Topic: Pokemon Sword & Shield

Hey, a thread for discussing the core Pokemon RPG launching in 2019, announced back at E3 2017.

All we know thus far is it has been in development longer than Let's Go, will appeal to long time series fans, feature plenty of new Pokemon, be visually grander than Let's Go and will have no connection to Pokemon Go.

Oh, good idea, gonna move my last post over here.

Compendium of everything we know so far (let me know if there's anything else to add):

• It's aimed at long-time (core, though not necessarily competitive) players
• Graphics will be improved over SuMo (which considering Let's Go! is typically considered a step down does have me hopeful they look nothing alike outside of Pokemon models)
• Not a remake and contains many new Pokemon (read start of Gen VIII)
• Will not have any influence from Pokemon Go!
• Releasing second half 2019 (read November 2019 most likely)

This may not happen with this specific game, but I'd like it if Monolith Soft helped out with creating the world layout. After BotW and all three Xenoblade games, they can pull off a killer, huge world very consistently.

Pokemon doesn't need to be open-world, something like Xenoblade 1 or 2 style is fine. Xenoblade 1 and 2 are not entirely open-world, they're linear JRPGs with just huge optional stuff to find.

@Yorumi Oh yeah, I never said it can't work as an open-world. I'm just saying you don't need to be open-world.

There's a lot Game Freak should be doing, though, that they're probably just not gonna do.

@EvilLucario I guess I feel the same way. I sort of hate that people think this is the default that all games have to be. As is if it was the natural evolution for every game. It used to be about graphics... well nvm it still kind of is. "Well this is fine and all but when is this going to look like all the other games that I play? Why isn't this taking the same path? I want this to look like that!".

Let's guess what country will be represent for Pokemon 2019.
X & Y = France
Sun & Moon = Hawaii
2019 = ???

@DarthNocturnal
Hm... interesting.
Like we heard rumour about Project Beluga from GameFreaks Twitter.
Something about between Canada & Alaska.

@Yorumi
If Generation 8 based on Canada , i guess there will be a lot of Plant / Ice type Pokemons.

@Anti-Matter They should do Morocco or Spain. They won't, but it would be great.

Mexico. With Mario Odyssey DLC.

I'm pretty insistent on a colder region, like a Scandinavian area. These regions are really underrepresented in media, yet they are very gorgeous. I feel like it's even more necessary at this point because we have now had two tropical regions, and to be honest, I wasn't ever excited for Alola.

Of course, whether or not the beauty of a Scandinavian region would shine through is another question, GF really needs to move away from their 2.5D ways to represent the region's topography properly.

Based on previous leaks, Gen 8’s main games should take place in Spain or Italy, of course none of this is guaranteed.

I would personally love to see an Italian region with an updated Kalos post game, we got that easter egg in XY of there being another region that the train station could reach, and based on real-world comparisons, that region should be Italy-based. It would also be a fairly unique region with its shaping.

Keep your Xenoblades in your pants, if this Pokemon game was going to be any different the developers would need time that they don't have since announcing it. And they would also probably give some indication that generations 8 wasn't going to be the same thing like all of the past generations... which they haven't given.

If you want to gobble down open world games like Gulpin, I hear Playstations still exist. But I don't exactly see the Killzone dev handing out the Decima engine so Game Freak can turn around a new open world game in three years.

Yeah, at this point, this topic is radioactive. Everyone and their mom, cousin and step uncle has an opinion on what they think the game should be. No one will ever agree.

...Eh?

I wouldn't mind seeing a region based on Canada, but I also think other northern countries like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc. would be neat too.

what about the southeast US It would be divided into 3 sub regions
Coastal(north area where inland is the mountains where the ice types will be in)
Florida(where we can have some aloha pokemon and more tropical area and PIkaworld)
Gulf Lowlands and pains(texas area east)
Professer magonial a female one that gives you your first pokemon
a pokemon based on the palmetto tree a small one is on the dwarf palmetto and the main one is on sable palmetto
and then a pokemon on spanish moss and palmetto bug and mocking bird and the region will have platiotion homes with ghost types.

i have other pokemon
panther a dark and ghost type cat based on the forlida panther
a parkeet a brid that is a ghost/flying based on carlina parkeet

I just really don't want to see anything even remotely tropical right after Alola. I know that my dream of a Scandinavian region is just that - a dream - but I really hope that they, at the very least, don't give us anything similar to Alola for this next generation.

I would like a region based on Nordic countries (Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark) as well. Might also have something to do with the fact that I'm from Finland. I fully expect them to do it sooner or later. Japanese like to give attention to Nordic countries for some reason, at least in manga/anime series. Steins; Gate: 0 has a guy named Leskinen (Finnish surname) and Little Witch Academia had an entire episode dedicated to a town which was heavily inspired by Finland and Sweden.

There's more than enough variation in the landscapes as well. There are mountains, volcanos, lakes, forests, swamps, etc. Maybe they could bring back the seasons from Black & White as well?

The towns could be a bit smaller which I'd appreciate. I don't like exploring bigger cities in Pokémon. I don't want another Castelia or Lumiose City unless they can find a way to make them more engaging. Actually, I don't like bigger cities in general in RPGs but I really enjoyed running around the same cities in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for hours. Maybe they can take some notes from that game. Make the NPCs do more than just say the same thing every time you talk to them.

If they can't make an open world game that's fine, it'd be a bit unreasonable to expect them to make that big a leap in one game. But it should be at least like, OoT/TP tier. XY/SM HD isn't going to satisfy the console market, and LGPE most certainly isn't regardless of what Game Freak thinks, they need to go bigger.