Pokémon Sword And Shield Players Can Now Vote For The Next In-Game Distribution

Still didn't get the game, wondering if it will ever drop in price enough for me to pick it up.

@Kalmaro it is Pokemon. It will not.

THIS GAME IS DEAD, GAME FREAKKKKK

@XBontendo It will eventually... On ebay, lol.

This game has died. The dlc was life support

gold bottle cap is already winning by far, so it is decided already

@abdias what do gold caps do anyway? I've got a bunch in Moon from the Plaza lotteries, but I have yet to put them to any use.

Meh, I don't really care either way since it doesn't offer any real incentive to revisit the game, like with a special event or something of the sort or to even add more pokemon to the regions via a software update.

Heck, if I could describe my experience my entirety of Sword, it'd be this: played through the main story, beat it, tried the first dlc, got bored not even halfway through and stopped playing, haven't picked it up since.

If GF really want people to revisit gen 8, then they better offer a better incentive other than "here's a voting poll because we don't care anymore, pick what you want and leave us alone."

Well, lets see if legends can gain there honer back, LOLOOOOLOLOLOL never happening.

@Kalmaro Considering how many copies it sold I wouldn't hold my breath for a price drop.

At least not until Shining Diamond/Brilliant Pearl are out, and even then that might only renew interest for Sword&Shield so that's even more chances of the price not dropping.

Personally I didn't mind the games(I got Sword, some people I know including a sibling got Shield). It's definitely much shorter than previous games and I'm not sure how to feel about the pokedex "cut" still but on the other hand even with the 200 or so added alongside(I was about to write "by" but you can still get them without thanks to trade/etc) the expansion pass I feel like it's actually possible for me to complete the full(in-game) pokedex for the first time in a long while so I'm low key pondering booting up my save again. But yeah, the main story is short. It's still a gym challenge story but one where they definitely cut down existing outside of the challenge. So where previous games had "filler" towns you could visit that didn't feature any gyms, Sword&Shield are bereft of those an anything you will visit in the game will more or less be all gym challenge towns.

All of this said, supposed development issues set aside, I wonder if they decided to keep a smaller world/stakes/etc on purpose to specifically make it an "introductory" pokemon game.
I.e.: "Cutting the filler" making it easier for brand new player(younger players always having been the focus of the Pokemon franchise means there's always a large intended target audience being made of kids for whom the latest pokemon game is only their first or second game) to complete it.

Especially with the "next" games seemingly being set(at least, as seen thus far) to be as close to a 1:1 recreation of Diamond/Pearl(down to overworld grid layout) as possible and recalling hearing how "big" those games were, I could see something like "You've seen an introductory lighter experience in Sword&Shield, now are you ready for the real deal?" with the newer game.

One thing I am curious about the future games is what "being made by the Pokemon Home" team will mean in term of compatibility with Home and pokemons from there(i.e.: will they push the 1:1 recreation of Diamond/Pearl to "only support the national dex of the Diamond/Pearl era" or "actually also support Sword/Shield pokedex" and the like).

@Ludovsky Too tired to get into my many reasons for not getting the game at launch.

I think the general consensus for why the game launched the way it did was to keep up with the show coming so soon.

I'm looking forward to the next games though.

@Kalmaro looks at my copy of Pokemon Red that is worth more today than when I bought it new back in '98. Yeah, I have my doubts on any major price drops there.

Gold bottle cap is what I would vote for if I used Twitter.

I have a suspicion that one final DLC pack launches this year for these games that could be free to everyone at that as kind of a send off for the game as we start to transition into the next phase of Pokemon. Not sure what major addition a new expansion would add, but I do think it could be where we see the remainder of missing pokemon get added into the game as well. Hell, maybe that's all there will be to the update, but regardless, I do think we're in for one more final addition to Sword and Shield in the coming months.

@duffmmann Eh... It's already $45 on eBay pre-owned. I'm just waiting to see if it gets any lower.

@Kalmaro,

Hope the price does drop enough, although with the evergreen nature of Nintendo games, prices remain strong years after games releases.

I suppose you could always buy it and sell it on when you are done, the evergreen prices would work in your favour then.

@nhSnork the regular bottle cap make one of your pokemon IV perfect. The golden one make every IV perfect. On Ultra Moon you can do that on the blue store on the shopping mall, It should be the same on Moon (never played that version).

The requirement for that, aside of the bottle caps, is that you reach level 100 with your pokemon.

If you, or anyone reading this, dont know what an IV is, it is a mostly hidden value that every pokemon has for every stat. It ranges from 0 to 31, bigger number means better stats.

Should had just bring back the Everybody Votes Channel from the Wii. Would had made this process much easier as not everyone had a lame Twitter account.

Still Shiny hunting max dens. Pretty much done with the game, so I guess Gold Bottle Caps would still be of use

@Kalmaro Honestly if you haven't gotten Sword and Shield, then getting the next games instead might indeed be for the best. Especially if you're more used to traditional game.

Sword and Shield definitely had a feeling of "Pokemon, but on Speed Forward" which ontop of development stuff/etc had me wondering if "Getting the player competitive ready the fastest possible" also was an incentive with how much was done to allow players to level up pokemons faster than in previous games(the new XP, rather than rare, candies were kind of ludicrous once you got in the L and XL types. A rare candy might be a guaranteed level that's useful for lvl70-80+ pokemons, but XP candies made taking recently bred lvl1 pokemons to lvl 40-50 in instants a joke).

So I'm kind of looking forward for a more traditional game with more battles against trainers/etc and larger world myself since I've always been mainly a singleplayer person.

This game isn't remotely dead no matter how much the haters want to scream otherwise lol. It's got a very healthy competitive scene. The VGC ladder always has people playing.

Gold bottle caps are a decent freebie. But I don't use Twitter.

Eh... why not. I give it a shot.

I'm bored anyway.

@Heavyarms55 Honestly I'd say that's indeed it's strenght but also kind of it's weakness. The more I've played Sword, the more to me that Sword and Shield were built primarily cater to the multiplayer crowd while most people were hoping for primarily a singleplayer Pokemon game.

The extremely brisk gym challenge, with no "filler" non-gym towns/events/etc, near lack of dungeon but also extreme ease for leveling pokemons thanks to XP candies and how quickly the player can get into Battle Tower stuff thanks to how short the main story is... it feels like the game is designed less as a singleplayer game but rather one where the singleplayer is a brisk campaign existing only as a tutorial before funneling players into multiplayer matches as fast as possible.

This is GREAT for the competitive crowd because of how much stuff exist to get pokemons "competitive ready"(fast leveling thanks to XP candies, pokejobs to increase EVs passively, very short story before unlocking almost all the essentials, etc) as fast as possible but similarly this come at the cost of the kind of length people expected of the single player experience.

It does make me wonder if that was the intent all along though; Sword and Shield as a decidedly smaller adventure that could be completed quickly by new players while not extending it's welcome too long for the competitive multiplayer-focused players.... and then now Diamond and Pearl remakes for the people who wanted a bigger singleplayer adventure all along and for the the newer players introduced to the series by Sword/Shield to migrate to.

@Ludovsky I'm really not interested in having this conversation again, for the 87,000th time.

SWSH is a great but not flawless Pokemon game. It's not the Pokemon game everyone wanted. Because no Pokemon game ever has been or ever will be.

If there's anything that's true about the Pokemon "community" is that it is literally impossible to please. And the haters are the loudest part of the community.

The people love them bottle caps.

I guess I shouldn't have expected anything too exciting for a distribution that we can vote on. But I saw the article and thought maybe they were distributing hard to find/hard to evolve Pokemon or something.

Doesn't effect me. I played the single player campaign and stopped there, as I've done with every Pokemon game without Battle Frontier or Pokestar Studios to give me something to do.

First one I've deleted the save data immediately after completion, though. I knew I wouldn't be revisiting this one.

Man, I wish Marnie got more screentime and development. Most interesting character of the game and she's barely in it in favor of the other rivals.