the game will send players to Lumiose City — the Parisian-inspired central city of Pokémon X and Pokémon Y

The trailer does, however, hint at the return of Mega Evolutions

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    I hope Palworld has caused enough of a shakeup at gamefreak that they actually make it as good as it should be given their resources, experience, and access to experience.

    Also that they ditch the battle mechanics from Arceus in favor of the mainline ones that actually work, because the floating initiative system was half baked, inconsistent and a bad idea to start with and on top of that I swear they fucked with the damage formulas in ways that made things hit way harder than they should have given the stats and levels involved. The mainline battle engine may be flawed, but it's also the one gameplay mechanic that they seem like they've actually gotten into a pretty good place over the years and every time they try to really shake it up in a spinoff the result is just bad.

    Still going to pirate it for an emulator, though, because fuck nintendo and everything they touch.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      9 months ago

      I liked the idea of the floating initiative thing, but it didn’t work very well. I actually kind of liked whatever fuckery they did to the damage scaling though, it was the first pokemon game in a decade where I lost battles occasionally.

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
        ·
        9 months ago

        I liked the idea of the floating initiative thing, but it didn’t work very well.

        It was very inconsistent and basically would have required a comprehensive overhaul to interact with every move correctly, but they just kind of did a vague "priority and status moves are cheap, everything else has the same a normal flat cost" thing. It also boosted the power of what was already one of the strongest attributes - speed - while all the other stats were nerfed across the board with the flatter, less-stat-intensive damage formula, breaking their "actually almost balanced overall" core system.

        I actually kind of liked whatever fuckery they did to the damage scaling though, it was the first pokemon game in a decade where I lost battles occasionally.

        My biggest problem with it was that it was counterintuitive and RNG heavy, further compounded by the fact that almost all the fights in the game were just wild battles. Like I saw some wild first stage bird that was ten levels lower than a third stage with good stats take off 60% of its health with a non-crit, non-supereffective, average powered move - that's obviating stats and leveling to a comical degree.

        As far as difficulty, Sword and Shield actually had decently tough post-game stuff, which emphasized that trainer battles in the games being horribly undertuned is an active design decision and not the devs being unaware of how to create challenging content. I've played fan games and romhacks that fixed the difficulty in a natural feeling way without shifting the damage way too far towards the move's raw numbers and away from the attack and defense stats.

        That's another "I really hope Palworld has forced them to rethink some design decisions" area, because at this point there are literally two entire generations of pokemon fans who grew up with it and are adults now: their audience is people experienced with the games, and I really really hope that Palworld eating their lunch drives that point home.

        • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          9 months ago

          Yeah I haven’t played Palworld but I’m glad it exists just to show that there is a large, solid audience that wants “Pokemon but not aimed solely at children”

          I don’t need Pokémon with guns and murder but I want it a game with a reasonable level of challenge

    • GinAndJuche
      hexagon
      ·
      9 months ago

      The last two games leaked early iirc, so you’ll be getting early access and mod support that way as well!

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
        ·
        9 months ago

        I played both of them early too, lmao. IIRC I even posted a pre-release review of Arceus on here.

        • GinAndJuche
          hexagon
          ·
          9 months ago

          A pirates life can be really great sometimes, other times Denuvo.