Should the difficulty be increased?

[Perriechu]

I just want challenge mode back.. :( That was literally such a good system that satisfied everyone. The default setting wasn't too challenging, easy mode made it so younger players weren't put off and challenge mode allowed the more capable players to have actual fun. I loved X & Y but the difficulty of the game is something that put me off so much.

With a general amount of grinding I found the games really annoying and hard to play without the EXP Share. And I wasn't spending hours and hours grinding because it just becomes a daunting chore rather than fun. And with the EXP share it's just too easy - especially with the leaders only having three or less Pokemon and the Elite 4 being pushovers..

I hope for Sun and Moon we get two things back;
- Difficulty settings (Probably not, but I'll settle for a slight increased difficulty over XY)
- Battling the Elite 4 in a set order. I hated that about V and VI.

And about the whole series being targeted towards children; whilst that was true it has been stated many times that they want to appeal to all audiences. Pokemon is no longer just aimed at children now, adverts always feature adults playing it or older children. Pokemon GO features a middle aged woman playing it. Union J, a British boyband were used to promote XY for a period of time in the UK so it proves that the target audience for Pokemon isn't just children anymore.

They've implemented a system before that benefits everyone, I don't see why they can't just bring it back tbh, but without having to complete the game in order to get it. It should be set at the beginning like a lot of other games and then if you wanna change you start a new game.

 

[OuterTsuchinoko]

I would love it if Sun and Moon were more difficult like Gen 1-4, but I don't think it going to happen or is necessary. I know I and maybe most people don't play these games for their difficulty as much as they play for all the other things you can do in them. I play the games more for the initial adventure, breeding, shiny hunting, and collecting. I definitely do think they should put an option though, but I doubt they will, especially seeing how they are putting even more into the game to make it easier like telling you what attacks are strong against the opponent during battle.

 

[MegaKuriboh]

I don't think they will increase the difficulty, and that's fine. I do think they should put in a Challenge Mode though, because it's really sad as a vet Pokemon player to see the last Gym Leader use 3 Pokemon and all the Elite 4 using only 4. If not, then at the very least they can give us good Gym Leader/Elite 4 Rematches and stuff like the Battle Frontier and strong post game trainers, all which XY lacked.

 

[OuterTsuchinoko]

They need to bring back the achievement medals back from B2/W2. Those could help increase difficulty depending on how difficult the medal is the player is going for. Also should have the last gym and all Elite Fours have 6 pokemon. I'd like to see trainers using more healing items too. Something as small as that can really help increase difficulty.

 

[StarsMmd]

None of the pokemon games have ever been hard to anyone who knows what they're doing. I've made a few hacks myself and I've found that the pokemon formula isn't built for difficulty. No matter how many high level pokemon they put in, you just end up grinding until you can beat them. Even if this may sound appealing, some of us find grinding boring and it really just slows the game down. Also, if you increase the levels of the NPC pokemon, you just get more experience and as a result level up even faster and usually end up over levelled anyway. I don't think anyone should ever be playing in game pokemon for a "challenge" (unless you want to be bitterly disappointed).

I've thought about it and one of the keys to pokemon's success is that it makes every player feel like a pokemon master. Even when I was playing my first game and didn't know the type matchups perfecly, didn't pay attention to natures, didn't know IVs and EVs even existed, didn't know all the pokemon and their stats and didn't know I could look things up online on sites like serebii, I still beat the game easily. You can play through with any pokemon you find cute or cool or interesting and not have to worry about building the best team necessarily. You save the world and become the champion of the region. It makes the player feel good about themself. I always thought I was the best pokemon player in the world and I'm sure a lot of us have felt that way at some point.

I actually had so much fun in XY. I remember how fun it was to be able to catch all my favourite pokemon in game and pretty early on at that. I spent a lot of time shiny hunting too. A good friend showed me a video about chain fishing for shinies and we spent a day on it together and we caught a shiny each and it was really exciting even for men in our twenties; that was my first shiny ever. We tried using the pokeradar method of shiny hunting and failed miserably. We spent weeks breeding for shinies and competitive stats. We spent a day getting all the mega stones during the hour that they were visible. We spent a day on a reddit for exchanging friend codes for friend safaris. We spent a lot of time wonder trading some of the extra pokemon we'd bred and it was a great feeling imagining how happy someone out there might be to receive a good pokemon rather than a bunelby. I got into trading and learned to nickname certain pokemon things like "yes", "no" and "5IV" to use those as a means of communicating with other people. I remember my friend telling me all about how he figured out a way to convince gullible children on wifi to trade him their legendary pokemon (he would ask for 2 legends for his one and trade a rubbish pokemon for the first one and then disconnect). He's a bit of a nob but he found it so funny it was hard not to laugh along. I completed the pokedex for the first time by systematically trading over GTS, evolving and breeding. I remember the frustration of getting haxxed repeatedly at the battle maison. Honestly, I had one of the best times playing XY by enjoying what the game had offer. I'd forgotten until about half way through this post and now I'm smiling like a kid again.
Also, this was by far the easiest gen for breeding and raising competitive pokemon and as such was the first game I played competitively in. I'd previously just decided it wasn't worth the effort. I had a lot of fun with competitive battling and pretty much played XY until ORAS came out.

 

[d4rk]

I see a lot of people complaining about how easy it is to beat X/Y because of Exp. Share and that they need to be proud of grinding.

I'm sorry but all the grinding system found in gens 1-3 (which I've played most) was totally broken. You could take really big incomes of Exp. points in trainer battles then have wild Pokemon 10 levels below you, yielding ridiculous amount of Exp. Points. This felt really unfair to me, as if you want to train an entire team in-game then you need every Pokemon having the same level.

For me the problem is not the new Exp. Share system but the lack of challenge, as you say. Maybe one day technology will allow Nintendo to develop, I don't know, maybe an algorithm based on the lowest level of your team and apply this level to all wild Pokemon, wherever and whenever you are in the story. It would be more acceptable and you would not end up in 3rd town with lv. 40 Pokemon and lvl.20 wild, like I've done in my last play of Y. Though I have seen some effort on this point since Victory Road has decent lvl.55-60 wilds, if I remember.

Maybe they will finally make wild Pokemon yield more exp. points, even if it is to the cost of having longer battles and higher level wild Pokemons. This could come, as in Y, with an "easy" way to cross a road, without tall grass spot all around the way. Grass spot may become a grinding point more than an obstacle (main obstacles being other trainers). It would be funny to observe wild Pokemon-free areas when being into a cave or in Water as well.

Maybe the entire game will not be a dumb succession of trained Pokemon with 10-20 levels higher than the story sweeping around like bullies. I also felt like any trainer excepting Gym Leader are not that difficult to beat - another possible enhancement here.

When I play a game, my lead Pokemon takes a whole lot of Exp. Points and is capable of sweeping everything, even when the opponent resists the type. And then I have a really bad time just grinding the rest of the team. I really, really hate it. In classic RPG (and I speak about Tales of Symphonia, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy and such stuff), all the members of a team gain the same amount of Exp. anytime, and that is why I actually love Gen. 6 Exp. Share.

Edit :

(...)

Just read your post after writing mine. Man I was really touched by your story. You have described about all the possibilities of XY games and the time you spent on it. I'm not a huge fan of all these things (radar chain, fishing chain) but I am really happy these features make other people have a good time.
And I totally agree that the Pokemon recipe makes feel every player well, as if he was a Pokemon master. Maybe breaking that could result in a different audience for the games.
To be honest, I feel like all the aftergame challenge with international battles, IVs, EVs, all of this seems like a whole different world than the in-game quest. My point was mainly to say : is there a way to establish a link between these worlds, in a more subtle way than Battle Mansion, Battle Frontier and all these boring things? I don't really know, I ain't no game designer.

In my opinion, grinding for experience and spending all the time to battle in battle facilities just to get powerful objects (this is how "challenge" looks for hardcore players), is really time-consuming and unproductive. The most painful to me is really, really, to discover that your beloved in-game team that you put most effort and time to grind and raise levels (because no Macho Brace, no Power items, no EV-checking at all in gen 1-5, only lower level wild Pokemon available, gen 1-5 Exp. Share, no correct breeding)... Well this in-game team has no chance in competitive. The most powerful competitive Pokemon can be trained in no time (the most time being invested on IVs, breeding and HA/eggmove stuff, but certainly not raising the level, I can say) while the in-game team has no control on competitive aspects but took days and days to raise the least significant thing : the fucking exp. points and level. That really feels not fair at all.
Also an unfortunate event : you cannot undo a game. Once you got your progress to the top with a single in-game team of 6 Pokemon it's over. Hence you cannot discover how it is to play any other Pokemon than your team's Pokemon at low level and with a shitty moveset than will never go into competitive. And if you wanna have a new in-game team, you just restart the game and lose everything that's inside... Good thing we have Pokemon Bank going. I will try it once.

 

[MegaKuriboh]

I actually really hope the EXP Share from 6th Gen returns. I always thought XY was far too easy, but it's not because of the EXP Share. Right now, I'm doing a run through of Y but instead of just using a normal 6 mon team like I always do, I'm switching between 20 or so different Pokemon, and it makes it a lot harder. The NPC trainers and even some wild Pokemon are pretty strong (especially the Hariyama/Throh right outside of Geosenge town) partially due to the wide variety of Pokemon (you're not just facing 6 trainers with only Koffing and Ratatta) but the problem with that game is that the bosses are a joke. The Team Flare Admins only have one Pokemon each, Gym Leaders have at most 3 Pokemon (even the last one, who uses Ice Types, a weak type in general) and the Elite 4 have 4 Pokemon, and most of them don't even use good movesets! There are plenty of trainers (like your rivals) that only put like 2 or 3 attacks on their movesets, it's disgusting. If the trainers had better movesets and balanced out teams, it would be a lot more challenging, and this is what I hope Sun/Moon has (or give us a challenge mode for Arceus sake)

 

[Karous]

I would love selectable difficulty. I'd be so down for a hard Pokemon game. Possibilities/suggestions to go about it:

1. They can take a page from Fire Emblem Fates Conquest, and only let trainer battles give XP (provided repeatable battles are not an option until post-E4). Combined with a harsher XP curve where higher leveled Pokemon gain significantly less experience against lower leveled Pokemon, this is designed to prevent grinding and overleveling and really force you to think about team composition. Trading would be allowed but ideally no XP bonus from that.

Beating the E4 unlocks an option to allow normal XP gain from wild Pokemon/trainers/etc for competitive battlers who would like to EV train their Pokemon or people who just want to play normally without restrictions after the storyline.

2. Take a page from Colosseum/XD which disallowed trading and offered very limited XP grinding opportunities. However, they have design decisions that, while fun and adding to the difficulty, wouldn't make it to a main series game (limited Pokemon choices, purifying that slowed you from getting powerful Pokemon to sweep everything, secondary objectives) but one can dream.

 

[François2]

I liked the EXP share system in gen 6, I just thought they needed to take it into account more than they did when deciding the levels of the pokémon throughout the game. The levels needed to spike harder than they did and that can easily be changed if increased difficulty is something GF desire.

 

[Zeturic]

People ask for this all the time, but I've never really understood why.

If you think the game is too easy, making it harder on yourself is really easy. Disable the experience share, avoid optional trainers, don't train against wild Pokemon, don't use TMs, don't evolve your Pokemon, use crappier Pokemon, don't use items in battle, use Set battle style...

You don't have to be as systematic about it as some people are when they do Nuzlockes, but it'll still make the game harder. To be honest, even just being undereleveled is enough to make the game fairly difficult; I remember playing through Emerald once, and, by the time I got the Elite Four, my team was still in the low 30s (my Combusken didn't even fully evolve until the post-game), and it was pretty difficult.

 

[Rivvon]

People ask for this all the time, but I've never really understood why.

If you think the game is too easy, making it harder on yourself is really easy. Disable the experience share, avoid optional trainers, don't train against wild Pokemon, don't use TMs, don't evolve your Pokemon, use crappier Pokemon, don't use items in battle, use Set battle style...

You don't have to be as systematic about it as some people are when they do Nuzlockes, but it'll still make the game harder. To be honest, even just being undereleveled is enough to make the game fairly difficult; I remember playing through Emerald once, and, by the time I got the Elite Four, my team was still in the low 30s (my Combusken didn't even fully evolve until the post-game), and it was pretty difficult.

I dunno, I always felt that, by avoiding Trainer battles, I was missing out on content, in a way. I have nothing against inflicting artificial difficulty on oneself, but personally, I'd rather the game actually be challenging. It was fun to fight against Elite Four members who had appropriate Held Items and strategies in B2W2's Challenge Mode--it really felt worthwhile to defeat them.

That being said, in my opinion difficulty options (that are available at the start of the game) would be the way to go, so people who want an easier or harder time can opt to do so. I felt the series was always about tailoring the experience around the Trainer, in that you had control over what Pokémon you caught and used, so I think it would be great if you could also tailor the difficulty to your liking.

 

[TheLegendaryGuy]

People ask for this all the time, but I've never really understood why.

If you think the game is too easy, making it harder on yourself is really easy. Disable the experience share, avoid optional trainers, don't train against wild Pokemon, don't use TMs, don't evolve your Pokemon, use crappier Pokemon, don't use items in battle, use Set battle style...

You don't have to be as systematic about it as some people are when they do Nuzlockes, but it'll still make the game harder. To be honest, even just being undereleveled is enough to make the game fairly difficult; I remember playing through Emerald once, and, by the time I got the Elite Four, my team was still in the low 30s (my Combusken didn't even fully evolve until the post-game), and it was pretty difficult.

That wouldn't make the game difficult, that would make you too easy for the game to beat, and both of them are, kind of, different.
It would be better if there would be better if the games had some mechanism to identify the Pokemon type the player is using and then, the opponent NPC would switch into the type most effective on the player's mon, if they have it(ignore if I said something stupid. I am a gamer and not a game developer), and if the bosses had their pokemons higher levelled than the previous games, and if the rival would not consider the ones in X/Y as a source of inspiration.

 

[Jacrad]

In the sense that there should be more puzzles, yes.
X & Y were utter disappointments because of the severe lack of puzzles. The first few gyms usually don't have puzzles but by the half way point I expect puzzles. Most of the gyms were just alternative modes of walking.
If they have to sequester them away to a Trick House or have Strength block puzzles set aside on the routes, fine, but more puzzles would be greatly appreciated by me.

I definitely feel that the idea of an easy or hard mode that you're locked into is not a good idea. It needs to be something you can toggle on or off. If you make the wrong decision because you overestimate or underestimate your ability you're stuck in an unfavorable situation.
I could definitely appreciate a harder difficulty. I have to admit I'd rather gym leaders and elite four members have full teams (For the most part.)

 

[destinedjagold]

Should the difficulty be increased?

I am buying the game on release date. But if they confirm this before the release, then I'm going to preorder the minute after I read this announcement.

 

[Ahab_]

Me too have been cheering for it since gen 3 but I realized a long time ago it was just me hoping for the franchise to grow up alongside me. Nevertheless, eventually I came to terms with the fact that the main gameplay of Pokemon games is always aimed to new young generations. Even so, and as has been pointed before, there are unofficial ways to make it harder such as nuzlockes and so. For now I believe it to be the only way we can expect a higher difficulty.

By the way I am new to the place but too lazy to make a thread just saying hi; so hi to anyone who reads this.

ps. English is not my mother language so sorry for the typos and such.

 

[Thunderflare]

They should just allow new modes for the Post game. Here are a few ideas.

• Pokemon World Tournament
• Stadium run, where you go up against all the Gym Leaders, Elite Four, and Champion with one team.
• Pokemon World Tournament!
• Official online competitions with event Pokemon as rewards
• Pokemon...World...Tournament!
• New game+ You keep all your Pokemon from the last playthrough, but they will not obey you as if they were traded until you defeat the Champion. And, naturally, the difficulty is higher.
• Did I mention the Pokemon World Tournament?

 

[Karous]

They should just allow new modes for the Post game. Here are a few ideas.

• Pokemon World Tournament
• Stadium run, where you go up against all the Gym Leaders, Elite Four, and Champion with one team.
• Pokemon World Tournament!
• Official online competitions with event Pokemon as rewards
• Pokemon...World...Tournament!
• New game+ You keep all your Pokemon from the last playthrough, but they will not obey you as if they were traded until you defeat the Champion. And, naturally, the difficulty is higher.
• Did I mention the Pokemon World Tournament?

I'm hoping for the return of the Battle Frontier. Battle Tower (and its descendants) are a boring mess with cheap AI specifically designed to screw you over, honestly there's zero point to them when you could just play online with the same rules against real people.

I mean, Battle Frontier also featured similarly cheap AI but they were fun because the facilities offered unique and interesting twists and battle styles. Also, Battle Factory for the lazy. I would love to see it make a return, especially after the joke of a postgame that XY offered.

 

[Crunchy Crayon]

I really thought I was the only one bothered by this. I thought the games were always this easy until I've (recently) purchased Pok?mon Red. The new games are still enjoyable, but the older gens still take the cake due it's (slightly) harder difficulty.

 

[CF1994]

Yes, the difficulty should be increased a bit this time around.

I actually kinda miss the olden days when each Gym Leader you faced progressively had more Pok?mon on their teams, and each Elite Four member had 5 members, making it an actual challenge. Thankfully ORAS had acknowledged the formula for the most part.

Plus, I do think the EXP Share should be noticeably nerfed if they insist on having every single member on your party earn experience points. The Pok?mon in battle gets the most EXP, as always, while the rest of the party that didn't fight in battle gets roughly half or less of the EXP.

 

[jfuze174]

One thing too that makes the game easier is that they're just soooo Pokemon now and with gts and wonder trade nobody has to go in the first couple of gyms with pidgeys and rattata anymore