Pokemon Sword and Shield has some bad news for fans. It’s not as bad as a restrictive Pokedex, but a lot of people are about to be rather upset. Although it’s just as likely that some will be celebrating the decision. Specifically, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company have announced that the newest game in the franchise will not include the functionality for cloud saves. According to Nintendo Life, there’s not going to be such a feature in the anticipated Switch title.
There’s a precedent here, and it’s actually a pretty good one. Nintendo has decided that the cloud save system could be too easily abused by timing important actions against the autosave function and syncing to the cloud servers. For example, if I wanted to fight an important trainer battle, I could wait for the cloud sync to save the game just before said battle, and then simply shutoff and revert to the old save mid-battle if things aren’t going my way. Nintendo echoed this sentiment in their explanation of why some games don’t get cloud saves saying, “in certain games this feature would make it possible to, for example, regain items that had been traded to other players, or revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost. To ensure fair play, Save Data Cloud backup may not be enabled for such games.”
And this isn’t the first time such a system has been pulled from a Switch title. Pokemon Let’s Go, Eevee! and Pokemon Let’s Go, Pikachu! lack the support for the feature. So while some gamers are likely to be upset, the surface-level explanation at least makes sense with the idea of preventing cheating. And with all the new gameplay features being added to the more complex battle system, it’s probably pretty wise of Nintendo to curtail such problems ahead of time.
Pokemon Sword and Shield arrive on Nintendo Switch and Switch Lite starting November 15th. So if you’re looking to get in on the Galar region fun with fighting back new enemies, get ready now, because it’s coming soon.
