Pokemon Sword And Shield Has 18 Gyms In Total, And Will Likely Let You Change Pokemon Natures

We’ve covered a few details on Pokemon Sword & Shield in our previous post regarding HMs, autosaving, and EXP share, but there’s a bit more to share, including that there will be 18 gyms in total, and seems to have features that allows players to get their main campaign Pokemon team ready to join competitive, in way such as changing natures. [Thanks, Game Informer!]

Firstly, there are 18 total Gyms in Pokemon Sword & Shield, and they will be split between Major and Minor Leagues. Different gyms appear in each league, and some differ between versions like Bea and Allister’s Fighting and Ghost gyms, which appear in the Major League of Sword and Shield versions respectively. The idea seems to be that the gyms can be in different leagues each year in Galar.

That said, it’s currently unknown if this just means whether it’s only the placing of Gyms that is affected, and whether you’ll be able to fight all 18.

As for details on getting Pokemon ready for competitive battles, this comes from vague comments by planning director Kazumasa Iwao. According to him, this time they wanted to bring in ways to help players be able to take the Pokemon they caught in their adventure straight into competitive battles, and this is being done by allowing players to alter “back end” stuff such as “hidden parameters” that aren’t usually visible to the player. Iwao specifically mentions that one example includes the “personality parameter”, which can be taken to mean the current Nature system that can majorly affect stats.

Pokemon Sword and Shield will come to the Nintendo Switch on November 15, 2019.