Smogon Temtem Information Center (AKA that Pokemon-like MMO I want Smogon to dominate!)

[Theorymon]

What the hell is this?

Temtem is a Pokemon-like MMO game that got kickstarted last year, and is going into early access on PC this September. If this isn't a good place for this thread, apologies! Just didn't think Orange Islands would want it.

Now when I mean Pokemon-like, I mean holy shit its basically offbrand Pokemon. Take a look at this gif!

It's literally just Pokemon with different monsters, in an MMO world, and phrases changed around! You'd think that'd mean its a stupid thing I don't care about, but here's the big thing: Unlike any other Pokemon clone, they're actually taking the competitive aspect of it seriously!

So I'm gonna tag Ullar here, since as far as I know, he's among the few people here who actually has access to the Alpha. Here's some really basic competitive info I know about the game (sorry if I get stuff wrong here, I don't have access to the Alpha lol)

Important differences from Pokemon

-All competitive battles are doubles. It's sorta like VGC: you bring 8 Temtems, choose 4 of them.

-As far as I know, the dev team has said a major philosphy for this game is NO HAX! so basically, moves won't miss, no critical hits, etc! Also includes stuff like sleep having a set amount of turns depending on the attack.

-There are general base stats, and an IV and EV like system. Each stat can have 50 IVs (known as SVs. AH fuck, I hope they dont make it as bad as mons), and I believe you can invest 500 EVs (called TVs) into each stat, for a total of 1000 per Tem. Not sure if it works like EVs where 4 = 1 stat boost or not.

-All the stats are visable from the stat screen, so no hidden values!

-Unlike Pokemon, moves don't have PP. Instead, there's a new Stamina stat, which acts like a shared PP moves delpete from. Afaik, if you run out of stamina, your Temtem starts to hurt itself when it attacks. They can still use the attack, but theres a damave calc to determine how much damage you do to yourself after you use the attack. You can also give up a turn of attack to regain stamina.

-Statuses work differently. You can have 2 at once, there are no statues that you can remove via switching, and the older status can get overridden by new status. Some are benfial, and notably, for sleep, your tem actually wakes up the moment it gets attacked! There's even benefical statuses you can inflict on teeammates. Here's the statuses, stole them from the offical thread.

statuses in temtem

Cold and Frozen: If Cold is afflicted twice, the Temtem becomes Frozen. Frozen Temtem cannot attack.

Asleep: Asleep Temtem cannot attack, but if they are damaged, they wake up. Status effects that damage also wake them up such as poison or burn.

Trapped: Trapped Temtem cannot swap out.

Doomed: Once the turn counter on the Doomed Temtem hits 0, the Temtem faints.

Seized: Seized Temtem lose their item effect.

Poisoned: Poisoned Temtem lose 1/8 of their health every turn.

Burned: Burned Temtem lose 1/16 of health every turn and it reduces attack by 30%.

Exhausted: The Stamina costs of an Exhausted Temtem increase by 50%.

Invigorated: The Stamina costs an Invigorated Temtem decrease by 50%.

Immune: The Immune Temtem is immune to new status conditions.

Regenerating: Each turn, the Regenerating Temtem heals 1/16 of their health.

Exiled: Synergies do not work with Exiled Temtem.

Neutralized: The Neutralized Temtem's strengths and weaknesses do not apply.

-Totally different movepools and stats, because these are differnet monsters. I unfortunately don't currently have a list of stats and movepools, but Ullar gave me a tier list of the Temtems! I'm not sure if they're really experts on competitive mons (I find it really suspect that a wallbreaker set there maximized both offenses), but maybe temtem just has a different flow to Pokemon, idk. https://www.playtemtem.com/forums/threads/competitive-alpha-temtem-sets-analysis-and-tiering.860/

-Priority works differently, they act as speed multipliers for the attacks used, so speed matters more when using proirty attacks than usual!

-stat boosts are also always multipliers, there's no "stage system" like Pokemon.

-There's a totally different type chart! Here's what Ullar gave me.

-Here's some other info in case I missed anything, a lot of it is basic mons stuff though: https://www.playtemtem.com/forums/threads/basic-mechanics-and-terminology-the-guide.53/

-Here's some other basic mechanics: https://www.playtemtem.com/forums/threads/temtem-basics-of-battle.439

So yeah, I'm really interested if anyone else wants to get this in early access when it comes out, sounds like it could be cool while we wait for Sword and Shield to come out!

 

[Martin]

-Unlike Pokemon, moves don't have PP. Instead, there's a new Stamina stat, which acts like a shared PP moves delpete from. Afaik, if you run out of stamina, your Temtem starts to hurt itself when it attacks. They can still use the attack, but theres a damave calc to determine how much damage you do to yourself after you use the attack. You can also give up a turn of attack to regain stamina.

This game generally sounds sorta cool, but I’m a little worried about this mechanic. My concern with this is that it may lead to defensive strategies being a little too powerful if they don’t consider their balancing very, very carefully. I feel that it will likely reward very defensive Pokemon much more than very offensive ones, and when combined with the ability to switch+recover stamina I’m worried that the game will be dominated by Pokemon that can abuse this to never die while their opponents have little choice but to wear themselves away.

 

[Theorymon]

This game generally sounds sorta cool, but I’m a little worried about this mechanic. My concern with this is that it may lead to defensive strategies being a little too powerful if they don’t consider their balancing very, very carefully. I feel that it will likely reward very defensive Pokemon much more than very offensive ones, and when combined with the ability to switch+recover stamina I’m worried that the game will be dominated by Pokemon that can abuse this to never die while their opponents have little choice but to wear themselves away.

Yeah this could be an issue. If it means much, I found an excel sheet that documents the moves (seems to be missing entire types, not sure if this is because the game is in alpha or people just haven't recorded them yet), it seems like there's no recovery moves, and the focus on doubles could be deterimental to stall. There's also apparently a mechanic called "hold", where you have to wait a certain amount of turns to use particulalry strong moves, and this seems to apply to a lot of defensive buff moves.

Also, I'll update this in a bit, but synergy is another mechanic, where if your partner's type matches the snyergy of the move a different mon uses (not always the exact type, so for example, there's a water move that has synergy with fire types), they get an extra effect that always activates. So it coul lead to some strats where say... if you want a move to be better, you'll want a partner of a specfic type to power it up.

This is the spreadsheet forn reference. Again, a lot of incomplete info here sadly: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...nM3DmFPVb4UWcLblbVg2RTOJU/edit#gid=1411398797

Some of the typings seem sorta crazy to me depending on how they balance it, such as Digital having NO resists, Wind being Flying-type++, etc. However, I find it interesting that there's no immunities, and I couldn't find anything on entry hazards either (granted, thats not too relevant cuz its doubles compared to singles).

 

[Ullar]

Important: Alpha Access can be bought thru Discord

this will start on June 25th if any of you guys wanna hop in Omnenesia and dominate before official release. Crossplay thru Steam is a thing for the buy-in too, as well as cosmetics in the final game

Theorymon

 

[Ullar]

Go here to buy, should be a Preorder Store tab at the top of the channel listing

 

[mixu]

You guys think Smogon would add Temtem on showdown if the game blows up?

Release this month on 21st!

 

[Kalalokki]

You guys think Smogon would add Temtem on showdown if the game blows up?

Release this month on 21st!

No

 

[mixu]

No

Why not? It's aiming to be competitive unlike pokemon. Smogon is for competitive battling, no?

 

[Kalalokki]

Why not? It's aiming to be competitive unlike pokemon. Smogon is for competitive battling, no?

It's called Pokemon Showdown for a reason

 

[mixu]

It's called Pokemon Showdown for a reason

Yeah the reason being Pokemon game, what's the problem with having temtem showdown?

 

[Pyritie]

Yeah the reason being Pokemon game, what's the problem with having temtem showdown?

I mean pokemon showdown is all open source so I guess you could make a fork of it

 

[Ivy]

Digimon Showdown was made by basically one person off a fork of LGPE of all things, so really, anything's possible.

 

[Theorymon]

So this comes out as early access on PC in like 10 minutes. Once me and some of the others play this game, this thread will get a big chunky update!

Ullar feel free to help btw you're the tem expert around these parts!

 

[Chloe]

Hope it's fine to post my thoughts on the game in this thread. I've played upwards of 40 hours and I bought it on Thursday. I love this game.

WARNING: Mild spoilers, I won't spoil the contents of the story or anything like that. Just gonna rant about my thoughts.

It was a blast from start to finish. The game hasn't totally been completed yet, they tell you once you get up to a point that the next islands come in future updates, but it took me ~35 hours to do the main quests, and I still haven't completed all the side quests they give you, haven't caught all the Temtem I want to catch, haven't even had a look at breeding yet. This game was really well crafted and even though it's not complete, I am very content with what I've experienced so far.

For a lot of people, the main issue they've overheard is the connection issues / queueing drama. These were patched rather early, the server capacity was updated by 50%, and a lot of the day 1 issues that plagued the game have been patched rather quickly. The dev team has been really good about fixing everything as soon as possible given they didn't expect this huge reception the game has been getting. They even tweeted telling people to ask for a refund if they're unhappy with their purchase.

Anyway as for the game. It's really good, I was never bored throughout the story, it was actually kinda challenging at times, especially compared to Pokemon. I can breeze through the entirety of Sword and Shield (which I also enjoyed) without having any of my Pokemon faint, but here I'd somewhat regularly lose to trainers. The battles were consistently kept interesting and unique, I'd sometimes face trainers with a Temtem 15 levels higher than mine and have to determine how to beat them.

The combat system is also exciting and really enjoyable. There's no hax in here, so moves rely on Stamina and Hold to work. It makes games much more interesting than click super effective move over and over like Pokemon is at times. I saw above in the thread someone was worried about Stall becoming too potent. Recovery isn't really a thing for the most part. There are moves and abilities that can help a Temtem heal a little but nothing to make something like Stall a valid archetype.

I was initially critical of the designs of some of the Temtem, but they really grew on me. The aesthetic design of this game is so nice. Animations are much more fluid, battles look good. The story feels much more real and fledged out than it does in Pokemon games. If I'm going to say one thing about the story, which isn't really a spoiler, is it feels like it's kind of made for a more mature audience. From what I've seen so far it's really solid and interesting, especially when compared to Pokemon.

If I had any complaints with the game, I will say that the end being abrupt, and having to wait for the game to be "complete" really annoyed me. It feels as if they should've waited until they'd finished the rest. That being said however, the game feels like a complete product already, it would've been nice to continue going though. My only other issue that comes to mind right now is there's a move called Double Kick and it only kicks once and I hate that, literally unplayable.

Overall, I'm really happy with this game. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a fun unique time with a turn based Pokemon-like game. If anyone else has played this game and wants to talk about it with someone, I'm always happy to.

 

[DreamPrince]

So Stamina is basically MP from DragonQuest and Kingdom Hearts.

Do we the company who made this game?

 

[Ironmage]

Despite the fact that the game looks quite good, I still can't shake the feeling that I won't really enjoy playing it. It probably has a lot to do with two of the things I'm looking for are only tangentially related to quality.

Firstly, I want a complex game, and what's currently available just being the starting areas doesn't remove my worries that this isn't it, especially with the shift in base mechanics really leaning towards an extra layer being usable. With a greater focus on doubles and allegedly on PVP (where power cannot come from a level advantage), I would expect the ability to support your teammate to be prevalent, but in a cursory search I've yet to see field conditions, ally-specific buffing moves, or attack redirection. As someone who can be more defensively-minded, I also feel that there should be something to make up for the stamina system requiring a hit to direct self-healing and doubles' reduced options for hazard/anti-switch play. The focus on competitive does partially drive this concern, since that can mean removing 'frivolous' interactions or just reducing the specialization availible if the devs view matchup dependence as something to be avoided (just look at Chess: a classic competitive game with no customization whatsoever)

My second point of contention is really on my backup if the gameplay falls through: the creature designs themselves. Considering my asthetics on fantasy creatures lean heavily towards a) things that look artificial (even and especially among natural beings) and b) weird invertebrates nobody has heard of, it's not really surprising I'm less than enthused with most of them. Sure, Digital type exists, but its both clearly set up to be out of the way (in-universe rarity, markedly skewed matchups) and the early example in the rival's starter doesn't go all-in on its type like e.g. porygon or rotom.

I want to like this game, so if you have solid reassurances on these I'd love to hear them. Again, I've only looked at a couple ongoing LPs, so I could be mistaken about something.