Pokemon Champions will be ditching IVs to make the series’ competitive scene more approachable, something producer Masaaki Hoshino had to discuss with one of the series’ original battle designers.
Starting later this year, Pokemon Champions will the the official game of the Pokemon Video Game Championships, with the free-to-play title set to be the go-to game for competitive Pokemon going forward. But at the same time, Pokemon Champions aims to make the competitive battles a bit more approachable for players, and one way is by removing one of the series’ long-standing stats, IVs – which are somewhat hidden modifiers that decide how a Pokemon’s stats will grow as they level up.
In a roundtable interview attended by GameSpot, Hoshino said that the removal of IVs took a “heated discussion with [Shigeki] Morimoto,” one of Pokemon’s original battle designers.
Hoshino further explains Champions’ approach to accessibility in a separate roundtable interview attended by GamesRadar+. “From the very beginning, we didn’t want to go and change that core battle system,” he says. “We thought that was very important, especially to the current players who enjoy the battle system. So we wanted to keep the same core battle system.”
However, he also notes that not everyone “really got into the PvP part – playing against other players – and with this product, our hope is to expand that accessibility, to make it something that anyone can jump in and enjoy.” He adds that “up until now, in order to participate in those battles at a high level, you needed to do a lot of work, for example, all this different training that takes quite a bit of time, and that can feel like a bit of a hurdle for certain players.” In theory, then, Champions should make that easier than ever before.