[DanielN]

- 02 Jan 2024 10:31 #235425

Introduction

Over the last few years, the Pixelmon team has begun to identify an issue surrounding difficulty and immersion when it comes to playing Pixelmon in the singleplayer experience. From playing in August of 2022, our experience was that it was incredibly difficult to get into the gameplay of Pixelmon outside of the standard Minecraft gameplay for a beginner. We felt this was important to address, as the singleplayer experience is “our game” whilst also constituting the majority of the playerbase, and so we wanted to make sure that the experience was fun and invoked the same emotions that the mainline games did for us.

Whilst the majority of ours attempts to solve this issue started in August of 2022, we have been aware of this issue and trying to introduce more Minecraft elements into Pixelmon dating all the way back to July of 2021 when we first introduced the cave level multiplier to the 1.12.2 version of Pixelmon. This setting was intended to making the caving experience in Pixelmon more interesting by introducing higher level Pokemon the further down into the caves you headed.

Initial Attempts

From our first look at this issue we clearly identified two areas that were the main problem. The first being that it was too difficult to start the game compared to a default Minecraft survival world, and the second that there was not inherently much challenge involved in Pixelmon at any point (mainly later game).

We found that it was too difficult to get into the gameplay, as we were searching food, unable to get enough apricorns to create the necessary balls to create a team, and spent hours walking around with only starter, having fainted and looking for a village. As a team, we agreed that this was a very boring and difficult way to start a game and would put most people off from play Pixelmon as it was a far more hardcore Minecraft experience than even in Hardcore Minecraft itself. To solve this, we introduced the setting to initially place the player in a village at the start of every new game and combined that with increasing the loot found in all structures in the game.

Then to solve the second problem that was initially identified, we introduced a reworked version of the Ultra Space where it was intended to be a more end game focused experience. To achieve this, we added higher weightings for the higher star raids, a mechanic that would remove you back to the overworld if your party fainted, several environmental dangers for your health and party, and finally always aggressive Pokemon that challenge you in horde battles. We thought that all of these combined would introduce a more difficult and challenging dimension that only players further along in their game would dare to enter.

Initial Feedback

After implementing the above solutions, we found that the progression curve was not as well paced as we had initially hoped. It became much easier to “cheese” elements of the initial gameplay, by getting an inventory of balls from the structures then spamming capturing higher level Pokemon outside of battle. Additionally, this meant certain functionality or features such as crafting PokeBalls was entirely unnecessary as it was much easier, faster and more efficient to find them from loot tables.

Future Direction

This leads us to where we are today, with some significant changes in the latest version of Pixelmon (9.2.6) on 1.20.2. With the latest version we tweaked a lot of the settings previously mentioned in this article, such as the cave level multiplier, and preventing out of battle captures for Pokemon with a level higher than any Pokemon in your party. We also changed the PC blocks to only drop itself when broken with a silk touch pickaxe moving forward. This brings it inline with the Healer, and introduces a level of difficulty inline with other Minecraft features, such as the Ender Chest, as you can no longer switch out your party whenever you feel like it during the early stages of a game. However, the main feature of this version is the new “whiteout” screen once your entire party faints, and the loss of your inventory (when the keepInventory gamerule is disabled).

We feel that these changes will introduce a new risk to Pixelmon as you can no longer enter a cave, lose your entire team in a battle and then carry on your mining experience as if nothing happened. Another example, would be intentionally challenging gyms with under leveled Pokemon to skip over the challenge of the initial trainers and getting a free pass to the end.

By default this setting is disabled, for now, as we didn’t want to force such a drastic change on the entire player-base without additional feedback first.

The Pixelmon team intends to continue along this path of trying to make the gameplay experience more interesting as the game grows and evolves and we would love to hear your feedback on how these settings have impacted your gameplay going forward and where to look next.

[FarmerShinoy]

- 07 Jan 2024 03:48 #240758 Hy devs. First thank you for all you have done in the project, and big up for the devs who fix bugs every days for having playable new updates.

I completely agree with you for adding challenging features, like loss of inventory, and not being able to catch a lvl 70 Zacian after 15 minutes of gameplay (When I see friends not being roleplay and destroying the lvl curves... then go in ultra dimension to catch lvl 100 Garchomp... I don't see the fun).

Some player will not understand this changes, because they will not read this post. I sugger to add dev blog in the menu of the pixelmon mod.

For gym, maybe add a condition of fainting all ones before a gym boss, or fainting all npcs to acces to the move reminder (in the big towers). I dont know if it's easily doable.

I love strategy, but I find lvl 140 gym to difficult for no reason. It's not strategy anymore, or I have to make a specific team for every gym type I want to fight. I sugger to make Rare, Epic, Legendary... boss not having big lvls, but better strategy team, with also more legendaries and cheated pokemons, instead of a lvl boost that destroy the speed stats experience.

For pokeballs and food issues, I sugger to add balls and food loot to npcs, (for exemple 1-3 pokeball for lvl 1-14 npc, 1-3 super ball for 15-25 npcs, then 1-3 ultra ball for +25 lvl npcs, and other types of balls for higher ones), because npcs dont drop enough money to the player.

I am a big fan of pixelmon mod, and I hope with the suggestion of the community, and your hard work, the gameplay will improve.

Thank you

[ClothierEdward]

- 08 Jan 2024 17:00 #240766 It's cool to see the dev team working on ways to make the Pixelmon experience more Minecrafty. There have been a bunch of cool changes that have come around such as the cave level multiplier, better villages, and overhaul to Ultra Space. Still there are some improvements that can be made, especially when it comes to the two primary issues discussed in this blog.
When it comes to "cheesing" the progression by speedrunning high-level Pokémon, I believe it could be executed in a better way. First of all, make it easier to obtain ores such as Silver and Platinum. A big reason some people prefer looting villages over crafting Pokeballs is that they now require materials that require more effort to obtain. As such, a buff to the spawn rates of those ores would be really helpful, especially in the early game. Secondly, I'm not sure that the player should be entirely gatekept from catching Pokemon of a higher level. Perhaps make it so that you can only catch Pokemon 10-20 levels above your highest level Pokemon. Bonus points if you can make it configurable in the config files.
As for Ultra Space, the way I've seen that dimension is that it's something the player should enter as fast as possible. Despite what people have said about Ultra Space, I'm of the belief that Ultra Space is the first place a player should go to in order to get powerful Pokemon and amazing loot. This is especially necessary as challenges such as gyms, the Tower of Two Fists, and evil team structures have trainers that scale with your team's level. To remedy this, I would propose that Ultra Space should only be accessible after entering the Nether or End dimensions. Perhaps make it so that you can create wormholes using a material such as Eyes of Ender or Shulker Shells. Or maybe you can find inactive wormholes in the overworld but you need an item only obtainable in the Nether or End in order to activate it. By making Ultra Space available later in the game, players will be less inclined to target the more powerful Pokémon in the early game and will be more likely to train their own Pokémon they caught in the overworld.
Either way though, I like the direction Pixelmon has been going in regards in terms of difficulty. In the future though, it would be cool to see a dev blog on gyms and the thought process behind their architecture and difficulty. Thank you and have a good day.

[ribchop]

- 09 Jan 2024 13:44 #240960

Hy devs. First thank you for all you have done in the project, and big up for the devs who fix bugs every days for having playable new updates.

I completely agree with you for adding challenging features, like loss of inventory, and not being able to catch a lvl 70 Zacian after 15 minutes of gameplay (When I see friends not being roleplay and destroying the lvl curves... then go in ultra dimension to catch lvl 100 Garchomp... I don't see the fun).

Some player will not understand this changes, because they will not read this post. I sugger to add dev blog in the menu of the pixelmon mod.

For gym, maybe add a condition of fainting all ones before a gym boss, or fainting all npcs to acces to the move reminder (in the big towers). I dont know if it's easily doable.

I love strategy, but I find lvl 140 gym to difficult for no reason. It's not strategy anymore, or I have to make a specific team for every gym type I want to fight. I sugger to make Rare, Epic, Legendary... boss not having big lvls, but better strategy team, with also more legendaries and cheated pokemons, instead of a lvl boost that destroy the speed stats experience.

For pokeballs and food issues, I sugger to add balls and food loot to npcs, (for exemple 1-3 pokeball for lvl 1-14 npc, 1-3 super ball for 15-25 npcs, then 1-3 ultra ball for +25 lvl npcs, and other types of balls for higher ones), because npcs dont drop enough money to the player.

I am a big fan of pixelmon mod, and I hope with the suggestion of the community, and your hard work, the gameplay will improve.

Thank you

Thanks for the feedback! To respond to some of your points

- We 100% do not want progression to be skipped, we're looking into more ways to help with this as well, for example considering why Legendaries can even spawn on a player who is low level, as well as looking at what level Pixelmon spawn around the player in general. Before 9.2.6 it was almost impossible to not catch a Pixelmon 30+ levels over your party level because they spawn everywhere!

- We will be looking into how we can make the Dev logs more visible! We defiantly want to see as much feedback as we can from many different types of players.

- Gyms are a bit of a big subject. Right now we (the dev team) consider gyms to be the 'End Game' of current Pixelmon but we don't always want it to be that way. All of us agree that having gym leaders with level 140+ Pixelmon does not feel right, especially if we're trying to keep some semblance to the main games. We have future plans (no etas or anything) to look into adding content that is later-game than gyms and as part of that we'll likely tune down some of the current gyms (especially the overworld ones) difficulty to be more in-line with where we want progression. This likely will also involve balancing other battle content in the early-mid game (arenas, random trainer battles, etc). Right now gyms are a bit harder than we want them to be because like I said they are pretty much the current 'late game'.

- Adding loot pools to npcs / battles is a great idea! We're currently taking a larger look at loot, how and when we distribute it as a whole so we will keep that in mind!

[ribchop]

- 09 Jan 2024 14:09 #240961

It's cool to see the dev team working on ways to make the Pixelmon experience more Minecrafty. There have been a bunch of cool changes that have come around such as the cave level multiplier, better villages, and overhaul to Ultra Space. Still there are some improvements that can be made, especially when it comes to the two primary issues discussed in this blog.
When it comes to "cheesing" the progression by speedrunning high-level Pokémon, I believe it could be executed in a better way. First of all, make it easier to obtain ores such as Silver and Platinum. A big reason some people prefer looting villages over crafting Pokeballs is that they now require materials that require more effort to obtain. As such, a buff to the spawn rates of those ores would be really helpful, especially in the early game. Secondly, I'm not sure that the player should be entirely gatekept from catching Pokemon of a higher level. Perhaps make it so that you can only catch Pokemon 10-20 levels above your highest level Pokemon. Bonus points if you can make it configurable in the config files.
As for Ultra Space, the way I've seen that dimension is that it's something the player should enter as fast as possible. Despite what people have said about Ultra Space, I'm of the belief that Ultra Space is the first place a player should go to in order to get powerful Pokemon and amazing loot. This is especially necessary as challenges such as gyms, the Tower of Two Fists, and evil team structures have trainers that scale with your team's level. To remedy this, I would propose that Ultra Space should only be accessible after entering the Nether or End dimensions. Perhaps make it so that you can create wormholes using a material such as Eyes of Ender or Shulker Shells. Or maybe you can find inactive wormholes in the overworld but you need an item only obtainable in the Nether or End in order to activate it. By making Ultra Space available later in the game, players will be less inclined to target the more powerful Pokémon in the early game and will be more likely to train their own Pokémon they caught in the overworld.
Either way though, I like the direction Pixelmon has been going in regards in terms of difficulty. In the future though, it would be cool to see a dev blog on gyms and the thought process behind their architecture and difficulty. Thank you and have a good day.

Hey there, thanks for the feeback!

To go over some of your points
- We definitely will be taking a look at ore distribution. With moving to 1.20 in general, Minecraft has significantly changed how ores are distributed so reigning in this balance is something we're keeping a close eye on.

- Part of what we've noticed in why people prefer villages at the moment is just the sheer amount of loot. At the moment, there is no reason to 'build up' a base because the sheer amount of loot you acquire from exploring and that doesn't match well into the 'Minecraft' part of the experience. Part of this as well is the level of loot as well, if you look into the Pokemon games you don't get Ultra Balls when you step out of the first town, but in Pixelmon you start in a village, and can loot almost half a stack of them from your first village! (Along with a full inventory of other Balls, Potions, etc). We'll looking into both making early game materials (think Pokeballs, Potions, etc) more available early on as well as moving the other 'tiers' of loot (Great Balls, Ultra Balls, Full Restores, etc) more towards parts of the game that make sense through various means. We're very focused on finding a balance between progression of the Pokemon games, tied with the open-world feel of Minecraft.

- To be very clear on the catching over-leveled Pokemon, you can still catch them as it stands! The feature added to 9.2.6 doesn't prevent you from catching an over-leveled Pixelmon, but what it does is forces you into a battle with that Pixelmon. This adds a bit of 'risk' for the people who would be doing this (experienced players mostly who have knowledge of how / where to find these higher leveled Pixelmon). That said as I stated above we will be looking into other areas as well, such as spawning levels of Pixelmon (which already had a slight change in 9.2.6) as well as things like should Legendaries even spawn on you when you've just created your world.

- I noted it above but as far as Gyms, the towers, arenas, etc go we're going to be looking at adjusting the balance of these. Some gyms (such as the Grass gym) are definitely currently too hard, and that's currently 'intentional' as the gyms are currently the 'End Game' of Pixelmon. We're looking at adding stuff to follow the Gyms, and then tune the balance of the current structures to be more in line of what we're wanting in the future.

- Definitely agree on Ultra Space access, it's something we're aware of and are discussing possible solutions. We see Ultra space as part of the 'Late Game' of both Pixelmon and the Minecraft bit of Pixelmon and it doesn't make sense that you can access it before you've gone to the Nether / End

Again appreciate all the feedback, it's very helpful for us to improve in the future!

[SKyTheThunder]

- 09 Jan 2024 14:23 #240962 In regards to Ultra Space access, I believe this suggestion thread has a pretty organic approach to it, which can be expanded to other features as well, to make them scale more naturally: https://pixelmonmod.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=57963

[Mikalixar]

- 09 Jan 2024 14:24 #240963 Here are some ideas I have, regarding the Difficulty Update, as well as the general playstyle of the game.

Fossils
Fossil Ore blocks should drop as the block by default, and then like Suspicious Sand and Suspicious Gravel, should drop or reveal fossils by using a Copper Brush. Furthermore, maybe 1 Fossil per block brushed off. Ever since I saw the reveal for Copper Brushes, I thought "that would be cool for Pixelmon's Fossils!" After throwing the idea out there and getting input or feedback from other members of the community, I was told that 9Tales made the suggestion back in June of 2023! Here's their post: Brush Fossil Blocks

Catching Mechanics for Higher Levels
Those that played Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, there was 2 mechanics that I'd like to bring up:
- First, when you first encounter Zacian or Zamazenta, they are labeled as ??? with a Level of ??? and are unable to be hit. While the unable to be hit could be either cool or a bit too overboard, I'm more looking at the ??? feature.
- Secondly, if you aren't a high enough level or you don't have the respective badge to catch above a certain level range, the Pokémon "won't let its guard down", and therefore you "can't throw a Poké Ball!"

Apricorn Smiths
Much like a Minecraft Village's Blacksmith and Weaponsmith, in the Pixelmon Villages there could be a new NPC and immersive building that you could trade your Apricorns and metals used to make the discs and lids for Poké Balls, with a majorly discounted price (cost of labor and overhead fee) than buying the Poké Balls directly from the PokéMart. This could be a way to make Poké Balls obtainable, while also alleviating the need to have so many Poké Balls in loot tables of chests.

[SimonMage]

- 09 Jan 2024 17:03 #240964 Hi, I love Pixelmon and I play this mod until the first version and before of it I played the old Pixelmon from 1.6.2. This mod has a lot of nice features but other are slightly forgotten. For example is a nice idea the faint system, but enabled by default I think, because the 90% of classic pixelmon users don't check the game rules and maybe this feature can be forgotten as the fly battle system hardcoded a lot of time ago and now forgotten. I think now Pixelmon (in particular) in 1.20.2 has to focus to fix bugs because, for example in my case and other a lot of other users, the 9.2.6 is more bugged than 9.2.5. Everyone know that the 1.20.2 is unstable but we started from 9.2.0 (7 versions for fixing 1.20.2 bugs) and a lot of users can't test new features for the bugs reported in the tracker. Also I know that Pixelmon aims to improve the single player experience but adding some features for graphic aspects can be amazing I think:

Imagine how it is having an entire system dedicated to animations of Pokémon? Like sleep o attacks animations, watching a charizard sleeping like the anime, a real Snorlax sleeping in front of you blocking the road as the games or watching a real flamethrower made by Charizard with his animation like the anime <3.<3

I think the best single player feature is aiming to improve the immersion of the gameplay, like having an integrated lore inside the game with nice animations of Pokémon, with this aspects, players can see the amazing aspects of the Pixelmon.

I noticed that how Pixelmon improved the builds in these last years, I think now are very beautiful but I think it's very amazing if you remove the "vanilla" villages and replace them with a real towns as the games or the anime. Imagine to walk around amazing skyscrapers with your bike and with a lot of nice things inside, having different structures for each town in different biomes, for example, some towns with mines, something else with black markets, others with some arenas undergrownd the towns with some quest and lore dedicated to the town.

Another thing that can be amazing I think is re-adding in 1.20.2 the battle musics, I noticed that I don't hear anymore from a lot of versions and the battles improve the immersion very a lot.

At the end, I think the best feature that you can add in the mod can be the disguise into a Pokémon like the new Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (Indaco Disk) or the old games as Pokémon Mistery Dungeons, I think can be amazing that players can make a command like a disguise to becomes real Pokémons with levels and explorating the world as a Pokémon Mistery Dungeon, where you can fight other pokémons with your moves and trying to make a party with them as the old games. I love a game like this and I know 100% that you add a similar feature (also very little morph, and making the possible to others to make a similar system like map makers) you can see all the pixelmon/pokémon fan trying and playing with this amazing feature, I hope that you hear my considerations.

Kind regards.

[SKyTheThunder]

- 10 Jan 2024 05:22 #240966

Hi, I love Pixelmon and I play this mod until the first version and before of it I played the old Pixelmon from 1.6.2. This mod has a lot of nice features but other are slightly forgotten. For example is a nice idea the faint system, but enabled by default I think, because the 90% of classic pixelmon users don't check the game rules and maybe this feature can be forgotten as the fly battle system hardcoded a lot of time ago and now forgotten. I think now Pixelmon (in particular) in 1.20.2 has to focus to fix bugs because, for example in my case and other a lot of other users, the 9.2.6 is more bugged than 9.2.5. Everyone know that the 1.20.2 is unstable but we started from 9.2.0 (7 versions for fixing 1.20.2 bugs) and a lot of users can't test new features for the bugs reported in the tracker. Also I know that Pixelmon aims to improve the single player experience but adding some features for graphic aspects can be amazing I think:

Imagine how it is having an entire system dedicated to animations of Pokémon? Like sleep o attacks animations, watching a charizard sleeping like the anime, a real Snorlax sleeping in front of you blocking the road as the games or watching a real flamethrower made by Charizard with his animation like the anime <3.<3

I think the best single player feature is aiming to improve the immersion of the gameplay, like having an integrated lore inside the game with nice animations of Pokémon, with this aspects, players can see the amazing aspects of the Pixelmon.

I noticed that how Pixelmon improved the builds in these last years, I think now are very beautiful but I think it's very amazing if you remove the "vanilla" villages and replace them with a real towns as the games or the anime. Imagine to walk around amazing skyscrapers with your bike and with a lot of nice things inside, having different structures for each town in different biomes, for example, some towns with mines, something else with black markets, others with some arenas undergrownd the towns with some quest and lore dedicated to the town.

Another thing that can be amazing I think is re-adding in 1.20.2 the battle musics, I noticed that I don't hear anymore from a lot of versions and the battles improve the immersion very a lot.

At the end, I think the best feature that you can add in the mod can be the disguise into a Pokémon like the new Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (Indaco Disk) or the old games as Pokémon Mistery Dungeons, I think can be amazing that players can make a command like a disguise to becomes real Pokémons with levels and explorating the world as a Pokémon Mistery Dungeon, where you can fight other pokémons with your moves and trying to make a party with them as the old games. I love a game like this and I know 100% that you add a similar feature (also very little morph, and making the possible to others to make a similar system like map makers) you can see all the pixelmon/pokémon fan trying and playing with this amazing feature, I hope that you hear my considerations.

Kind regards.

As much as we love hearing players' feedback, this thread is specifically aimed at difficulty and gameplay progression. Your ideas are more about immersion and would be better suited for our Suggestions Forum: https://pixelmonmod.com/viewforum.php?f=146

A quick note on the complex animation system you brought up:
Animation has always been a major bottleneck in our workflow, mainly when adding new Pokémon. So creating multiple new animation sets for >1000 Pokémon and their variants (aka. several thousand new individual animations) is currently not in the cards, due to a lack of manpower. We're always happy about anyone willing to help us out in that regard.

[ElCamboyano]

- 25 Jan 2024 00:32 #241052