New Innovation, New Problems

The great thing about some Pokémon games is that they keep up with time, whether in the form of a completely new iteration as with the main series games or continuous updating as with the mobile games or even some of the console games. The newer versions of these games often bring about new innovations. However, in the process, some of these innovations sometimes bring about new problems as well. They may not necessarily affect gameplay too deeply, but they may still be a source of bother. That has been the case for a couple of recent innovations in more current Pokémon games.

In the new main series games of Sword and Shield, Max Raid Battles can be played over the Internet with a friend or two, which facilitates those living far away to play. This entails the creation of a "lobby" with a four-digit link code or "password", which then is shared to another player to link up. However, as there are only 10000 possible combinations and some players may not create a unique enough number, sometimes someone would run into a number for another player's Max Raid Battle. Some trades over the Internet also work the same way. This code/number issue became a bit of a hot topic last month among my main series fellows, just a week after the games were released. While lack of more recent discussions may or may not suggest continued problems, this was definitely a case of a new innovation causing a new problem.

Pokémon Go is no stranger to new innovations causing new problems, as it is a constantly updated mobile game with new features and adjustments. In a recent update, the game received a load of new feature innovations - which I will discuss soon, but now's not the time - but some other features of the game became "broken". Specifically for the latter, several search strings that are very useful to find Pokémon according to their stats became unusable after the update. The issue is that these comprise a feature that shouldn't be disappearing without a good reason, so the update should have been able to keep the feature while adding new ones - unrelated ones, at that. The feature has been rectified with another updated version, but not everyone may have updated or can update quickly enough. Though the new innovations did not directly create the new problems, the process of preparing the update with the new innovations seemed to have done so.

Innovations in games and especially Pokémon games are great, of course, but what's not so great is the issues that may arise as part of (the process of implementing) those innovations. Yet, games themselves are human innovations as well, and there's another kind of innovation that people can create, which is the innovation to improve situations and resolve issues. The latter has certainly applied to the latter, and the hope is that the former may apply to the former. All that's left to do is to await further innovations to the Pokémon games that I and so many others love, with the hope that they won't cause (too many) problems as they are conceived.

One year ago: Dreaming Big, Making an Impact

Two years ago: Friend Faves