How Pokemon Sword & Shield get Random Battles Right
/Random Battles have taken many different forms over the years, but in RPGs at least, they’ve always kind of been there. Of course, these days players tend to think of Random Battles as being annoying, and so truly Random Battles are not something we typically see much of any more. In their place, we see lots of different, more modern methods of getting players into combat. What’s interesting though, is that these more modern methods share a lot of the design benefits that Random Battles had. They are still the smaller, less intimidating fights that exist in-between big boss battles. And yet, there are other areas where modern methods are actually inferior. We’ll get into those later, though.
Whether they are truly random or not, these smaller fights players are constantly fighting are a great way to control a game’s pacing. They give the player a lot of smaller, easier challenges to overcome through the course of their journey. As a result, by the end of a particular part of the game it feels like you’ve accomplished something just by getting through it. Completing a dungeon can feel fulfilling even without a boss at the end, and a big part of this feeling comes from overcoming those smaller challenges. Plus, when there is a boss, they just feel more menacing when there are weaker enemies to compare against.
Finally, boss fights represent a point of high tension- which is great! But we don’t want the player to exist in that state all the time. After the boss is dead, the player probably wants to just chill for a bit, maybe go back to town and do some low-effort shopping. If the player jumped from boss fight to boss fight all game long, it would pretty exhausting. It can be pretty cool when the boss hasn’t even reached their final form yet, but even in the most climactic points of a game, it can get pretty tiring after the second or third boss fight in a row. This is why pacing is important, and this is one of the biggest reasons why small intermediary fights are important, whether we call them Random Battles or noth.
But we’re getting a bit off track here. What we’re really looking at are the mechanics of how we can get players into “Random Battles” in the first place, which for convenience, I will call “engagement mechanics”. Different engagement mechanics have different strengths and weaknesses, so we’ll look at that a little bit, and eventually I swear we’ll talk about how Pokemon Sword & Shield managed to be super clever about their approach to this topic.
Over the years, we’ve seen developers experiment a lot with their engagement mechanics. We’ve seen encounters placed in pre-defined map locations. We’ve seen games where the player gets to choose what the encounter rate is. We’ve seen games that give the player ways of knowing when a battle is about to take place, and sometimes even ways to “cancel” those pending battles. Increasingly, we even see games where players enter battle seamlessly, right where they are standing. By far what has become the most common approach these days though, is having enemies appear on the overworld. If the player touches said enemy, a battle ensues.
The power in showing enemy encounters on the overworld, is that it gives the player agency over when they do and do not want to fight enemies. This means that, ideally you never again have to deal with a battle popping up when you really wish it wouldn’t. No more battles when you’re, say, solving a puzzle, or doing some platforming. You never get the feeling of wishing the Random Battles would just chill out, because overworld encounters typically mean that most or all battles are entirely opt-in. Of course there’s always variance in how hard it is to get away from enemies, but for the most part, if one is in a battle, it’s probably because they choose to be there.
However, when every battle is opt-in, it necessarily creates a scenario where the player has to choose to keep their party levelled up. How many fights does the player have to purposefully engage in to stay at the appropriate level? How does the game designer balance their game when they have no way of knowing how many battles the player is going to opt-in to? Historically, truly Random Battles have meant that we could assume the player would encounter x number of battles on average. If we know the encounter rate, and we know how many steps on average an area takes to clear, then things like the experience curve aren’t so hard to balance.
Sure, in most games players have always had the option to run away from fights, but running away is an opt-out mechanic. When you’re opting out of an encounter, you’ve still entered the fight to begin with. And when you’ve already watched the battle transition, when you’re sitting there with the enemies right in front of you, it’s easy to feel like you should just finish the fight. Comparatively, avoiding a fight altogether on the overworld typically doesn’t take much more effort than jamming the control stick in a different direction real quick. Choosing not to opt-in to an overworld encounter is a much smaller commitment, than choosing to opt-out of a fight already in progress.
At least dodging enemies on the overworld presents some amount of challenge the player is overcoming, and so it still provides some of the pacing benefits a Random Battle normally would. Even if you choose to avoid every fight, one still has to overcome the mild annoyance of dodging enemies. At least is still feels like the player is engaging with the environment, rather than periodically getting teleported to a different dimension while they are just trying to walk in a straight line across a room.
But when it comes to leveling up and player progression, opt-in Random Battles don’t leave the designers a whole lot to work with.
So the story up until now is that, seeing enemies on the world map has a lot of advantages, but it creates some new issues of its own as well. Which leads us to the actual topic of this article- which is to say that, I think Pokemon Sword & Shield has some really good answers to a lot of these problems. That’s not to say that their approach is the one true solution and everyone should do what Pokemon does. I just think that their approach is very clever, yet simple.
First off though, I’m going to leap into yet another tangent by pointing out that Pokemon games innately have a leg up in this matter, because they actually have several “levels” of battle in their loop. In addition to gym battles, overworld battles, and Random Battles, Pokemon games also have trainer fights, many of which are forced encounters.
Trainer fights yield far higher rewards than Random Battles, and are typically more fun, too. When compared to Random Battles, Trainer fights are more challenging, have more variety, and even more narrative in the form of dialogue before and after battle. These are the fights that the player wants to do, and so by putting much more weight on trainers than on Random Battles, it alleviates or removes a lot of the things that Random Battles have to deliver on. In this way we can rely on Trainer Fights to give the player most of their progression, and we can rely on the player actually fighting them, because many Trainer Fights are some combination of desirable, and/or unavoidable.
But even beyond the Trainer battles, it so happens that overworld encounters also work particularly well in Pokemon, because you will see what kind of pokemon you’re going to fight before the battle even starts. This works out so well, because everything in Pokemon is designed around the idea of exploring and discovering new types of Pokemon. Even if you don’t want to “catch em all”, if you see a Pokemon you’ve never seen before, there are still reasons to check it out. By fighting it, you’re still going to fill out your Pokedex, you’re still going to learn that Pokemon’s name and type, and you’re still going to sate your curiosity.
The one part of all of this that’s actually new to Pokemon Sword & Shield though, is this game’s replacement for truly Random Battles - which I will call “mystery” encounters.
Essentially, Sword & Shield eschew the classic methodology of “every so many steps, trigger a Random Battle”, and in their place, the player will instead periodically see a little “!” symbol appear in front of them when they are navigating tall grass. If the player keeps going after the symbol pops up, they will trigger a Random Battle. However, if the player manages to swerve out of the way in time, they will avoid that battle entirely.
This method of encounters is different from overworld Pokemon encounters primarily because that “!” symbol is unpredictable. If one wishes to dodge the mystery encounter, is requires a quick reaction, and realistically you are going to fail from time to time. This means that, even if your goal is to dodge every encounter, you still get a lot of the same tension that you would otherwise get from navigating a dungeon in a game with truly Random Battles. Even if you have every ability to dodge the encounter entirely, you still never know when a battle is going to pop up.
So it would seem that Pokemon’s approach to “Random Battles” gives us basically everything we want out of our engagement mechanics. We can let trainer battles and gym fights do the heavy lifting when it comes to pacing and balancing progression. Meanwhile, every other fight is completely opt-in. The player has a lot of good reasons to opt-in to fights, but never really feel like they have to. Battles never get in the way of other challenges, and yet, the act of opting out creates an entirely separate set of challenges, and delivers on the tension that we want out of a dungeon.
Of course, lots of people have been critical of Pokemon Sword & Shield when it comes to things like overall game difficulty, the size of it’s dungeons, and so on. I would say that these are all valid criticisms, but they don’t really take away from the what the game does well. Whatever may happen inside of the battles, or between the battles, the fact remains that Intelligent Systems made some pretty smart choices when it comes to it’s engagement mechanics.
I’m not going to advocate that every game does exactly what Pokemon does, but I think what Pokemon does works really, really well, and it’s hard for me to think of another game that nailed their engagement mechanics quite so well as Pokemon Sword & Shield do.