More information about Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield has been revealed.

Firstly, Eurogamer managed to get their hands on the game for the first two hours. During their time they discovered a few interesting new tid-bits. As aforementioned in prior articles, the Wild Area is essentially one giant interconnected route where wild Pokemon roam freely. It has now been confirmed there are no barriers preventing the player from roaming the Wild Area freely- aside from higher leveled wild Pokemon and trainers of course.

The game’s map also clearly marks where the player should go next, and provides a reminder on what their next task is. Whether towns and cities will have any barrier is currently unknown.

As the Galar Region is inspired by the real life United Kingdom, some NPCs will use British slang and phrases, such as referring to a television as a “telly” and the phrase “you look fresher than a mint!” As Eurogamer points out, the slang is “both endearingly accurate […] and endearingly less so.”

Much like how Pokemon Let’s Go had roaming Pokemon with different colored auras to indicate their size, there is a rare chance wild Pokemon here can have a faint yellow aura. This aura indicates “a couple of” IVs are maximized. IVs (Individual Values) basically a Pokemon’s stat growths on top of other modifiers such as the species, nature, and Effort Values obtained from fighting other Pokemon. These “stronger” Pokemon can even have access to moves they would usually only obtain via breeding.

The system is akin to that of Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, where defeating the same species of Pokemon over and over again in a row (“chaining”) would cause more powerful variants to appear. Whether chaining will have the same effect in Sword and Shield is currently unknown.

The final pieces of information come from Famitsu. Each Pokemon Center will contain an NPC that can change the nickname of a Pokemon, as well as delete or relearn forgotten moves. In past games, the “move relearner” usually asked for payment in the form of Heart Scales. Now there is no cost in relearning old moves. This certainly matches up with earlier stories of Game Freak attempting to make the process of making a Pokemon “competitively viable” easier.

Famitsu also revealed a little more about how Max Raid battles will be tougher. While Game Freak had claimed in the past that these battles would be more challenging, a small snippet of that was revealed when Famitsu played the game. There a Gigantimax’ed Butterfree had access to Max Thunder. Butterfree cannot typically learn Electric-Type moves when leveling up, so the Max Raid bossess may have more move-types that what their wild counterparts would know.

Finally, Producer Junichi Masuda confirmed to Famitsu that they would not be revealing all the new Pokemon. “The number of Pokemon introduced in advance is intentionally reduced. The reason is that everyone wants to enjoy new encounters and discoveries while playing on their own.” 

This means that some Pokemon may remain a surprise, including the starter Pokemon’s evolutions, other Galarian forms, and whether those Pokemon with Galarian forms can evolve beyond what their “normal” counterpart can.

We will keep you posted as we learn more.

In case you missed it, you can find our thorough hands-on preview for Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield from this year’s E3 here.

Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield are both launching on November 15th, for Nintendo Switch.