LogFAQs > #971186594

Muscles posted...

My rpg experience is pretty much limited to Skyrim, so I was thinking something like that, as far as skill trees go, so I think a longer adventure would be better

Like, for example, in the fire tree you would have 1 that boosts fire moves, and another that boosts defenses of fire pokemon, and maybe the level 100 could be your fire pokemon get so hot it turns water attacks to steam and they take no damage

The issue with that (assuming you have limited skill points and can't eventually grind out every possible bonus) is that you'd end up gimping your ability to do parts of the game you didn't specialize in. For the most part, you don't end up playing Pokemon only to battle, or catch, or hunt for shinies, or any other one thing. You play it to do some of all of those things, and while you'll probably end up focusing on one over others depending on your personal preferences, if the bonuses from specialization are significant, specializing will make the other aspects less enjoyable.

This is why I thought that would work with an ARPG-style approach: You make different characters that specialize in different roles to contribute to the progress of an overall "account," eventually getting everything running optimally once you get all the specializations online. That said, as much as it's a cool idea, I don't think it would add all that much to the game except to pad postgame play with extra grinds to optimize everything, which isn't the best.

You also can't mess around with types too much. Specializing in one type is exactly the opposite of how teams should be built (you generally want to maximize type coverage so you can respond appropriately to whatever your opponent brings out), and if you tie too many type-specific bonuses to a specialization, that introduces too many extra variables to have to predict when battling (the vast majority of competitive Pokemon is a matter of predicting what your opponent will do and acting to mitigate that). Tweaking type relationships is a massive undertaking, balance-wise.

SpaceBear_ posted...

Everyone talks about how Pokemon hasn't changed and is stagnant or whatever and yet nobody ever comes up with a better idea.

Most of the time, even if every item on their wishlists were delivered, those people probably still wouldn't buy the game. Realistically, Pokemon already does about as much to innovate between generations as can be expected, which people would realize if they stopped to consider why they were ever interested in the games in the first place:

• Explore the world and catch fantasy creatures - Each generation has a new world to explore and new fantasy creatures to catch
• Customize the creatures you catch to personalize your team - Each generation adds new ways to customize your Pokemon, both in the form of new mechanics and by adding new options to or streamlining existing mechanics (new moves, new abilities, new hold items...)
• Use those creatures in turn-based battles against other teams - Each generation adds new battle mechanics to consider
• Battle and trade with friends - Major advances in this aspect have been more limited, but the shift to having online play was a huge step, and since then there have been things like raids that introduce a co-op aspect as well

That's not to say there isn't still ample room to improve some of those things (the battling in particular has a tendency to get bogged down by overexplaining everything, like telling you 3-4 times that your pokemon is confused before it hits itself), but "innovating" more than this would be a fundamental change in the sort of game that it is, and that's just not a reasonable expectation. Most of the people saying "Pokemon is stagnant" just don't actually like the kind of game Pokemon is and instead want to have their nostalgia fuel overhauled into the sorts of games they currently play.