I mean, there's a reason most people ask for difficulty settings in Pokemon games rather than just increasing the difficulty for everybody. Obviously a lot easier to have a wide appeal when people can play how they want. Not sure how feasible it is here though. I haven't even tried this game yet to judge it, wanna see the dev put in a few more updates first. This thread blew up way too fast for such an early version of a game.
The current grind-as-difficulty, with items to make things manageable, is the culprit for things blowing up.
While it has sex in it, this game is still a Pokémon fangame first and foremost, which brings certain expectations if the game is called "hard" or "challenging."
The usual convention for most games on places like PokéCommunity is to use level caps gated by Gym Badges, plus other tweaks to make games easier or harder, such as disabling healing items in battle.
People looking for that will be bamboozled by the game in its current state, because it runs counter to the expected definitions.
(I prefer not having a level cap, because I do like being able to grind my way to victory, used to leave Mt. Moon with a Gyarados every time, but I am also not part of the audience seeking out a "hard" game.)
No, he did say it's rough around the edges because of stuff like that and that he ewill start changing it after completing the base game. You obviously are simply reading the last interactions in which he's annoyed at people. And for fuck's sake, do NOT compare an alpha 0.1 with a finished game.
If I can't take how he's reacting to people into consideration then nothing else matters. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Dunno. I hope he genuinely takes the criticism and doesn't whine like a baby at people providing it and just saying they need to git gud.
But again! He has straight up said it was intended. And if he changes it now, then he has changed the intent of those interactions. Or at least widened his views on how to accomplish what he wants.
second edit to avoid making a second post: i've completed all of the available content up to the end of the demo and, as to be expected of an early alpha, the game needs some serious work so i'm just going to write down my general thoughts in a pseudo-organized pile (the original post has been spoilered to avoid taking up the entire page)
-the difficulty; yes, this is a dead horse, but it's a dead horse worth beating because the difficulty curve is a plate of spaghetti
--opinions on the rival battle have seemingly been split down the middle, but regardless the first fight being against a stab priority user and being required to win isn't exactly what i would consider to be a fun time. i beat it on my first attempt without leftovers or potions, but my experience does not invalidate people who have struggled with it. making winning this fight optional and then directly telling the player they may want to consider using items accomplishes the task of giving the player a wake-up call better than just going back into the meat grinder until essential's questionable ai decides it wants to use status moves 3 turns in a row
--not cheesing the second fight leaves you at a complete roadblock, but going +6 evasion turns it into a total cakewalk and neither of these two situations is fun for the player, coupled with the lackluster selection of pokemon in the starter town leaves you with few options and most if not all of them are sidestepping content instead of interacting with it. grinding for 15 minutes off of the back of level 4 mankeys isn't fun, and i'm going to reiterate that moving the youngster to where the camper is now and reducing the levels of the pokemon in the grass to give you more options instead of just roiding out your starter would be the way i would solve this. you don't even need to make the battle any less difficult (aside from fixing the illegal sets)
--speaking of which ILLEGAL SETS good golly is this a real dealbreaker and rips me out of the game harder than a wonder guard sableye-m. between stuff like zangoose having moves it shouldn't and stuff like the comically underleveled ferrothorn (my dyslexic ass has been reading this as ferroseed the entire time and i was in for a rude awakening at the joey battle) it just feels really amateurish and leans more into the "haha yesss! i can make the HARDEST POKEMON GAME" side of the snakewood-inclement emerald spectrum
--swerving hard into the "too easy" side of things, the lopunny you're given immediately after getting access to route 1 proper completely overshadows basically every other mon in the game barring the starter and a few niche tech options and you could easily just roll the rest of the content with her. i don't necessarily think this is a problem, especially considering how the ability to fuck the rabbit is the thing drawing most people's attention to the game, but i do think that it would probably be better if you go it it at level 15 instead of 20, but on the other hand that would mean more grinding to get swords dance
--i get that this is an alpha and things are incredibly volatile, but the inclusion of an audino experience slot machine before the first gym means that only a small number of people are actually going to be on parity with the gym itself (especially with how overpowering your opponent with raw numbers is deemed a valid strategy.) it may be worth looking into a level cap script or similar to prevent this from happening, or to move access to the training dummy after the gym
--i understand the idea here, decoupling influential trainers from rigid typings and the achilles heels associated with being an ice type trainer in a region with 3 unique ice type pokemon (one of them being regice) is fine in concept but the execution with the first gym leader felt a little scattershot and unfocused and the reward tms were just kind of... there, without really tying themselves back into the gym fight (i don't remember a single one of her pokemon using a poison type attack let alone toxic, but that was more than likely a personal problem coming from overcompensating with my pokemon's level and eating the gym alive)
--i don't like comparing early demos to fully featured games like radred or inclement, but the design ethos here seems to be more interested in blindsiding the player with unexpected level jumps and "gotcha!" moments as opposed to more conventional design choices, of which there are a few shining through like joey's entry hazards or the gym leader's baton pass shedinja ninjask (i am a fraud), even if i don't think they're implemented the best i can see the thought process here
aside from that, there are a few minor hiccups i've noticed. you can't talk to the cashier at the restaurant, but if you take advantage of the improperly set collision for the stove you can walk through that and talk to her from the other side of the counter, and the flow of the conversation leading up to getting the exp share is a little clumsy (instead of ending the conversation outright, maybe bring you back to the dialog choices, and then merge getting her number and the exp share into the same option?)
minor edit: coming back to this, the audino trainer gives you a lucky egg but immediately challenges you to a battle before you get the chance to equip it. tying into the point above, maybe give the egg first and then unlock the infinite exp after beating the gym?
i know that this is very obviously accentuating the negative here, but i would much rather this point be made now and something done to make sure this weirdness doesn't keep happening, lest we end up with a cabal of yesmen defending a level 60 choice band extremespeed tauros camping outside the second gym or something equally hyperbolic
this isn't to say that the game needs to be easy. hell, karryn's prison is regarded as one of the best eroges of all time and that'll chew you up and spit you out faster than a two cent whore in hollywood hills, the difficulty just needs to be comprehensible
the rest ranged from fine to great, the route itself was designed well enough, the towns were aesthetically pleasing, the dialog was generally fine, and as much as i think the subpixels going on in the spritework is weird the original designs themselves are good, and just to remind everybody that "oh right this is a porn game" the available h-scenes are definitely the highlight
"wow ix that sure is a lot of word" thanks i made them myself anyway time for this post to get buried under more difficulty discourse (not like this massive comment overhaul is going to do anything to help in THAT front lmao)
after slamming my head into the wall for 10 minutes against the zangoose i finally gave in and spammed double team, and if this is the template for the "difficulty" on offer color me unimpressed
if you don't cheese them by overleveling your oc donut steel, spamming items, or spamming evasion up, the first two battles are frustrating and then immediately afterwards you're handed an infinity+1 sword that completely trivializes the remaining content, so saying that the difficulty curve is schizophrenic is putting it mildly
even something as simple as moving the youngster to the second major chokepoint and maybe lowering the levels of the wild encounters would do wonders as the selection of wild pokes in the first town are underwhelming compared to the starter while the mons in route 1's encounter table includes stuff like intimidate/charm snubble which actually can be built around
and just for the hell of it i decided to do some research; it turns out that the beefgate zangoose's moveset is illegal
zangoose can't learn fake out or (somewhat absurdly) cut by any means in any generation
and on a minor side note, this whole "git gud" discourse is fascinating to me in that the "strategies" people are providing are the exact opposite of getting good at pokemon
smogon community singles are played at level 100 and ban evasion boosting strategies, vgc is played at level 50 and both of them prevent you from using items from bag, so overleveling spamming items and spamming double team are... not... things, without even getting into this game's difficulty contemporaries like emkaizo or radred
But honestly, it's not that big of a grind, like seriously. And it's not hard, grind for 15 minutes, lose and retain exp if ya need to, and then just have fun through the game.
dev : u have to grind, be smart blabla.
zangoose : critical hit with cut in spite of u having spammed double team and one shot u. oh, and you can't grind anything before that point.
dev : u have to grind, be smart blabla.
zangoose : critical hit with cut in spite of u having spammed double team and one shot u. oh, and you can't grind anything before that point.
After giving some consideration I've decided to git gud which honestly isn't as hard thing to achieve as it is time consuming.
Once you know what to do it's a breeze yes, however railroading players into commiting genocide on local wildlife for 15+ minutes in order to be on the same or reasonable level as the mandatory first battle - not counting the rival battle - to leave the town is not good design. Is it difficult? No. Is it a tedious time sink? Yes, and if you all consider grinding and then spamming one attack + health restoring items once in a while untill everything dies as tactic requiring player skill and deep knowledge of the game then I guess more complex games and their systems need godlike omnipotence in order to engage with them.
At the end of the day this is the age old argument of "it get's better after 100 hours". All I really want from this game is for it to respect my time dial down the level scaling down a bit cause it feels that with every new trainer we go to a new difficulty setting. And if you want players to grind then go for it but don't make it so it requires 5 hours of grind to unlock 30 minutes of gameplay/story or area to explore. So no there is no self improvement that the player needs to undergo it's just about finding and applying a bandaid on a flawed game design.
And yes I hear you it's early alpha yes I get it, if the dev can actually dial it back to a more comfortable place where it's neither too easy or just outright broken then I don't have any issue. Only time will tell where this project is going
"And yes I hear you it's early alpha yes I get it, if the dev can actually dial it back to a more comfortable place where it's neither too easy or just outright broken then I don't have any issue. Only time will tell where this project is going"
This two lines from the guy above me defines the most rational behaviour in these cases. This game has a shitton mistakes, but give it some time before complaining because... You know, it's simply unfair to judge a game like this in its primal stage. Please.
You have to be fair, it still is a pokemon game. Some grinding is to be expected, but with the right team you can skip a lot of the grinding.
If you have the right pokemon and can 2hko the opponent, you can save yourself the grind to get to the level where you can comfortably trade blows 1:1
You have to be fair, it still is a pokemon game. Some grinding is to be expected, but with the right team you can skip a lot of the grinding.
If you have the right pokemon and can 2hko the opponent, you can save yourself the grind to get to the level where you can comfortably trade blows 1:1
Well yes I did grind and it wasn't some grinding, I was squatting in the bushes for about 30-40 minutes total to play for 20 minutes and kinda made me wish there was autoplay feature for the wild mon battles. And the result is this: My starter evolved and is at lvl 20 currently and it is my only pokemon in the team right now and I spam one attack with occasional swap to confusion because type resistances. Also pro tip: getting oran berries rather than regular potions is a way more efficient use of money on healing items because while berries heal 50% less compared to potion they cost 10 times less. Also this playthrough was a fresh one, the first was deffinetly a jarring experience. As it currently stands you don't need to make a decent team you just need to spend time grinding till you're overleveled. That may change later in the game when facing gyms and all that shit but the first impression right now is just that, a game that needs you to do a chore before you can start enjoying it which is not ideal at the moment. We'll see where the road leads as it develops more but for now don't expect good development choices from this, the premise is good the execution is what needs fine tunning
Edit: I steamrolled the first gym with fully evolved starter. Didn't even need to swap to my lopunny, granted they were lvl 40 but still despite the whole "it ain't gonna be like those baby pokemon games that come out these days" aproach to this game I just flattened everyone that went against me anyway
Well yes I did grind and it wasn't some grinding, I was squatting in the bushes for about 30-40 minutes total to play for 20 minutes and kinda made me wish there was autoplay feature for the wild mon battles. And the result is this: My starter evolved and is at lvl 20 currently and it is my only pokemon in the team right now and I spam one attack with occasional swap to confusion because type resistances. Also pro tip: getting oran berries rather than regular potions is a way more efficient use of money on healing items because while berries heal 50% less compared to potion they cost 10 times less. Also this playthrough was a fresh one, the first was deffinetly a jarring experience. As it currently stands you don't need to make a decent team you just need to spend time grinding till you're overleveled. That may change later in the game when facing gyms and all that shit but the first impression right now is just that, a game that needs you to do a chore before you can start enjoying it which is not ideal at the moment. We'll see where the road leads as it develops more but for now don't expect good development choices from this, the premise is good the execution is what needs fine tunning
Edit: I steamrolled the first gym with fully evolved starter. Didn't even need to swap to my lopunny, granted they were lvl 40 but still despite the whole "it ain't gonna be like those baby pokemon games that come out these days" aproach to this game I just flattened everyone that went against me anyway
Obviously you would win every time if grind till exhaustion, but it wont hold your attention very long as a game if you need to be over-leveled to play. I've done some mirror combats for kicks and jiggles and, at the same level, the enemy wins the rng roulette almost always.
If you try to play without grinding, it feels like the game is cheating you. 6 sand attack+ 6 double team? don't worry, the enemy will still hit you every time that matters, with a secuence of crits if necessary. I did the first fight 10 times(on purpose), lvl11 starter and lvl7 zigzagoon, the enemy got 16 critical hits, I got 1. Won once on the third attempt because of a not damaging move(which was the first and last time I saw it use it.).
I also didn't have any trouble with this. I didn't grind at all except to catch a few guys I didn't even end up using.
Maybe the RNG didn't fuck me over.
The first pokemon you get becomes OP pretty fast. Hell, even at the start with a guaranteed hit and soon a guaranteed 20hp move you're already set until you get the steel move that buffs your defense.
And Lopunny is OP from the start and stomps the bridge trainer. By the end of the content, your team is definitely overpowered with just those two.
The difficulty curve is basically "Beat Youngster Joey-reject that camps the town entrance through a bit of luck and a potion, then battle a bit with anyone until your starter evolves the first time. Then you duck the bunny and you basically won the game already."
Honestly, the only thing I am afraid of is that post-Gym 1 content is going to require a straight up mix of comp-strategies and cheese, because why else would they give us the opportunity to overlevel to the max at the end of current stuff?
reading all that whining about the difficulty at the beginning of the thread was cringe, the difficulty is just fine how it is. gj dev, ill be keeping an eye on this game
I'm not sure what you're talking about? That fight was hella-easy and I didn't need to use any potions at all.
Were you aware btw that there are Leftovers on MC's desk right next to his PC? And on the PC there are normal potions? Also, there's no shame in using Double Team and Fake Tears, to increase your evasion (I only had to do it once) and to decrease the opponents Sp. Defense (again also only had to do it once), seemed to be good enough to beat it without using any potions because Leftovers did its work.
