Aug 10, 2015, 07:45 AM
Honestly I do agree with what you say regarding how the player to environment settings in the main series Pokemon games actually prepares very little to some of the more competitive games around given how deep the Pokemon metagames (Smogon, Battle Spot, VGC) can be. To be honest, the TCPi/Game Freak have only started to acknowledge (or say) the existence of the competitive Pokemon communities and say that players should be looking to get perfect IVs in there battle-ready Pokemon with the release of XY and new beginners guides like the recent "strategy" on Pokemon.com. Back in the old generations of Pokemon, only a handful of people either knew or was active in the competitive scene. Most players learned how to EV train with sits like Gamefaqs, Smogon, Serebii, etc while the games like Emerald and Platinum has a significant difficult increase from the story mode to the Battle Frontier. Though it may sound a bit unfair comparing the story mode and BF together, if we are talking about the PVE in the main series Pokemon then yes Pokemon has done a poor job at it considering you have to look up to these sites like I did back then. Like seriously c'mon... you really think that a in-game team is able to make a serious run at the AIs at the Battle Tower who actually uses optimally trained Pokemon for their time?
At the same time, Pokemon advertises their game to the younger audiences so most of these kids don't even care about the true battle mechanics of the game unless they are curious. If we are looking for a better PVE , then its best to improve the quality of the in game story AIs and level progression. Game Freak practically killed this off when they released the obviously broke new experience system and the EXP Share as the improved Exp ALL from the Gen 1 games, except any player can easily now overlevel against the opposing gyms or boss/rival battles. I know people will say just turn the thing off but it doesn't really help the newcomers when it comes with competitive at all and they'll just assume having high level Pokemon is the "best way" to be competitive which we know isn't the case. I think if Game Freak/TCPi want to improve the PVE settings then its probably best to implement actual "level limits" based on the highest level Pokemon of the Gym Leader's "main" Pokemon, more "competitive/optimal sets" for AIs, diverse gym leaders even using Weather/Field changes, and possibly other potential changes.
Now probably the fan-made games (Reborn, Insurgence) are the best example of this as they game creators assume that these aren't just beginning trainers, and do have AI difficult spikes frequently than the main series counterpart games. However I do think that with the Pokemon World Championships getting larger and large along with more in game references to the these competitions (like having to face-off against more VGC player's teams on the PWT in BW2 and the random AI references in the Battle Resort) will they actually start focusing on the overall game difficulty so lets hope that's the case.
At the same time, Pokemon advertises their game to the younger audiences so most of these kids don't even care about the true battle mechanics of the game unless they are curious. If we are looking for a better PVE , then its best to improve the quality of the in game story AIs and level progression. Game Freak practically killed this off when they released the obviously broke new experience system and the EXP Share as the improved Exp ALL from the Gen 1 games, except any player can easily now overlevel against the opposing gyms or boss/rival battles. I know people will say just turn the thing off but it doesn't really help the newcomers when it comes with competitive at all and they'll just assume having high level Pokemon is the "best way" to be competitive which we know isn't the case. I think if Game Freak/TCPi want to improve the PVE settings then its probably best to implement actual "level limits" based on the highest level Pokemon of the Gym Leader's "main" Pokemon, more "competitive/optimal sets" for AIs, diverse gym leaders even using Weather/Field changes, and possibly other potential changes.
Now probably the fan-made games (Reborn, Insurgence) are the best example of this as they game creators assume that these aren't just beginning trainers, and do have AI difficult spikes frequently than the main series counterpart games. However I do think that with the Pokemon World Championships getting larger and large along with more in game references to the these competitions (like having to face-off against more VGC player's teams on the PWT in BW2 and the random AI references in the Battle Resort) will they actually start focusing on the overall game difficulty so lets hope that's the case.
