The new open world format no longer lends itself to overworld trainer battles. I don't know anyone wbo actually fought the trainers in Paldea. You get enough Exp from raids and catching and items on the ground that trainer battles are unnecessary and you have to go out of your way to trigger them. They should cut them from the next game and focus on story battles like rivals, evil team and gyms etc. Maybe include some superbosses like the Ogre clan scattered around the world scaling to your level.
Legends and SV have a decent enough foundation for an exploration and catching based approach to the series. You don't need to pad out routes with mindless npc battles anymore. Even in the older games this was a chore and I skipped as many trainers as possible.
>I don't know anyone wbo actually fought the trainers in Paldea
I battled EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM
Get the FRICK out of here, casual
It's almost as if they incentivize you to battle them by way of the League Reps at Pokemon Centers who give you items if you defeat enough trainers in an area or something, especially TMs that you can only unlock by doing so.
Trainer battles are still an important part of the Pokemon world. Since they're optional, they should make all of them challenging and interesting while level scaling to your badge count.
Too much work to make 300 trainer battles all unique and interesting to account for each possible variation of badge count
ROWE did it
My favorite rom hack / fan game ever. Actually super based. Doubles everywhere starting wherever you want. Very fun.
They don't have to revamp the team for every badge or anything, just change the levels and moves and evolve when necessary, it's really not that much work
That's not challenging or interesting. That's the same thing as fighting mindless NPCs.
>create a base strategy/moveset for a trainer's Pokemon
>tune it depending on badge count
I don't see what's so complicated
Keep in mind /vp/ thinks changing a number in a table is the same as programming an entire new algorithm.
dumb gorilla Black person it takes literally two seconds to modify trainer data have a nice day
We need to remove pokemon altogether
>I don't know anyone wbo actually fought the trainers in Paldea
Me and millions of people
OP literally mentioned the clan as good examples of trainers to be kept, try reading.
Those guys literally aren't in Paldea
I like them though, and I actually really like how SV handled them. The absence of random trainers scattered around was literally the main complaint people had with PLA and the wild areas in SwSh
>The new open world format no longer lends itself to overworld trainer battles
It's because this is their first time doing it.
The most pressing issues are:
>gyms/important battles not being scaled
>raids being OP
They have to severely nerf raid items and make then post game or something. As you said, battling trainers is irrelevant if you can just use candies.
I also think that they should add more battles around towns or important fights not relevant to the main story, like side quests or something to make the towns somewhat memorable.
Gamefreak is never going to change this formula. They perfected to hitting millions of units surpassing the prior release. What would be the point of Pokémon without trainers?
The same point as Pokemon without all the Pokemon. Nothing is sacred, and if they can cut something to save dev costs, they will.
Is that why they made Legends, then? A game where there's only a tiny handful of trainers and the focus is on Wild Pokemon and boss battles against Wild Pokemon?
As long as they make a game with Pikachu and Eevee where you can capture Wild Pokemon, that's literally all it needs to be considered a mainline game nowadays.
>Is that why they made Legends, then? A game where there's only a tiny handful of trainers
It's why it was boring garbage
No because Legends is not a part of a main series game. Legends was Gamefreaks way of saying "hey! we're transitioning to open world now!". Notice how they went back to the same story/game structure for Gen 9. Gyms, 2 legedaries, evil team, etc.
>No because Legends is not a part of a main series game.
Is that why Legends is listed as a main series game on the official JP Pokemon website?
>Notice how they went back to the same story/game structure for Gen 9. Gyms, 2 legedaries, evil team, etc.
You mean the fact that Legends and SV were developed concurrently, and thus couldn't take from each other without risking homogenizing into the same product fundamentally?
None of that matters. Fact is Gamefreak is too stuck in their ways to change. Yeah they did that shit with Legends but it technically wasnt considered a new generation. Every new generation of games takes out content and adds new content in whilst holding the same story structure its nearly been since 1996. 8 gyms, defeat trainers/villains on the way up and beat the league. THEY ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE THIS.
What they should do is add those trainer battles to towns/cities or important areas. Get rid of the shit gym mini games and replace them with small tournaments to decide who fights the gym leader.
Legends had a handful of trainer battles and they were all memorable and challenging because the game is balanced around getting Exp from catching and also rotating your mons from your overworld catches. The unique battle system also plays a part since lower leveled Pokemon can cause a lot of damage even if they're 20 or 30 levels lower than you.
I think it's inevitable that real-time catching will make its way to the main series. It's not a coincidence we've had both LGPE and Legends focusing on catching mechanics, and SV already incorporated mechanics to allow you to throw your ball outside of battle. I think once that happens random NPC trainers definitely become unnecessary. You can nerf Raid rewards and catching Exp but while you can just catch higher leveled Pokemon at will in the overworld, the incentive to train your own team will always be minimal now. Like some others have said, the solution is making so NPC battles have a purpose as part of a side quest or something.
One day i'll read a thread that isn't smogon shit where i know people play the games, Today is not that day.
>Trainer battles are unnecessary
No shit Sherlock, why else do you think they made them optional now?
It's good to give the players options, no need to remove them
raids are trash, replaced that with something less shit
no reason to remove trainer battles, the game is already casual and you can just not do them unlike some routes in former games.
You're unnecessary but still you persist