Pokémon Pokopia Goes Underwater: Update 2.0.0 and Bubbly Basin Are Live

Honestly, this update got me. Pokémon Pokopia has been my nephew's and my go-to co-op comfort game since it launched on Switch 2, and today's version 2.0.0 basically hands every player a snorkel. The star of the show is Dive, a brand-new move that lets you swim freely underwater - and the lovely part? It's completely free for everyone. No Expansion Pass, no strings attached.

The free side of the update goes further than one move, too. The Build specialty now works underwater, so you can put a house on the seabed if that's your dream (it's mine now). There's a shared storage system that lets you reach your items across towns, new bits and pieces like a portal pod and a safe, frameless glass for the builders among us, fresh hair colours, and the usual round of improvements and fixes.

Bubbly Basin, the first slice of the Expansion Pass

Alongside the free goodies, 2.0.0 opens the door to Bubbly Basin, the first part of Pokopia's paid Expansion Pass. It's an entire underwater town: you grow watermelons with the help of Water-specialty Pokémon, while Generate-specialty friends power bubble machines and switch on the streetlights. If that sentence doesn't make you smile, I don't know what will.

This is only Part 1, by the way - Part 2 is planned for later this year, with Part 3 following in 2027. So the little life sim has a proper roadmap ahead of it.

What I appreciate most is how the free/paid split has been handled here. Dive - the actual mechanic that unlocks the underwater world - is free for everybody, and the paid pass sits on top of that with a new place to explore. That's the consumer-friendly way to do DLC, and it deserves saying out loud, because we've all seen the other version, where the fun gets locked behind a paywall piece by piece.

My nephew has already announced that our village is getting an underwater district this weekend. Honestly, who am I to argue.

Image: Crisco 1492 / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nintendo_Switch_2_in_Docking_Console.jpg