Will they tone down the difficulty to match XY?

[Dr. Buni]

Pokemon was never meant to be a hard game though...even if there are a lot of older people playing this is the series of games that parents will buy their kids for the holidays. It's been directed to kids and always will be. As for the Exp. All, that is a complete non-factor. You can choose to use it or not. If the game has nearly as many trainers as X/Y, your team will be overleveled either way.

It is not a non-factor. The EXP.share is one of, if not THE main reason, X/Y were the easiest games in the series. Hopefully it will not be present in OR/AS and if it is present, lets hope its back to how it worked in pre-Gen VI games. Also yes, Pokémon aren't mean to be hard games, but until Generation IV, they weren't meant to be beaten by 2-years old kids either. There was difficulty in the older games, not Battletoads level of difficulty, obviously, but the games weren't boringly easy either. Also, don't underestimate kids. As I kid, I managed to beat a handful of hard games, like most of the classic Mega Man series. Sometimes kids are able to beat games with more easy than adults, in fact.

 

[Dex]

I hope they can create something challenging. Being able to beat the majority of the Gym leaders with brute force by simply trading KO for KO because they had so few pokemon was no fun. Weirdly, the hardest gym for me was Grant's Rock gym. Apparently my entire team was was weak to either rock or Dark at that point, so Tyrunt was deadly. But I loved that challenge. By the end, I found myself with exp. all turned off, strategically avoiding tall grass to not level up more than I needed, which was no fun.

 

[EvilChameleon]

Only time I used the EXP Share in X/Y was when I was grinding up my Pokemon to match the level of the highest leveled Pokemon the Gym Leader/Champion had. Same thing with the Lucky Egg.

 

[Norzan]

They should add the Easy, Normal and Challenge mode but not in the way it was handled in B/W2 with those stupid keys, it should be available from the start.

 

[Rainami]

If they make it too easy I'm gonna be pissed.

Pokemon was never meant to be a hard game though...even if there are a lot of older people playing this is the series of games that parents will buy their kids for the holidays. It's been directed to kids and always will be. As for the Exp. All, that is a complete non-factor. You can choose to use it or not. If the game has nearly as many trainers as X/Y, your team will be overleveled either way.

It is not a non-factor. The EXP.share is one of, if not THE main reason, X/Y were the easiest games in the series. Hopefully it will not be present in OR/AS and if it is present, lets hope its back to how it worked in pre-Gen VI games. Also yes, Pokémon aren't mean to be hard games, but until Generation IV, they weren't meant to be beaten by 2-years old kids either. There was difficulty in the older games, not Battletoads level of difficulty, obviously, but the games weren't boringly easy either. Also, don't underestimate kids. As I kid, I managed to beat a handful of hard games, like most of the classic Mega Man series. Sometimes kids are able to beat games with more easy than adults, in fact.

XY's EXP. Share makes level grinding and EV Training a lot easier, I think it should be available in the post game.

 

[Dr. Buni]

Only time I used the EXP Share in X/Y was when I was grinding up my Pokemon to match the level of the highest leveled Pokemon the Gym Leader/Champion had. Same thing with the Lucky Egg.

I didn't even do that. I challenged all Gym Leaders, Elite Fours and the Champion with an underleveled team. It was much more challenging and fun. In fact, if not by my lovely Aegislash, I would have lost twice against the Elite Four. In my second playthrough, though, I tried turning the EXP.Share on and it was awful. By the time I reached a Gym, my least used Pokémon would be 5~10 levels above the most level Pokémon in the Gym Leader's team. I honestly have no idea why Game Freak thought giving the Exp.Share in the main game would be a good idea. The feature is extremely useful in the post-game, when you want to level up fast to have online battles, but during the main game it is the most "anti-fun" feature ever created by an human being.

 

[Kwame120]

Hopefully not...but I'm fearing that they will. I've found post-Heartgold quite easy, hopefully they can bring the difficulty back. They still can, it just tends to be the postgame stuff like the World Tournament. Maybe we'll have a mode with "Classic" difficulty and "Casual" difficulty, to borrow the terms from Fire Emblem.

 

[Bolt Strike]

I'm hoping no, but it probably will be. The direction they've taken in difficulty and design changed drastically in BW1, I have a feeling they consider it "necessary" to dumb down the game to the point where a braindead monkey could beat it. If they can bring back Challenge Mode and do it right this time, though, then it won't matter as much because all of the experienced players can just stick with Challenge Mode the entire game, which would have a more comparable difficulty to the originals. Levels would probably also be changed to match XY's pacing, I highly doubt the Exp. Share is changing either.

 

[Hidden Mew]

I really hope not. I enjoyed X/Y, but there were points where it was way too easy, particularly against the Elite 4. They should have had stronger teams and at least five Pokemon. I didn't even use the Exp. Share since I thought that made level grinding too easy and unrewarding, if that makes any sense. I don't remember R/S/E being particularly challenging for me, but I definitely remember struggling against a couple of Gym leaders and the Elite 4, especially Wallace. I would hope that they would keep the levels for the teams pretty much the same. I wouldn't mind if they kept the Exp. Share the same way as it was in X/Y, as long as the levels either are kept the same or they're increased a bit. Allowing for easy or hard modes would solve the problem though.

 

[Osprey]

I'd like the Gym Leaders, Elite Four, and Champion to all be kind of difficult. It's true that in Y I went in and swept the Pokemon League without much effort. The fight got close only when I went in with a severely underleveled team post-game. Replaying several older games, I noticed how much harder it was to grind, with my team just barely keeping up with the AI's levels. And keep those 2 psychic twin Gym Leaders (Liza and Tate?) as tough as they were in the originals. As much as I hated those two, I'd hate to see them nerfed.

 

[Bolt Strike]

It is not a non-factor. The EXP.share is one of, if not THE main reason, X/Y were the easiest games in the series. Hopefully it will not be present in OR/AS and if it is present, lets hope its back to how it worked in pre-Gen VI games. Also yes, Pokémon aren't mean to be hard games, but until Generation IV, they weren't meant to be beaten by 2-years old kids either. There was difficulty in the older games, not Battletoads level of difficulty, obviously, but the games weren't boringly easy either. Also, don't underestimate kids. As I kid, I managed to beat a handful of hard games, like most of the classic Mega Man series. Sometimes kids are able to beat games with more easy than adults, in fact.[/FONT]

It was 5th gen that nerfed the difficulty, not 4th. That's when they started with the handholding, caps on team size, messing with the Exp system, etc.

 

[Dr. Buni]

It was 5th gen that nerfed the difficulty, not 4th. That's when they started with the handholding, caps on team size, messing with the Exp system, etc.

Poor wording of my part. What I meant was that until Gen IV, the games weren't made for babies to be able to beat them.

 

[Zweilous]

I honestly hope not, even ignoring the Exp. Share I didn't find XY to be that difficult, and having the remakes being dumbed down in the same manner would take away from some of the fun the originals had.

If they have to, I agree with the sentiment that they should add Challenge Mode back in, that way they can have an easier game for the younger audience while the older ones can still enjoy the difficulty of the old games.

 

[Ivysaur]

Best case scenario would be to tuck away a "hard mode" in the options, somewhere will kids won't accidentally turn it on. Obviously we're not the target demographic but GameFreak has honestly done a pretty good job of acknowledging and catering to the older fans lately. Hopefully difficulty settings is the next step.

 

[Oswin]

I hope not, Ruby and Sapphire is still hard as nails even for me now. Wattson's Magneton and Manectric, Flannery and Overheat, then there is the double Slakings and then Tate and Liza... Hopefully they'll be just as difficult as the originals.

 

[Bolt Strike]

Best case scenario would be to tuck away a "hard mode" in the options, somewhere will kids won't accidentally turn it on. Obviously we're not the target demographic but GameFreak has honestly done a pretty good job of acknowledging and catering to the older fans lately. Hopefully difficulty settings is the next step.

I don't think tucking it away is a good idea. I think they should just have a warning that says something along the lines of Challenge Mode only being recommended for "experienced players".

 

[Ivysaur]

Best case scenario would be to tuck away a "hard mode" in the options, somewhere will kids won't accidentally turn it on. Obviously we're not the target demographic but GameFreak has honestly done a pretty good job of acknowledging and catering to the older fans lately. Hopefully difficulty settings is the next step.

I don't think tucking it away is a good idea. I think they should just have a warning that says something along the lines of Challenge Mode only being recommended for "experienced players".

As someone who was once a kid, we never listen to those warnings. Nintendo and GameFreak have shown that they're really adamant about the games being easy enough for kids to beat, to the point they have dumbed-down Gym Leader and Elite Four rosters and have made recent regions very linear. I think hiding the option would be the only way Nintendo would be okay with including it. But as long as we get I don't really care.

 

[Alpha71689]

I wish there was a menu where you can select which difficulty you want. Most games have it, either when you first start a new file or by unlocking it.

 

[UnovaCastaway]

Well, they didn't improve the level curve in HGSS, if that's considered part of the difficulty. It was still tedious to properly grind for Red.

 

[hopeandjoy]

I think that a difficulty select is a really good idea. Which, of course, means it probably won't happen because we don't even have second save slots.

I'm of two minds about the EXP Share. On one hand, I was almost always 5 levels higher and probably would've been higher if I didn't occasionally shut off the EXP Share to even out my team's levels. On the other hand, I really really hate grinding.

I don't think that the Lucky Egg made Gen V any easier because you needed it just to grind effectively. Without it, the more you used the wild Pokemon to grind once you ran out of trainers, the less and less EXP you would get. The Lucky Egg made that tolerable.

So I don't know what I actually want. Part of me wants a higher level curve or better AI just because I hate grinding so much, but on the other, grinding is a pretty important part of any RPG.