When it was revealed at E3 2019 that not every Pokemon would be available in Pokemon Sword and Shield, the internet erupted in rage, with players upset by the idea that some of their favorites might not be usable in the latest Pokemon entries. A few weeks after the initial outcry, Game Freak has decided to step forward with an official statement on the matter. Pokemon series producer and director Junichi Masuda claimed that Game Freak is passionate about every Pokemon that they've created, but that the company had to make the difficult choice to not include the full lineup of over 800 monsters. Masuda also says that even if some Pokemon won't be in this series of games, they still have a chance to appear in further entries, later down the line. Perhaps that means we'll see a full Pokedex when the inevitable revision or sequel game releases one day.

For those unimpeded by the controversy, Pokemon Sword and Shield is set to launch worldwide on November 15th.

Thank you to all of our fans for caring so deeply about Pokémon. Recently, I shared the news that some Pokémon cannot be transferred to Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. I've read all your comments and appreciate your love and passion for Pokémon.

Just like all of you, we are passionate about Pokémon and each and every one of them is very important to us. After so many years of developing the Pokémon video games, this was a very difficult decision for me. I'd like to make one thing clear: even if a specific Pokémon is not available in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, that does not mean it will not appear in future games.

The world of Pokémon continues to evolve. The Galar region offers new Pokémon to encounter, Trainers to battle, and adventures to embark on. We are pouring our hearts into these games, and we hope you will look forward to joining us on this new journey.

Junichi Masuda

Source

 

[Pandaxclone2]

It's honestly bothersome that people use "Well, in [insert certain generation games here] you can't catch them all in a single game, so why are you complaining now?" as an argument. That's completely different from this issue. The Pokemon were always coded into the games no matter what their availability was, so in a way you could be assured that you'll be able to use all of them. Sword and Shield are not going to do this, presumably because they've mishandled the porting process from 3DS to Switch and are now being demanded to finish the games by a deadline.

Their quality polish concerns are hardly a good reason to axe the entire list of Pokemon and seems more like an excuse to give beyond "we no longer have the time." It honestly wouldn't be asking much to just let Sword/Shield be entry Switch titles that just ports/rebuilds the engine from 3DS to Switch, then focus on quality polish in their future titles. The only way I could fathom that they haven't done so is if they've bit off more than they could chew by prioritizing on other aspects of the game.

 

[Mythical]

That is what Pikachu and Eevee were supposed to be, but they fucked it up by using Pokemon Go mechanics. A proper reboot should have all the moves and mechanics from throughout the generations, minus all the other pokemon and pokemon-specific items. A proper reboot would have been the most practical move as well, because while they are rereleasing the first 7 generations, technology and hardware will evolve enough to contain another 7 generations of pokemon. Not only that, Game Freak could have used that time to create new pokemon designs for multiple generations, and release them in batches over the years.

Or they could branch out the series and make an official "battle simulator" for the competitive niche, and let players build teams for battling without any of the extra work. Cutting out most of the game, leaves absolutely no excuse for not having a National Pokedex and not being able to model and animate every pokemon.

I would pay a solid $60.00 for an official battle simulator akin to Pokemon showdown/smogon and for dlc for each gen over time as well. Others people probably less maybe $30?
Doing so would probably take a lot of the fun out of Pokemon for some though. There are a lot of things to search for in Pokemon, personality/stat modifiers, ivs, shininess, special moves, special abilities, and gender. I also believe that competitive pokemon battling would just switch to the official simulator at this point. Those together would kill a lot of the gameplay value of pokemon imo. Atleast for some of the audience, but maybe that would help separate some of their ideas between audiences too who knows

 

[SANIC]

This is true, but I wonder if it has something to do with adapting them all to the overworld where the models have to be refined for 360 degree viewing, new animations, etc. Not to mention each wild Pokemon will supposedly have different behaviors and reactions to the trainer. And they each spawn based on different conditions/weather. I could see adding all this for 800+ Mons being extremely time-consuming.

Not that I'm trying to change anyone's mind here. The die-hard "catch 'em all" fans have every right to be angry regardless of the reasoning behind GF's decision.

Their overworld animations are just their walking animations from sun and Moon, as shown with wingull and machoke

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Remember Ruby and Sapphire? Not only you couldn't transfer Pokemon from the Gameboy Color games, the only way to get all Pokemon was cheating. It took two years to be able to get most of the Pokemon without cheating. And you still had to cheat to get them all if you didn't go to a Nintendo event to get some legendaries. And this was before online trading existed.

Is possible the rest of the Pokemon or most of them will be added on a later game.

You can trade them over with LeafGreen/FireRed.

They're so super HD that even the gamecube pokemon games look better and the animation is way better

Models not animations. They made the 3DS models HD so they wouldn't need to fix them again

 

[Xzi]

It's honestly bothersome that people use "Well, in [insert certain generation games here] you can't catch them all in a single game, so why are you complaining now?" as an argument. That's completely different from this issue. The Pokemon were always coded into the games no matter what their availability was, so in a way you could be assured that you'll be able to use all of them. Sword and Shield are not going to do this, presumably because they've mishandled the porting process from 3DS to Switch and are now being demanded to finish the games by a deadline.

Their quality polish concerns are hardly a good reason to axe the entire list of Pokemon and seems more like an excuse to give beyond "we no longer have the time." It honestly wouldn't be asking much to just let Sword/Shield be entry Switch titles that just ports/rebuilds the engine from 3DS to Switch, then focus on quality polish in their future titles. The only way I could fathom that they haven't done so is if they've bit off more than they could chew by prioritizing on other aspects of the game.

Good points. What I don't understand though is why they can't just promise to add all the Mons to Sword/Shield later on. Even if they did it one generation at a time, I think most people would be happy with that. They're going to have to add them all to the next set of games anyway, might as well get it done sooner rather than later so they can be easily ported.

 

[RedBlueGreen]

"We get that you don't like that a bunch of Pokémon won't be in Sword and Shield, but too bad, they're not going to be in the game"
-Junichi "God of Pokémon" Masuda

 

[pedro702]

But in that same vein, in every generation you've always been able to trade high-level Pokemon to trainers that can't handle them yet. It was never considered to 'break' the game before. Sure, it's possible to make all the single-player parts easier that way, but I don't think GF really cares if you want to deprive yourself of a more balanced experience. It's just like twinking in an RPG.

trading is trading they cant stop that but gamefreak does care, that is why to migrate pokemons from previous gens was always only available after the pokemon league so you couldnt bring your powerful pokemons right before the first gym, mark my words the open world will be small at first and with each gym a new area opens up and gets bigger.

pokemon cant be like botw or else the game is no fun you would need zero training just catch a powerful pokemon on the limit of the obeying level everytime and you would be fine, remenber if you die in pokemon its not gameover you just loose some money and get teleported back to the pokemon center, so catching one even if you die right after you still catched one.

 

[Xzi]

trading is trading they cant stop that but gamefreak does care, that is why to migrate pokemons from previous gens was always only available after the pokemon league so you couldnt bring your powerful pokemons right before the first gym

From previous generations, sure, but you could always have someone trade you powerful Pokemon from the same generation.

pokemon cant be like botw or else the game is no fun you would need zero training just catch a powerful pokemon on the limit of the obeying level everytime and you would be fine, remenber if you die in pokemon its not gameover you just loose some money and get teleported back to the pokemon center, so catching one even if you die right after you still catched one.

I don't know man, I checked the Treehouse gameplay again, and at 7:23 they say you can access the wild area very early, but in certain parts of it you'll run into Pokemon that are too strong to take on.

 

[pedro702]

From previous generations, sure, but you could always have someone trade you powerful Pokemon from the same generation.


I don't know man, I checked the Treehouse gameplay again, and at 7:23 they say you can access the wild area very early, but in certain parts of it you'll run into Pokemon that are too strong to take on.

unless they made a cap level where the battle doesnt even start if you dont got the gm badge to control it if that is the case that will be even worse lol you can go there but you cant battle them lol.

 

[Xzi]

unless they made a cap level where the battle doesnt even start if you dont got the gm badge to control it if that is the case that will be even worse lol you can go there but you cant battle them lol.

I think it's just likely to be a 100% fail rate when you throw any ball at a Pokemon which is X levels above the strongest in your party. As with an MMO, you absolutely CAN try to take on an elite mob 50 levels above you, but it's guaranteed to be a waste of time and in-game resources.

 

[pedro702]

I think it's just likely to be a 100% fail rate when you throw any ball at a Pokemon which is X levels above the strongest in your party. As with an MMO, you absolutely CAN try to take on an elite mob 50 levels above you, but it's guaranteed to be a waste of time and in-game resources.

pokemon is not an mmo and with gamefreak stopping you from even going into gyms in lets go if you dont have a certain type in your party or pokemons of a certain level, they dont want to let kids fail so to me there will be 2 choices.

Area is locked away or strong pokemons dont respawn until you got the needed gym badges.

Or you wont be able to battle them at all and your character will say they are too strong for me and move away.

Gamefreak doesnt allow you to die like that to piss off the kids.

 

[Xzi]

pokemon is not an mmo and with gamefreak stopping you from even going into gyms in lets go if you dont have a certain type in your party or pokemons of a certain level

I doubt they'll do the same hand-holding with a mainline game that they did with Let's Go. They aren't keeping the same simplified catching mechanics, after all.

Area is locked away or strong pokemons dont respawn until you got the needed gym badges.

Or you wont be able to battle them at all and your character will say they are too strong for me and move away.

Neither of these things is stated or shown in the Treehouse. IMO it'd be stupid to finally introduce an open-world area to Pokemon just to make it extremely limited and progress-locked in the beginning.

Gamefreak doesnt allow you to die like that to piss off the kids.

Say what? It's very much possible to fail repeatedly in mainline games if you don't understand type advantages or other mechanics. The games aren't aimed at two-year-olds. And besides, there's always the option to just run from high level Pokemon (as he does in the Treehouse video), having your entire team faint is not your only option.

 

[pedro702]

I doubt they'll do the same hand-holding with a mainline game that they did with Let's Go. They aren't keeping the same simplified catching mechanics, after all.


Neither of these things is stated or shown in the Treehouse. IMO it'd be stupid to finally introduce an open-world area to Pokemon just to make it extremely limited and progress-locked in the beginning.


Say what? It's very much possible to fail repeatedly in mainline games if you don't understand type advantages or other mechanics. The games aren't aimed at two-year-olds. And besides, there's always the option to just run from high level Pokemon (as he does in the Treehouse video), having your entire team faint is not your only option.

wait and see, if i can catch a tyranitar with my lvl 5 starter then pokemon looses its meaning imo so i bet they will lock some stuff up.

 

[Xzi]

wait and see, if i can catch a tyranitar with my lvl 5 starter then pokemon looses its meaning imo so i bet they will lock some stuff up.

Again I think catching will be a 100% fail rate if the wild Pokemon's level is too high. That's a really simple solution to implement.

 

[Pandaxclone2]

Good points. What I don't understand though is why they can't just promise to add all the Mons to Sword/Shield later on. Even if they did it one generation at a time, I think most people would be happy with that. They're going to have to add them all to the next set of games anyway, might as well get it done sooner rather than later so they can be easily ported.

From what I've gathered, Game Freak doesn't like to add core gameplay and features in through DLC. They had a chance to do so with ORAS exclusive Mega Evolutions by patching them into X and Y, but refused and cited concerns that it would be "too large for DLC." So while there's a chance they could add the remaining Pokemon through patching afterwards, it's not likely.

My guess is that they wanted to have Dynamax apply to all Pokemon in Sword and Shield, and in doing so required all of them to have a special animation for growing/attacking. There's also unconfirmed rumors that the Dynamax models actually use 3 different models; one for each cloud left which indicates how many turns until the Dynamax wears off. Given the fact that Game Freak have a history of optimization issues (e.g. There are 120+ seperate Lillie models for every appearance she makes in uSuM), this wouldn't be surprising if true. Perhaps the sheer (unnecessary) workload from that meant they didn't wish to include all Pokemon as a result.

 

[warweeny]

pokemon ULTRA sword/shield next year, this time with all pokemon! (same game of course, with minor changes)

 

[Clydefrosch]

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I disagree, seeing the numbers of sold PKMN Pikachu/Eevee games, there are billions of dollars more to be milked of consumers. I dont see any end to this as long as there's money to be made.

Pikachu and Eevee played heavily to the nostalgia of the earliest fans AND tried to grab a few bucks from the pokemon go crowd. Take either of that away and in terms of pokemon games, it would've crashed and burned.
To be honest, in terms of pokemon games, it kinda didn't do very well. In terms of being a switch game, it did good, but for a pokemon game, lower end of the spectrum.

This here does neither.
It specifically spits in the face of the nostalgia crew by excluding large parts of everyones first experience with pokemon.
It also completely disregards the hundreds of thousands of people only buying new games for online play.

Ultimately, you need to pander to those older players with disposable income. Because not only did they make the franchise ever more profitable, they're also in charge of getting their children every new iteration of these games and getting them into it.

And you know any franchise can only stomach so many 'below expectations' before some executive demands a complete reboot or some other backfiring nonsense like that.

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From what I've gathered, Game Freak doesn't like to add core gameplay and features in through DLC. They had a chance to do so with ORAS exclusive Mega Evolutions by patching them into X and Y, but refused and cited concerns that it would be "too large for DLC." So while there's a chance they could add the remaining Pokemon through patching afterwards, it's not likely.

My guess is that they wanted to have Dynamax apply to all Pokemon in Sword and Shield, and in doing so required all of them to have a special animation for growing/attacking. There's also unconfirmed rumors that the Dynamax models actually use 3 different models; one for each cloud left which indicates how many turns until the Dynamax wears off. Given the fact that Game Freak have a history of optimization issues (e.g. There are 120+ seperate Lillie models for every appearance she makes in uSuM), this wouldn't be surprising if true. Perhaps the sheer (unnecessary) workload from that meant they didn't wish to include all Pokemon as a result.

if they knew what they were doing, dynamax would only require a couple of lines of code and a handful of effects to take care of all 900+ pokemon growing. it's no work at all.
even then, even if they made individual cloud models, that's still no hard work. busy work, maybe, but essentially not much harder than hand-numbering your vacation photos. It'll take you a day, but a child could do it.

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it is, and the community saw this issue coming ages ago. Gamefreak have had years to try and solve it. But they've just kept on trucking.

I wouldn't have bought a dozen games twice if all of them only added 50 or so more pokemon.
neither would have millions of others.

the solution to this 'problem' is becoming a money making machine and simply accepting the cost of doing business.

 

[goldensun87]

Another problem with Game Freak, is that they are extremely out of touch with what their core fanbase (the competitive niche) wants and/or cares about. At this point, a lot of people don't want or care about trading for version exclusives. We can either hack everything in, or the GTS makes it obsolete. Not to mention, cutting the National Pokedex out of the game, kills the drive to "catch 'em all" anyway.

What Game Freak desperately needs, is "new blood". Employees and executives with fresh ideas, who can think outside the box, and actually care about what fans want. They want to profit off of two games with each release, they can release a curated yet full-featured RPG, and release an absolutely complete, full-featured, official battle simulator, complete National Pokedex, all battle relevant items, etc.

 

[Clydefrosch]

You knows it's bad when a Vita version of a Digimon game looks better than a Switch Pokemon game.

View attachment 171657

thats nonsense and you know it.

cyber sleuth has boring and reused 'labyrith' dungeons, the story is lazy and all you do is take one 'quest' after the other and running from a to b hoping you walk into the right pixel or don't overlook a random npc to start a cutscene.

also, using terrible image quality meme comparing grapics is kinda dumb.

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Another problem with Game Freak, is that they are extremely out of touch with what their core fanbase (the competitive niche) wants and/or cares about. At this point, a lot of people don't want or care about trading for version exclusives. We can either hack everything in, or the GTS makes it obsolete. Not to mention, cutting the National Pokedex out of the game, kills the drive to "catch 'em all" anyway.

What Game Freak desperately needs, is "new blood". Employees and executives with fresh ideas, who can think outside the box, and actually care about what fans want. They want to profit off of two games with each release, they can release a curated yet full-featured RPG, and release an absolutely complete, full-featured, official battle simulator, complete National Pokedex, all battle relevant items, etc.

the competitive niche isn't the core fanbase though. THey are a niche and will always be.
They are however an important part in selling millions of games in the past that will not be happy about losing pokemon in this game.

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Another problem with Game Freak, is that they are extremely out of touch with what their core fanbase (the competitive niche) wants and/or cares about. At this point, a lot of people don't want or care about trading for version exclusives. We can either hack everything in, or the GTS makes it obsolete. Not to mention, cutting the National Pokedex out of the game, kills the drive to "catch 'em all" anyway.

What Game Freak desperately needs, is "new blood". Employees and executives with fresh ideas, who can think outside the box, and actually care about what fans want. They want to profit off of two games with each release, they can release a curated yet full-featured RPG, and release an absolutely complete, full-featured, official battle simulator, complete National Pokedex, all battle relevant items, etc.

the competitive niche isn't the core fanbase though. THey are a niche and will always be.
They are however an important part in selling millions of games in the past that will not be happy about losing pokemon in this game.

 

[goldensun87]

the competitive niche isn't the core fanbase though. THey are a niche and will always be.
They are however an important part in selling millions of games in the past that will not be happy about losing pokemon in this game.

They still need to consider, that the next generation of potential Pokemon players, is dependent on parents who have played the original games. Even if many parents do not fit into this category, 2020s kids are living in a world with easy internet access and fleshed out social networks/media. Outbursts like this will never go too unnoticed. Although I have to admit, current-gen kids' internet activity is far more compartmentalized compared to 90s and 2000s kids. All they know is apps for specific activities. Girls are glued to Insta and Snapchat and rarely explore Youtube, and boys are fixated on pay-to-win mobile games during their pre-tween years, and "(insert current popular multiplayer shooter here)" once they become "big boys".

 

[Darth Meteos]

i think this might be gaming's worst pr move since "we aren't planning to do anything about it"