameBoy games were.

@Octane I mean, I'm sure players were overleveled. The EXP system sounds similar to the way it was in Let's Go, and Let's Go made it insanely easy to level up quickly early on (maybe later on, too; I don't know, because I hated those games and stopped playing due to the lack of wild Pokemon battles and the horrible art style). Also, I've yet to play a Pokemon game where my Pokemon weren't dramatically higher leveled than the enemy trainers' Pokemon I came across, even with games that had the EXP share item.

The challenge in Pokemon games was never in the campaign (outside of Whitney and her stupid Miltank, anyway). It was in the eugenics simulator found within and competitive battling scene.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Pokémon Colosseum and Pokemon XD were JRPGs on Gamecube developed by a different developer, so it's not like this approach would be anything new for the property.

I think it'd be a good way to pad out generations AND keep certain segments of the fanbase happy.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yeah, that was in Black and White. But one of the two had an easy mode, and the other contained the hard mode. And both were locked behind the credits. Incredibly stupid design choice IMO.

I don't know. I find the older games more difficult than the newer games, so to me it feels like they're making things too easy.

Couldn't care less about the story in the games though, I prefer minimal cut-scenes and mandatory character interactions, because it's just all very flat and emotionless in Pokemon games, even though it always seems like the fate of the entire world is at stake.

@Octane The "difficulty" in old Pokemon games is mostly down to the QoL features older gens were missing. It's the same reason most old JRPGs are harder than modern ones.

Actually, in some ways, SuMo was one of the harder Pokemon gens. Especially with that often infuriating reinforcements mechanic in wild battles.