Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl

[Moonface]

I think EXP Share being always on would be fine if the game was structured like a typical JRPG. By that, I mean that games in that genre tend to have every party member receive XP at the end of the fight, so you don't just stick with the same group of characters and also don't have the party leader always being more powerful than the rest of the team even if you never switch anyone out, and I've never felt too powerful in games that do that.

I think the problem for Pokemon though is that there's just not much reason to change a fire Pokemon to a different fire Pokemon, just to pick one type out of many. Anything else I find after at least the first two gyms just doesn't feel like it'll offer me anything I don't have that's worth getting that new Pokemon up to the same level as the rest of my team. Also in trying to do that, the rest of the team is always going to get XP too so the new Pokemon will never catch up and be too weak, or the rest of the team gets too strong if that new Pokemon is brought up to where it needs to be to be useful in upcoming fights.

EXP Share just feels like it's useful at the start to keep your team all balanced in level and to make it easier to level up weaker new Pokemon for the sake of their evolution and Pokedex entry. By mid game though it doesn't really make me feel more incentivised to bring in something new that I've already got covered by another Pokemon, so it really just ends up keeping a balanced team the whole game without swapping everything in and out in battles but the rest of the game doesn't scale against a team that has likely been working since the start or close to it, unlike JRPG's that are built knowing that the party has been growing stronger from near the beginning of the game.

Even games like Octopath Traveler don't have the problem and that game requires you to find all eight characters across the world, yet the last one I found didn't end up feeling like the runt of the group.

[Mr EliteL]

I take it the ones that help in overworld are still infinite like Fly, Surf, Cut, Dive and Waterfall?

Not totally for the EXP Share always being on, the option should've been there or gone back to being an item a Pokémon holds to help them out if you got them late to fill a spot or for Pokédex. Oh well.

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, we're going back to TMs being consumables and HMs being infinite use items. Basically the way it should have always stayed.

The exp share is good if you're trying to level up Pokemon you catch late and want to try to get them up to par, or in the case of a Pokemon like Magikarp, no longer having to lead off with them, switch them out, and then repeat for every single encounter/Pokemon a trainer has. However having it permanently on from the start of the game is just going to make your entire team too high level, and there will be no more balancing which Pokemon get exp in every battle, which was one of the very few things that could make the game interesting.

Granted if the difficulty of these remakes stay the same, you can just choose Chimchar as your starter and solo the entire game with it, so that would make it so you don't have to worry about the exp share always being on, haha.

@Moonface You make a good point about making the games structured like other JRPGs. While the entire team does get exp in those games, the entire game is also usually balanced around that fact. Unfortunately as we know, Pokemon is not. If they made the scaling of the game more even, or better yet, make it so opposing trainers scale to the highest level Pokemon the player has (with their movesets changing depending on level), then we could see something more interesting happen. Instead of going into the Elite 4 with a team of level 100 Pokemon and facing their Level 40 Pokemon, with the occasional dip into the 50s, instead we'd have an Elite 4 with all level 100 Pokemon too.

In the end I'm not going to let it bother me a whole lot. I'm just going to try to enjoy the remakes for what they are, and hopefully have a good time. While Gen 4 wasn't my favorite, I liked it a hell of a lot more than any of the following generations, so I'm looking forward to it.

[Moonface]

Yeah, levelling based on the player would probably be the only way to balance out the game considering the large number of Pokemon a game contains. Set every route to have a base total, such as Level 20 for a route, but if the player enters it at level 30 then the game scales it at something like Base + x% Player Level. I wonder if any fan games have ever come up with a solution to the issue.

[Dragon Lord]

I think the most I've seen is that there are some Pokemon hacks that have drastically higher level scaling throughout the game. I think I remember a friend telling me about one where the Elite Four were like... level 80-90. I never played it myself, but apparently it's brutally hard and a huge change from what Pokemon games normally are.

I might have to try it out some day. Gonna have to ask them what one it was though.

[queenzelda]

I decided to pre-order the double pack for Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. I've always wanted to get the double pack but every time I try it's always sole out. This time I decided I'd preorder and not care.
I can't wait to play the Switch remakes, should be fun. 

[Moonface]

I decided to pre-order the double pack for Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. I've always wanted to get the double pack but every time I try it's always sole out. This time I decided I'd preorder and not care.
I can't wait to play the Switch remakes, should be fun. 

Which version do you intend to play first?

[queenzelda]

Which version do you intend to play first?  

Definitely Shining Pearl, cause the legendary always reminds me of Godzilla: and I love Godzilla. I tend to name it Godzilla sometimes too. XD I suppose I'm weird like that.

[Moonface]

I'm going to assume you plan to have a different starter in each version, so which one of the three is being the neglected child?

[Dragon Lord]

Speaking of starters, that's a good question to ask everyone: Which starter are you going to choose?

Sadly Gen IV is one where there's a huge difference between one of the starters and the other two. Infernape (final evo of Chimchar) is so much better than the other two that there's hardly any reason to even consider choosing them. Especially since there's better Water/Grass Pokemon to choose from in the game. This is of course talking about just in-game and not taking competitive battling into account (though I think back in the day, Infernape was used in competitive for a little while).

So yeah, I'll be taking Chimchar as usual, as the other two are just a waste compared to Infernape.

[queenzelda]

I'm going to assume you plan to have a different starter in each version, so which one of the three is being the neglected child?

I'll be choosing Piplup for Pearl, then Chimchar for Diamond. I'll replay one to get Turtwig. So for a bit the abandoned child will be Turtwig I suppose. XD Personally I LOVE Empolion, but I've always had an affinity towards penguins. <3

[Moonface]

Speaking of starters, that's a good question to ask everyone: Which starter are you going to choose?

No idea if I'll be playing either of the games but if I were, I'd be choosing Chimchar too, purely because I find it has the best looking final evolution. I'm very shallow and pick my starter depending on what their final evolution looks like, regardless of whether it's statistically good or not.

Apparently some copies of the game got released already too, but I haven't seen any notable information about the games come out because of it.

[ShiraNoMai]

The most notable thing to come of the game leaks was learning the fact that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are the exact same ROM, with only a flag telling them "hey, this is Pearl!" Or "hey, this is Diamond!" To load the correct version patch in. That's the first time Pokemon games have ever done this. I mark it down to the fact it's a different dev team and they operate differently to GameFreak.

Honestly, as silly as it sounds, why work harder when you can work smarter? My understanding, based on what you hear from GameFreak's development timeline, they tend to operate almost in an old-fashioned way, and that more than likely reduces quality in favor of traditional methods that take longer to do. And due to the strict deadlines The Pokemon Company sets for them, lately it has not been proving fruitful.

[Moonface]

The most notable thing to come of the game leaks was learning the fact that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are the exact same ROM, with only a flag telling them "hey, this is Pearl!" Or "hey, this is Diamond!" To load the correct version patch in. That's the first time Pokemon games have ever done this. I mark it down to the fact it's a different dev team and they operate differently to GameFreak.

Honestly, as silly as it sounds, why work harder when you can work smarter? My understanding, based on what you hear from GameFreak's development timeline, they tend to operate almost in an old-fashioned way, and that more than likely reduces quality in favor of traditional methods that take longer to do. And due to the strict deadlines The Pokemon Company sets for them, lately it has not been proving fruitful.

I'm surprised this (or something close to it) hasn't been the standard already. Even if not just coding a single game and then attaching flags to things to have stuff locked out, surely most of the games could have been built up to a certain point with the overworld and NPC's all being the same, and then just adding in the Pokemon at the end since those are generally the only differences in most of the games.
I can see a mod quickly being pumped out that removes the lock on these games though for modded Switch's. I won't be shocked to see an emulator out for this as fast as Metroid Dread since it's going to be massively appealing to be able to have only one of the two versions but have all of the content available by removing the version lock without needing to modify your Switch to do it.

Speaking of modifying, someone figured out how to change the scaling for models in this game to a value of 1 so everything is rendered at its true size, instead of being scaled to fit into the overworld. Naturally, the person chose to test this with a Wailord:

[ShiraNoMai]

The most notable thing to come of the game leaks was learning the fact that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are the exact same ROM, with only a flag telling them "hey, this is Pearl!" Or "hey, this is Diamond!" To load the correct version patch in. That's the first time Pokemon games have ever done this. I mark it down to the fact it's a different dev team and they operate differently to GameFreak.

...I won't be shocked to see an emulator out for this as fast as Metroid Dread since it's going to be massively appealing to be able to have only one of the two versions but have all of the content available by removing the version lock without needing to modify your Switch to do it.

Actually there is an emu file for it out, that's how they were able to find out it was the same ROM with a flag denotating the version differences, as well as the tweet you just shared with the modded Pokemon model scaling.  The game leaked a bit early so people are already playing/gathering info on it.

I do want to play this, but I feel like I have so many other games to be playing too