Pokemon Sword/Shield director elaborates on having all party members automatically gain experience
As previously reported, Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield do not have an Exp. Share item. The way the system works now is that all members in your party automatically receive experience in battle, and there’s no immediate option to disable it.
While we touched on this subject previously, in an interview with Jeuxvideo, director Shigeru Ohmori explained the decision to not have an Exp. Share item and instead have the functionality turned on. He told the site:
“In the past, we’ve used the Exp. Share system and, more recently, you were able to disable it and limit the experience gain to a single Pokemon. Yet we noticed that many players were leaving the Exp. Share system set to ‘ON’. Seeing this, we started to wonder if there really was a need for players to be able to turn it off – if there was value in it as a gameplay feature. Of course, we discussed the fact that some players only wanted to train one Pokemon at a time, but what arose from our talks is that if players wanted to do this, why not bring only one Pokemon with them? … in order to remove the need for the off switch, why not allow them to change their team anywhere and at any time? This way, if they only want to have one Pokemon at their side and focus on leveling it up, they can; otherwise they can have a full team, training them all at once and thus having an easier time. So, rather than focusing on Exp. Share, we concentrated on team composition.”
Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield are out now on Switch having just released this past Friday.
Thanks to Kyrio for assisting with the translation.
