Game Freak has revealed that cut Pokémon will be returning to Pokémon Sword & Shield as part of free updates, and while this announcement has been met positively by fans, there are many who are wondering why the company never mentioned this until after the game was released. Nintendo revealed that a new Pokémon Direct was coming this week, which led to speculation that paid DLC content was coming to Pokémon Sword & Shield.
The Galar region is being expanded with new content in the form of the Expansion Pass, which offers two different updates that will be released over 2020. Pokémon Sword & Shield will be gaining two new Wild Areas in the form of the Isle of Armor and The Crown Tundra, which will be adding new items and Pokémon to the game. The most notable aspect of the Expansion Pass is that the two updates will be bringing back at least one hundred Pokémon each that had been cut from the roster in Pokémon Sword & Shield. It doesn’t matter if the people who own Pokémon Sword & Shield purchase the Expansion Pass, as they can still access the returning Pokémon.
The people who managed to acquire leaked copies of Pokémon Sword & Shield discovered unused Pokémon buried in the files of each game, so it’s clear that Game Freak had been planning on bringing back some of the cut Pokémon for a while now. The question that fans are asking themselves is why Game Freak never revealed that old Pokémon would be coming back in free updates? It’s clear that the Isle of Armor has been in development for a long time and the initial announcement about the National Dex being cut happened at E3 2019, so Game Freak has known about the returning Pokémon for a while, yet the company never tried to diffuse the growing controversies with Pokémon Sword & Shield over the latter half of 2019.
There was a backlash from fans when it was revealed that Pokémon Sword & Shield would not feature all of the Pokémon from the series, which led to a lot of nasty discourse surrounding the game in the run-up to its release. The fact that Pokémon Sword & Shield were sixty dollar games with less content than the earlier/cheaper games in the series rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and led to numerous anti-Pokémon terms trending on social media.
It’s clear that Game Freak had planned to add more Pokémon into the game through updates before the release of Pokémon Sword & Shield, so why didn’t they announce it? The addition of more Pokémon in free post-launch updates would have quelled a lot of the negative discourse surrounding the game, even if all of the Pokémon didn’t make it into the game. It’s possible that Game Freak was initially planning on keeping the new/returning Pokémon behind a paywall, but the backlash prompted the developers to make them free for everyone.
A lot of negative press regarding Pokémon Sword & Shield could have been avoided if Game Freak had been honest about restoring cut Pokémon in future updates. Ultimately, it didn’t matter much in terms of the bottom line, as Pokémon Sword & Shield still sold a lot of units, but Game Freak could have saved itself a lot of hassle by promoting the fact that cut Pokémon were coming to the Galar region in the future.
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Pokemon Sword & Shield are available now on Nintendo Switch. The Isle of Armor will be available in June 2020, while The Crown Tundra will be available in Fall 2020. The Expansion Pass with both DLC costs $29.99/£26.99.
