Pokémon Sword and Shield introduce new mechanics to let you use your favorite Pokémon competitively

The folks at Game Informer recently made a trip to Game Freak’s Tokyo headquarters for this month’s cover story, which happens to be Pokémon Sword and Shield. They had a chance to chat with the game’s director, producer, planning director and art director, picking their brains on the direction of the series and what they hope to accomplish with the upcoming Nintendo Switch titles. Among the topics discussed include Max Raid Battles, The Game Informer Show, the new autosave feature, controversy surrounding the National Pokédex, the decision to exclude HMs, a twist to the Exp. Share item, competitive mechanics and elements such as breeding:

“Traditionally in the series, you start with your starter Pokémon and then you catch a lot of Pokémon in the beginning, and those are with you throughout your whole adventure, and the player gets attached to them. But a lot of times, they get into the competitive battles and they find they can’t actually use those Pokémon or they’re not competitive, so they have to go out and find the exact right Pokémon or breed them in a certain way to make sure they’re viable in competitive battle,” planning director Kazumasa Iwao says. “This time around, we really wanted to introduce some systems that help the player be able to take those Pokémon they caught in the beginning, and the first one they chose, and actually take them straight into competitive battle. There’s a lot of hidden parameters to Pokémon that aren’t surfaced to the player. We’re doing a lot of stuff in the back end introducing systems that allow players to make sure that Pokémon they want to use in competitive battles are viable.”

“I’ve got to be very vague about it, but one example – it will be visible to the player and they’ll know when they see it, I think – say you have a Pokémon where it’s got all the right stats and everything, but there’s a personality parameter as well that comes into play in battles, and it might not be the right personality, so you’ll breed until you get the right one, is what people do currently. But you’ll see that there’s a system in the game that will fix that for people.”

“We do think there’s value in that effort that players put into it,” he says. “But at the same time, I think with Sword and Shield we wanted to also have a system that makes it a little bit more accessible. For example, if you’re bringing a Pokémon over from a previous game into these games, being able to use that specific Pokémon that has sentimental value to you in the battle system competitively is something we wanted to try this time.”

Source: Game Informer