An autosave feature sounds like the most innocuous and uncontroversial thing that a developer could add to a game. After all, who wouldn’t like some security in knowing that they’re probably not going to lose progress? And yet, when it was recently announced that Pokémon Sword and Shield would periodically autosave, players got nervous.
Being able to manually save and reload as you wish makes hunting for rare Shiny Pokémon, gaining specific abilities or optimizing your creatures’ stats a hell of a lot easier. By design, the player should be at the mercy of the RNG, but being able to reload and retry can speed up the process a lot. No doubt aware of this, the game’s director Shigeru Ohmori has now reassured fans that autosave functionality will be an option you can toggle rather than something mandatory. This gives players the best of both worlds, ensuring that losing data won’t often happen while allowing them to maintain strategies to get the rarest creatures.
There’s not long now until the release of Pokémon Sword and Shield and Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are busily gearing up the hype train. We’ve been getting a steady trickle of information about the game over the last few weeks, including new features like this autosave functionality, Dynamaxing, Signature Moves and raid battles.
Game Freak also confirmed recently that, for the first time ever, the series will be ditching its usual endgame battle against the Elite Four for a proper tournament format. We’ve also seen several brand new Pokémon and peeks at existing favorites’ new forms (who can deny the awesomeness of Sirfetch’d?).
Bubbling away in the background though is the Pokédex controversy, which has made some longtime players rightly skeptical of this new release, but let’s hope that we see some free downloadable content in the future that resolves the issue.
