Welcome to part 2 of Nugget Bridge’s Pokémon X & Y changes review! Last time I wrote a bit about some of the gameplay mechanics changes and move updates in X & Y, and before moving on to the exciting new stuff in the last part of the review, I figured I should touch on a different type of gameplay mechanics change: the changes to breeding Pokémon in the sixth generation games. There were several changes made in X & Y to make breeding Pokémon significantly less time consuming than it has been in the past. The traditional breeding process ended up being basically completely replaced by RNG manipulation the past few years, with players able to acquire Pokémon in a few minutes instead of a few days. In X & Y, that same level of RNG manipulation is gone, but breeding to get five-31 IV Pokémon is fairly easy — though it still takes a significant amount of time relative to using the RNG, or more importantly, just playing on a simulator instead of on the game cards. On some level, I can’t complain too much: until X & Y, I literally hadn’t been the original trainer of a Pokémon I used in a battle against another player since Journey Across America in 2006. I now have a box and a half full of perfect Pokémon that are mostly my own, so obviously I’m using the changed system much more than I used the previous system. However, I’d still like to take a moment to look at the big picture of the breeding changes in Pokémon before I get on to the individual changes because I don’t think this was a perfect set of changes.
As you’d expect from an established franchise that has been as consistently successful as Pokémon has been, Game Freak tends to be slow to introduce major changes to the game. Incremental change works very well to slowly improve parts of the game that aren’t broken, such as the battle mechanics. While I think most people would agree that the mechanics changes I wrote about last week would look even better if they had included, say, a reduction of the flinch chance of Rock Slide, a reduction in confusion self-hit chance, and a reduction in the odds of losing a turn to paralysis, the reaction to the mechanics changes in Pokémon X & Y has been deservedly positive because the changes that were made were good. Slow, incremental change is effective for gameplay mechanics, especially because if you go too crazy, things can get a little broken. That’s when you end up with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. Or maybe Cataclysm.
However, slow change is much less effective in cases where the incumbent features are weakest. While Pokémon doesn’t seem to have too many areas where large change is needed, one place that really did need an overhaul was the time investment required to raise a competitively viable team. Like the battle mechanics, we saw a variety of changes that made raising Pokémon a little bit better this generation… but if Game Freak wanted to keep players playing on their 3DSes instead of online simulators, an improvement larger than a little bit was probably needed. Breeding is faster and easier than it’s ever been, but being faster than before doesn’t necessarily mean battling on the cartridges outside of official events — or on the cartridges at all for players who prefer rule sets other than Standard — is going to be seen as a viable alternative for players who have enjoyed the convenience of simulators or for new players who might see breeding a competitive team as too much effort to make battle spot worth trying out. I should probably get my stake on the table here: I started playing competitive Pokémon in 2002 and used simulators basically exclusively until 2011. Even when I started playing in the Video Game Championships, I very rarely played in-game because it was a pain to get Pokémon and in-game Wi-Fi was horrible. The latter issue is definitely fixed now, and I think it’d be best for the growth of the game if people were connecting with newer players through the games, which have millions of people playing them, instead of the simulators and their thousands, but I’ve been using the simulators for over a decade for a reason. They’re much more convenient than getting a team in-game to test out is, and it’s going to be really difficult for Game Freak to change the behavior of players to keep them on their 3DSes at this point, especially old dogs like me with habits that are hard to break.
Pokémon breeding mechanics are among the franchise’s touchiest issues because it is probably the single case where Pokémon appealing to many demographics pits design goals against each other the most. Game Freak, like many of the more casual players it has attracted, seems to value each Pokémon’s individuality and has maintained a high level of individual complexity for each Pokémon (six IVs that can be 32 values each, one of 25 natures, one of three abilities) that with one new exception, can’t be modified at all once a Pokémon is born. The time investment of acquiring a high quality version of an individual Pokémon is also probably intentionally reasonably high: while it certainly isn’t going to take anyone a week to breed a single Pokémon like it may have in generation five — not that I would know — even using a previously bred Pokémon in the same egg group as a father, collecting a mother of the appropriate species and passing IVs is going to take a few hours per Pokémon without incredible luck. This is in stark contrast to a simulator, where players can enter a whole team and be battling in about five minutes.
I think Game Freak is probably never going to be willing to just have an online simulator clone mode to really compete with simulators on convenience because it’s so far off of the image they seem to want, but unlike in Black 2 & White 2, I think the in-game battle experience is fairly indisputably better on the carts in XY. As such, I think it’s realistic for the games to be reasonably competitive if the extra time involved with making a team in-game isn’t too severe. Whether or not Game Freak accomplished this in X & Y will probably be seen over the next year or so, but I think there’s some evidence in both directions right now. There are many, many more players playing in-game and making legitimate competitive teams than probably at any other point in Pokémon’s history, including a lot of people I would never have expected to be playing on the carts at all, but there are still plenty of players — some who are extremely dedicated to VGC — who are just waiting for Poke Bank to transfer RNGed Pokémon over to play with because they don’t want to spend the time making a team. I’d really like to see more players playing in-game compared to generation five, both because it’s typically much easier to convince people playing in-game who aren’t already tournament-goers to try out the format and attend events and because I think the international element of playing on the carts is a little more interesting than the relatively static group of simulator players. However, as someone with a few hundred hours logged in X & Y already that was mostly spent breeding Pokémon instead of battling, I’m not sure we’re really at the point where that’s going to happen over the long term yet.
Changes to Breeding, Training, and Acquiring Pokémon in Pokémon X & Y
For a full guide to breeding Pokémon in Pokémon X&Y, check out Huy’s Guide.
- IVs and Natures: Still the same as before
The first change is actually a lack of change. There are still six IVs controlling the six stats that have a range of 32 potential values and 25 natures. There are still no ways to change any of these values after a Pokémon is born.
This is noteworthy because if there is any place that makes sense to attack the difficulty of achieving perfect Pokémon, this was the spot to do it, and it didn’t happen. This seems to be one of those places where Game Freak likes the individuality of their Pokémon and appears uninterested in changing things, and I think that it’s probably a mistake. I’d love to see them remove IVs completely, but since they don’t seem to want to do that, simply allowing there to be some way to do additional training at max level or through super training to increase IVs seems like it would have been a reasonable solution that I am unsure why we haven’t seen. Natures are much less obnoxious to deal with because of Synchronize and Everstone, but a way to change a Pokémon’s Nature on the fly would be pretty handy, too. I don’t feel like either of these concepts are too out there — I could change personalities in RPGs that had a similar function way back in the early 90s (one of the Dragon Quests, I think?) and several MMOs have an equivalent to boosting stats at max level that being able to increase IVs the same way would emulate — but Pokémon not having anything like them implemented means that the cost of individuality is that the vast majority of Pokémon are genetically inferior fodder. Which apparently is a better state of affairs.
- New Item: Ability Capsule — Changes a Pokémon’s Ability to its other non-Hidden Ability (one time use, 200 BP)
Ignoring that changing between non-Hidden Abilities is almost never useful and 200 BP is a ridiculous price tag (especially now that battling online doesn’t give BP), this is a really fascinating change to me because of the previous bullet. Abilities, like IVs and Natures, had always been locked and now can be changed at a cost. Here’s hoping this is a step in that direction…
In the mean time, if you breed a flawless Pokémon with the wrong ability you can make it competitively useful for the low, low price of one easy payment of 200 BP!
- A parent holding Destiny Knot when breeding allows 5 IVs to pass down from the parents instead of 3 IVs.
Rather than improving the potential of existing Pokémon, the solution Game Freak chose was to allow Destiny Knot to vastly improve bred Pokémon. This wound up being a pretty good solution: with one parent holding Everstone and the other holding Destiny Knot, if both parents have 31 IVs in the 5 stats the bred Pokémon is going to use, you actually end up with a 19.3% chance (1/6 of not passing the right stat + a 1/32*5/6 chance of rolling a 31 when the wrong stat is passed) of breeding another perfect Pokémon to trade. Where this tends to be practically useful is earlier than that scenario in the breeding process, since if you have a male with the right five 31 IVs in the egg group you’re working with, as simply catching a female with the correct Nature and breeding it with the male using Everstone and Destiny Knot means you can almost always end up with a Female with the correct Nature and 3 31 IVs within an hour(probably 4 if the female is from Friend Safari), which is already starting to get you pretty close to having a realistic shot at rolling a perfect child.
Destiny Knot is fantastic. It makes X & Y breeding by far the fastest its ever been in the Pokémon franchise. I do want to go back to the points from the introduction here, though, because they’re most relevant to Destiny Knot. Destiny Knot was Game Freak’s only major overhaul toward breeding competitively viable Pokémon. Once you have a decent selection of Pokémon, it definitely becomes viable to get most breedable Pokémon with even or primarily female gender ratios within a few hours. The question to me here is still whether or not it was a big enough change. There’s a little inherent greed in basically writing that this was a great change but that I actually wanted more, but making a team on a simulator in five minutes is still going to appeal to a lot of people when you consider that even in a situation where I have males in the appropriate egg groups and get fairly lucky, it’s going to take me a minimum of about ten hours to breed a completely fresh team (which is probably a low estimate). That’s an awful lot of time to spend preparing to play a game.
I know there are a not insignificant number of players that see raising Pokémon as a major part of the game and as important to competition as battling, and while I’m glad some people value and enjoy the breeding aspects of the game, the competitive impact of breeding should be zero. No one comments on how really unlocking champions, leveling your account, and buying runes are as important a part of becoming a champion in a game like League of Legends as battling on the Fields of Justice, or how going through the storymode in a fighting game to unlock characters is as important as actually battling other players in those games because those claims are completely ridiculous and are just as ridiculous in Pokémon. At the end of the day, for Pokémon as a competitive game, acquiring a team to start battling is a barrier to entry, and while that barrier isn’t quite The Wall from A Song of Ice and Fire anymore, it’s still a fence I’m concerned many people are going to choose not to climb.
- Pokémon Bank Delayed Until Almost 2014
The lack of Pokémon Bank is perhaps the most irritating part of collecting Pokémon right now. On some level, this isn’t worth writing extensively about — it’ll come out when it’s ready and it’s better to have the game without Poke Bank than getting them both at the same time later — but the impact of not being able to transfer Pokémon is pretty large. Other than the release of generation three, where Pokémon weren’t allowed to be transferred at all with the changes to IVs and the addition of Natures, this is the first time Pokémon haven’t been transferable between generations at launch and it causes pretty large problems for the competitive game. Without Pokémon Bank, a variety of Pokémon and move combinations are missing. Some egg moves are now illegal, which vastly reduce the power of Pokémon. Chandelure, for instance, can’t learn Heat Wave without using a tutor or breeding with something that used the tutor in a past generation, so while even in 2011 before the BW2 tutor came out it was able to use Heat Wave by breeding with a Slugma from generation four, it is now relegated to the less useful Flamethrower and Fire Blast for a couple months without transfers. Several other Pokémon are missing important tutor moves that make them significantly weaker, such as Zapdos also missing Heat Wave, Scizor missing Bug Bite, and basically every Pokémon who would normally use it missing Icy Wind, which is greatly reducing the game’s speed control options. This is before you even look at Pokémon being completely unavailable because they aren’t available in XY. The net impact of this is that while we currently don’t have a ruleset anyway, we’re playing in a bizarre, fictional metagame that will be changed quickly when Pokémon Bank is released.
While starting fresh is probably appealing to some players, it also complicates breeding. It is much, much faster to get a perfect Pokémon using perfect parents, even if it is just a perfect male of another species. If Pokémon Bank were available, it would allow us to transfer over the flawless Pokémon we have in generation five and breed quicker in generation six. This is particularly irritating in cases like Scizor, where it is a good enough Pokémon now to breed one to use temporarily, but doing so is fundamentally a waste of time on multiple fronts, since we can neither transfer perfect Scizors to breed faster and will probably want to replace it completely when Bank comes out to get Bug Bite. Pokémon Bank is leading to a lot of wasted time, which is pretty frustrating for such an important feature and again adds to the barriers to entry complaint… we’re spending more time to spend more time on this one.
- There is currently no way to RNG or hack and only limited cloning
So here’s something else that’s a little controversial. I imagine most players who aren’t playing in VGC events would read that bullet and view it as a positive. I don’t, and I want to take a moment to explain why.
It is a pretty obvious theme at this point that I think anything that forces players to take a substantial amount of time to get started battling is a bad feature. RNG and cloning were things I liked a lot in generation five because it let people get around the tediousness of acquiring a team and get to battling, which for many competitive players is the only part of the game that is appealing. I interact with a lot of different players with a lot of different views on this stuff, and I can read some of the holier-than-thou responses about breeding Pokémon with trust and love and being a *** REAL POKEMON TRAINER *** already, but the bottom line is there’s a very understandable reason why so many players at tournament play and the time spent breeding Pokémon just to compete (even though that wasn’t actually true last generation). Most players don’t want to go through significant effort just to be able to play a game, especially if they aren’t already invested in it… it’s very different for me to spend a couple days making a team compared to someone who’s never played the metagame before and isn’t sure if they’ll even like it.
Fundamentally, what we do here on Nugget Bridge is try to make VGC more accessible to people and help grow and teach the game. Anything that makes the game harder to play works against those goals, and I’d say RNG and cloning not being available is a big mark against that. The lack of cloning is leading to people actually trading Pokémon, which is definitely cool and community building, but it isn’t even close to allowing for the same type of availability in Pokémon we had before and that is definitively bad.
I’m all for hacking being gone for now, though, if only because of how poorly people tend do it… but given a certain Magmar I’m getting mixed signals on how we’re handling hacking at this point, anyway.
- EV Training with Hordes / Super Training
One of the more promoted new features other than the obvious ones like Mega Evolutions and the glorious return of the Red & Blue starter Pokémon was Super Training, a way to EV train Pokémon without engaging in battles. While not nearly as time consuming as actually breeding Pokémon in the past, EV training has traditionally been a long and extremely tedious process, so I think we were all eager for a faster way to train Pokémon. Instead, we got Super Training!
Sort-of-jokes aside, Super Training was disappointing. The one really positive thing I can say about Super Training is that since it does give you that little graph of your EVs training even when acquired through normal battles, it should be reasonably discernible for new players that there’s a way to train their Pokémon other than experience that is probably important, which at least people can figure out exists without the help of an internet resource revealing the mechanic to them now. That’s not to say it’s necessarily reasonable for a player to figure out how to optimize EVs training without outside help, especially since the whole points-only-count-in-multiples-of-four thing is pretty unintuitive (more so when you remember it’s usually multiples of 8 but sometimes 4 at level 50 instead), but at least it’s there and people can probably get 252/252 spreads down without any outside influence. I am all for new features that help break down barriers to being competitive, and at least this indirectly teaches players something.
Super Training itself is hilariously inefficient as a feature, unfortunately. I used it to train my first few Pokémon because I think the minigame is kind of fun, but once the novelty wears off EV training through hordes is much, much faster… which is a little worrying considering that the whole point of Super Training was presumably to actually be an efficient way to train, and that the minigame probably took a decent amount of effort to develop. Super Training, inexplicably, is not even useful enough to be the best way to do anything but acquire some items. Hopefully, Game Freak increases the EVs training received from each training activity by at least about double next time they release a game, because it just isn’t very effective right now.
Perhaps the worst part of Super Training is that even though it doesn’t shy away from assigning numerical values because it comes out and tells you that you’re going to get +4/8/12 EVs training for each drill, it doesn’t actually list the values of your total EVs anywhere, instead giving me you graph you can’t actually use to figure out if you’re off by anything smaller than accidentally putting 252 EVs in Attack instead of Defense. All-in-all, Super Training feels a generation or two away from where it needs to be to be useful, but at least Game Freak isn’t essentially denying the existence of EVs anymore… even if the translators did decide to keep using a name for them (base stats) that competitive players usually use to refer to something else.
- Females can pass Egg Moves when bred
- Males pass Hidden Abilities when bred with Ditto
- Egg Moves can be relearned at the Move Reminder
While these changes are not very exciting to look at — they’re kind of the @Leftovers of the list — they’re really important because they allow for several combinations of moves and abilities to be legal that previously were not. Male Pokémon being able to pass their Hidden Abilities allows several Pokémon that previously were only released in male-only promotions to use their Hidden Abilities and Egg Moves at the same time, though many of those Pokémon, such as Charizard and Venusaur, are now in the Friend Safari anyway. Females being able to pass Egg Moves similarly increases the pool of allowed combinations, as you can now continually breed Egg Moves onto females and then introduce more with new males and get any combination of four egg moves you want on any Pokémon that can breed. The practical applications of this are pretty limited, but it’s kind of neat in the sense that combined with the Reminder change you can breed any egg move you’d ever want on a Pokémon and then relearn them as you need them and be able to change movesets with Heart Scales instead of needing to breed a new Pokémon. Cool changes.
- Friend Safari Pokémon are guaranteed to have at least two 31 IVs
- Friend Safari Pokémon can have Hidden Abilities if you’ve been online at the same time as the owner
- Legendary and other Pokémon that are unable to breed are guaranteed to have at least three 31 IVs
There’s isn’t a lot of exposition I can add for these changes, but other than Destiny Knot these are the best improvements for raising a competitive team in XY. While there aren’t really any legendaries worth catching at this point — Zapdos isn’t really Zapdos without Heat Wave and potentially Tailwind, and Articuno and Moltres are horrible — locking 3 31s makes it realistic to chain reset for a near-perfect legendary now without spending ridiculous amounts of time. I’m actually a little surprised by how many players have even managed to take this a step further and get Hidden Power Ice Zapdos already on Battle Spot, so even without RNG people are getting really solid legendaries.
While catching anything competitively useful out of the Friend Safari is pretty unlikely, between being able to get any of the Pokémon’s available abilities and at least 2 31 IVs, the Friend Safari is an excellent place to get the first mother for starting a competitive Pokémon’s lineage and cuts a bunch of time off of the process most of the time. Subtle change here, but it makes a mountain of difference.
Conclusion
Overall, the changes to building a team in this generation were positive, decreasing the time it takes to breed competitively useful Pokémon and adding some new ability/move combinations to bred Pokémon. Will it be enough to get people practicing on the actual game instead of the simulators this season? Only time will tell…
The post Looking Ahead to Pokémon X & Y Part 2: Raising a Competitive Team appeared first on Nugget Bridge.