Pokémon GO announces new Shadow Raids
Niantic has announced a new type of raid coming to Pokémon GO, and while it will offer up the chance to get some powerful creatures, it’s also bound to anger a lot of fans. The new raids are called Shadow Raids and, as the name suggests, will have players facing off against and catching Shadow Pokémon.
Shadow Pokémon have been in the game for quite some time, and are typically stronger than other Pokémon in the game. It comes at a cost though, as they take more damage than regular Pokémon. They can be purified, though, which almost always comes with a boost to stats.
Shadow Pokémon will appear in three-star and five-star raids, and over the course of the raid will grow stronger both offensively and defensively. A new item called Purified Gems will help you in your battle against them, though, by lowering their attack and defense temporarily.
It sounds like a neat little addition to the game, but it comes with a huge caveat: you can’t use remote raid passes to participate in them. That’s likely to piss a lot of players off, as they’ve been pretty outspoken about recent changes to remote raid passes that make them much more frustrating to use.
Niantic recently made remote raid passes more expensive, and put a hard cap on how many a day players can use. Despite player outrage, with widespread social media pushback on the move, Niantic went ahead with it anyway, to the chagrin of many.
As players have pointed out, the changes to remote raid passes made raiding in the game significantly less viable for disabled and remote players, and this new event certainly doesn’t help in that regard. Not only does it prevent players from raiding remotely at all, it also swaps out potentially solo-able raids with more difficult versions of them, putting remote players at a distinct disadvantage.
The new Shadow Raids will be available from May 22, during the Rising Shadows event. It won’t replace all of the raids in the game, just some of them, so there will hopefully still be some decent raids available for players who want to raid remotely.
You can read more about the new Shadow Raids in the official blog post announcing the feature.
