I don't have to convince anyone or their personal fanclub and discord buddies why going out of your way to remove an accessibility feature your game naturally has
and the choice to put in this effort to remove an accessibility option the player already had
1. If you want to continue claiming that speedup is an accessibility feature, you should actually provide arguments as to why it is. Multiple people in the thread have responded to your accessibility claims in good faith, including MrKyurem who created a detailed post about accessibility in video games which you have yet to respond to, instead continuing to baselessly assert that speedup is an accessibility feature.
2. You cannot really say that speedup (or any feature) is something natural or innate to the game. Like any other feature, it can be removed if the game developer believes it to be against their overall product design. Just because it is a widely accepted feature in the overall community, doesn't mean that it has immunity from being removed. As such, pointing out that speedup is natural is an irrelevant point. As an example, emulators have the ability to pause the game, which I view as a positive feature, as you might need to take short or long breaks and don't want the game to continue running. If a ROM Hack somehow released with a feature to prevent pausing, proper arguments would focus not on pausing being a widely accepted feature, but why pausing is actually a good feature that shouldn't be removed.
I don't have to convince anyone or their personal fanclub and discord buddies why going out of your way to remove an accessibility feature your game naturally has, out of fear that people will "just speed through all of your game without appreciating it", is not the right response to that fear. It doesn't matter who thinks I'm wrong to say this, because there are better ways the developer could have handled these fears. The developer didn't have to make this fear the problem of anyone who wants to play his game. It was wrong for the developer to go out of his way to make the intended experience of playing his game worse for everyone
There are better ways the developer could have handled these fears [of people using speedup]. The developer didn't have to make this fear the problem of anyone who wants to play his game. It was wrong for the developer to go out of his way to make the intended experience of playing his game worse for everyone
Firstly, not everyone is bothered by the speedup prevention, so don't go stating that the game has been made "worse for everyone", as there are people who never use speedup anyway.
Secondly, you are right in that it is better to fix the root cause of why people want to speedup. But unfortunately, doing so is not enough to prevent people from using speedup. I want to bring up another recently released hack called Pokémon Coral. It features a plethora of engine improvements that make the game feel super responsive and buttery smooth. Despite this, people still feel the urge to use speedup (based on some online let's plays). The point being that no matter what you may do to try to fix the root causes of speedup in the first place, some people will want to use speedup anyway.
With that in mind, people don't play games in a vacuum. They discuss with friends and other players and they share media about the game online. In that sense, it is justified for a developer to control how their game is played. Disallowing speedup means that people who don't want to appreciate the game as a whole and only portions of it will not play the game, and that any discussion around the game will be had by people who have a greater appreciation of the game. It means that people won't spend 20 minutes in the grass with speedup trying to overlevel their team above the gym leader. It means that let's players and streamers will be forced to play the game at 1x speed, which the developer might find more satisfying to watch.
Therefore, the developer's response to the fear of people using speedup is justified. It solved the problem of discouraging people who would not truly appreciate the game from playing, thus curating a more appreciative fanbase. Whereas you see the antispeedup as a problem, the developer sees it as a solution to unappreciative players.
The process of running back and forth to the Pokemon Center to heal is dull. It's not gameplay, it's tedium. Deja vu, you've been through this place before. There are no interesting choices being made here. You're trading seconds of IRL life for a heal ingame. Would anything fundamentally vital to the core gameplay loop of finding and catching Pokemon and battling trainers be lost if this process was 6x faster? Would it do anything good for that loop if the process took 6x longer? Would anything really change if there was a Key Item that healed you on the spot after being forced to wait for the time it would take for your player character to run back to the Pokemon Center?
Mukuitsjanuary and many others have explained to you repeatedly why backtracking to the Pokémon Center is an option at all. But I want to elaborate on another point. Namely, I consider it reductive to consider backtracking to the Pokémon Center as a purely pointless exercise. Firstly, you might accidentally hit some trainers on the way back. More importantly, one of the key appeals of Pokémon is the aspect of exploration. Needing to travel between routes is a core aspect of the gameplay. There isn't an option to simply teleport to each trainer and obstacle to make a decision because Pokémon is a roleplaying game where you play as a Pokémon trainer, and part of that involves needing to travel through routes. While backtracking to the Pokémon Center does "waste" time in the sense that you don't make any progress, it gives you an opportunity to experience travelling through the route again. And you might say that "oh, then why don't you just go back and forth between a route if you want to do that", to which I respond by saying that doing things is more fun when there's a purpose attached to it.
I will state that this is a subjective observation and not a strong point, and that tastes may vary. But I think that there is merit to the core argument that there is enjoyment in itself on travelling between routes as part of the roleplaying aspect of Pokémon.
It could be argued that the choice to use a Pokemon center instead of a limited supply of healing items is an interesting choice, but that would be wrong, because while the healing items you can purchase are limited by your funds and the healing items you can find are limited by your environment, your funds are not limited. IRL time can be wasted grinding to obtain practically infinite funds to obtain a practically infinite supply of healing items.
The argument here is that there is no actual choice between using a Pokémon Center vs using a limited supply of healing items because you can accumulate effectively infinite healing items via infinite funds. I want to address two possible scenarios of how you get these infinite funds to show why this argument falls flat:
1. Getting infinite funds requires significant time investment, possibly by thieving wild Pokémon, using Pay Day a bunch of times, or doing trainer rematches.
- In this scenario, while it is theoretically possible to acquire infinite items via infinite funds, the player is discouraged from doing so because of how tedious the effort is. Meaning that in practice, the player only has a limited pool of items to use, thus the decision to use items vs backtracking to the Pokémon Center is still there. Also, there is a player decision in deciding whether to do such a money grind, that decision being influenced by whether the time spent grinding is worth the value in getting those extra items.
2. Due to poor balance or whatever, getting infinite funds is trivial.
- In this scenario, while this indicates a balance issue of the game, it nullifies your example of Pokémon Center backtracking to your overarching argument that "removing speedup is bad is because the areas that one would use speedup do not add to the game anyway", because if getting such a stockpile of items was possible, then backtracking to the Pokémon Center wouldn't be an issue in the first place because you could just heal in the field.
As an aside, this point feels reminiscient of Radical Red's recent update, in that it tried to "fix" the tedium of people grinding on wilds to get certain items held by those Pokémon by just giving you those items (and also "fixed" grinding itself by just giving you infinite Rare Candies). I put "fix" in quotes is that these are just bandaid solutions to the problem that Pokémon's systems are not well designed for a primarily strategic experience, and that Radical Red would be a much better game if it dropped the JRPG framework and tried to be an exclusively battle and resource management roguelite (not like Emerald Rogue, which still has "routes" which I find kind of pointless).
You might be afraid of players mashing A through text, but players who do this have decided the story is not valuable to them. Maybe they've played your game once already and would rather skip the cutscenes, or maybe this is their first time playing and they just don't care about the worldbuilding and characters and complex sociopolitical commentary on socioeconomic disparity in a pokemon game about a ten year old and his pet monsters kicking the ass of countless adults and saving them from the local mafia, cult, or gaggle of bullied kids. You can't convince these people to care about your writing and they won't appreciate any attempt to try and make them sit through dialogue they don't care about at the intended pace. Nobody owes you anything. Nobody owes you a fair shot. Nobody even owes you a chance to impress them with your writing. No writer on this planet is owed a reader. Every writer should cherish the readers they have, not make their product worse out of spite for people who might be reading wrong. I'm not being unreasonable here, I'm telling you how "unreasonably" new writers are judged. Remind me again, what's the name of that author who is still, to this day, being mocked for writing a garbage Star Wars ripoff about dragons when he was a teenager? The world doesn't owe you a pat on the back for trying. And the world doesn't owe you valuable constructive feedback. So when an author is given feedback, the good authors ask what they can learn from this, if anything can be learned from it. Trash feedback like "You should have written about fish instead of murder mysteries because I like fish more than murder mysteries" can be ignored if your goal is to write a murder mystery. But all those people who asked how they can get around a choice that intentionally tried to make the game worse for everyone, not just people who used the speed up button "too much"... They don't think that choice of yours is a valuable part of the Pokemon experience in the way that audio-based timing challenges are to Mother 3 and difficulty is to Dark Souls. Your game isn't Dark Souls or Mother 3. When people tell others how to get around the anti-speedup, does it frustrate you? It certainly doesn't frustrate the people who want to speed up your game, like spoiling the end of a murder mystery would frustrate people who want to figure out the killer for themselves as they read instead of just watching the detective hero do all the thinking. That's because nothing intellectual and vital to the pokemon experience is lost when grind, no matter how minimal, is minimized further.
I'm not really sure what point or argument you're trying to convey. You seem to allude to the argument being focused around the story (to which I believed to be about skipping through the boring parts of the story), but then you branch to discussing about acknowledging consumer feedback, and then your final point concludes with how nothing is lost when grind is removed from Pokémon. To that, I can say that the developer has responded to feedback by stating their position on why they don't want people using speedup, and that the game shouldn't require any grinding. While your claims about grind are true about other ROMHacks, the developer has explicitly stated that the hack doesn't require grinding, and it is unfair that you continue to generalize his hack to all the other ROMHacks made. I'm open to clarification on what you meant here, if you clarify this point I will attempt to respond to it (that is, if I'm still interested in responding).
Ever play Dark Souls? The only Dark Souls game I've played so far respawns enemies if you run back to heal. This clearly communicates how the process of getting through the area in one go is the intended experience, it's what was tested and balanced for. The player is punished for running back to heal. This turns running back to heal into a choice with trade offs. Is it worth running back to heal, and re-doing this route again? Would you do better this time, know what to watch out for, improve as a player? It also ensures any moment where you take damage puts you closer to death and the need to retry. This adds tension to the combat. Even if you could defeat an enemy by running forwards and attacking like a moron without doing anything smart like trying to avoid damage, losing health in the process makes the rest of the game harder until you can get to a source of healing. It's an interesting game design choice, one of many in the Dark Souls series, and I think it would improve Scale X Fang 2: Claw X Foot or whatever you decide to call it.
(I have not played Dark Souls so I cannot comment on this)
Resetting trainers every time the route is left until the route is cleared sounds like something that would be easy for Pokemon. I think I'll do it if I ever make another Pokemon game.
Feedback like this is constructive and helpful. The developer already wants to implement save points with a quicksave feature to add more consequence to playing poorly. A feature like this could possibly be done by preventing the player from going back to the Poké Center, adding even more stakes to each route, although that's up to the developer. If you continue to respond here, you should give more constructive feedback, instead of just ending all your points with "therefore, speedup should be added back" as you do seem to acknowledge the idea that a game is designed poorly if it requires speedup.
If you're afraid of people speeding through dialogue and missing something, let people skip it and then talk to NPCs afterwards to be told where to go and what to do unless you're writing a sidequest mystery where the player is actually supposed to puzzle things out based on missable clues. That element of figuring things out for yourself served Fallout well, but then again this isn't Fallout.
Dialogue is meant to be read, so people shouldn't be given the choice to speed through it in the first place. The problem is less that NPCs don't tell you where to go after you talk to them, and more that the type of people to speedup through dialogue are the type that don't really care to pay attention and inevitably get stuck. There is only so much a developer can do in guiding people with that type of mentality to not do such a thing.
If you're afraid of people speeding through gameplay, create gameplay challenges that can't be beaten by mindlessly attacking without paying attention to the game's intricacies and tradeoffs.
Creating more engaging gameplay is also something I agree with, but again some people are stuck in their ways and will still use speedup.
And for the music, if you want people to listen to it at the intended speed, let people listen to it outside the game. If people are going to mute the game and speed it up, or mute the game and listen to audiobooks while mashing A at the intended speed instead of the player-desired speed if that's not an option, there's a chance the player will listen to the game's OST via youtube or soundcloud or bandcamp.
The point of music in a game is for players to listen to while playing the game. Saying that OST tracks on YouTube "solves" the issue of speedup players wanting to listen to the music at its proper speed does not acknowledge that is not a solution. Music isn't just simply there in a game; the specific tracks for each section add emotion and tone to the current scene. Stating that listening to the OST on YouTube is equivalent to in-game when there are other elements in the game that complement the music is extremely ignorant and disrespectful to the game at whole.
In conclusion, while you may have a few good points in your arguments (namely just making Pokémon gameplay more engaging), they are ultimately clouded down by the rest of your arguments, your insistence on claiming anti-speedup is accessibility, and your inability to respond to people's counterarguments.
You know what's great about the truth not being democratically determined or subjective? I don't have to convince anyone or their personal fanclub and discord buddies...
I don't have to explain why I am right to anyone who's not going to listen.
It's your perogative whether you want to justify yourself, but know that without effective communication, your ideas will not go anywhere. Based on the fact that most in the thread have not been convinced, justifying how they're unconvinced with counterarguments to your arguments (which you have not responded to), I don't think you've done a good job in justifying your arguments.
