Category: Game Design Questions

Anonymous asks:

In regards to your Seven Types, how do you feel about adding Waste, Wind, and Sonic? Waste represents the trash side of Poison, something that would effect Pokemon heavily in-tune with Nature and Magic. Wind would have a greater effect on in-flight Pokemon and light weights while little to no effect on heavy weight or submerged Pokemon. Sonic would effect Pokemon differently based on how sensitive their hearing is. Can you see these three as having a fillable spot in your system?

In reference to this, where I outline a radical condensation of Pokémon’s type chart into just seven attack types (Might, Finesse, Nature, Water, Energy, Magic, Spirit), where Pokémon themselves have no type at all but have weaknesses and resistances by individual species.

So, in regard to these three suggestions – the point of what I was trying to do was have as few types as possible (well, actually, the real point was to think about how I would do a Pokémon game if I were starting completely from scratch, which I’m still thinking about, with a view to maybe writing a long screed of rambling nonsense at some point in the future, but let’s not go down that particular rabbit hole right now).  I wanted to see how little I could get away with.  So just on philosophical grounds, I don’t think any of these things need to be types.  I do think they can be effects that are attached to specific attacks.  Sonic I would probably deal with by putting in a Deafness status condition that, say, causes Pokémon to disobey (because they can’t hear your orders properly) and make a couple of Pokémon either especially vulnerable to it (e.g. Zubat, who ‘sees’ with sound) or resistant or outright immune to it (anything with the Soundproof ability, like Mr. Mime).  The attacks themselves, I think can just be typeless (which is a thing my system has; they just do normal damage to everything).  Wind is similar; I mostly imagined wind-based attacks as belonging mainly to Finesse, with some being dual-typed (another thing my system has – Hurricane as Finesse/Nature, Twister as Finesse/Magic), and all having effects much like the ones you describe; they’re not universally more effective against certain Pokémon, just more effective given certain environmental conditions.  Waste… waste is a weird one because one of the ways I wanted to flip things on their head was by having pollutant Pokémon like Koffing and Grimer be vulnerable to Nature attacks, not resistant (not all of the Pokémon that are “Poison” in the existing system, mind you, just those specific ones; other Poison-types could have different vulnerabilities).  Poison, like the others, doesn’t need to be a type in itself; just keep it as a status condition that can be worsened or prevented by the traits of certain Pokémon.

Anonymous asks:

I know you don’t like to speculate, but what would your opinion be on Sun and Moon bringing in facets of the Ranger games / mentality into the main series (as some people apparently think due to similarities between the ranger regions and alola)? It’s pretty unlikely, but what do you think such a thing could add to world-fleshing-outness, conflict, story, et cetera?

Well, I think you’re right about it being unlikely – the fact that Alola is an island region (if that’s what we’re getting at?  Not sure what else there is) seems like a pretty flimsy reason to make a prediction like that to me.  But having said that, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad idea to, say, replace HMs for field moves with a minigame where you convince a wild Pokémon to temporarily join you and help you to clear an obstacle.  HM moves are a pain, and you can potentially get a nice sense of negotiation with the wild Pokémon, show how they fit into their environment, and emphasise that wild areas really belong to them.  Other parts of the Ranger philosophy, like having only one partner Pokémon rather than large teams, seem incompatible with the basic assumptions of the gameplay; you could have characters who live with Pokémon in that way, but I suspect that much of the significance of that would be lost if the player wasn’t the one doing it.  If you don’t actually play from the Rangers’ perspective, they probably just seem from the outside like trainers who only have one Pokémon.  You can’t really make the Rangers the villains either, for obvious reasons, although a faction like that certainly would have been an interesting presence in a story like that of Black and White, just to make things more complicated for everyone – what would they have thought of Ghetsis’ rhetoric of Pokémon liberation?  It would be also interesting to introduce some new mechanics that emphasise the uniqueness of the player’s relationship with the starter Pokémon in the same way as the Ranger games do, but that’s probably something you have to build from scratch to serve the very different gameplay of the core series.

vikingboybilly asks:

The rotomdex is freaky! It’s too drastic of a change! Please beg gamefreak to keep everything exactly the same, waaaah.

I like the Rotomdex!  I think it raises a lot of interesting questions.  The developers of the Pokédex have apparently chosen, instead of going to all the trouble and expense of programming an AI, to just enlist a Pokémon to do it.  Unlike all the stuff we’ve seen Rotom inhabit before, this next-generation Pokédex is actually designed to have a Rotom in it.  Does it still work without one?  The trailer seems to imply that it either doesn’t work at all, or operates at diminished capacity.  What does that say about what Rotom does while inside an appliance?  Can it increase the efficiency of other machines?  Does a fridge with a Rotom in it keep things cool more effectively than a normal fridge?  If the Pokédex isn’t complete without a Rotom, how do they sustain production?  Do they have to breed Rotom, or are they simply not able to make many of these things?  Can Rotom battle in this shape, and if so, what abilities does it confer?  And apparently the Pokédex allows Rotom to talk – that’s a pretty neat perk.  What will its thoughts be on the whole thing?  Does Rotom actually know everything in the Pokédex, or can it just display that information for the player?  Lots to play with there.

Anonymous asks:

I’m replaying HeartGold atm and just got to Bugsy when I noticed that his gym is spider web-themed, like Burgh’s and Viola’s. Why does GF make bug gyms with spider web designs? Can’t they do something else? Would be cool if they made like a beehive or an anthill gym or something, imo. Whaddya think?

Well, in point of fact they did make a beehive gym – Burgh’s original gym design from Black and White, before the renovations that took place in Black and White 2.  It was not one of their better gym designs, to be honest; the gimmick was that some of the walls were made of gluey honey and you could walk through them, which effectively just made moving through the gym painfully slow.  So, in answer – they can and they have, but it takes more than a good theme to make a gym fun.

Phi8 asks:

If you had the chance, would you rearrange the National Dex? And how? I’m also talking the possibility of merging spiecies like the Nidorans or Illumise/Volbeat, that kind of stuff.

Well… yes and no?  By which I mean the National Pokédex doesn’t remotely resemble how I would structure the Pokédex if I were starting from scratch (I think I would arrange Pokémon by habitat, similarly to what you can do with the Fire Red and Leaf Green Pokédex, or perhaps by egg group), but seeing as we have the damn thing as a known and established entity, I don’t think that getting rid of it or changing it would serve any particular purpose.

Anonymous asks:

The thing about the pika-clones is that Gamefreak has stopped trying to use them to recapture pikachu’s popularity and seems to now be making them just for the sake of tradition, just like the generic birds and rodents. But at least diggersby and talonflame have had multi-dimensional designs, cool new elements, and awesome hidden abilities to make up for their low stats. So if Gen 7 has a new electric rodent, do you think gamefreak could do the same and make it actually interesting and useful?

Okay well first of all I don’t think VII having a new Electric rodent is an “if.”  And certainly they could, and I hope they will.  I agree that Diggersby and Talonflame (and I suppose to a lesser extent even Vivillon, I will grudgingly admit) prove that there’s scope for cleverness even within the “templates.”  Emolga, I thought, was a good start, though Dedenne was a rather depressing return to form.  And I suppose one could argue that Se Jun Park’s famously creative use of Pachirisu in the 2014 world championship gives them some justification for continuing to include Pokémon that demand a very… unconventional strategic approach, though not much (I believe we are still waiting on such championship-level breakthroughs for Farfetch’d, Delibird, Kricketune, Phione, Girafarig… you know, I’m just not going to list them).  They may by this point actually regard competitive uselessness as an essential part of the template.  So of course they could; that doesn’t mean they will.

thephilosophicalsheep asks:

All right; so in gen 6, gamefreak made obscure competitive phenomena like EVs and egg moves more accessible to younger players with additions such as super training and the DexNav. Now what I want them to do is encourage their use by allowing NPCs the same benefits. Rarely in the pokemon games do you even see in-game trainers using ITEMS. That needs to change. I want to see Sun and Moon trainers with EV-trained, egg-moved, battle-equipped mons. That’ll better prepare kids for competitive, no?

Mmm… well, sort of?  I mean, we already have that in, for example, the Battle Maison; facilities like that have used all of those things for ages.  And to be honest I’m kind of happy with that, as a step up in difficulty from what we see during the story portion of the games.  I don’t want to throw all of this $#!t at you from the start; that’s just bloody overwhelming.  And I think the increase in transparency that comes from Super Training is much more important to introducing the EV system than having NPCs with EV-trained Pokémon would be; you can’t see EVs in battle, so ultimately that just winds up as being “everything is now harder for reasons you don’t fully understand; hahahahaha!”  The other thing there is that EV spreads for competitive movesets are often based on calculations around which Pokémon you can take down in X number of hits and which Pokémon can take you down in X number of hits, all assuming equal level and heavily informed by the current metagame, and that’s just not something that’s ever going to have any place in single player.

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vikingboybilly asks:

How come some plants are pokémon, but most are not? Humans are the only known non-pokémon animal in existence (besides pokédex mentions of Indian elephants and stuff), so is there some kind of bias because the world’s environment and obstacles isn’t made out of meat?

I think probably because if all plants are Pokémon too then you begin to run dangerously short of things that are okay to eat.  Game Freak seems to be very uncomfortable with the idea that humans eat Pokémon, at least in the present day – hell, in recent years they even seem to have become uncomfortable with the idea that wild Pokémon eat each other.  When you ask them about it, they make reference to the huge variety of wondrous fruits and vegetables that exist in the Pokémon world.  I suspect if all the plants become sentient too then they run out of wriggle room.

Anonymous asks:

Obviously, any regular reader knows that you’re a champion of the Grass type. One thing that occurred to me recently – any thoughts on why is there only a single Grass/Ground type? Wouldn’t that seem an obvious combination to be exploited? Roots would presumably feature heavily. It seems that flavour wise, at least, this one would seem natural.

I think maybe the fact that it seems so natural is actually part of the reason.  Ground is, let’s face it, a poorly thought out mess of a type.  Pokémon can be assigned to the Ground type because they have powers related to earth and soil, or because they happen to live on the ground, or sometimes, it seems, just because they’re generally tough and resilient.  It’s a really vague set of traits, most of which also apply to pure Grass-types.  If most of the things that define Ground are also essentially inherent to Grass anyway, there’s never any need to add Ground to a Grass Pokémon, unless you come up against something like Torterra who’s associated with the earth in a much more elemental sense than most Ground Pokémon.