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Masuda on the exclusion of the Battle Frontier in ORAS

Do you think the Battle Frontier would have been rarely used by players in ORAS?

  • Yes

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • No

    Votes: 15 71.4%

  • Total voters
    21
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Alola everyone! Amidst all the Alola and Ultra Sun/Moon news, I wanted to take a step back and see how you all felt about Junichi Masuda's reasoning on why the Battle Frontier was excluded from ORAS. According to him, "Put simply, the Battle Frontier wasn't included because only a tiny number of players would have appreciated and used this game feature. Players get fed up more easily than they did in the past and aren't attracted by these 'demanding' challenges."

This was said several years ago in 2014, but I wasn't aware that he had made an actual comment on the exclusion (forgive me if there is a post already dedicated to this).

Do you all agree or disagree? Would the Battle Frontier have been largely under utilized as Masuda assumes? Or do you think he's underestimating the buyer's interest?

Personally, I would have loved the Battle Frontier. I've never owned Emerald and when a friend temporarily lent it to me, there wasn't enough time to access the BF. I think all the challenges are pretty fun, unique and serve as a great post game to keep people interested (after the Delta Episode, that's about it).

I get where Masuda is coming from, but even I actually played the Battle Tower and Arcade in Platinum when I was younger (getting to Palmer and Dahlia respectively)-my patience wasn't that thin.

Source: INTERVISTA ESCLUSIVA: Junichi Masuda e Shigeru Ohmori ci svelano alcune curiosità su Pokémon Rubino Omega e Zaffiro Alpha! - Pokémon Millennium
 
I think they might've underestimated the nostalgia factor here; most times I see the lack of Battle Frontier in ORAS brought up, most players are actually annoyed that it didn't appear, so I doubt there would only be a tiny amount of players interested. Remakes, which are based on older games, should give this feeling more; cutting off a well-liked feature from Generation III doesn't sound like a good move to me.
 
Although I don't defend the lack of Battle Frontier I kinda think it would be go pretty much unnoticed by the larger demographic — not every Pokémon player plays competitive and, even if they do, online battles are much more challenging than battle facilities.
Is not the best, but, at least, there's something to battle post game.

Kinda sucks tho cause I've beaten every Battle Tree mode.
 
I mean, it's always easy to say "Oh they should have done this thing I wanted, they should have done that" but do we see all of the data that they do? For all that we know, they might actually have good evidence backing up their thinking that only they are privy to. I, personally, don't know exactly what that evidence would look like, but I would be surprised if decisions like these were made on as much of a whim as I sometimes joke.

That being said, leaving it out did disappoint quite a lot of people, so maybe they did underestimate how much it'd be appreciated. But then again, maybe they didn't, and maybe the Internet fandom is just a loud minority. It's hard to know for sure, but minority or not, I do understand why the people who were bummed about the Frontier's exclusion would feel that way, and those feelings are certainly valid.

With regard to this anecdotal household, neither me nor my partner could give a fig about the Frontier, since Masuda has me correctly pegged as a rather busy bee, and I get more fun out of resetting my games and playing them in a different way rather than hanging around in the post-game. Plus, I have just never been very interested in Battle Facilities to begin with. To me it's like, "Oh, a place I can go to lose a lot and maybe get a sticker if I manage to appease the RNG gods. Woohoo." Not really my cup of tea. Similarly, my partner really just cares about playing through the main game and engaging in whatever side-features are available, and then getting back to business with whatever show or stream or video or art project she was focused on before.

I do think that they should implement more creative battle styles or gimmicks like what we see in the Frontier, even if it doesn't take the form of a concentrated Frontier, or even a competitive-level challenge. One of my favorite-ever features in the series was the Black Tower/White Treehollow because it was an incredibly fun and challenging gimmick layered on top of standard battling, but also, it was actually accessible to me, as a player who, if there's going to be substantial post-game content like that at all, wants to keep going through it with my playthrough team rather than a eugenics project. And I'll admit that places like the Battle Institute do get a little boring with them just being straight battles. Maybe something like the Battle Tents would have been a good compromise here. Inverse Battles were a step in the right direction, but they were locked to one match per day and oh, they're gone again now...
 
It depends on the facility really. Even most fans of the Frontier dislikes the Battle Palace, for example. However, many liked the Battle Pike, Battle Factory and Battle Arena.

In the end though, I think Masuda misunderstood why people liked the Frontier in the first place. It's not really the RNG difficulty that draws us in (otherwise we'd all just be fine with bland Battle Tower clones), but rather the crazy twists on Pokémon battles the different facilities have. It can theoretically work without a Battle Frontier in a single new facility, but Game Freak decided to end Gen 6 with an underwhelming cut-and-paste Masion instead. Basically, I think Game Freak was thinking more along the lines of "is this too hard?" when they should have been asking "would these types of battles be fun?".
 
Battle Frontier may not have been acessed by many people...
SO LET'S MAKE A REPETITIVE BATTLE FACILITY WHERE YOU JUST BATTLE UNTIL THE GAME DECIDES TO MAKE A SPECIFIC TEAM TO WRECK YOUR TEAM HOORAY!!!!

If they were to test it out a bit, and make an acessible to everyone facility - like the Battle Hall, for example - maybe they would see that people do like to have fun on that kind of stuff. I really love 4th gen Battle Frontier for that reason. There were quite a few facilities where you could just have fun, and would possibly not need to breed a Pokémon for that. Hell, there is a facility where you don't have to breed at all; you just picked battle ready rental Pokémon, the majestic Battle Factory!
Of course, it'd be nice if they were to include some more better Pokémon, so that the luck and skill were included on the battling, and not on the hopeing that the game gave you good Pokémon, but still. I love too much all the crazy gimmicks they could throw at you with those Frontiers, and would be more than happy playing them.
 
Being about 13 at the time of Emerald and the original Battle Frontier, I had no idea what I was doing when it came to breeding, but was decent enough at battling. As a result, I almost exclusively played the Battle Factory, except for to try out a few of the other facilities and realize I had no idea what I was doing.

Also, a neat thing about the Battle Factory that I think many people did not know: The more you swap rental Pokemon after you defeat an opponent, the more likely you are to have good sets to choose from at the start of the run. It created an interesting balance of "how good is my team right now" versus "how badly do I want good Pokemon for future runs".
 
I think the people here might be swayed in the "No" side since they're "hardcore" players. I think a better (and unbiased) demographic might be the 'casuals' for which the decision was made for, who I doubt are on these Forums.

But I think 'casuals' might've tried a hand at the frontier with their story teams.
 
They thought enough of the Battle Frontier to make several of references to it, say that it's being built in-universe, remix the theme music, and even bring back one of it's bosses in the very next game (Anabel). So I doubt that they think of it as some throwaway feature that few people remember or care about. Because it was in fact one of the big highlights and selling points of the 3rd Generation (and the 4th, for the matter...). I have no doubt that it would've been played and appreciated. No less than other returning aspects of the game.

And if they brought it back with improved game mechanics and greater accessibility, like Bases, Contests, or the PokeNav? Then all the more. Other games have already done some of the work. Platinum's Frontier gave us shorter requirements to fight the Brains and earn Silver Prints. Battle Sub introduced the break between the first 20 rounds and Super Sets, making it less stressful to maintain your streak (and more or less creating a lower difficulty setting to ease players in). Maison lets you take breaks in-between matches, and you earn BP for every win. Surely they could've continued to addressed other problems, like maybe elaborating on the impact of Natures on the Palace. Maybe make the Pyramid floors brighter so that you fumble around less. etc.

I think it's just a matter of them not wanting to put in the additional time and resources...And I can understand that. But the perception of the player-base from this interview seems out of touch, and I don't buy it as a reason for why this feature was left out.
 
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Well, imo the question asked in the thread is wrong, because its premise is incorrect: everybody takes Masuda´s words in that italian interview as the truth, but personally, I am sure he was just making up random excuses like usual, and this particular one happened to be a bad excuse that rightfully annoyed a lot of people. Masuda is just a a bit dumb when it comes to PR talking, and ORAS suffered unnecessary negative backlash as a consequence of his PR excuses.

In short, I think the BF wasn´t excluded from ORAS because "today´s players wouldn´t appreciate it", as Masuda claims. It was excluded simply because Game Freak´s current mindset is to reuse the current generation´s Battle Facility in their remakes. For HGSS, it was the Sinnoh Battle Frontier that got copypasted. For ORAS, it was XY´s Battle Maison. Basically, had Platinum not existed between DP and HGSS, I think HGSS would have DP´s shitty Tower and nothing more.

So, my argument is that Game Freak just doesn´t treat postgame battle facilities as those "cannon, irreplaceable features" the fandom seems to think they are. GF just don´t feel the urge to bring them back for remakes. They consider postgame battle facilities non- cannon, and with remakes. they will just use whatever battle building the current generation offers.

This is my view of the matter, and the future Sinnoh remakes will show if I am correct: if those future Sinnoh remakes actually bother to bring Platinum´s BF back, then my argument will fail. But if the Sinnoh remakes just reuse whatever Battle Facility the game befoire them had (like HGSS and ORAS did), then my argument will be correct and the absence of the Emerald Frontier in ORAS will be explained. Therefore, I am calling this situation "Schrodinger´s Frontier", as there is no way of knowing if it will be in Sinnoh remakes or not until said games come out. :p

(Also, back to ORAS; while not as big as an entire Frontier, it at least had Triple and Rotation battles over what RS Tower offered, plus the Battle Institute on top of that. All those were battle modes not found in the original RS, and were removed after ORAS, so that is some extra battling modes. It is extra battling content, whether people value it or not.)
 
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I think TPC and Game Freak are just stereotyping the market. They're making gameplay decisions almost entirely based on the mobile market, with occasional decisions made for the competitive market and that's it. It's very telling that Ishihara had no faith in the Switch and thought smartphones would replace consoles on the market:

Pokemon CEO Didn't Think the Nintendo Switch Would Succeed
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/pokemon-ceo-didnt-think-the-nintendo-switch-would-succeed
"I told Nintendo that Switch wouldn't be a success before it went on sale, because I thought that in the age of the smartphone, no one would carry out a game console. It's obvious I was wrong," said Ishihara.

It's pretty clear that Game Freak just saw that mobile was popular and assumed that mobile was going to kill off the console market, and so they designed the 3DS games to appeal to those types of gamers.

Because of this, I think once Pokemon makes the jump to the Switch we'll start to see a reversal of this type of philosophy. They've underestimated the push back from hardcore gamers and they're starting to see the demand for deeper and larger scale experiences. Between the popularity of games like BotW and Mario Odyssey and the Pokemon fanbase's demand for Pokemon to follow suit I think they're starting to realize that there's still a market for a Pokemon game with depth and content.
 
I agree that there may be confidential factors on why they did not bring back BF. However, for Masuda's statement, I can see where he's coming from. The fans we see on the internet and the hardcore fandom overall take up only a tiny portion of the total number of fans/consumers of pokemon all over the world. There's going to be a lot more people enjoying pokemon as a casual game to kill time compared to people who breed competitively. And before you say that the breeding mechanics became super easy by Gen6, that's because we, the fans on the internet, have been aware of the breeding mechanics and have been constantly taking notes of the updates. There are people who don't care about breeding, or are overwhelmed by all the extra information needed to prepare a "perfectly viable" team versus simply having to level up. Besides, seeing how the Battle Tree is designed to discourage players through hax - opponents specifically designed to counter your team; AI partners losing on purpose by choosing to be stupid - I can only imagine the angry outbursts of fans who would not be able to enjoy a feature of the game they paid for in the event the BF turned out to be full of hax. You paid for entertainment; you'd want to get your money's worth. A feature so discouraging and discriminating to casual players may have seemed unappealing for the general gameplay overall.

Personally, though, I would have loved the BF coming back for extra content. The Battle Factory especially.
 
I agree that there may be confidential factors on why they did not bring back BF. However, for Masuda's statement, I can see where he's coming from. The fans we see on the internet and the hardcore fandom overall take up only a tiny portion of the total number of fans/consumers of pokemon all over the world. There's going to be a lot more people enjoying pokemon as a casual game to kill time compared to people who breed competitively. And before you say that the breeding mechanics became super easy by Gen6, that's because we, the fans on the internet, have been aware of the breeding mechanics and have been constantly taking notes of the updates. There are people who don't care about breeding, or are overwhelmed by all the extra information needed to prepare a "perfectly viable" team versus simply having to level up.

This is another example of them stereotyping the market, they perceive the situation as a false either-or scenario where you either have to be a casual who just wants an easy game to go through to kill time or a hardcore gamer that wants to do every single thing in the games and battle competitively. The fanbase is a little more black and white then that. There are people that want gameplay depth that don't really want to battle competitively. There are casuals that might be interested in extra gameplay features. Game Freak seems to want to sort the fans neatly into different buckets and it just doesn't work that way.

Besides, seeing how the Battle Tree is designed to discourage players through hax - opponents specifically designed to counter your team; AI partners losing on purpose by choosing to be stupid - I can only imagine the angry outbursts of fans who would not be able to enjoy a feature of the game they paid for in the event the BF turned out to be full of hax. You paid for entertainment; you'd want to get your money's worth. A feature so discouraging and discriminating to casual players may have seemed unappealing for the general gameplay overall.

Personally, though, I would have loved the BF coming back for extra content. The Battle Factory especially.

But if the battle facilities are full of hax, isn't that Game Freak's fault, not the fans'?
 
But if the battle facilities are full of hax, isn't that Game Freak's fault, not the fans'?
Yes, it is Game Freak's fault for including the hax. But I'm guessing there must be some technical limitations to how they design battle facilities. They obviously don't want the battle facilities to be super easy, but they don't seem to have a good idea on how to balance the AI without including hax at some point.
 
Please note: The thread is from 7 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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