It seems the Pokémon virus, Pokerus, has been removed from Scarlet and Violet
If you’re not familiar with the deeper mechanics of the Pokémon games you may be confused to what Pokerus even is. Pokerus was a mechanic introduced in the Generation 2 Pokémon games where the Pokémon center nurse would sometimes tell you your Pokémon had caught a contagious virus called Pokerus after healing your Pokémon.
While that may sound bad the nurse is quick to assure you that Pokémon under this sickness seem to grow stronger than those not affected. What this means is that Pokémon infected with the virus would gain boosted Effort Values or EV’s with no ill side affects, you could even pass the sickness on to other Pokémon on your team or in your boxes to really give yourself a boost.
As for what Effort Values are well… That’s a bit too complicated for this article to get into but just know they are something competitive Pokémon players want to raise to get their teams up to snuff for competition.
This long prelude was all to tell you that it seems that this mechanic has been cut from the latest Pokémon releases, Scarlet and Violet. This news comes to us from @mattyoukhana_ on Twitter, you can check out their Tweets below.
It seems Pokerus is not in the game’s code whatsoever, even when hacked in. @mattyoukhana_ then goes on to add that Pokémon will not receive EV’s from defeating Pokémon in the auto-battles feature.
This has of course risen to speculation as to why this feature was cut, some speculate that it may just be unneeded as simpler ways to raise a Pokémon’s Ev’s have been added since Gen 2 so it may have been seen as redundant, others think that it may have been done to avoid connection to the Covid-19 pandemic, as having a mechanic where you WANT to catch a disease might have been seen as being in poor taste.
It’s hard to know if we’ll ever get an official word on why this was removed. Pokerus is so obscure it’s hard to believe that Game Freak would ever feel the need to comment on it. If word does come though we’ll be sure to report on it.
