Real talk, this forced settings is genuinely such a massive thorn for the series.
These features were perfectly fine being a toggle, nobody had problems with it being a toggle, why is it that Gamefreak or the Devs or whoever is running the show want to give people less options.
Personally, I think on principle it’s fine for devs to draw a line somewhere and say “them’s the brakes,” because in theory, you could suggest-a-toggle a game to death. For instance, why stop at the Exp. Share being on or off? After all, what about the people who might have preferred the “even more difficult” experience mechanics from prior to Gen 6, when the Exp. Share only applied to one Pokémon, and only active participant Pokémon gained an amount of experience that got divided by the number of participants, and catching Pokémon rewarded no experience?
As a non-Pokémon example, plenty of people complained about the breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild, so should Tears of the Kingdom have included a toggle to satisfy players who wanted non-breakable weapons, even though that would go firmly against the core game design that the developers intended?
Should we have layers of toggles for every increasingly archaic iteration of a feature? That would be a little absurd, especially since every additional option and play mode you add risks creating more problems for development to iron out.
The devs make the game according to their vision, and if their vision is for a mechanic or feature to work only one way, then I think that should be up to them.
But at the same time, it is obvious that players generally like having more choices when it comes to customizing their experience of the game. So it’s kind of a tricky line to walk in terms of whether you prioritize the developer’s vision or the players’ preference.
With something like Pokémon’s Exp. Share, I think that’s mostly where the issue is. I doubt that it would present a significant technical problem in this instance, considering that Gens 6 and 7
did feature a toggle. But Game Freak already made a significant change to arrive at that system in the transition from Gen 5 to 6, and there were people at the time who didn’t like that, even with the “compromise” that a toggle-able Exp. Share offers. And yet, Game Freak still chose to draw a line there without going back. We’re now at a point where they’ve chosen to draw another line, even though I’m sure they know that doing so will inevitably put some people off (because drawing a line anywhere always will for someone, somewhere).
Personally, I think this is possibly because experience being shared across a party is more of a staple in RPGs these days, so Game Freak might view that as something they were actually lagging behind on and needed to modernize. I don’t have any hard evidence of that; it’s just my gut feeling based on how they spoke about it in some of the media leading up to Sword & Shield (I suspect similarly about autosave). In which case, that would be them putting their feelings as developers over a segment of the players’ preferences.
Regardless of the exact motive, would that be the right call? I think it’s hard to say. Were it up to me, *I* would probably have left it as a toggle, but there’s part of me that thinks that’s actually beside the point, and that the issue isn’t primarily with the presence or absence of a toggle, but rather, with many of the games just not being adequately balanced around party-wide experience sharing. I think you could probably find a way to draw the line while also making it so that the altered mechanics don’t break the balance of the game.
Going back to the Tears of the Kingdom example, the game did not feature any sort of toggle to make weapons unbreakable… but it
did introduce various avenues that allowed players to reinforce or replenish weapons, which did satisfy a lot — not all, certainly, but a lot — of people who didn’t enjoy that aspect of Breath of the Wild’s game design.
I’d like to think there’s potential for a happy medium somewhere even if Game Freak do insist upon not having a toggle, unless it just simply
is their intention for the shared experience gains to be so high that they end up making the game extremely easy. I suspect that that’s probably
not what they’re aiming for, and that they just haven’t really nailed down an approach that works yet… but maybe I’m wrong, and it’s working exactly as intended. If so, then well… I just don’t really agree with their vision, if that’s what it is. But I just have to make my peace with that.
I really got nothing when it comes to set mode being removed, though. I never really used it, personally, but like R_N says, it seems like a really odd thing to remove when it’s how all “proper” battles in competitive and multiplayer work anyway, which assumes that at some point you’re expected to graduate beyond the need of shift mode’s training wheels. (Honestly though, with SV being so busted I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if this were somehow a symptom of larger issues.)
