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SwSh Changes/Additions you would make in an update to SwSh

SerenaToAlola

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As per the title, let's talk about what changes/additions you would make in an update to SwSh.

Something I want them to add to the post-game is the option to run your own gym. Basically, once you beat the game, you have the chance to run your own gym where various trainers will come battle you instead. This could be followed by a Gym League Challenge where you go against the other gym leaders to see who gets in the major/minor league. The catch is, you can only be either the champion or a gym leader.
 
  1. More post-game. Maybe add an Ireland-esque area that could function similar to the Battle Zone. Just anything more than the Battle Tower, which felt like a total cop-out.
  2. Add in dungeons and flesh out the Wild Area, routes, and towns more.
  3. Add in at least 100 more old Pokemon.
  4. Polish up the story so that it doesn't feel rushed. Figure out whether the conflict between Eternatus and the legendaries or the gym challenge will be the focus.
  5. Better NPC teammates for Max Raid Battles.
 
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I assume we're talking like more of a third version sort of thing, which personally I'd like to avoid, but in theory:

Diversify the Wild Area with caves, forests, mountains, and more cooperative minigames akin to Funfest Missions
Minor League Gyms
Make Spikemuth an actual town and make the hotel in Wyndon be more than a lobby
Make the Gigantamax Factor inheritable like egg moves, or just make it available to every member of that species outright (and give me Stadium Blimp Gigantamax Wailord goddammit)
Add some method of growing berries
If feasible, add petting back into Camp (and make affection more visible)
Exp. Share toggle
Adding in some amount of old Pokémon feels like a no-brainer
Revise everything about the plot climax so that the conflict is more fleshed out and the villain base isn't just a bloody elevator ride
It would never happen but fuck the Battle Tower and replace it with something like the Black Tower/White Treehollow
Look... just, why does Yamask's evolution requirement have to be so esoteric?
I dunno more clothes probably
 
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Off the top of my head:
  • No EXP gain from camp. Also, there needs to be an explicit way we can check our Pokemon's affection levels, like in Generation's 6 & 7.
  • Bring back being able to actually pet your Pokemon.
  • NPC Raid Battle teammates should be scaled to the Raid Pokemon's Raid level in terms of effectiveness. Also, do away with the Wobbuffet Trainer.
  • Make Spikemuth an actual city or town.
  • The end-game content with Macro Cosmos needs to be redone; we should actually be climbing the floors of Rose's Tower rather than taking the elevator as such. Bring back Keys, warp panels, etc. Whatever to make it feel more like villainous dungeon.
  • Given the version exclusive Gym Leaders more substance; they're the only Gym Leaders to not leave their Gyms and have personalities visible beyond their Trainer Cards.
 
  1. Make all routes their own wild areas complete with going off road and a controllable camera. Just don't include them in the "everything is level 60 when you beat the game" thing so you can still train new low level Pokemon. I mean I loved the lake next to Magnolia's house. More places on the routes should have been like that with little nooks and crannies.
  2. Allow people to catch higher level Pokemon. Just don't let them be useful. It saves people from accidently running into a level 41 shiny and having to K.O. it when you can only catch level 40 pokemon.
  3. Get rid of the scripted clock. No one wants to be stuck in daytime when it's like 2AM. We want to pretend we're inconveniencing the gym leaders by having them wake up at that time to fight us.
  4. With that said, leave the story open and not have it be scripted to be in the time span of only like a few days or a month. If we screw off and forget about the main story for awhile, insert a timer and have the NPCs mention how long we took to get to a certain point.
  5. Please for all that is good and holy let us turn off the EXP Share. My Alcremie is too powerful to live anymore.
  6. Make Gigantamax Pokemon easier to catch in raids without resorting to using Master Balls.
  7. Open up Spikemuth. Stop having it be closed.
  8. Let Piers sing ala Roxie.
  9. Maybe expand on Oleana's character a little. Make her more than, what one post called her, an angry mom who's tired of her kids bringing home frogs.
  10. There also needs to be more direct Macros Cosmos involvement in the story and not just mention all the companies through pokejobs.
 
Additions to my list:

- I'm disappointed that the official site mentioned on Team Yell's page that "they will take over hotel lobbies, prevent other challengers from accessing transportation, and even shout and distract opponents during battle." But that never really happened, which struck me as especially odd after we had in-battle stat buffs/debuffs in Opal's Gym. I was expecting there to be a chance of them making your Pokémon miss or get confused when battling Marnie. So I'd add something like that.

- You know how in B2W2 and ORAS you can accumulate fans who give you rewards as you progress through Pokéstar Studios/Contest Spectaculars? Something like that would have made a lot of sense here.

- This is more on the radical side, and while I did like the Gym Challenge as it is, I probably would have added a whole other dimension to Gym Leader battles involving the crowd reacting to certain things. Maybe give moves another data layer like for Contests, where certain moves can make the audience more hyped, dazzled, anticipating, or bored. Depending on how you or the Gym Leader combo those, certain boosts could occur (again, like during Opal's Gym). Maybe when you KO a Leader's Pokémon using a STAB not-very-effective move, your Pokémon could enter a state called "Underdog" where the crowd really gets behind them and powers them up.

Allow people to catch higher level Pokemon. Just don't let them be useful. It saves people from accidently running into a level 41 shiny and having to K.O. it when you can only catch level 40 pokemon.

At least within the Wild Area, Pokémon that are too high-level for you to catch cannot be Shiny. Apparently due to a programming oversight, that doesn't apply to overworld Pokémon on routes, but they were at least aware of this scenario and tried to prevent it.

Edit: Okay, a clarification here, because I kinda misunderstood the report. SciresM found that while the Shiny lock on most wild encounters that are too high-level for you to catch (regardless of if they're in the Wild Area or not) functions as it should. However, it seems that Game Freak forgot to apply this measure onto "static" encounters, which are preprogrammed overworld spawns that will always appear in certain areas until you encounter them, like the Eldegoss that always floats down from the right side of the screen as you travel from Turffield to Hulbury.

Get rid of the scripted clock. No one wants to be stuck in daytime when it's like 2AM. We want to pretend we're inconveniencing the gym leaders by having them wake up at that time to fight us.

I actually liked the scripted clock

Make Gigantamax Pokemon easier to catch in raids without resorting to using Master Balls.

Now that I think about it, I'm kind of surprised that they didn't just add a new kind of ball that works better on Max Raid Pokémon, kinda like Beast Balls did for Ultra Beasts. Or like, since in GO you have to use specially-awarded Premier Balls in order to catch Raid bosses, maybe make that a new function of Premier Balls in the main series to differentiate them from standard Poké Balls.
 
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I'd adjust Dreepy's levels for evolving. It's pretty useless if it's not evolved into its second or third stage. I'm only saying this because I've gotten 2-3 Dreepy via wonder trade and put one on my team... to level it up via experience share
 
I think a third version/update that included optional areas, put more npc's and things to do in the towns, adjusted the difficulty curve a bit (or just add a toggle for the exp share lol), and some more stuff to do post game could easily make this one of the best games in the series.
 
Gameplay Changes
  • First of all, I'd bring back petting into Pokemon Camp.
  • Secondly, I'd make Pokemon follow us again. I don't see any reason why they couldn't do this in SwSh.
  • I'd add a new minigame somehwere, like maybe something focused on the Galar Mines.
  • I'd add a shop for buying ingredients for curry instead of just talking to a person in the Wild Area, just to give more purpose to some towns.
  • I'd have Max Raid Battles change up more often than they do, and give the player much more better partners than a Wobbuffett that does literally nothing all battle and gets KO'd like 2 times.
  • I'd actually have us compete in the Minor League, though we only need to beat 2 or 3 to prove we're capable of joining the Major League.
  • Add a toggle for EXP Share for people who don't want to use it.
  • Add a suitable replacement for Game Corners like an arcade with maybe 2 or 3 minigames.
  • Add a Pokestars Studio-esque theater centered around stage plays or something. Opal owns it.
Region Design Changes
  • I'd make the routes longer and a little more complex. Not so much linear.
  • I'd add mentioned curry ingredients shop to Wedgehurst, Turffield, and have it in a market in Stow-On-Side and Hulbury.
  • I'd add a bit more to the Wild Area, like make that watch tower the ruins of an old castle that we can explore as a dungeon with a high level Pokemon living inside the dungeon, maybe like an Aegislash. Maybe add a few caves.
  • In Turffield, on top of adding the curry ingredients shop, I'd allow us to go around the gym and give us access to the 4 homes around the town. Maybe one has an NPC who will gives you a TM, and then access to a farm where you have a daily task you can do, helping Milo herd some Wooloo or something like planting berries.
  • In Ballonlea, I'd open up the town a bit more, giving us more to explore. I do know I see homes to the left of the Ballonlea Gym. I'd add two new things to it. A candy shop that serves up treats for your Pokemon that can act like the X- items, and later in the post game they get special mints to change the nature. Then I'd add a the theater I mentioned.
  • I'd likely just make Stow-On-Side a bit bigger, adding more homes and the curry ingredients shop in a market. I'd add a dojo also where you can battle daily and even encounter Bea.
  • I'd add more dungeons, expanding the Galar Mine and Galar Mine No. 2 and making them more of a multi layered mine with elevators going down to lower levels and a minigame focused around mining.
  • I'd greatly expand Spikemuth. Make it feel much more like a town than a long corridor. Let us know that people live here. Maybe add a warehouse that Team Yell uses as a training grounds that we have to go through before we can battle Piers at his gym/concert venue. Also add the Game Corner replacement.
  • Treat Route 10 more like a Victory Road than a typical route. Make it more like the Vast Poni Canyon than a route.
  • I'd add an Ireland esque area for the postgame.
Story
  • I'd start to hint at something going on at Marco Cosmos a lot earlier and even have something involving the building Sonia points out on route 3.
  • Drop the 1000 years thing. Make it a lot more urgent and make it seem like Galar will run out of Dynamax energy in 50 years.
  • I'd have a sequence after the 7th gym where you have to go into the power plant underneath Hammerlocke Stadium and go through a dungeon of sorts.
  • Before fighting Oleana, you have to go through the lower levels of the tower to find the key to the elevator. Deal with switch and portal puzzles.
  • Have another dungeon of sorts we have to go through before confronting Chairman Rose.
  • Have some actual returning characters, like Wikstrom, Clemont, Maylene, Ryuki, Diantha, Lusamine, Lillie, Gladion, Colress, and Champion Cynthia.
In other words, there's a lot I'd change or add.
 
Gameplay Changes
  • First of all, I'd bring back petting into Pokemon Camp.
  • Secondly, I'd make Pokemon follow us again. I don't see any reason why they couldn't do this in SwSh.
  • I'd add a new minigame somehwere, like maybe something focused on the Galar Mines.
  • I'd add a shop for buying ingredients for curry instead of just talking to a person in the Wild Area, just to give more purpose to some towns.
  • I'd have Max Raid Battles change up more often than they do, and give the player much more better partners than a Wobbuffett that does literally nothing all battle and gets KO'd like 2 times.
  • I'd actually have us compete in the Minor League, though we only need to beat 2 or 3 to prove we're capable of joining the Major League.
  • Add a toggle for EXP Share for people who don't want to use it.
  • Add a suitable replacement for Game Corners like an arcade with maybe 2 or 3 minigames.
  • Add a Pokestars Studio-esque theater centered around stage plays or something. Opal owns it.
Region Design Changes
  • I'd make the routes longer and a little more complex. Not so much linear.
  • I'd add mentioned curry ingredients shop to Wedgehurst, Turffield, and have it in a market in Stow-On-Side and Hulbury.
  • I'd add a bit more to the Wild Area, like make that watch tower the ruins of an old castle that we can explore as a dungeon with a high level Pokemon living inside the dungeon, maybe like an Aegislash. Maybe add a few caves.
  • In Turffield, on top of adding the curry ingredients shop, I'd allow us to go around the gym and give us access to the 4 homes around the town. Maybe one has an NPC who will gives you a TM, and then access to a farm where you have a daily task you can do, helping Milo herd some Wooloo or something like planting berries.
  • In Ballonlea, I'd open up the town a bit more, giving us more to explore. I do know I see homes to the left of the Ballonlea Gym. I'd add two new things to it. A candy shop that serves up treats for your Pokemon that can act like the X- items, and later in the post game they get special mints to change the nature. Then I'd add a the theater I mentioned.
  • I'd likely just make Stow-On-Side a bit bigger, adding more homes and the curry ingredients shop in a market. I'd add a dojo also where you can battle daily and even encounter Bea.
  • I'd add more dungeons, expanding the Galar Mine and Galar Mine No. 2 and making them more of a multi layered mine with elevators going down to lower levels and a minigame focused around mining.
  • I'd greatly expand Spikemuth. Make it feel much more like a town than a long corridor. Let us know that people live here. Maybe add a warehouse that Team Yell uses as a training grounds that we have to go through before we can battle Piers at his gym/concert venue. Also add the Game Corner replacement.
  • Treat Route 10 more like a Victory Road than a typical route. Make it more like the Vast Poni Canyon than a route.
  • I'd add an Ireland esque area for the postgame.
Story
  • I'd start to hint at something going on at Marco Cosmos a lot earlier and even have something involving the building Sonia points out on route 3.
  • Drop the 1000 years thing. Make it a lot more urgent and make it seem like Galar will run out of Dynamax energy in 50 years.
  • I'd have a sequence after the 7th gym where you have to go into the power plant underneath Hammerlocke Stadium and go through a dungeon of sorts.
  • Before fighting Oleana, you have to go through the lower levels of the tower to find the key to the elevator. Deal with switch and portal puzzles.
  • Have another dungeon of sorts we have to go through before confronting Chairman Rose.
  • Have some actual returning characters, like Wikstrom, Clemont, Maylene, Ryuki, Diantha, Lusamine, Lillie, Gladion, Colress, and Champion Cynthia.
In other words, there's a lot I'd change or add.

Add Roxie to that list of returning characters and I'm completely on board.
 
Well besides bringing back the Natdex and a few of the move removed (like Return and Pursuit and maybe a reworked HP)

-get rid of the incense needed for breeding it makes no sense in the first place

-have all evolution lines have their own unique egg design with certain lines (the Nidoran line, Volbeat and Illumise and Tauros and Miltank) sharing an egg design

- speaking of eggs make it to where Miltank can have Tauros eggs... they are literally the Male and female equivalent to each other the games themselves drive this home. They should be abl6 to produce the eggs of each other

-make Nidorana and Nidoqueen able to BREED for gods sake
 
I'd add a shop for buying ingredients for curry instead of just talking to a person in the Wild Area, just to give more purpose to some towns.

Super this. I kinda can't believe there isn't a shop for these already, but then, I'm already shocked that they took out the ability to grow berries. (I mean yeah sure there are berry trees, but being able to grow them makes a big difference. The Gen 5 games feel eternally stuck in a rut due to the convoluted methods you have to go through in order to accumulate berries after the discontinuation of the Dream World. Neither the curry ingredients nor berries in Gen 8 are quite as bad, but I do still think it will age poorly.)

like make that watch tower the ruins of an old castle that we can explore as a dungeon with a high level Pokemon living inside the dungeon

(y)

A creaky old castle is just the kind of environment that these games are missing.

Drop the 1000 years thing. Make it a lot more urgent and make it seem like Galar will run out of Dynamax energy in 50 years.

I feel like the 1000-year projection was kind of important for what they were going for, however vague the carrythrough was. I get the feeling that Rose is supposed to be a kind of futurist; a man with a grand long-term vision. When he and Leon are debating at his tower, they have this disagreement where Leon argues that a single day won't make a difference when it comes to that sort of timescale (which is true), while Rose makes the not-altogether-unreasonable point that the present peoples' enthusiasm for the championship is a relative triviality that means nothing to the countless people whose lives they could be substantially improved by securing Galar's energy prospects, and he doesn't think that a sporting event should take priority when it comes to making a breakthrough that could revolutionize life in the region for centuries to come. I would say those are both fair views, and that strikes me as the conflict they're trying to portray. If Galar were in fairly immediate danger of losing all resources within half a century, Rose would look less like the guy to whom you say, "Slow down just a minute bucko, let's think this through, and also, what's the catch?" and more like... well, any sane person staring in the face of our doomed environment as reality barrels down on us right this very moment.

I think it's more just a matter of fleshing out what's there. Reading between the lines, I feel like I can kinda see what the deal is... Rose oversees the collection of many kinds of resources that support Galar, which he fears the eventual exhaustion of, and so he's interested in the possibility of using the power within the Wishing Stars. He tells us that much. And it turns out that he has access to a Pokémon which can, according to the Pokédex, produce "infinite amounts of energy." To him, that must certainly seem like a tantalizing solution. But again, what's the catch? They're not really clear about whether or not our capture of Eternatus fixed anything. Does simply reviving it for a little while solve the problem (which would be incredibly saccharine and convenient), or was Rose intending for Leon to capture Eternatus and then turn it over to him so that he could milk it for infinite energy (which is what I kind of suspect, since when he interrupts the Championship match, he implores Leon's help because Eternatus proved too hard for his own group to control)? That would be an extreme worth putting our foot down on, because it's unfair to a living creature and it's unrealistic to expect some miracle solution to just fall from the sky. It takes long-term commitment and cooperation to keep everything in balance. You can't just abuse a poor alien dragon thing for all its succulent Dynajuice.

(Out of curiosity, I took another look through the script and, yeah, near as I can tell, the future of Galar's energy is saved just by reviving Eternatus. It's dumb, but I guess it sorta makes sense with what's established since Eternatus was last active a whopping 20,000 years ago and that's kept Galar going for this long.)

Moreover, what did his position as chairman of the League have to do with his other goals, if it seems like he didn't care about the League finals anyway? Oleana tells us in the post-game that he used to work in the Galar Mine when he was young, and gives us his rare card which says that he often acts without revealing his thinking to others (so he's always been conscious of energy needs, and what he did with Eternatus was apparently a typical part of his personality, though can I just say how tired I am of Pokémon games always dumping the antagonists' personal details on us after the fact?), and it's said elsewhere that he used to be a really capable Trainer, too. But in his time, they wouldn't have had the ability to Dynamax their own Pokémon, as the Bands used for that were only recently invented under his term as CEO. And the official Sword and Shield site tells us that it was indeed him who implemented Dynamax into the Galar Gym League, which makes me think it was all part of a larger plan to figure out how to study Dynamax in controlled environments and then harness its power to summon Eternatus. I know "show, don't tell" is a fairly useful adage, but in this case they don't really do enough of either, because I shouldn't have to read so deeply into two or three sentences in the game and then visit the official website in order to piece together what's going on.

Have some actual returning characters, like Wikstrom, Clemont, Maylene, Ryuki, Diantha, Lusamine, Lillie, Gladion, Colress, and Champion Cynthia.

You know, I gotta say that I actually liked not having any old character show up for once. Last time that happened was all the way back in RSE.
 
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Technically, no. Jasmine and Pryce had cameos in the background that appears when you take part in contests.

I suppose, but those are so easy to miss and to be honest I'm not sure we can even conclusively say that it's actually them. Every other instance of old-character cameos has been indisputably clear, whereas those two are practically "Team Yell have a pin-up of the Gen 2 Swimmer"-tier.
 
I suppose, but those are so easy to miss and to be honest I'm not sure we can even conclusively say that it's actually them. Every other instance of old-character cameos has been indisputably clear, whereas those two are practically "Team Yell have a pin-up of the Gen 2 Swimmer"-tier.
Good point. I also thought the pics were a little bit more detailed, but a Google search showed me that I was wrong. I guess this proves how little I used contests.
 
get rid of the incense needed for breeding it makes no sense in the first place

Yeah, I don't know why incense has managed to stay around this long. It's just an unnecessary Guide Dang It, and not even all Baby Pokémon require it.

-have all evolution lines have their own unique egg design with certain lines (the Nidoran line, Volbeat and Illumise and Tauros and Miltank) sharing an egg design

And can we get like Shiny menu sprites too? How were these not instituted when they were already going through and making Shiny Pokéathlon sprites for everything in HGSS?
 
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