[warning: tldr ahead]
Hello hello ideas~ someone said I posted well and that I should post more so here we go.
I feel as if this thread is turning into something of a wishlist, with people listing extra features they would like. While this is a good start (in fact, I think this is a decent way to come up with new features), most of these things proposed seem like really small, almost trivial matters that exist for the sake of convenience (apart from that self-insertion thing which seems to tend to lean a tad to the narcissistic side of things). These are great and all—in fact, I'm really happy about the progress the actual main games have made in terms of improving convenience for everyone—but I don't think this is the most important thing in game design.
What I feel is most important is the fun side of the game, extra features which either (a) aren't immediately obvious and let you have fun exploring them and discovering new things about the feature, or (b) obvious side events which are actually fun to play (this likely will not include features like large dungeons, etc). Here are a few features which I felt fit this criteria from previous main game series or from other fan-made versions:
(a) fun via exploration
Pokemon Tohen, a spinoff game released just yesterday, features a "crafting system", whereby you can create items by combining other (more common) items. Here's the screenshot from the official release:
I think this is a pretty cool idea, though it doesn't have to be implemented in exactly this way (if we do decide to do so). Where I'm going with this is that we don't necessarily have to lay out everything available for players, and that part of the fun comes from figuring something out for yourself for the first time.
In a similar vein, Tohen also had a "title" system, where various titles become available as you complete various tasks ingame. This might remind you of another of my favourite features in a main game series, the Medal Rally in BW2. I feel however that the Medal Rally was not executed very well—mainly, there was no real incentive to actually get medals. I think that unlockables are extremely powerful incentives in most RPGs, since they bring out the completionists in all of us (which is something I really enjoy personally). I'd like to see this return, possibly involving extra areas only available after you are deemed "worthy" enough, plus with some more medals / achievements that don't involve excessive grinding (2000 battles for Battle Veteran? Really?).
(b) "direct" fun
Direct fun might be a little harder to create, since after a while all the miniquests and side quests and minigames do tend to get boring and grindy. One thing I'd like to bring up is just a reminder that our miniquests should have proportional rewards. For example, near the start of Tohen is a sidequest where you bring a little girl home through a forest absolutely
infested with dumb bugs (I swear the encounter rate was probably twice as high as it should have been), only to get a potion. Like, thanks.
Level balance is also an important thing to note here—since you want the game to be fun, you probably don't want the difficulty to spike
too hard. In other words, it's probably a good idea to minimise the amount of grinding that has to be done (while also making sure the game is challenging enough—I like the idea of giving the Elite Four almost competitive teams). In this regards the order in which we arrange the typing of the gyms is probably important as well, but that's an issue for another post.
That probably turned into a semi-wishlist as well, but hopefully I managed to talk a little more clearly about what I think are the aims of any Pokemon game. After all, games are primarily meant to be about fun, not just about convenient grinding
Here's a little extra information about Tohen. I don't actually recommend playing the game itself since the poor spelling and punctuation kind of ruin the feel of the game (this, incidentally, is why spelling / punctuation is important), but I do think it brings up a lot of interesting ideas we could work off (though not copy directly, probably).
I
really hope this is the right thread for this :x