Pokémon Sword And Shield Won't Support Pokémon Global Link

@Xelha

Game Freak should really stop spamming Dig! xd

Well this move is actually understandable. This is no National Dex snafu in this case.

I didn't even know there was such a thing.

@duffmmann people will make it another bringbacknationaldex nonetheless. It’s a shame, the hate on places like r/pokemon just recently died down and hype was getting back.

@Xelha

How is this a problem? PGL was outdated, and they're basically saying you don't have to go on a website to access features you shouldn't have to go on a website for anyway. I get that you hate Sword and Shield even though you haven't played them, but you're seriously reaching at this point.

Thank goodness. PGL was definitely an outdated system and something that could be implemented so much better on a modern architecture. There are many ways I can think of in which it could be done better!

@darkswabber

The reddit nerds are still going to buy the game regardless. I'm so sick of this incessant internet whining just for the sake of whining. I rarely go on message boards anymore because the minority is always the loudest, and they never prove anything by it. Mark my words, Sword and Shield will be in the top three best-selling Pokemon generations of all time, if not number one in a couple of years. Reddit and NintendoLife are not indicative of the general public's interest in the games, because most people have better things to do than cry on the internet all day.

I for one am thankful. As long as we have the same functionality for the online components I’m happy.

The actual PGL site, linking, and sending yourself items and such from the websites mini games.... well I’ll just say it was archaic.

People are gonna act like this is a national dex level decision, except the fact you need NS Online for online functionality at all with Switch. I didn't personally expect Pokémon to be an exception.
That being said, Pokémon Home better be free if we have to keep paying for NS Online, or at least free for NS Online subscribers.

so the 3ds Pokemon service is not being used for the Switch.
makes sense. why would people complain?

I paid $5 for a year of pokemon storage on the 3ds. I'd rather pay $20 for Nintendo Online at least that offers more than a few of the Regis

Look at the adorable children pretending to care about Pokemon Global Link.

@Spudtendo amen! I know I’m going to enjoy the games and I know many of my friends are going to enjoy them too. Especially since I skipped pokemon for 3 years and the last games I played (ORAS) I didn’t finish because of pokemon fatigue.

Pokémon HOME is also launching on Switch, which the statement fails to mention for some reason

@Roto13 of the 13 comments before yours only 2 people hinted at caring about global links removal, the other 11 defended its removal.

I'll just be happy when Pokemon moves back to 3DS. Fine and all it went to home consoles (clearly this is just a home console as Wii U was never a handheld, and it only replaces Wii U: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch ), but I like playing Pokemon on a handheld. Guess I'll have to keep waiting.....

I never really used the Global Link. The site itself was kind of cumbersome, plus it wasn't essential for anything I did with the games.

@Erufuda Why don't you try to find one comment from me defending things like the removal of the Pokedex before you embarrass yourself with further posts?

I'm fine with the removal of PGL, but it would be nice if they gave us more information about the new system and Home.

Especially because I read it launches in 2020, few months after the game it's release.

I don't think I ever even used it!

@Erufuda

The issue is that complaining at each other instead of Game Freak solves nothing and the end result is always the same. If your issue with the game is the deciding factor on whether you buy it or not, don't you think your time would be better spent taking it up with the developers? They aren't reading comments on Pokemon articles at NintendoLife, that I can assure you. Complaints here mean nothing when you go and buy the game anyway, no one really cares what you do with your money here. I'd rather spend my time here discussing things I'm interested in, not things I'm not.

Also, to the people who really aren't going to buy this game but spend a decent amount of time complaining about it: what is your intent? To try and dissuade complete strangers whose time and money is none of your concern to not purchase a game just because you aren't interested in it? I can't imagine a better way to waste your time on the internet. You really need to get outside.

You can still battle and trade without Home, right?

@Xelha

If I dislike a game, I don't waste time clicking on articles about it. There's a whole wide world of interesting games out there, I'm not going to lose sleep over one that isn't. All you have to do is move on, you'll be happier for it.

Seems the Pokemon Home Phone app will be replacing this

@RazorWind

No-one is arguing the right to free speech. I'm just curious about the intent. You might as well be complaining to yourself with all the good it does here. As I've said before, their time and energy is better spent e-mailing Game Freak or commenting on their Twitter feed or something.

Ehh, it won't be missed that badly.

The real question is: who even used the Global Link website in the first place? I recall making an account for some reason, but I don't recall ever doing anything with it.

@Erufuda (first comment) Haha, true.

@graysoncharles
There is no info on Home being a paid service, however isn’t it going to share functionality (or perhaps even replace) Pokémon Bank, which is a paid service? It’s not a stretch to imagine they’ll charge for it as well, unless they include it as a feature of the NSO (the ideal solution).

@gamefreak77 It's never coming back to 3DS, man. 3DS is really really dead

Unsurprising news is unsurprising. Of course we'll need NSO to battle and trade Pokemon online. That'll be a major draw for an NSO subscription and Nintendo would be stupid not to require it for this game. PGL is way outdated, and Home seems like it's going to merge the main features of PGL with Bank. Why is anyone taking this as bad news?

@gamefreak77 it won’t be coming back to 3ds anytime soon bud. Game Freak said it themselves a while back:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/10/19/ultra-sun-and-ultra-moon-will-be-the-last-pokemon-rpgs-for-3ds?amp=1

insert laughing crying emoji

Am I the only one who simply hated the service and believes it sucked big dinossaur balls? I won't miss having to waste my time connecting my DS/3DS to some online system with login validation and etc.

@Spudtendo Top 3? Excluding remakes and direct sequels, that would mean it would have to at least beat 17,680,000 sales. No pokemon game has even gotten within 1,000,000 units of that number since 2007.

Considering this has probably been the most controversial pokemon buildup we've seen, and the Switch, while understandably successful, has not even gotten to a third of the DS's sales, this is just uninformed.

@Spudtendo Oh come on, are you serious
Do you seriously think that people complaining on Internet doesn't solve anything ? That it can't be heard ?
What about Sonic the movie ? What about what happened with Ooblets ? What happened just recently about Apex Legends ? Do you think that people complaining on Reddit, IGN or whatever website is useless and that they shall post a letter to the devs ? Or take a car and knock on their door ?
I understand you find it tiring, I know it's sometimes exhausting to have to go through all this flow of negativity, but you know what I do when it happens? I'm just going to look elsewhere for the time it takes, which is what I did when I read your first comment I didn't agree with at all, I know I could have been offended or answered a little meanly if I got carried away, so instead of trying to have a sterile discussion with people who will never agree with me anyway, I prefer the easy solution: scroll down.
But right now I can't really let you say that, it's really too much. The fact that you can say that people who complain don't lead to anything... It's just absurd. I didn't even mention the "it's the noisy minority". This is certainly the case with Pokemon, considering that the majority of them are kids who don't document themselves as much as experienced gamers anyway and who will only wonder why they can't play with their good old Blaziken, but well they will have played the game and at the end they will tell their friends in the playground that it is just a bit lame because of that, that' s all.
But does that mean it's useless to complain? Does that mean that the fanbase is not affected by the bad decisions made by Game Freak? Absolutely not. I'm not going to try to explain to you how complaining on the Internet can directly allow developers to hear, it would be an insult so obvious is it. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to go against people wanting to express their resentment about a product they like or have liked before.
Complaining is annoying, everyone would never want to have to complain, so to say that people complain because it makes them happy is stupid.
In fact, if no one complained, we would not have stopped having lower quality products over time. Nothing would get better. So in the end, you can be as condescending as you like, but you still enjoy the benefits of other people's complaints, as much as anyone else.

@Spudtendo "If I dislike a game, I don't waste time clicking on articles about it." And what if you used to like Pokemon ? Can't you understand something that easy ? Don't you see that some fans can't just accept the overall quality being lowered as you do ?
People who don't like Pokemon don't talk about Pokemon, it's simple as that. But saying "don't talk about what you don't like" is a dumb argument that a kid wouldn't even dare to make.
For the love of God, please just let people talk about what they want, it's ridiculous now

The Global Link website was absolute trash anyway. Whenever they ran events the site couldn't handle the traffic it got, it seemed to magically delete profiles, amd when it did work the site was a pain to navigate and the minigames weren't all that fun anyway.

@Erufuda exactly - "don't ask questions, just consume product" that is "being sold to you". The one and only alternative to complaining about said product.

Because blatantly not buying said product would be an utterly insane idea.

@LightBeam "used to like" grammatically implies the expiry of resonance with the franchise in question. Which happens worldwide and in all spheres. But of course, not being able to accept this expiry of resonance and move on is a proverbial part of what fanship does to people.

And seriously, painting "what happened to the Sonic movie" as a POSITIVE thing in such discussions only makes them sound more macabre on the side of arguments like yours. Fanship is parasitic in general - it doesn't seek nor encourage "improvement" from creators, it seeks and demands further doses of once experienced aesthetic stimulants. Touting such entitled imposition attempts as a good thing is eyebrow-raising at best (although even outside this topic, it would be somewhat naive to deny the existence of cases where people actually succumb to complaining for the sake of it - there are various factors fueling that fire).

As someone who actually used the service to get Pokemon team codes it is pretty slow and annoying. This is mostly bad news for the 3DS games losing functionality when they shut it down. No loss for Sword & Shield as long as they port features over, especially if they make them native or improve them.

Thank god. Never liked Global Link.

@Xelha
Actually, your saltiness toward every Pokemon Sword / Shield thread was wasting the time and useless.

i still don't understand what the global link is so this is probably a good thing

@LightBeam wow that is a lot of talking there.

Anyways l never heard of this but l might check later to understand more why ppl hates this PGL.

Oh please, people don't act like this is a bad thing. Global Link was always a wonky and unreliable feature. I'm plenty okay to see it go. It was obsolete from day one.

Did a single Pokémon service/gimmick stayed for longer than a generation? Wasn’t Pokémon Bank supposed to be the definitive Cloud storage for your boxes?

I’m not supporting GameFreak anymore in their newer games and/or (scam) subscriptions, so whatever.

@rushiosan
Pokemon Home is absorbing Pokemon Bank and Global Link, alongside some other features.

And of course no Pokemon service/gimick stays for longer than a generation or two, since Nintendo is always making new hardware every 4-6 years.

Did anyone like Pokemon Let's Go trading? If Sword and Shield's trading is similar to Go, trading will be rendered useless. Too many times people back out on Let's Go's trades.

@westman98 I meant a generation of games (V, VI etc), not a console generation...

Good, honestly. The Global Link was a super clunky and outdated system and I'm glad to see Pokemon Home will be picking up some of its functions.

@nhSnork "Because blatantly not buying said product would be an utterly insane idea."

Strange how that option never comes up. No-one is being coerced into anything.

Do people not realize that PGL is not needed anymore in SwSh? This is to be expected.

@Spudtendo Pokemon sells to children. It's going to sell well no matter how crappy it is.

Does that make you happy because it doesn't matter to me?

This news isn't nearly as bad as some of the other though.

Yeah, that's what I figured.