Laughing, because as I read this I’m like 5%-10% of the audience that are fanatics will be livid, but this is overall net good for anyone else and especially new players just picking this one up as their first pokemon game.
The only people that care are people that actually think a turn based RPG battle is anything like an actual competition. Its on the level of a rock-paper-scissors tournament.
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In general, I only really support removing something if it’s like a bug or in some way unintended.
Else-wise I’d rather see it be an option. Celebrating this being gone is like celebrating some shooter or whatever removed it’s hard mode.
If it’s not this, it should probably be made into an option:
There’s a finite limit to that sort of thing, else you end up with some JRPG menu disaster with 4 level deep menus for a game that is still primarily targeted at Teens. The Millennial/old-fanbase bump is certainly nice for the bottom line but I actually think they are 100 percent in the right as designers on choices about hot to carry a major franchise forward vs. but putting out legacy titles with increasing complexity for a diminishing player base.
I basically 100% disagree… or maybe 90% disagree. It depends on how it’s implemented. If it’s like each turn in combat there’s menus 4 levels deep, that’s ridiculous.
If it’s like an option you select once at the start of the game, or like a global option you modify from the home screen before you’ve started playing. You can have hundreds of pages of options for all I care.
Have multiple colourblind modes for different kinds of colourblindness. Have every single resolution supported by modern and future hardware. Have every single graphical setting imaginable. And yes have every gameplay option imaginable.
Hell put it all behind a warning screen that basically says “abandon all hope ye who venture past this screen, we, the game designers picked a best way to play this game, if you change anything beyond this screen, that’s on you”
I’d actually criticize a game that didn’t give me a recommended way to play. I don’t like it when games say “the best way to play is up to you, player”. No fuck you designer, you designed a game, now finish the job, tell me the most fun combination of settings that exist.
My problem comes when, I like many nerds, play a game the recommended way and find something that we’d like to be different. If there’s an option to make the thing the way we want, then yay. If not, then boo, especially if it used to be there and then they took it out.
I think its wrong to conflate design options with Usability options, my original comment was about adding Nth gameplay modifying sliders, not about adding display options to improve the ability of people to play a game. More games need various color blind mode supports as standard options for accessibility for a condition that actually affects a large number of gamers (Since gaming still skews male and colorblindness has always skewed male). In theory I agree with you about the other display options, but realistically that sort of thing will only be realized on PC centric titles. I do think certain games should have tweak-able options, but I also see that as being more genre dependent. I get what you are are saying about having it Default to the designed intent and then allowing you to change it but you can still run into issues with players picking/changing the setting and not understanding the ramifications and then disliking the game and stopping play because it was “bad”. When the targeted Demo is 7-15 this is even more likely.
I do agree that the amounts of options generally given to people is different between pc vs not pc, and that too should change. All options all the time.
I disagree that I’m conflating design options and usability options. Is a difficulty setting design or usability? How about autoaim?
I think asking for more of one is by definition asking for more of the other.
At the end of the day all options are players getting an experience that is better for them, whether that means easier on the eyes, or requiring less button inputs or slowing things down or having the monsters have less shields.
I’m surprised they didn’t just make it an auto-on feature considering how much this specific community is concerned with pedantic bullshit.
you say these things like they all fall under the same aspect of accessibility but I disagree. Having colorblind and visual impairment options is very important, especially for games where visual information is paramount. The simplification of button inputs is more one of mechanical functionality over anything else. Most fighting games absolutely could and should reduce the barrier for executing their moves, but you also need a minimum amount of move "complexity’ to fit 20+ attacks onto one character and make them all possible to be executed at a moment’s notice.
The difficulty thing I would hold out more staunchly on. Difficulty options are nice, but I would hardly argue they are in any way equivalent to accessibility options. For most games, yeah, some people just want to absorb the story or explore stress free, which are things that can be also be addressed with different play modes (like creative mode for Minecraft). For some games, the difficulty is the game, like Dark Souls or Darkest Dungeon. I’m not gonna fun police if people want to tweak the experience to their liking, but I’m also not going to hold it against the designers for giving only one way to play the game. The author may be dead but their vision lives on.
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Also this reminded me that DOOM 2016 managed to include color blind modes that rather than address the specific colorblindness actually replicated that experience for people with normal color perception.
So my lumping them all together actually comes from a place of empathy. It’s funny that you bring up Dark Souls because I used to have exactly your opinion but when Sekiro came out with no difficulty settings at all there was a bit of a stir caused. I was on one side in the ensuing discourse, I defended the actions of FromSoft. But as I watched it play out I saw that there were basically two sides in this fight.
People who wanted to enjoy games, and gatekeepers and I was fighting on the side of the gatekeepers.
Needless to say I’ve since changed my mind. I hope you will too.
I think its a false binary. I do think certain games can and do have a very specific ludic intent that the designers have created and then gone on to explain/defend in interviews as an artistic choice. I fully believe 1. they have the right to do so, 2. it will limit mass appeal, accessibility and sales, and 3. to what degree #2 occurs is wholly at the discretion of the publisher. Arguing that every single game should have a difficulty option is akin to the Studio forcing Deckard’s narration in Blade Runner.
I think that’s a little reductive. Yes, there are way too many shitty gamers that spew toxic masculinity all over everything. But there is also integrity of an artist’s vision and the structure of the media. Is the ancient language of the Bible or the Iambic Pentameter systems of Gatekeeping? One could argue that they reduce someone’s ability to consume the media, but to remove them also removes the actual poetry that forms the piece.
I do not defend difficulty as elitism. I also recognize that 99% of the time in the discourse, that is what’s happening. But I think there is a valid criticism (warning, food analogy) that it is not a chef’s responsibility to create a lemon cake without the lemon because part of their audience doesn’t like the flavor.
We don’t disagree on any of these points. I don’t know anything about Balde Runner, sorry.
I quite like this metaphor.
If adding an easier difficulty to Sekiro was as easy as not permanently removing exp share, that’s not making a removing the lemon from lemoncake, that’s literally just using the sprinkles you used to use.
And on that note, removing a feature you used to have just punishes people who liked it to the benefit of nobody.
I’ll completely agree with you there. In the specific case of Pokemon’s exp share, that is an unnecessary mandate on something that has historically been optional. I would actually place it on the opposite side of what we have been talking about; Nintendo’s outdated mandate of accessibility (in terms of difficulty, not in terms of disability/impairment) that removes friction from the game in its extreme flattening.
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Looks like we’re gonna be getting EV candies and Nature-chaning mints. At this point, the only thing that’s going to require a lot of breeding effort is IVs.
That’s unacceptable! How can you call them Effort Values if you don’t need to put an inordinate amount of effort on them?!
/s
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