People Are Mad About Pokémon Sword And Shield’s New Expansion Pass/DLC

Pokemon Sword and Shield

Credit: Game Freak

Vocal gamers are, as a whole, a conservative bunch. It’s possible that they lean a little bit that way from a political perspective, but that’s not really what I’m talking about here. They’re just suspicious of change in a general way, especially when it comes to beloved franchises trying something new. Such is the case with Pokémon, which is one of the oldest franchises to have developed a powerful and relatively insular fanbase: change is hard, and Pokémon doesn’t usually change. And recently, we got some change.

Here’s the change: way back with Pokémon Yellow, the franchise established what became a tradition. It would release two games to begin a generationâ€"itself a pretty weird thing to doâ€"and later it would release extra games that were essentially the same basic thing as the original games with some added enhancements. Sometimes this was a single “third version”, as is the case with earlier games, and later there would be upgraded version of each game in the generation: see Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon. It’s the sort of behavior that would be considered ridiculous from anyone else, but the Pokémon franchise sort of got grandfathered in.

That is, until now. The recent Pokémon Direct confirmed that Pokémon Sword and Shield would be keeping only part of Pokemon’s absurd release strategy, the one where it releases the same game twice, at the same time. But for new content, it’s now moving towards the industry standard idea of just selling new content as DLC for a fixed price tag. And so we’ve got the expansion pass, which will add the Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra for $30 total. That means that not only do you not have to buy a whole new game to get the new content, you can access the new content with your existing save file.

It seems like a win, but people are upset. Pokémon Sword and Shield have been a flashpoint for a while now, both due to specific controversies and, I suspect, the general idea that this long-standing franchise was continuing to open up to the broadest audience it’s had since Red and Blue. And so that general spirit of controversy continues to this expansion pass, and people are complaining that we’re not getting the upgraded version(s) that we used to. Like I said, a certain stripe of gamer is deeply conservative, and that’s what we’re seeing here. If you use a game franchise as a source of comfort and stability through two decades of your life (there’s nothing wrong with doing that, I do that), it can make any change feel that much scarier.

It’s tough to see, because it makes it that much harder to change old franchises. But it’s still a positive change for the series: I basically never bothered with the upgraded versions, starting with Yellow. But DLC inside of a game I already own is another matter, and so I’ll jump into the Isle of Armor feet first.

There’s another side to this controversy that feels like a misunderstanding more than anything else. People were originally upset that Game Freak was trimming down the Pokédex for these games by not allowing players to transfer all old Pokémon into the new games. That gets a little better with the expansions: Game Freak is adding in 200 old Pokémon, free for anyone that wants to transfer them over from elsewhere. People have said that there’s a paywall for the new creatures, but that’s not really true: you only need the expansion pass if you want to catch them. Everyone else can access them through trades and transfers, which is basically how it’s worked with the expanded Pokédex for years.

I expect this all to blow over pretty soon. That’s the issue with catering to hardcore fans: you need to do it to some degree, but the people that complain about the shift to an industry standard release concept are also the people that will buy the new expansion pass without asking, every time.