Zumi

do i gotta point out that these changes are preliminary. apparently i do so here's a thing i put in rejupdates channel on the reborn evo discord after some discussion that occurred in rejuv gen the day this post came out I get that people are upset that it's looking like we're toning down the difficulty, because................. yes that's kind of what we're doing. HOWEVER, easier =/= bad. It's because for the overall QOL of the game it'll be infinitely better if the difficulty curve isn't as fucked up as it is right now. For people who want the game to remain challenging, hopefully the passwords we'll likely be adding in will help with micromanaging difficulty better and make it so that people can still enjoy getting pulped by every fight if they want that. I want to make something VERY clear though before people get up in arms in that we're ruining the experience for some. You know who gets the most shit thrown at them if the game doesn't feel fun to play through because people complain about the difficulty being unfair at many points? It's Jan. (which y'all shouldn't be doing btw because that's fucked up. stop harassing devs over things that REALLY do not matter that much but which you don't agree with. thanks) He also has told us in the dev server that he doesn't even like testing his own game anymore because the battles feel like a hassle to get through. And as he mentioned in the post where he announced Intense is getting discontinued, if Jan stops having fun, Jan stops working on the game. The vanilla experience NEEDS WORK. And that's what we're trying to do. Besides, it's not like Normal mode is getting COMPLETELY reworked like Casual/Story mode is, the latter is what truly will be the easier experience if people just wanna go through the game for the story. Normal will still keep challenge to it! It just needs adjustments in a lot of places in order to not have people get completely walled as often in the vanilla experience as they do now. The survey results post will go into further detail, but the explanation for the boss bars being removed is because according to our current survey results, more often than not people struggle on the fights that use boss shields, especially from Chapter 8 onwards. We understand that the boss bars are great from a narrative perspective because of the visual impact it has, hell it's literally the main reason why we decided to put those in in the first place—but in the mechanic's current state it's not fun to go against for several reasons and adding those in essentially did not pan out as we hoped for. This is not only a sentiment shared by a lot of people who filled in the survey, it's also something most of us on the dev team agree on. If it's any consolation for those who REALLY do not want them to be gone—and this is literally a development that started yesterday, so we don't have anything concrete yet don't YELL at me—we're currently looking into possible alternatives for the ways shields function, as these are the main reason why the battles don't feel fun as of right now. If we find something that works as a better middle ground that makes the shields less of a pain in the ass to deal, hopefully we can use that instead. But if we cannot find a solution that doesn't feel jank to go up against, we'll stick with our current decision to remove them entirely from main story fights and find a different approach to make boss battles stand out altogether. Please, have a bit of faith in us. We're doing our best to make the game a good experience for as many people as possible. I know it's impossible to please EVERYONE, but please also try to understand that Pokémon is literal ass to balance in such a way that everyone is pleased, especially with such a diverse and huge playerbase. We're trying to keep options open.

See, this is a comment I will never understand-- How come you feel forced to use D-bond? The choice to do so is entirely up to the player because you could as easily just choose to not carry a mon on you with a cheese move, it's not something we as the devs obligate people to do or use. You can make a fight as easy or challenging as you want yourself, we're simply leaving the choice open for people if they don't want to spend a ton of time to beat a fight.

Hi friends, wanted to chip in on the discussion about boss bars and explain that while yes, for more experienced players they feel like less of a roadblock and more like "a slightly bigger hurdle than usual", for new players they can straight up be run killers. I've seen several people grow frustrated and quit the game because they couldn't get past certain fights, and without giving too much away about survey results (as I want to cover some more stuff about balancing in a later post) we've seen the numbers that people struggle more often on fights with boss hp bars than not, so please also understand as of why we've come to this initial conclusion. If passwords are being added, you'll likely can micromanage the difficulty yourself and make things harder again if you want. Things are still subject to change, like Jan said! But we're trying to look at things from the perspective of less experienced/new players too, and make the experience more smooth overall so people don't have to get walled at every turn.

bless y'all and thank you for the hard work over the years!!

Yes, Terajuma, Darchlight & GDC got major overhauls in terms of both visuals and story flow.

Everything will be temporarily be inaccessible, including the club, download pages and other links. You can still access downloads and other additional stuff through our own site, though!

ceri stop eating shrooms

It is mentioned directly by Alexandra at the start of V13 that she and Damien were able to make prosthetics out of black shards for Celine after she was grievously wounded by Madame X, which are the same prosthetics you see in her artwork! It's a detail that some might've overlooked when skimming through text, though.

waugh i forgot to put a post here after putting the dev update up but artwork for celine, kreiss and cairo has been added to the thread!

Artwork of Talon has been added to the post! No character wallpaper yet, but there is an icon! His full resolution artwork has been uploaded to the sta.sh under the Sidequest folder. More characters that appear in V13.5 will be added later as they are revealed. I've also removed the old versions of the artwork for the team Xen members, as they will no longer be used. Volta has also been moved to Chapter 3 as she now appears during the main story rather than only being mentioned a couple of times.

THERE HE IS... MY BOY

please stop pushing for specific release windows (yes i see it in the other threads as well, not just here), it'll be done when it's done

V15 and V16 are still separate from V14. V14 is simply split into three parts, but how that works? For the time being, that's

by the way, if you throw a shitfit in the comments about this decision, i will bite your head off and that's a promise

All of the Aevian forms do actually have dex entries..... Just that the Pokédex won't heckin cooperate in-game and doesn't show alternate forms properly. I'll probably put together a post with all the dex entries at some point!

i think we've already said plenty of times that the player will not get to date characters so i'm surprised this question is still coming up at all

The Pokédex is currently bugged and doesn't include the A-forms as a result. The wiki's pages work based on PBS files and since the alternate forms of every mon are script-side, they're not included on the pages. They'll manually be added at a later point, we're working on it!

Definitely a story change -- got changed because of Covid and how it seemed in poor taste to keep that part in after everything that's happened.

Feedback either got buried underneath a lot of other things, or simply just... kinda went over our heads due to the other stuff we had to pay attention to. There were indeed a lot of experienced players part of both alpha and beta, which might've also skewed the perspective compared to people who are playing for the first time or aren't completely used to the difficulty of these kinds of games yet. We're probably going to use a better method of collecting feedback about balancing during testing in the future to make sure the former doesn't happen as often.

We're aware of the issues with balancing. Unfortunately, most of these issues came to light after V13 was brought out. The feedback we got during alpha and beta seemed to have been too little in regards to balancing to properly gauge how other people would be experiencing the game (especially now that the AI is completely different -- which really did end up adding a lot to the overall difficulty), but we take feedback on this stuff very seriously and hope that we can make a more enjoyable experience in the future. Sorry for the trouble things have been causing in the game, we're definitely looking at different options for what we can do to make things better!

Not necessarily, honestly. There's a lot of things in this balance patch that should've been addressed a long time ago (and there still are a lot of things that have gone unaddressed but we just simply didn't have time to make even bigger changes), and weren't decided to push through on just a whim. It's also a lot easier to crank up the difficulty after toning it down significantly in comparison to having to tone it down from an already way too difficult fight. Adjustments will be made where necessary in the future!

Quick update; added Emma's new art and updated Aevis' artwork to match his new appearance.