Pokemon Champions dev explains why matches are so short

Masaaki Hoshino, the producer of Pokemon Champions, has provided some insight into the team’s focus on implementing short matches.

Cutting down on play time was one of the initial goals for the project. Hoshino previously worked on Pokemon Unite, but even after shortening matches to ten minutes, “there were still some who felt that it was still too long.”

Hoshino said in a Famitsu interview that the team’s goal was to have five minute matches. In the end, they were actually able to go lower than that as the average time is currently at four minutes. This wasn’t easy as it was important to maintain the essence of Pokemon battles and what that looks like.

Our translation of the interview excerpt is as follows:

There seem to be many things designed to make the length of a single match shorter, such as reducing the length of stat change animations as well as ongoing moves, and having the ability to surrender at any time. Please explain to us the reasoning behind this.

Reducing play time was one of our important aims during development right from the start. In Pokemon Unite – a title I worked on previously as a producer – we were able to reduce a single match from 30 minutes down to 10, but there were still some who felt that it was still too long. Therefore, in this game we aimed to get the average to 5 minutes, to make it so that whether you win or lose you can keep battling. So we examined many areas carefully to make it shorter.

However, this game is not simply a sim – it was very important to us to show Pokemon in a lively and active way. To do that we made move animations visibly impressive, while cutting anything redundant and we cut down the space between turns to the point where text was just about readable. We also simplified ongoing effects and allowed things to occur simultaneously such as ‘Intimidate’ during Double Battles.

Furthermore, ‘being able to forfeit at any time’ was deemed to be necessary, so we proceeded with its development even though it placed a burden on the server engineers. As a result, the average match time is currently 4 minutes, so we were able to get it shorter than our aim, and we felt a response to our efforts of players happily saying ‘I don’t know when to stop’.

Related to the length of battles, in this game there has been a change to how the winner is determined if the timer runs out. Please tell us about how that came about, and your current thoughts on it.

Within the development team, we had many intense debates about the strategy of aiming for victory by allowing the time to run out. This strategy went completely against our concept of allowing players to quickly jump into battle after battle. We understand it is a strategy, but we decided it would be a big burden for new players to the title. So from the results of our discussions, in the release version, Ranked Battles result in a tie, and in Competitions there is ‘ruling’.

Following release, when looking at Ranked Battle data, the number of ties across all ranks in Double Battles is almost non-existent (less than 0.1%), for Single Battles the number is a little higher in the top tier, but overall it is still very low. We are aware that there have been various opinions expressed from those top tier players, but this has also been welcomed by a large number of players who had previously struggled against this battle strategy. This state is how we hoped to make it, and while we have new people joining on the smartphone version, we plan to keep it unchanged from the current version.

Pokemon Champions is live on the Nintendo eShop and on mobile now. The game just added a bunch of Pokemon, items, and more – get the full lineup here.

Translation provided by Simon Griffin and SatsumaFS on behalf of Nintendo Everything.