How to stop all the online Pokemon players from ruining their own fun
I've been writing about Pokemon Home here for the last week. Something I mentioned in my first post was that connecting all the games together with Home has an effect on players' enjoyment of the games.
I also mentioned that Scarlet and Violet waited until their 3.0 release, their final DLC, to connect to the Home. Well, I'm pretty sure this was done in order to avoid a situation where Home would negatively affect player enjoyment.
Filling your own Pokedex might be a bad idea
The quest to Catch Them All is the main driver for a lot of Pokemon players. But each Pokemon game generally contains a lot of older Pokemon. Players want to see their favorites show up again, and the developers want to be able to reuse previous designs so that they don't have to invent so many new Pokemon for each new game. (They only made a new generation with no older Pokemon once, for Black and White.)
If you are a collector trying to actually Catch Em All in Home, and if you could connect your brand-new Pokemon game to Home at launch, you'd be able to transfer all your old Pokemon to the new game in one go. Instead of having to scour the landscape, battle, catch, and grow your team, you'd be able to ruin your own fun, and complete some of the game's most difficult win conditions right away.
Possibly intentional development delays
So... the games simply do not allow that. Scarlet and Violet waited until their final DLC had come out to connect those games to Home. So for the first full calendar year they were out, I was forced to play Scarlet as Scarlet. I wasn't able to mass-transfer in my old ringers from previous games, and I wasn't able to ruin my own fun.
Based on when each new Pokemon game has connected to Home, I have begun to think that The Pokemon Company must be deliberately making the Home product team wait to connect new Pokemon games. If they wanted to launch with same-day connectivity, I'm pretty sure that they would have been able to pull it off at least once.
But they never have. Pokemon Legends: Arceus took four months to connect to Home, in the same update that had Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl taking 6 months. Sword and Shield launched 3 months before Home launched at all. Scarlet and Violet took a year to connect. So... I think some of these delays might be intentional.
It's possible that I'm reading this wrong, but even if these waiting periods are accidental, I think they're having a good impact. I can't say for certain that I wouldn't ruin my own fun! I've got a lot of old favorite Pokemon that I've been carting from game to game for years. Maybe I'd stoop to swapping in my old starters from previous games, or my old raid-ready, perfect-IV, fully EV-trained ringers. I'm not sure I have the fortitude to resist that kind of thing.
Pretending to be a natural philosopher
There's a Pokedex design decision in Pokemon Legends: Arceus which strikes me as possibly related to Home, too. I'm sure Home is not the only thing affecting PLA's Pokedex design, but I've been wondering for years whether and how much it contributed.
A Pokedex is a core mechanic in any proper Pokemon game. It's a checklist which tracks whether you've caught every Pokemon in the game. It provides the structure for each game's endgame, and completing it usually gets you some material rewards that make further endgame play more interesting. The moment I complete every game's main plot, I immediately open up the Pokedex and start setting myself some new goals.
The Pokedex in Pokemon Legends: Arceus works differently. Instead of simply giving you credit for catches, it gives you credit for observing each Pokemon, like an 1800s natural philosopher. You become the Stephen Maturin of Pokemon, basically. Just collecting the Pokemon does nothing - you need to fill out a whole page of observations, and each Pokemon in the Pokedex has different requirements. You might have to observe it firing off certain attacks, or catch a certain number, or use it in battle.
Arceus is, in fact, set in a kind of Pokemon version of the 1800s, and the Pokedex you're working on is presented as if it might be the historical ancestor of newer, simpler Pokedexes - as if you're collecting the original data that provided humanity's scientific foundation for the kinds of Pokedexes in normal Pokemon games. It's cute.
PLA is set in Sinnoh, the same region as the 2006 Diamond and Pearl games, and contains the exact same list of Pokemon. PLA launched in 2022, two months after a pair of Diamond and Pearl reboot games: Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. So, in late 2021 and early 2022, a real Pokemon Fanatic would have found themselves playing with the exact same list of Pokemon in two different adventures.
Imagine if PLA had a traditional Pokedex? You could swap your Pokemon from Diamond, Pearl, BD, or SP directly into PLA at launch and wipe out the entire Pokedex before your adventure was even complete! A decision like that could cut hours and hours off of your maximum playtime. It's a fun-terminating decision that the player is highly motivated to make.
With PLA's Pokedex design, however, being connected to the Home ecosystem is actually enjoyable. I did, in fact, transfer Pokemon from BD into PLA when I started PLA... so that I could put them through their paces in the battle system and get a head start on all those observations for the Pokedex. The new Pokedex takes my desire to bring my buddies along and turns that into something that genuinely increases my enjoyment. It seems like something that was done with strong awareness of the effect that Home has on its network of connected Pokemon games.
I want to see more of that
I want to see more of that, yeah. I think that there is clearly some central committee making IP-shepherding choices around game releases and Home connectivity, and thinking carefully about the impact that a central clearinghouse for Pokemon might have on each game. But I also think that simply delaying the connection date for Home is kind of a weak choice.
I'd love to see more games do the kind of thing that PLA does - take advantage of Home and use that connectivity to give the player more to do. Sure, it probably cut a few hours off my playtime to be able to swap a couple of my Sinnoh Pokemon into PLA. But... it also motivated me to actually complete the checklist for each of those Pokemon. I'm not sure that I would have actually 100%ed the Pokedex in that game if I hadn't had so many different ways to start working on all those checklists.
I think Pokemon is super weird and I want it to lean harder into the things that make it weird and absurd and rickety and unique. There is no other game out there where people are carefully toting 20 year old save files around from game to game as a kind of emotional connection to their own childhood. All the dumb shit that NFT guys said about the potential to "own your own digital goods" is kind of alive and well in the humble databases of the Home ecosystem. And the consequences that might have on your fun are being rather well-managed by what I can only assume is some kind of silent and mysterious central committee, whose goals I can only fuzzily guess at by watching years and years of release calendars and game patches.
I want to see a game launch with day 1 Home connectivity and a Pokedex so fucking weird and involved that transferring all my old creatures into it on my first day in the game is good for my experience, not bad for it. I bet they can do that! They can figure it out!!