Pokémon Sword & Shield could see an autosave feature

A long-overdue feature could finally hit the series.

For the first time in the series’ history, Pokémon Sword and Shield could have an autosave feature in the game.

In the series past, to save your game in Pokémon, you were required to save in the menu manually. On older hardware where you never knew you were going to run out of battery life, players had to save often to ensure they never lost progress. While batteries are not an issue with newer hardware, it was still incredibly frustrating when you lost your progress.

However, Gamefreak appears to have added an autosave for the upcoming games. As you can see, the picture at the top of this article shows a ‘Now Saving’ icon in the top right corner while the player is running around. The image doesn’t confirm that will allow autosaves, but it would be unusual for the game to let you move while saving. It’s also while the player enters a shop, so it the game could be saving upon entering a new building, or simply changing the environment, or finishing an encounter.

It’s a small, vital quality-of-life improvement, and something that Pokémon fans have been clamoring for generations after. Whether it could lead to more than one save of the game’s instance, or whether the feature is optional, is another question. It could also make raising Pokémon for competitive play more difficult too. It’s not so easy to exit every encounter that doesn’t contain perfect Pokémon IVs and EVs. However, we won’t know the impact until the game’s release on Nov. 15.