Pokémon Sword and Shield will feature raids that can be played online in co-op. These are taken from Pokémon GO and are highly unusual for a single-player RPG. Is the series evolving into an MMO?
This is the background: On November 15, 2019, the new single-player RPG for Pokémon will be released, bringing the 8th generation. Now, Nintendo has introduced a new feature that has not been present in classic Pokémon before.
What’s new in Pokémon Sword & Shield? Raids. For the first time in the history of classic Pokémon RPGs, you can meet up with friends locally or online to take on powerful raid bosses.
Between the cities in the new Galar region, players will find stone circles. At these stone circles, up to four players can participate in the raid. The Pokémon adopt the new Dynamax form, which makes them gigantic and grants them special Z-attacks.
What do raids mean for classic Pokémon RPG?
The raids could be the first step toward developing classic Pokémon RPGs into an MMO.
This is special: This form of battles is inspired by Pokémon GO. The mobile game introduced raids back in June 2017. Here, up to 20 players can team up against a raid boss and catch it after a successful battle.
The CEO of The Pokémon Company, Tsunekazu Ishihara, already spoke in 2017 about the impact Pokémon GO would have on the future of the franchise. They were surprised by the success of Niantic’s mobile game.
Throughout 2018, Niantic earned over 800 million dollars with Pokémon GO. Therefore, it is not surprising that The Pokémon Company wants a larger slice of that pie.
Pokémon GO itself is officially not considered an MMO, even though it meets all the requirements for one. Even genre pioneer Raph Koster states that Pokémon GO is a full-fledged MMO.
Will there be a “real” Pokémon MMO soon?
What’s behind this: If you put together,
- that Pokémon GO is an insane global hit,
- the Pokémon Company therefore wants to incorporate more Pokémon GO into the overall marketing of the franchise
- and that Pokémon Sword and Shield is now introducing an MMO feature with the online raids for the first time,
it seems plausible that the classic RPGs will continue to develop in this direction. The first step has definitely been taken with the Dynamax raid feature. They likely want to test the waters and also attract Pokémon GO players.
How soon could there be a Pokémon MMO? Probably not anytime soon.
However, it is conceivable that even more social and online features will come to the RPGs in the future. Perhaps there will be a kind of “MMO-light” as seen in Borderlands 3. It would also be conceivable that there will eventually be an official MMO offshoot, just like Bethesda did with The Elder Scrolls Online. In the context of Pokémon single-player RPGs, the raids are a massive innovation.
In the context of a full-fledged MMO, however, it is a baby step. But even a baby step is still a step. In the future, we expect at least a stronger focus on social features like raids.
With Pokémon Let’s GO, they already wanted to appeal to the GO players. So the MMO players among Pokémon fans:
What do you think about these developments in the Pokémon universe?
