Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Discussion

[Dragonstrike]

You can't find Pokemon Duel anymore because it was shut down and all official support for it has long ended.

100 new pokemon in SwSh is actually a fairly average number, all things considered.  400 total in the 'dex is exactly how many pokemon were in SwSh before any DLC (and 96 of them were new according to Bulbapedia).  We can probably expect that to be a rough standard going forward if that leak is accurate.  It was rather inevitable that the sheer number of mons that exist was going to inevitably be too much for all of them to be in every game, tbh (which is something that the studio has mentioned in response to the dexit criticisms iirc, and isn't helped by the tight schedules that TPC runs for every aspect of the multimedia franchise).  Including SwSh's DLC, there's 664 pokemon in the games out of the 898 that exist overall (and I think it's likely the DLC model is going to continue for future main titles as well).

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Now, counterpoints with raw numbers and facts aside, I'm looking at SV a bit more optimistically, tbh.  I generally liked what I saw with the Wild Area and PLA, and I'm interested in seeing what they're going to do with Gen 9 now that they seem to really be running with the open world idea.  The main thing that worries me with it is the balance of the level scaling, because we all know how prior attempts to make more open ended pokemon games have been level wise (*cough gen 2 cough*).  But so long as the scaling isn't completely out of whack and the region of Paldea feels like it's actually full of (a reasonable amount of) things to do, I do think the open world idea could work quite well.  Of course, beyond the 3 storylines thing and Tera Raids, we don't actually know much about what's actually going to be dotted around the world yet (nor how densely packed the things we have been shown already are going to be).  But hey, as long as the exploration is up to par as well as the battles, it'll probably be fine.

I definitely am not in the 'pokemon can do no wrong' camp and 100% have my own concerns about what may or may not go awry, but I do think a lot of commonly voiced issues brought up by long time fans tend to be...a bit overblown, I guess?  I do wish that the games were higher quality at times, but given the size of GF's studio, what they are able to put out on such strict scheduling is still pretty impressive.

And as far as judging the gameplay goes, honestly, I don't think the trailers are really a good indicator of how the game will play in any kind of specific sense.  They always tend to go over it all in very broad strokes, leaving the exact intricacies for the community to figure out (Nintendo loves its surprises, after all).  Until we get our hands on the games, I don't think we can really accurately judge how well it executes the open world idea and the various gimmicks they're implementing this generation.  The only surefire thing is that the gimmicks will be featured prominently in the main gameplay (auto battles in the Team Star bases and exploration, Tera types in actual battles and raids, etc).

If there is one thing I can comment on regarding gameplay we've been shown so far though, it's that the new Tera Raids seem like a much more compelling thing to grind in the endgame than SwSh's Dynamax Dens, given that every pokemon can have any Tera type (compared to only a handful of mons getting Gigantamax forms which only very, very, very rarely spawned outside of event dens).  It does make me wonder how the Tera types for pokemon you can't find in the wild will work though...