Can or should field effects be developed further?

[Zargerth]

Disclaimer, I guess: I don't mean to discredit the effort put into field effects, I'm merely wondering if field effects can be taken a step further.

 

I was talking with my brother about Reborn (which I every now and then do) and while he's more of a competitive player than the sort to play for the story, he told me one of the reasons he has not started playing Reborn (or any fangame for that matter) yet is that although he finds field effects a refreshing addition, they are unfinished. There are field effects that seem to serve one purpose only: making the boss or Gym Leader battle unfair by definition. This means all the field effect does is buff the Gym Leader's Pokemon in one or more ways, while offering the player no means of using the field to their advantage and instead acts as huge disadvantage. This doesn't promote strategic play, it promotes pure counterpicking and cheesing. Luckily there aren't many fields like this in Reborn.

 

Another point of view we discussed was the versatility of field usage. There are several fields the player can use to their advantage and interact with; one of the reasons I like the battle with Shade is that it promotes smart use of the field, and yet Shade can manipulate it just as easily. However, in his opinion there are fields that are like switches; they are either on or off. For instance, while Corey's corrosive mist field can be interacted with, Corey has no means to counter your counter as far as I know. What I mean is that once the corrosive mist is removed from battle with Fire-type moves, Corey can no longer create the mist again (I'm not sure if Flying-type moves remove the mist just temporarily or completely). Another example would be Serra's mirror field. Heck, breaking it causes you to lose relationship points, so if you're not willing to do that you're at the mercy of evasion hax. What makes the battle with Noel so great is that he is not having an unfair advantage over you right from the start, and there are several winning strategies depending on how you use the field. What Noel seems to lack, however, is the means of using your usage of the field against you - outside of Hidden Power, that is. The plethora of genius ways one can use fields shifts battling from just clicking super-effective / highest BP moves towards a more strategic battle where the circumstances are prone to change.

 

While these "interactable" fields tend to be what you might call a "double-edged sword", additional means to use the field is what prevents them from being too one-sided or one-dimensional. It's just that the Gym Leaders or bosses need counters to your counters. What are your thoughts on this subject; do you prefer stabile or linear / straightforward fields or fields that tend to change during the battle -depending on how the battle is played- and thus at the very least have a chance of shifting momentum?

[Dreamy]

I don't mind fields being heavily favored towards the gym leader: they're an AI with a set team that's restricted to a monotype, you're a human who can adapt their team and strategy over multiple attempts. they need what advantages they can get. However one of my favorite thing with the fields is the transformations between different ones based on certain moves used (and a new field is much better than just removing one) and I wish there were a wider variety of transformations and more interconnections so that the field could go through a large spectrum of different environments over the course of a long battle. Even if it didn't work very well against me, when I saw Adrienn's strategy of blowing away the mist with tailwind to reveal the fairy tale field to boost Mawile more, I just thought that was a really awesome strategy. The mirror field is also conceptually one of my favorite fields because it actually feels like it's altering the battle mechanics and changing the way you fight, rather than just boosting some stuff. I still like the simpler and less interactive ones though.

[Commander]

Here's my view on field effects: they should add an extra challenge, but not to the point you are getting your ass handed to you just due to a gimmick. I've always had mixed feelings towards field effects as on one hand it lets for higher difficulty and more creative design on leaders, but on the other, it's really all in the leader's favor and no matter what you do you can't change that. Yes, they can be manipulated in the player's favor, but that does require certain mons or moves in order to perform those. That gets into what I feel the issue is:

 

The game's design. Reborn is a very difficult game, but this is due to how it is designed to limit the amount of exp gained so grinding is rather difficult (and very tiresome if you keep spending hours over and over grinding stuff...believe me I had to swap Pokemon out just for a challenge and I got very, very tired of it very, very quickly). You want to use a new Pokemon? You'll have to do a switch and grind for those low level Pokemon as the exp share is available after 7 gym leaders (pretty much the entire length of a regular Pokemon game). Lucky Egg? Not until 11 gym leaders and it's a difficult quest if you haven't been mining. On the opposite side, leaders can be made much weaker since training new Pokemon is much more difficult (leading to a more constant difficulty...but also pushing people to only use the best of the best at their disposal).

 

As for the field effects after playing with many of them many different ways, I only ever felt on field was really, really unfair and that is the Chess field. The reason is that a 1.5x boost to a psychic attack is very, very powerful on one of the most powerful special attack types. It's a little bit too much at that point in time (though HC and Reborn do run different designs). The point is this: if you are getting beat up, you should be thinking about what you can do. If you are compelled to try a new team member out due to your struggles, then this gimmick is doing its job right as it's promoting strategy. If you are frustrated and keep resetting to hope for good rng, likely it might not be the field effects are unfair, but something outside of it is the main issue. Yeah, grinding is a necessary evil in RPGs so if the difficulty doesn't push you to do it, then it'd make the game boring.

 

Anyways, the field effects are designed very, very well and while the fields are skewed towards certain types/Pokemon, that does not leave the player helpless. Bennett is the best example demonstrating this. Both of his fights are on fields that give a certain type the advantage yet he managed to make use of them while fighting you. They weren't designed at all for bug types. Most of the fields just scratch a little below the surface through the game due to the limitations a single game could offer. It's kind of hard to say they are unfair when they are barely explored.

[FairFamily]

To be honest, I feel that the early fields are the least interactive fields, but over time you get more interaction. More pokemon are available and more moves become in the system. In return the gym leaders don't interact as much either, so it creates an intresting learning curve. When playing reborn multiple times with distinct teams, you can see that you can get advanatge out of all the fields. You just need some diverse team members and be a bit creative. I think I have interacted with most fields (except maybe some fields that do not occur that often).

 

For what kind of fields I like, I like fields that leave your team relatively the same in power with a few exceptions for the rest I like variety. Fields that barely change, fields that an be changed manually, fields that get created I like them all. The only field Ireally dislike is the glitch field. 

[nepeta100]

On ‎5‎/‎1‎/‎2017 at 11:50 PM, Commander said:

Here's my view on field effects: they should add an extra challenge, but not to the point you are getting your ass handed to you just due to a gimmick. I've always had mixed feelings towards field effects as on one hand it lets for higher difficulty and more creative design on leaders, but on the other, it's really all in the leader's favor and no matter what you do you can't change that. Yes, they can be manipulated in the player's favor, but that does require certain mons or moves in order to perform those. That gets into what I feel the issue is:

 

The game's design. Reborn is a very difficult game, but this is due to how it is designed to limit the amount of exp gained so grinding is rather difficult (and very tiresome if you keep spending hours over and over grinding stuff...believe me I had to swap Pokemon out just for a challenge and I got very, very tired of it very, very quickly). You want to use a new Pokemon? You'll have to do a switch and grind for those low level Pokemon as the exp share is available after 7 gym leaders (pretty much the entire length of a regular Pokemon game). Lucky Egg? Not until 11 gym leaders and it's a difficult quest if you haven't been mining. On the opposite side, leaders can be made much weaker since training new Pokemon is much more difficult (leading to a more constant difficulty...but also pushing people to only use the best of the best at their disposal).

 

As for the field effects after playing with many of them many different ways, I only ever felt on field was really, really unfair and that is the Chess field. The reason is that a 1.5x boost to a psychic attack is very, very powerful on one of the most powerful special attack types. It's a little bit too much at that point in time (though HC and Reborn do run different designs). The point is this: if you are getting beat up, you should be thinking about what you can do. If you are compelled to try a new team member out due to your struggles, then this gimmick is doing its job right as it's promoting strategy. If you are frustrated and keep resetting to hope for good rng, likely it might not be the field effects are unfair, but something outside of it is the main issue. Yeah, grinding is a necessary evil in RPGs so if the difficulty doesn't push you to do it, then it'd make the game boring.

 

Anyways, the field effects are designed very, very well and while the fields are skewed towards certain types/Pokemon, that does not leave the player helpless. Bennett is the best example demonstrating this. Both of his fights are on fields that give a certain type the advantage yet he managed to make use of them while fighting you. They weren't designed at all for bug types. Most of the fields just scratch a little below the surface through the game due to the limitations a single game could offer. It's kind of hard to say they are unfair when they are barely explored.

couldn't have said it any better myself field effects are amazing