[Discussion] Trainer Difficulty

I am pretty curious what people think about the difficulty of trainers in the original games, and where they think they should be in fan-games.

Personally, I have never really felt like I had to earn a Badge or the Championship title. Maybe I grind more than the average player before these battles, but I personally feel like there is little challenge to official games outside of making sure you have enough Pokeballs (of whatever type you like) and actually having to put in the time catching and leveling. Beyond that it all seems a little... easy.

How do you feel about the difficulty level in the official games, and how would you like to see them in fan-games?

I have always felt the difficulty of official games have been too low. (Except for Charmander-starter Brock in Gen 1. That was true pain...)

IMO the average difficulty of random trainers in general isn't too bad, since they are meant to train you, not challenge you.
Gym Leaders, however have been way too easy.
Which is why I'm upping the difficulty on Gym Leaders and Evil Bosses and such, trying to give them strong teams with good combos and a higher level of Pokémon.

I do however not think one should up their difficulty-level simply by increasing the level of their Pokémon, because that just requires brainless grinding against wild Pokémon, which isn't very fun.

The experience should be streamlined, so that you have the possibility to beat them on the first try, if you've challenged and beat all trainers and a sufficient amount of wild Pokémon along the way.
For a player who instead has avoided a lot of Trainers, and just ran away from wild Pokémon, the difficulty should be distinctly harder.

Well, I love starting a fresh game, because I think the start of the games were always the best part, once you get past gym 3, it becomes a walk over and becomes mindless grinding... Which I hate doing, I tend to get through the whole game with no higher than a level 50, with the easy use of a level 70 Mewtwo, Heatran or Giratina... Gifting players easy EXP and Pokémon were my only flaw... In some cases, I actually used a Bulbasaur right up until gym 5 in Red and Blue, and in Gold, Silver and Crystal, I tried to only use special Pokémon, until I came to Whitney and her normal types :( .

The trainers themselves, as tImE said, were to "train" you, not test you... They weren't created to beat you so you keep whiting out and having to travel for miles... Again... We all no what Mt Moon and all those other caves were like after losing... I myself would prefer a trainer to have the chance to beat me, providing you can counter a high level Pokémon in the future... So making a trainer or gym leader own a level 40 at gym 3, would make the game more grinding than it would make it harder.

Maybe adding an easy, medium, hard, level in the options and changing move sets depending on which you select may be a solution... I can't tell you how many times I've got to Lance's last Pokémon in Pokémon Yellow and I'm using a Pokémon with 20HP and Lance uses Thunder Wave 3 times in a row and I win... Just because his Dragonite is a high level, does not make the game hard.

Another thing, they could've added more tactical battles, only using Water types, like when Ash got to the Orange Islands and used Squirtle and Lapras for the obvious events, it's things like that which make a game hard.

The problem I have is trainers never really react to you. Use a super effective move? Tank it. Been put to sleep? Tank it. Moveset? Tackle at lvl 50. The last straw is the game telling you what's switching in, that's one of the biggest offenders. The player always having an extra pokemon or two just as revive fodder in important battles is another.

I hope to address the above in my game and hope every fan game does, because the more game that are challenging the better.

I always found the first gym to be a real "challenge."
It's the only tough one, you're just starting out, you dont have many pokemon, you're still forming a team, and your pokemon are weak.
The second one is usually easier, you had the time to train and things are going smoothly, perhaps you defeated some grunts, they were low level organization members, you're probably preparing for some real battles later.
By the third one its not challenging because they have 3-4 pokemon max, and they keep that number up until badge 6, where they start having 4-5 pokemon;not to mention in unova they only had 4.
Compare that to your 6 pokemon every time, thats too easy.
The battles themselves arent too hard and some pretty cool, but its the overwhelming trample you bring to the battle that makes it a cinch. It loses all difficulty when you bring an overwhelming team to smother the opponent.
Another thing, Gym leaders are solely there to test the trainer, to test his or her will, to train them as well, but for the elite four. They train the trainer through his journey to becoming the champion.
The games have yet to emulate the anime, where their pokemon and teams change based on your journey progression.
I would love something apart from Gym battles - while they're all nice and fun, I would love to have challenges, some where you use only a single type, like Nickaloose said, maybe some sky battles? ones where you have to use only a select number of pokemon? ones where you have to defeat an entire string of opponents, then finally the gym leader all in one go, no leaving to heal, one after the other, every time until you finish, etc.
They are meant to train you, and test you, and prepare you to reach and be able to challenge the elite four, but you can be trained in so many ways (just look at the orange island arc, lmao), and tested to handle so many things the original games dont even pay attention to.

tImE said:

I have always felt the difficulty of official games have been too low. (Except for Charmander-starter Brock in Gen 1. That was true pain...)

Click to expand...

Me too! I only have a good difficult at E4 remaches (the one at BW was very good). The Challenge Mode at BW2 was a very interesting addiction (except that this mode must be available since start).

For me, challenge is one of most important parts of a game. This is even a pain at good games like Zelda: Wind Waker, Final Fantasy 6, New Super Mario Bros and so on.

Fangames must have an easy start (keep in mind that average players aren't too skillful) and hard latter/secret bosses. A Lv75-100 boss at main story is too much, your pokémon will reach at the final form too early. If you game is long and you wish to have a huge difficult, just put less normal trainers for grinding.

Restrictive challenges like sky battles are interesting, but I didn't like these things in order to proceed at main story. Horde Battles and Reverse Battles are very insteresting, you can made good challenges with these things.

If you fangame is too easy, consider using Difficult Modes.

More difficult isn't always better even if the game is too easy. You have to give the player a wide variety of options and strategies or you just go from easy to impossible. And in most Pokemon games, you don't have the tools to actually get better. You can't easily switch up your moveset or stat spread. Add to that that most people want to use the Pokemon they want to use regardless of how strong they are. That means there's really nothing you can do except grind and nobody likes to grind in a fangame.

If players want to use their favorite "underpowered" Pokémon, there's not much we can do about it and still make the game fun for the rest of the players.

We simply have to try to make the game interesting to as broad of an audience as possible.
You can't focus on the ones who have it the hardest if they are in minority, you need to make the majority happy for a game to be successful.

I still try to make options available though.
In my game, I have a higher difficulty than normal, but in response, I also make available strategies to beat them.
Like proper areas to train, or Pokemon with a type-advantage available nearby.
I think that's the optimal way to make a game at least.

Slightly hard, with several options to make it easier.

Grinding is part of the game.

While I understand that people like to player using their favorite pokemon available, I also understand that games are supposed to present obstacles for the player to overcome. More challenging opponents seems like a natural obstacle, and pushing that method does not simply ignore the fact that people like to play with their favorite pokemon, it just forces them to play the game even more than someone who is willing to flex for optimal team set ups would have to... I hardly see how that is a bad thing.

If you take the challenge out of the game, you no longer have a game... You just have the operator doing trivial or completely pointless things.

tImE said:

If players want to use their favorite "underpowered" Pokémon, there's not much we can do about it and still make the game fun for the rest of the players.

We simply have to try to make the game interesting to as broad of an audience as possible.
You can't focus on the ones who have it the hardest if they are in minority, you need to make the majority happy for a game to be successful.

I still try to make options available though.
In my game, I have a higher difficulty than normal, but in response, I also make available strategies to beat them.
Like proper areas to train, or Pokemon with a type-advantage available nearby.
I think that's the optimal way to make a game at least.

Slightly hard, with several options to make it easier.

Click to expand...

Actually, you can choose to appeal to whomever you want to. There's no need to reach some mass audience. I'm sure many people around here will tell you that they're working on a game for their own satisfaction and not the satisfaction of the players.

But sometimes it's desirable to think about how players are going to react to what you're creating. And if you want your game to be challenging, then it might be worth it to think about how your game is challenging players. What tools do you give the player to meet the challenge? If the answer to that is grinding or using a specific Pokemon, then you should be aware that adding more challenge means asking the player to grind.

OP says grinding is part of the game, but that's his choice. You can make players grind or you can give them ways to get around it. The same goes for party construction. You can force people to use specific Pokemon or you can give players ways to win with the Pokemon they have.

With all that in mind, I'll give out some recommendations on how to approach difficulty and challenge:

1. Reusable TMs are your friend. Give a wide variety of moves for players to slap on their Pokemon and they'll be able to try out different battle strategies.
2. You want to avoid over-centralization to a few powerful Pokemon. Most people want some freedom when choosing their party so make sure you're not railroading your player into using specific counters. This is where TMs with good distribution will help.
3. Players can be kind of unpredictable so you need to make sure you're not counting on them doing sidequests and finding secrets. Don't count on a player having an item or a Pokemon if you hid it somewhere.
4. You don't need to make the levels higher to make the game challenging. In fact, at higher levels the player's team becomes a lot less flexible because it's harder to pick up new Pokemon.

Keep in mind I'm not an authority. If you're willing to break more conventions, you can get more creative. These are just my recommendations for the fangames that I play that try to be 'difficult'.

You can make players grind or you can give them ways to get around it. The same goes for party construction.

Click to expand...

The way to get around grinding is to optimize your team... This is true even in the original games. The way to get around optimizing your team is to grind. Both of these methods are evident in the original games, yet you sound as if raising the bar on these is destructive to gameplay...

I feel like all of the official games were pretty much a pushover. Just get yourself a Pokemon with decent speed and attacking stats, make sure you can hit all types for at least neutral damage, and voila, your team is ready to take on the world. Take a few healing items and you're downright invincible.

99% of the times this is all you had to do to get past all opposition in-game. I have never tried to wall my opponent , simply because attacking them head-on would save me lots of time (and PP).

In order to make my game a little more challenging, I tried to force the player into using different strategies, rather than just making my opponents more powerful. For example, giving that rich kid at the end of route one around 8 full restores would make it tempting to use embargo, wouldn't it?

Arma, you are a demon... XD

Still, I'm trying similar tacticts.
For example, giving my Electric-type Gym Pokémon with supereffective attacks vs Ground-types and giving others Levitate or Magnet Rise, simply to stop the player from sweeping with a ground type.

Still, forcing the player to use specific move, like embargo in your example, is going a little overboard imo, though, I admit, it sounds like I'd love to hate to play vs that rich kid. XD

I'm trying to challenge the player to simply think outside the box, or force them to play once versus the Gym Leader to scout their Moves/Pokémon before actually attempting to beat them, by giving their Pokémon versatility and counters to their weaknesses to stop the "High-Attack-Speed-and-Movepool"-tactic.

But at the same time, I try to give "underpowered" Pokémon some buffs to base stats and better movepools or abilities to actually allow the player to play their favorite Pokémon!

ЩѻƦḽᶑʂḽдƴƹƦ™ said:

The way to get around grinding is to optimize your team... This is true even in the original games. The way to get around optimizing your team is to grind. Both of these methods are evident in the original games, yet you sound as if raising the bar on these is destructive to gameplay...

Click to expand...

You already said that you don't mind having people grind in your game so I don't know what you want to hear. The dichotomy of grinding versus "optimization" (which I'm presuming means picking specific Pokemon given the context) is not something that you have to put in your game. I already pointed out some ways to get around it, giving players tools to use a wider variety of Pokemon without grinding. But if you don't do any of that and you increase the difficulty, then you're limiting the number of teams that can get by without grinding. If you care about avoiding grinding, and you care about giving players lots of different ways to play the game, then you should probably make sure that the difficulty in your game isn't squeezing the number of viable teams too much.

How does increasing something like the opposing Pokemon levels for each encounter, bottleneck the player?

That is the beauty of IV's and EV's, they allow you to actually overcome statistically better Pokemon as level disparity decreases and ultimately increases. As I said, grinding is an inherent and integral part of the original games for the very reason that it allows players to use their favorite Pokemon over Pokemon who have better stats, that they may not like using.

While simply increasing the levels of opposing pokemon is not really the most effective way to ensure a rise in difficulty, it serves as a baseline for the objective and takes advantage of the systems already put in place rather than having to go off on a tangent of design, construction and execution. This is particularly important when you consider workload and account for the time it takes to correct any bugs outside of simple stat adjustments.

It is not like a simple level adjustment is going to force the player to grind for an extra 2 or 3 hours before a major encounter if they decide to eschew optimal team selection based on stats...

tImE said:

Arma, you are a demon... XD

Click to expand...

Oh my bad, I forgot to say something. XD He doesn't challenge you to a battle, so it's not obligatory to beat him. You'll get a fair warning from him and other trainers in the area that the guy plays dirty. That and some of the wild pokes in the area come with the move embargo. So it's not too hard... It still gives you a bit of an extra challenge. Maybe I should put Taunt on his Zigzagoon!

tImE said:

But at the same time, I try to give "underpowered" Pokémon some buffs to base stats and better movepools or abilities to actually allow the player to play their favorite Pokémon!

Click to expand...

I'm doing the same thing as well, though it is kinda tempting at times to give extra boosts to Pokemon I like. It also ensures that enemy teams aren't too predictable

Worldslayer608 said:

How does increasing something like the opposing Pokemon levels for each encounter, bottleneck the player?

That is the beauty of IV's and EV's, they allow you to actually overcome statistically better Pokemon as level disparity decreases and ultimately increases. As I said, grinding is an inherent and integral part of the original games for the very reason that it allows players to use their favorite Pokemon over Pokemon who have better stats, that they may not like using.

While simply increasing the levels of opposing pokemon is not really the most effective way to ensure a rise in difficulty, it serves as a baseline for the objective and takes advantage of the systems already put in place rather than having to go off on a tangent of design, construction and execution. This is particularly important when you consider workload and account for the time it takes to correct any bugs outside of simple stat adjustments.

It is not like a simple level adjustment is going to force the player to grind for an extra 2 or 3 hours before a major encounter if they decide to eschew optimal team selection based on stats...

Click to expand...

I don't know what you're asking. It bottlenecks players that don't want to grind. You can have your players grind if you want to (or EV train or whatever). I think grinding is a waste of time in novelty games but you can do whatever you want all the same.

Even in the official games, if you play with a sub par team, you still have to grind... what are you not understanding about that?

Worldslayer608 said:

Even in the official games, if you play with a sub par team, you still have to grind... what are you not understanding about that?

Click to expand...

In the official games, the difficulty is low enough so that a variety of teams can avoid grinding. When you increase the difficulty, you require more teams to grind that didn't have to before. There are ways around this, but it takes a little more effort.

So yeah, anyone can do what they want. But I'd recommend not trying to just tack on increased difficulty. If it's not important to your game, then it's probably more trouble than it's worth trying to do it right. And if you do it wrong, it's just annoying to deal with.

*facepalm*

Okay, I think a lot of people here are missing an important distinction between the official games and the fangames. Real Pokemon games are designed with player-to-player interactivity in mind.

Why is that a big deal? Because by creating a main game that is ruthlessly difficult and more strategically involved inherently limits both the number of players who have beaten the game and those who even bother to purchase the game to begin with. The reason Pokemon is the Kirby of RPGs is to make the game approachable to everyone. Hell, playing Red and Blue as a kid, I didn't even bother looking at those stat pages and I didn't even know whether moves inflicted physical or special damage, and I still beat those games, and I could trade/battle with friends and feel proud of it. That's why the main games are piss-easy, so that the end goal of interacting with other players has no barriers to entry.

Obviously, we don't have the same luxuries with our fan games. People can barely get an online system with these games, so the mindset does need to change a little.

Regardless of that fact, we really shouldn't throw out the core elements of Pokemon just for the sake of making things "difficult." Forcing the player to rely on a single move or type, for instance, to win a battle is a d*ck move (I'm aware X/Y has something similar to this, and that's part of the reason why I think that game is one of the worst of the franchise). The beauty of Pokemon is that you could beat the game with an army of Raticates if you wanted to, and that's okay! It gives the player FREEDOM. I don't know how many of you guys realize this, but the official games give you PLENTY of options to create self-imposed challenges, making the game as hard or as easy as you want it to be. As a result, the games actually have replay value, and both skilled veteran players and clueless noobs feel respected. Any decision to limit that just defeats the point of the game, even in a fan game, and it should not be looked as a solution to up the difficulty.

If you really want to look into upping the difficulty with your fangames, however, I'd address the following problems with some of the official games below:

1) The overall difficulty curve scales in the opposite direction; the game starts off challenging but becomes easier over time, instead of the reverse.
- Someone pointed this out already (especially in Red/Blue when you chose Charmander >_>). One of the few things X/Y did right was give you a diverse range of Pokemon at the start. When I say "diverse" I mean diverse in terms of type combination/stat spread/etc. Not just different species alone. What made games like Red/Blue a major offender of this problem is that the gym leader's type theme resists almost every available move the player has available to them outside from their starter, at that point in the game. It was much harder to deal with because the player did not have a broad range of options to play against this.

Later on, however, you get every Pokemon type under the sun, and since the basic formula of each Gym doesn't change, you can easy send out one Pokemon that counters their type to effortlessly sweep a gym. This is what causes the game to feel "easy" I think, because even in X/Y, who many state to have the easiest gyms (more like forgettable) still posed a decent challenge for me at the start. Then it just went downhill as I built a more balanced team.

A possible solution to this, as I mentioned when talking about X/Y, is to give players those options to counter the gym leaders early on, to at least make the difficulty consistent. I also recommend, for later gyms, that if you still want type-themed gym leaders you don't exclusively use Pokemon that match the gyms type, but a different type of 'mon that has a move that matches the theme of the gym. This will get players switching out and keep them on their toes, even games like Emerald did this and I think it'll be effective.

2) Every Gym Leader has a single solution to beating them: Counter their type
- I think to solve this, you would possibly add more solutions to winning against them. How? I guess it's kind of up to you. :P
A good way to go about this is to ditch the type-themed gyms altogether. Recognize that you can run the risk of overwhelming players by making a gym's strategy too difficult to predict, however. Gym Leaders are bosses, and all bosses have some form of attack pattern for the player to work against. The complexity of that pattern can make the fight either easy or difficult... to even frustrating if you don't take care of it.

I'm sure there's more, but I can't think of any right now.