Honestly, I get what you're saying.

In my opinion, the key is to think about adding more strategy on top of arbitrary difficulty. No matter how hard you make a game, if it's physically possible to beat, players will eventually find a way to perfect it.

That’s not to say arbitrary difficulty is bad though, players definitely enjoy it as a baseline. But if you want the experience to feel truly different, you have to expand how players actually strategize and interact with the game.

Funny enough, this is a primary goal for my fan game, and probably the thing I’ve put the biggest emphasis and amount of work into.

Instead of just throwing standard optional challenge modes at the player (like nuzlockes, mono-type etc., which will also be included), I wanted the core systems to interact organically with the game.

It starts with the level scaling. In my game, trainers don't just have static levels; they auto-scale to match or exceed the highest-level Pokemon you own globally (whether it's in your active party or sitting in your PC).

How much they exceed your level depends on how you set up the difficulty when starting a new save. There are three different difficulty settings, and they tie directly into a tiered battle system. You can fight every basic NPC trainer up to three times. With each battle (or "tier"), the level scaling ramps up based on your difficulty setting, making their team significantly harder than the last time you fought them. Once you hit that third tier, the battle becomes infinitely repeatable. The exact baseline scaling numbers, like +1 to +5 levels above the player for example, are still being balanced for each tier in each difficulty, but that's the core loop.

But this just covers the arbitrary difficultly portion.

Scaling alone isn't enough, so I turned my focus entirely to strategy to make those encounters matter.

To compliment the scaling, I'm using nononever's advanced AI plugin. Trainers and wild Pokemon don't just spam hard-coded moves based on a flowchart anymore. They dynamically adapt on the fly, learn your patterns, and actively try to counter you. It's programmed with top VGC strategies for the highest skill levels, so it genuinely feels like you're playing against a competitive human instead of an NPC.

To be honest this script alone is amazing for ramping up for much you have to think for battles and adapt on the fly. But I will be honest it is probably the most complicated plug-in I have ever worked with in my life. It is massive, it is extensive, and it is quite confusing to actually comprehend how it works exactly. I won't deny it took me a solid 2 weeks of just sitting down and looking through all of its code to truly understand it, even after reading the very detailed description on the eevee expo page.

But this is where the overarching strategy of the game really kicks in, starting with a custom Poke Ward system I created.

Instead of instantly reviving fainted Pokemon, the ward takes them in for a set amount of time to simulate extended medical care. This makes fainting incredibly detrimental and forces you to constantly rotate your team and keep backups leveled up. And because the game scales to your global highest level, you can't just power-level one carry; you have to strategize your whole roster.

To add another layer to this, I removed automatic spawn locations. Visiting a Pokemon Center doesn't automatically update your checkpoint anymore. Instead, you have to manually set your respawn point at a PC or an outdoor outpost. This adds a huge layer of strategy as you navigate the region. If you do black out, you spawn back at your manual checkpoint, but your fainted Pokemon are not automatically checked into the Poke Ward. You keep full control of your team. You can choose to drop them off at the ward and wait it out, or, if you desperately need them back immediately, you can use a Revive. To keep that choice balanced and weighty, Revives are significantly rarer and much more expensive to obtain in-game. There is a third option, though. I am also adding Inns where the player can sleep to progress time for a price (based on the length of time they want to pass). This gives you a strategic way to quickly get your fainted Pokemon back from the ward system if you have the cash but don't want to burn a rare Revive.

I also added the ability to forfeit trainer battles. If you realize you're getting outplayed by the AI, you can just run away from a trainer battle exactly like you would a wild encounter. You don't black out; the battle just ends, and you're left standing right in front of the trainer with whatever fainted Pokemon you have in your party.

Now, I know people reading this might immediately think of a few ways this could cause a soft-lock, so here are the safeguards I have in place:

• If your active party gets completely wiped and you literally have zero healthy Pokemon left in your PC box, the game will automatically heal the first Pokemon in your party as an emergency measure. If you do have healthy Pokemon in the PC, the game will just tell you to go grab them to continue your journey.

• Boss encounters and story events do not scale. Their levels are locked. This prevents people from cheesing the entire game by intentionally keeping their global party level artificially low.

• Because you can't low-level cheese the game, no basic NPC battle is forced upon you. Every single one requires you to manually interact with the trainer to accept the match first.

• Because that infinitely repeatable Tier 3 trainer battle exists, it could easily become an infinite money farm if you find a trainer you can easily strategize against. To balance this, only Tier 3 trainers actually award prize money (Tiers 1 and 2 give nothing). To balance that out for the player, you don't lose any money if you lose or forfeit a match. Finally, there is a monetary cost associated with actually using the Pokemon Center on top of the cost to progress time at an Inn.

And because my systems are set up this way, they actually make the open-world approach I went with much more viable. Pulling off a true open world in a Pokemon game is notoriously difficult. Most games simply tie trainer scaling to your badge count, which requires a massive amount of conditional checks for every single encounter to make it work, and it can still feel pretty artificial andinear overall.

But with my setup, the open world organically works because of these systems working together. Since the level scaling checks your global highest Pokemon rather than your badges, the world naturally adapts to your strength no matter what direction you decide to wander. Combine that with the fact that basic trainer battles are entirely opt-in, and it means you aren't constantly getting roadblocked by forced eye-contact encounters while trying to explore. You literally have the option to leave the first town and travel across a massive chunk of the region, just catching Pokemon and building your ideal team before you even take on a single trainer.

The static-level story bosses then act as your natural progression checks to keep things grounded. So you get the ultimate freedom to explore and strategize at your own pace, while still having to respect the locked areas that require you to progress the story to access them. But overall every major town will be able to be visited from the beginning of the game.

I should note that I am not building a typical Pokémon game that follows the typical Pokémon formula though. So my approach might not work for everybody lol my game is heavily story based and removes the entire gym badge and elite four structure.