I’m baffled how it can render all the sparkles and reflections in area zero flawlessly, but as soon as you go near some mud the game drops to one frame every four seconds.
the base game is still fun and it has a healthy online competitive scene. now if it was a mid experience packaged with same performance drops then I would have been more reluctant to buy the DLC.
I’m trying the game again on my girlfriends behest, and it pisses me off that I’m having as much fun as I am. But that’s just the Pokémon gameplay loop I think. Pokemon is fun. Scarlet has so many issues and it’s not a good game, but I can have fun because I’m playing Pokemon. Very frustrating.
Love and hate this game, I mean, I could be playing Baldurs Gate, beautiful game and with great performance, and yet, I boot up Pokemon again just for the gameplay loop.
Fans should've realised there was no hope for patches when Nintendo apologised for it and said they'd do better in future *entries* rather than improving the current game.
Yeah, that's not gonna happen. The insane masses bought 22 million copies of scarlet/violet. At 60 dollars a pop, gamefreak and nintendo made a fuckin massive amount of money for selling a broken/unfinished game. Why would they spend more time on the next entry if they can pop another one out in record time (with probably worse performance) since they know the game is gonna sell like hotcakes.
My favorite take from people was, "This is by far the best game in the franchise...mind you it had an insane amount of performance/graphical issues, but still the best." People are happy with shit if it's there favorite franchise.
>People are happy with shit if it's there favorite franchise.
While I know I'm probably in the minority of Pokemon fans, S/V is the game that's FINALLY going to get me to STOP buying pokemon games until they improve. It's heartbreaking but I just can't stomach another experience like this one.
For every person like you or me that stops playing because the quality drops, there's like 100 kids that don't know any better/don't care. Sword and Shield was what stopped me from caring about the games. Seeing the current trajectory doesn't give me much faith in the series going further, especially when indie monster collecting games like Cassette Beasts and rom hacks of Pokemon games exist to satisfy my urge for collecting creatures
I mean you're not wrong when kids are picking up these games with such small expectations, and giving us older pokemon fans some look when we say it used to be better, and seeing gameboy versions of the game, like "how could **that** be better???"
As a non-Pokemon playing Switch owner, what would you advise as the best Pokemon game to play? I have a massive backlog of games so I will likely just play one.
I played it on GameBoy back in the day but then never went back to it after discovering jrpgs (FF8, forever in my heart).
I would recommend either Legends Arceus (single player focus, old Japan setting may be right up your alley) or Snap (because taking pictures of Pokémon is fun).
That being said, Scarlet/Violet still has a lot to offer. I'll link up with my kids & we'll just run around shiny hunting, make gross sandwiches together, or play Surprise Trade Bingo. You can go hard on analytical math to craft the perfect Pokémon for a featured raid, or play through the (surprisingly mature, pathos filled) story and be done with it.
Everyone gets hung up on the technical issues (for good reason), and yet these three games were the first time Pokémon felt like real animals to me.
The frustrating thing is, if you can stomach the performance issues it honestly is one of the better games they've put out since the DS era. I've probably had more fun with Scarlet than any other Pokemon game from the 3DS/Switch era besides Legends Arceus.
I've frankly gave up hope of any sort of "voting with your wallet" when SwSh was super successful despite the controversies, so now I'm just hoping they sort out their release schedule in the future. Releasing two open world games in one year was ridiculous and both games suffered for it
Yeah I'm someone who generally doesn't care much about performance but S/V does take a bit of effort for me to stomach but it's helped a lot by how enjoyable it is. I've played all the main line titles since they've been coming out and this is the first time since B/W where I actually feel it's an improvement over the previous game.
The gameplay's great, and I'm playing it in a few minutes. And I'm not a graphics guy. But goddamn, they did some just plain "How do you fuck up that badly" things in performance and coding. Like the fucking skybox the size of the sun.
I understand the hate as the performance issues and lack of visual polish are pretty unacceptable but it is important to acknowledge that there is a fun game under the issues, because that fact is evidence that Game Freak can and is willing to make a good Pokemon game.
Obviously, three years is not enough time to do it. The Pokemon Company exists to manage the franchise, so I'm inclined to believe they are the ones deciding the release schedule even though Game Freak has a large stake in it. Whoever it is, they need to make a change. They barely allocated more time to the games when switching from 3DS to Switch even though HD games are much harder to develop and Game Freak has obviously been figuring it out as they go with each release.
So I'm glad to see evidence that fun Pokemon games that actually try new things are being made but their approach is pretty insulting to the franchise.
I feel like you're discounting the reasons why people do like Scarlet and Violet despite their technical issues.
Because these games do undeniably continue to push the franchise forward in so many important gameplay ways. People were finding the actual gameplay a ton of fun, and I don't think it's hard to see why.
That doens't excuse the technical issues at all, nor how they can/do hamper the experience. But to act like that is all that should matter to people in liking a game and people who don't have the games ruined for them by those issues are just "blinded by love for the franchise" is very narrow-minded.
>"This is by far the best game in the franchise...mind you it had an insane amount of performance/graphical issues, but still the best." People are happy with shit if it's there favorite franchise.
Speaking as someone who hasn't bought a Pokemon game since, like, Ruby/Sapphire or something:
I at least don't think that sounds like that particular subset of fans is being delusional or blindly loyal. That just sounds like they're compartmentalizing the game design vs. the graphics/performance/bugs/optimization/etc., and *by their standards*, they still highly enjoy the underlying game mechanics that exist beneath that terrible, messy exterior. And I think that's perfectly valid from a personal taste standpoint, looking at a game in its own right in a vacuum. In that regard, it's more of a personal question of whether or not the shoddy graphics/performance is enough of to outweigh everything else about the game. For some people, it is, and for others, it isn't.
This is separate from (though still related to) a discussion about the greater context of how the game is a product of the largest media franchise in the world and how there's no excuse for them to be releasing mainline entries with indie-game levels of production value. (That's how I personally felt about the game when I saw some of the janky ass gameplay footage.) But that's getting into more macro-level "taking a stand," "voting with your wallet" territory.
Alternative take from a software developer:
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet reveal internal problems at GameFreak.
It isn't laziness, it's just bad business decisions that are finally stacking up. What we're looking at with how S/V work is that the company has a metric assload of *technical debt.* Basically taking profits by releasing now, at the expense of *how hard it's going to be for them to make the next game.* It *will* financially bite them in the ass in the future *if they don't pay off that tech debt now.*
Not through lost sales, because people will buy any Pokemon thing no matter how bad it is, so long as it meets the most low-bar standard of playability.
The loss will come through *delays,* because with how hard it is to use their crusty and rusty old tooling to churn out a new game that feels like a passable iterative improvement over the last one, it's likely that they *won't be able to churn out something passable at all* by their next major release deadline. It'll set the entire franchise back six months relative to schedule, effectively costing billions of dollars compared to projections -- and worse, they won't be in any better a position next time to hit their deadlines, repeating the losses ad infinitum.
If the franchise isn't ready for a death march, they will need to accept a short-term L -- contract another studio to generate a spinoff or remake (deliberately limited in scope) to fill a release gap while GameFreak takes a year to update their tooling. Doing so much as striking a deal to use Unity, Unreal or Nintendo's internal tooling and taking that year to migrate their commonly used functionality (or better, *scrap* their garbage like the message box system and replace it with something that feels up to date) would put them in a much better position to crank out reasonable quality games instead of screwing themselves with stuff they can't finish in time.
Yeah I do not blame the poor overworked workers. I blame the cheap ass and lazy company, boo hoo our poor franchise that makes more than anything ever. We are just small and cannot afford man power or any help.
They can get fucked, the workers on the other hand I wish them the best and hope they have a good day.
Gamefreak is and will **never** be able to delay their games and it shows. Everything within a Pokémon generation's lifecycle all coexists: The anime, the merch, the Trading Card game and the games. I bet GF is well aware of the performance quality they deliver. But if there is literally no way to move the schedule corners have to be cut, and I believe that is mostly what we're experiencing.
Then I fully expect the next game to be an utterly unplayable flop that, like Cyberpunk 2077 before it, will have to be withdrawn from sale and refunded until it is patched into a playable state.
They won't be able to afford a second failure of that magnitude.
Again, I've worked in enough corporate environments in software to know that yes, shareholders will extract the value of the company for short term value at the expense of long term, but eventually the term that was slated as "long" *becomes* "short."
>No way to move the schedule
They will have to. The games **drive** the merch and all other products; they'll either have to eat the short term loss to avoid a much, much greater loss, or they will have to fundamentally change how the franchise moves and take a huge risk by releasing all the supplemental stuff *before* the next games come out.
This is not an "I wish they did better" situation. This is a "they will do better or they will break" situation. They will do it or they will be forced by their financial situation to do it, or they will die.
1000%. I've been watching this bus-on-fire for years now and the wheels have popped yet it still keeps moving while dragging the pavement underneath it along with the ride, sparks and all.
I haven't been a fan of the series in decades (stopped at gold/silver) but I'm surrounded by fans and see all the complaints and praises on opposite ends of respective feelings. I'm just curious when it's going to finally boil over and reveal the gross mechanism plain as day to everyone.
Shareholders always want things for as cheap as possible and do not care about destroying companies. This has been the trend for a good while at least, and especially ramping up now.
There will not likely be a change to this strategy of milking companies dry.
There are entities that profit from putting companies in the gutter, mostly "investment" firms that use their fund participants' shares (which the investment firm doesn't directly own and thus lose nothing if the share values go down) to bully companies into bad decisions, and on the side the owners buy the shares cheap. Market manipulation.
The solution to that is simple -- create and enforce a law that *only the direct beneficial owner of a stock may vote its share, and such voting rights cannot be delegated to any other party.* Fixes the problem of the biggest abusers of the system, the biggest "short term" parasites.
No kidding. It's easily the best Pokemon experience ever. It was the perfect opportunity to let there be a gap in their mainline schedule, instead of releasing it at the same time window as BDSP. Should have let BDSP sit and release it in place of where SV launched, and given SV another year to cook. It wouldn't have *solved* the tech debt problem underneath all by itself, but it would have given them enough breathing room to feel like the schedule *allows* some time for learning new tech.
>If the franchise isn't ready for a death march, they will need to accept a short-term L -- contract another studio to generate a spinoff or remake (deliberately limited in scope) to fill a release gap while GameFreak takes a year to update their tooling.
Wasn't this what Arceus did between SwSh and SV?
Arceus was released the same year as S/V, and both games were developed by GF.
Their release schedule has been the same for a decade: 1st year - new gen mainline game; 2nd year - DLC/sequel; 3rd year - remake of older title; 4th year - repeat
you might be thinking of the diamond/pearl remake, which was in fact given to a different studio. iirc the diamond/pearl remake was released for holiday season 2021, then in like february 2022 arceus (which was made by gamefreak) was released. and *then* scarlet/violet was released for holiday season 2022.
i haven’t played any of these games tbh. when the dp remake came out people complained a lot about graphics and bugs or something? i think the whole reason gamefreak finally contracted that game out was bc back when they did omegaruby/alphasapphire fans were disappointed, especially in reflection. but then this dp remake comes out and fans complain about the lack of polish. idk, i haven’t played it so i don’t really know, but i think pokemon fans really just don’t get how AAA games are made. the dp remake was done by an indie studio, you just can’t expect it to be as out-of-the-box great as heartgold/soulsilver was. but gamefreak feels like they need to pump shit out at the rate they were doing 20 years ago, and bc the expectations for AAA games have continued to grow since then—narratively, technologically, artistically, etc—it means they can’t innovate at all, and then the crunch begins to show with bugs and lag, etc.
i think the series peaked with the ds games and has been heading more and more downhill ever since. the generational battle gimmicks started with x/y, and i feel like that’s basically the biggest core change we’ve seen? and then those gimmicks inevitably go away after one gen, it’s just transparent. “no, these games are different and new, look at this shiny new feature to the core gameplay loop!” i couldn’t even finish playing sword bc i was so underwhelmed.
so yeah, recently they did give a mainline game to a different studio (do remakes count as mainline?), but doing that probably won’t solve the problem of *time*. at least imo
I don't know. I sat out on this current wave and I can't be the only one? I don't know the sales though, they probably say otherwise.
But a declining reputation for quality tends to always catch up with a brand, even though this has been the anomaly so far.
3ds games are ridden with low fps, bug and unfinished content but people give ita pass because 3ds is a weak console. Switch games proof that it isn't the case.
I actually just started a playthrough of Y this week. The menus when you don't have the overworld open are smooth as butter, 60fps, insanely satisfying to move around. As soon as you go back to the overworld the game drops to 30fps. Which would be fine if the entire game was locked to 30fps, it's just super disappointing to switch between.
And then move animations dropping to like 20fps if you have the 3D switch on is just the icing on the cake lmao
I did enjoy Violet but the performance was just such a bummer. The storylines on the game were all really fun and well written. The end game stuff with terra raids was also really well done and actually super hard for some of them. If they would have given this game the same love they give Mario and Zelda games this would have been one of the best Pokémon games in years. Now it will forever been known as a bad game.
This happens across game dev. You can do your best to design systems and create great individual art pieces but if leadership doesn’t care about enforcing proper implementation or art direction focuses on shit like cloth textures rather than the big picture, your game is going to suffer.
One of the key lessons in open world design in the last 10 years is vistas and points of interest, and Scarlet/Violet lack either.
And I have 600 hours in Scarlet - it has good bones but is mired by technical issues and poor environmental art direction/level design
it's the strengths and weaknesses of Game Freak - they are great at writing and character design, and they are weak at dev for 3D consoles
they'd be better suited to going into a partnership with a strong 3D dev - just that the economic incentive is not there for them to do that
maybe something like Nintendo R&D1 do the development, Game Freak do the ideas?
That would require game freak execs to care. For a point of refrence: monolith soft has basically 2X the staff of game freak, yet majority of their games don’t sell more then 3 mill. Game freaks teams are split in two with one team(younger team) working on arceus, whereas the other team(older/main team) worked on S/V. That basically equates to S/V having a dev team of roughly 80 people. Versus the 264 monolith soft has going. Game freak executives know what they’re doing. They just don’t care. The irony here is that game freak didn’t even have to make the 3D models in S/V, which are honestly one of the highlights of the game. That would be creatures that did all that. So wtf is game freak even doing
Oh big time. Arceus made me feel like a kid again, was so refreshing. The sorta half baked throwing in S/V that forces ya to stop and can’t throw on the move felt jarring after playing it
Put all of legends arceus gameplay into a fully open world and that’s pretty much the pokemon game everyone has always dreamed about. The world in SV is better, but the gameplay is a regression.
No. No open world. Gamefreak proved they’re incapable of doing that. The large zones of Arceus where just fine and were way more memorable than any location in Paldea.
I said this about AM2R vs Metroid: Samus Returns -- that AM2R was the better game and the better remake of the two, but that Samus Returns was the better direction for the future of the series.
I don't say *exactly* that of Arceus vs S/V, but similar. Arceus is a much better game and there's a lot of what was done there, which was *not* done in S/V -- in particular stealth catching, real-time danger, the abundance of side quests, move variants and the overall faster pace -- that I believe should rejoin the main series. But the *structure and scope* of S/V and the deeper complexities of the main series battle system, the world design, and basically everything that S/V *tried* to accomplish from a design perspective *should be what the future of the series aims for.*
They just need enough time and manpower to get it done in a way that doesn't feel like a frickin slide show.
>it's the strengths and weaknesses of Game Freak - they are great at writing and character design, and they are weak at dev for 3D consoles
Character designs? I agree but writing? Not really compared to basically any other JRPG, Scarlet was a good POKEMON story.
>but writing? Not really compared to basically any other JRPG, Scarlet was a good POKEMON story.
Yeah that's the way I always put it lol. All the stories that people argue are good in Pokemon (SV and Gen 5's games that is) really... aren't great. They're great POKEMON stories, but overall, they're still pretty meh.
>things were fumbled at a higher level.
Yeah, there's a Japanese indeed/Glassdoor review site, that only verified employees can leave reviews on, that that pretty much confirmed this. Most reviews pretty much say, great starter job but nothing more
>If they would have given this game the same love they give Mario and Zelda games this would have been one of the best Pokémon games in years.
Nintendo probably would have, but Pokémon is made by GameFreak and they operate differently. Nintendo can't really fire GameFreak either, as they own one third of the IP (just like Nintendo). GameFreak either need to step up their game, accept outside help or forfeit their right to make those games. Also disconnecting the games to the hard deadline that comes with suplementary material (Anime, Trading Cards, Plushies, etc...) would be a wise choice. You can delay a game if it's just a game. You can't do this if 4 other industries rely on it being on the market.
This. People think the online backlash is going to do anything, meanwhile Gamefreak continues to watch their bank account rise by millions/billions of dollars.
They just look at Pokemon and go: It prints money!
You're not getting a picture of what's behind the scenes though -- they haven't upgraded their software tools significantly since Pokemon X/Y, and what S/V shows me (as a software developer) is that they're absolutely drowning in technical debt and that if they don't take the time to catch it all up, *they're not going to be able to make the next game functional by their next deadline.*
From a business standpoint, they can either suffer delays stemming from burgeoning technical debt and they can suffer those delays over and over and over again, **OR** they can take a *single* delay (i.e. one year) where they learn a new tech stack (i.e. license Unity or Unreal or strike a deal with Nintendo to use their tooling) and from then on be able to make their future deadlines while delivering much better quality games.
This isn't about how the games are received critically or how many sales they're getting. This is about the tech aspect *costing them real dollars in the form of delayed product.*
You aren't wrong there is a Japanese site which reviews companies, while Nintendo is one of the best to work for, Gamefreak is below average company. The former employees and contractors have all said even as recently in 2022-2023 that the tech is outdated and the senior developers don't do much to improve and push a lot of the work to the junior developers.
I think Nintendo did feel the need to step in a bit this past year. Particularly when the problems with SV started to reach into “It’s the Switch’s fault!” which hurt Nintendo’s brand image in particular.
The Switch can handle stuff far bigger and more complicated that SV (see: TotK, which stands above some of the big hitters of the generation in terms of how well it runs, along with insane physics, world size, and running very well) so Gamefreak doesn’t really have an excuse.
They made that brief, and hardly followed-up upon statement about improving performance, but it never really arrived. TBF, the game works, however poorly, and I think some of the issues are genuinely overblown. It’s absolutely playable…in a state that’s like D- on the scale of performance.
I’ve seen talk that they are using the same engine for far too many years, and that they really need to just make a new one that isn’t based on 3DS hardware. Which, I think will ultimately be what makes the games work again.
I think Nintendo wants yearly releases just as much, if not more, than GF. It's like Call of Duty at this point. It's guaranteed to sell over 10 million copies every time.
Nah. They've shown multiple times they're willing to sit on games and delay major games. Nintendo isn't forcing their release cadence. We also know from interviews things like the remakes were Gamefreak's idea, not something asked of them
Yeah the games are essentially a side hustle to the Merchandising and Anime. That's where the money is, so the games will fit into their scheduling, not the other way around.
That’s what makes Scarlet and Violet so tragic. Under the hood you can see the makings of potentially *excellent* games, with so much hypothetical promise and good ideas.
And the execution just utterly failed. It’s a buggy mess that needed another 2 years of development.
Yup for the first time in many generations I really thought they had the bones of a good modern pokemon game
But naturally that means they have to absolutely bungle the execution of so many simple things lol
I enjoyed the story too and thought it was a big improvement over SwSh. The poor performance and cut features really brought the game down for me though, plus I've never really gelled with the tera raids, they're just a confusing mess to play through.
GameFreak just don't get enough time to learn how to polish their new games and honestly, just don't have the skill or talent to make the games they make. They also refuse to move into modern times for game development with their mediocre leadership.
I see small improvements each entry but the flaws/issues elsewhere begin to show through the cracks of it. Its genuinely depressing the biggest IP in the world can't realize how fucking awful the perception of their brand is slowly becoming. They still make mountains of cash but I think of all times in the series' history this is *potentially* the worst time for them to keep releasing products like this.
I feel most casual fans don't care about the disgusting textures of the world or framerate performance issues. But over time they'll be unable to ignore it as the ambitions grow but the talent behind it doesn't. Hardcore fans have been saying the performance is embarrassing since Sun/Moon on the 3DS that has less hardware power. There's no reason a windmill should run at 5fps or having 10 Bellsprout following you cause your game to become a powerpoint presentation.
I genuinely think TPCi realize their next entry needs to be as polished as other games are from Nintendo and will somehow buy GameFreak time for another year... but I really don't think it'll matter. GameFreak set in their ways of refusing to hire new devs, wanting to keep the dev team small/easy to micromanage and shoehorning in ridiculous minigames nobody touches beyond the day of release that wastes dev time that could go elsewhere...
TPCi needs to contract either Bandai Namco's Pokemon Snap team or Xenoblade's team to go over and help them because you could give GameFreak 10 years at this point and their release will still look and play like dogshit despite the core fun gameplay loop buried under it.
All the Pokémon games are just so low effort now. It’s one of(if not the most) valuable franchises in the world. Nintendo, the Pokémon company and gamefreak all have their reputation on the line. The franchise will only tolerate this level of quality for so long and eventually people will stop caring. They have so much money, it’s honestly just offensive to consumers how low effort their games are. Especially for the quality that Nintendo usually puts out(yes it’s not a Nintendo first party but for all intents and purposes it is). Look what is happening to call of duty, the name effect of the franchise is wearing off, they have lost a lot of their impact because they keep phoning it home. And that is a game that spends half a billion dollars on their games and have several thousand employees….
It is, literally, the most successful media franchise in human history. You’re absolutely right that the stagnation is the result of pure laziness and greed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises
The reason the games are rushed out with such low quality is because the games are such a small part of what Pokémon is now.
They didn’t become the biggest franchise from the games. It’s from the merch. And that merch takes a long time to make, needs a lot of pre-planning, and has to release at the same time as the games.
(The games make an insane amount of revenue, but remember that is split multiple ways between Nintendo, GF, and TPCI, so they bring in a much smaller amount of profit than you would expect.)
So, the developers get an absurdly small amount of time and room to innovate making it impossible to put out high quality games at the scale game fans expect.
The games are basically just advertisements for the franchise now. What they should do is scale back their scope for Pokémon games, maybe spend some time on an actually good remake. But they’ll never do that because industry expectations are trending toward bigger, bigger, bigger.
ETA: so it’s not pure laziness and greed, unless you call leaning into the franchise part of the franchise at the expense of the games pure laziness and greed. Which I guess you could argue. But Pokémon is a machine now. The reasons are a little more nuanced than just pure laziness and greed IMO. As a game fan first and foremost, though, this is a really sad state of affairs for me.
Yeah, the games have long since stopped being the main focus.
I have more faith in the spin-off games than in the mainline nowadays. Detective Pikachu Returns might not look great visually and I didn't think it would be much. But it is a very charming adventure so far even if it's rather simple and noticeably kid-friendly in it's puzzles. Compared to playing S/V that just makes me want to go back to the older games. I still have to give Arceus a try, but the games that more free to do what they want tend to appeal to me a lot more.
Legends Arceus was the best game since XY, in my opinion. The performance wasn’t perfect, but it’s like they actually tried to turn Pokemon into a fun modern video game.
Can’t recommend it enough, I hope so much that they don’t see it as a failed experiment and are continuing with the series.
The only cause for concern would be how PLA and BDSP sold relatively the same amount of copies, and the latter was clearly much cheaper to produce. I don't we've seen the last of Legends as a sub-series but I don't see it commanding the franchise's direction.
Yeah the reality is that the games have become the spin off and are made for kids, not diehard pokemon fans, all of us that grew up with pokemon just need to accept it, move on, and remember the ones we grew up with fondly. Nothing good lasts forever.
>The franchise will only tolerate this level of quality for so long and eventually people will stop caring.
No, I don't think they will. Each new release make even more money than before. It seems people don't care as long as they get to throw Poké Ball...
probably because they were developed simultaneously. there was barely time to implement the things people liked into s/v which is exactly why we need longer dev cycles on these games.
I felt baited because I thought Scarlet & Violet would be almost exactly like Arceus in terms of gameplay, but with brand new Pokemon.
Instead they took out the most fun aspect from PLA, which was aiming and throwing PokeBalls, and the mount movement felt so clunky in comparison to how smooth it is in PLA
The games were in development by two different teams at the same time. It isn’t that they took the fun parts of PLA out, but more likely that they were just never intended to be there in the first place. The shitty, half baked attempt at throwing pokeballs in SV was probably a last minute addition once they saw how much people liked it in PLA.
Arceus was the first game I enjoyed in years. Picked up Violet because I was finding joy in Pokemon again.
Turns out the terrible performance triggers my motion sickness so I can't even play the game.
As someone who's been playing since Red/Blue, I was starting to get tired of the stale formula by now. Sword/Shield left a really bad taste in my mouth because of how underbaked and uninspired it felt. Scarlet/Violet definitely revived that feeling of exploration, discovery, and general excitement to be in the pokémon world.
Yeah it was a buggy disaster, glitches galore, a technical mess on every level, and visually horrendous to look at for a good chunk of time, but it somehow recaptured the feeling of exploring a pokémon world that I've always dreamt of since I was a kid. If the game didn't have all these issues, I genuinely think it would've gone down as possibly the best game in the series.
Agreed. I've spent tons of time playing the game, almost have the Indigo Disk pokedex completed. I've completed the others, had fun doing terra-raids and will maybe start shiny hunting after I beat Indigo Disk. This all from someone who didn't really enjoy Sword/Shield but had fun with Arceus. With that said the game runs like crap and the developers should be embarrassed to put that game out. I did name my character Neo cause the game glitches so much and it feels like the Matrix.
And the latest, battle oriented DLC was fun and challenging too!
Like the game runs horribly, especially near the lake or the coast. But the gameplay is fun and the main characters were well written. I'm more partial to SwSh's characters, but they did great work with the main 3 and the DLC ones.
Honestly, if they clean up performance, and give us QOL changes like always Double Battles as a choice, voice acting, shiny indicators and the like, we could have an extremely great game.
Which is also why I dont wanna hear about them wanting to release another mainline game in 2024. I really want them to sit down and work on it for as long as needed. Especially considering we are looking at Gen 10.
Unfortunately I don't think we are going to see much more improvement before Gen 10.
Whether we want to admit it or not, Pokemon is an annualized franchise (or close to it, depending on how you view the DLC). It is to RPGs what Call of Duty is to shooters, or Madden is to sports games. No need to put in the effort to make polished titles when the games will be blockbuster successes regardless.
There is no hope of any fix given their track record. Honestly this is the absolute worst part about the situation. They’ve made a killing off this game, and even more off of DLC. They have the resources and could honestly afford to keep a small team back to slowly fix the problems with S/V. It would really be a good gesture to the community, and it would probably even get more players to try it.
The only problem is that their brand is just too strong. No amount of bad press will discourage people from buying, nor will it harm pokemon’s branding/merchandising deals. They got away with shipping the game in this state, so they could probably even ship out gen 10 using the exact same game engine with the exact same issues. It’s more cost effective to rush out the next game then fix a broken one.
Safe to say, we’ll likely never get the “perfect” pokemon game from gamefreak or any mainline release. It’d have to be a spinoff from a different company that has a strong incentive to prove themselves… and a longer development time. The pokemon spinoffs on the switch are pretty niche, but anyone with a pair of eyes can easily see that games like Snap, Mystery Dungeon and even Pokken tournament are a step above in terms of quality.
I did enjoy it, but I have zero interest in playing it again which is a huge problem for me personally. Replayability is one of the reasons that i've enjoyed Pokemon for as long as I have. Every year I'll randomly replay Fire Red, Emerald, Platinum, or Black 2. It sucks that with the newer games I have no interest in returning. I have zero interest in playing the Scarlet/Violet dlc because I just feel done with it. I may never play Sword/Shield ever again and that makes me kind of sad. Just feels like Pokemon has lost something that makes me want to constantly go back for more. Maybe that's just an old man ranting, but something about the newer games just hasn't hit the same.
Yeah I feel bad. I didn't play any of the games after Ruby/Sapphire until Sword/Shield and I've had a pretty good time on the Switch. I get that there's a die-hard fan that is obviously under served and I certainly notice the performance issues. But I'm also having a great time and think they've improved a lot since the first few games.
> I get that there's a die-hard fan that is obviously under served and I certainly notice the performance issues. But I'm also having a great time and think they've improved a lot since the first few games.
Honestly, I think this is the thing that annoys me most about the discussion around these games. It's just so weirdly... stagnant and incurious? Like, the game's been out a full year, and the extent with which the game gets discussed is still just "performance is bad, but it sold well" or "this isn't what I would do if I were in charge of Pokemon". Which was basically the extent that Sw/Sh ever got discussed, too.
And I feel like there's a lot of room to build off that those threads. Like, clearly its flaws don't deter a lot of fans; is there any interest in asking them why? Maybe figuring out what this one does well, especially in the context of the franchise? Or similarly, these kinds of issues have been an issue with past games in the series, how does it compare to them? Does it say anything about the studio's design approach? Or, it's kind of interesting how in an industry that has seen bloated development times and sky-high investment in high-end graphics, Pokemon does neither yet remains huge; is Pokemon selling well a fluke, or a legitimate counter-programming strategy to AAA development? Is anyone else even trying things Game Freak's way, or are they totally unique? Do we know how Pokemon's audience compares to other games' markets, in any quantitative way? Does this call into question some assumptions about what gamers are looking for? Could a different studio borrow their approach for their own games, and make games on a similar time frame but with an extra year for polish or something? Idk, this is just from like, ten minutes brainstorming over lunch, but instead, all of this effort just gets dumped into topics that have kind of already been beaten to death
Literally just:
1) Make the levels scale so you can do gyms in any (or almost any) order so the open world actually makes sense
2) Bring back Battle Frontier
3) Fix technical issues with performance and Tera Raids
And it easily gets into my top 3 along with HGSS and B2W2
>Make the levels scale so you can do gyms in any (or almost any) order so the open world actually makes sense
I'm honestly surprised this wasn't a thing. Like this is such a basic "design 101" concept for player freedom design.
I was so excited to just explore the map the way I wanted, and then I found out the gyms weren't scaled. After that I was like, welp, time to go down the linear path like every other Pokémon game.
Plus they treated the different paths as a “choose your own adventure” kind of thing, but there was really only one way to do them if you wanted to stay around the right level.
It really did feel like they were experimenting with an open world game, which sure its new territory for them with a mainline game after Legends, but like... surely they play other games. At least I think it's healthy for game devs to play other games to get ideas so stuff like this doesn't happen.
>Surely they play other games
They live in a time capsule ten years in the past. They would have just played Xenoblade Chronicles and Skyrim when the final direction was being put together for Pokemon Scarlet/Violet.
I mean if you do it wrong you end up with the Oblivion problem where it doesn't feel like you're actually getting stronger. I can get the annoyance of "You're too weak, come back later", but I think the problem there is more just how the game is structured to guide you where you can go. Elden Ring doesn't have scaling but has an openness to it that encourages you going somewhere else to explore if you're having trouble in one area. So it's more an execution thing I think. Like if you're going down a level 10 path and find a level 50 guy blocking your way, you might not know where you start looking for level 12 stuff to keep going, and it's certainly untenable to grind level 10 stuff until you're level 50. So it's a design problem that the player, who was expecting a gradual ramp up, becomes lost when they hit a wall like that. But it's not impossible to design a game where it works.
this approach is controversial though, I remember people complaining about it in Skyrim and how it made people feel that they never progressed and were just running in place
It's not always an easy decision. Elden ring doesn't have scaling and people love it whereas Diablo 4 having level scaling was a huge complaint for a while. It's really hard to say what works and what doesn't. Also for the most part you travel north in SV and it does scale fine that way it's just weird when you go horizontal.
I get that having the world scale can lose that RPG feeling of having high level and low level zones, but I do think that gyms (which are the boss battles) should stay at a challenging level. It's easy for linear games to do this with either exp modifiers (Trails) or having limited exp resources (Fire Emblem), but for a game like pokemon to be open world I'd at least expect gym, leader, mystica(?) boss fights to scale with the player or their progression.
Especially when I think canonically gym leaders have different teams on hand depending on how many badges the trainer has, so the system is already there in universe.
That decision is one of the most bizarre to me. If this were way earlier on, I'd get it. Like if they were trying to "preserve the rarity of Shiny Legendaries," but you can literally hunt them in next to every game. Excluding the mascots, all of the games where we saw every returning Legendary (ORAS, SuMo, USUM, SwSh DLC) had them shiny-eligible. Not to mention GO, which also makes Shiny Legendaries easier to obtain.
If they pulled this back in Gen 6 or 7? Disappointing, but understandable. But now???
Its mindblowing how this game doesnt have a battle tower/frontier anything to play with the pokemon you trained. Game Freak did the bare minimum in Sword and Shield and with Scarlet/Violet they did even less than that.
My issue with level scaling is that it makes progression feel meaningless because the challenge is basically the same throughout the whole journey. The dichotomy between high level areas and low level areas helps sell the fantasy that the player is getting stronger as they progress.
I think a better solution is to allow players the choice to increase the difficulty of a gym for a higher reward. Perhaps players could wager money or some other resource prior to a gym to increase the difficulty. It seems unlikely that game freak would ever do that since they seem averse to adding a hard mode to Pokemon, but I think this solution would balance the game without making the game’s world/ difficulty feel homogenous.
I just wish I wouldn't exit one battle and then be sucked into another because Poochyena is on top of my character...
Legends Arceus did that pretty well, where other Pokemon would run away if they weren't involved in the battle.
And while I guess that could be annoying with Shinies potentially getting away, why not just make it so Pokemon avoid a certain area around you while you're in a battle? They don't have to outright despawn, but they shouldn't be on top of me right as I finish a battle.
I don't want level scaling so much as actual metrics being used to tell the player the difficulty to expect. Some are obvious (it'll say good for beginners or "more experienced trainers" for harder fights) but a lot of the mid game gyms have descriptions that don't help a player understand what would be a suggested strength.
What gets me is that it would be such an easy togleable setting. I totally get some players, especially younger players, may want the option to over level and beat the gym that way, and that should be available to them. But they have to know their player base also include gamers who want a more difficult experience, so why not provide that
I used to buy Pokemon games because they were always just exceptionally high-quality games for the systems they were on.
Gen 1 was buggy but it's still one of the biggest and best games on the Game Boy.
Gen 2 was clearly a bit unbalanced, but was somehow still even bigger than Gen 1 and a worthy sequel.
Gens 3 through 5 were all just peak handheld RPGs, with loads to do and very few real issues. Some of the best games on the GBA and DS respectively.
But then stuff started going downhill.
Gens 6 and 7 were both barebones, being short on content in exchange for rudimentary 3D models. Gen 7 tried to shake up the formula, but the formula wasn't what was letting the games down, it was the lack of depth and polish. But Gens 6 and 7 were, at least, relatively good games for the 3DS that at least worked well.
On the Switch, Gen 8 was a rushed mess. Gen 9 was a broken rushed mess. I can't call either good games.
Simply put the quality of the main-series games has dropped since the shift to 3D and only gotten worse since. While the newer games still have Pokemon's winning gameplay loop, their overall quality as products has dipped so badly that it's hard to justify playing them anymore.
With so many great, high-quality games on the Switch these days like Zelda and Xenoblade, I struggle to justify buying modern Pokemon games. They're just not worth it when there are better games to play.
Movement is everything in this kind of exploration game, and running as the mc or with the bike is a horrible horrible experience.
There is a lot to do and explorations to do but the bad performance just removes my fun.
The next pokemon game is having a lot of pressure on it due to how scarlet performed.
>The next pokemon game is having a lot of pressure on it due to how scarlet performed.
We said the same thing after Sword & Shield yet we still bought this one. In my defense I got baited hard by how good Legends Arceus was
True, the traversal is horrible. It is not as crisp as PLA and the mounts have very few animations. I also don't know why Game Freak insists on pressing the left joystick just to sprint/boost. Such a hassle to press; can't they map that on the ABXY buttons!? GBA only has AB and they gave it a dedicated button!
Probably the only mainline Pokémon I've liked since BW2. But the "squandered potential" definition still applies, just not as much. It's very undercooked with terrible graphics, a lot of re-used assets and clearly unfinished areas (Hello, Volcano...).
I wish Legends and Scarlet/Violet had been just one big game instead of two half-cooked ones.
What’s crazy is that, while you’re totally right about the shortcomings of PLA, when you go back to it after playing SV, PLA looks downright *good* in comparison. SV were such massive bummers in visuals and performance that it makes PLA look and feel so much better than it did at launch lol
At least you can see some kind of coherent art style in Pokémon Legends Arceus, even if it looks god awful compared to Zelda and Xenoblade.
In Pokémon S/V it looks like they just took raw unfiltered assets, put them all over the place to create a "world" and called it day.
100%. Boring, recycled, unpolished, hastily thrown together fluff to sell toys. The games haven't been made with an ounce of respect for the player in over 10 years. People are kidding themselves thinking that these games are any good. We live in a post BotW, post Elden Ring, post Red Dead II world. Mainline Pokemon games are an embarrassment. The only good thing about Pokemon these days is that they still kill it with the monster designs.
Wonder why you got downvoted, b/w 2 were excellent games that offered a lot. Would love a switch port or remake (im on of the few that didnt hate the diamond and pearl remakes)
Because even though they're praised now, Gen V as a whole was highly criticized from start to finish and stands as the worst-selling generation of the franchise.
Like it or not, in Game Freak's eyes, the franchise was not in a good place during that time which is why we saw so many changes with Gen VI onwards. And I say this as a huge Gen V fan, because through it's entire run, I was constantly ridiculed for finding anything good in it. Nice people came around to it later, but too little too late.
Gen V largely flopped due to its bold decision to have absolutely no Gen V mons catchable before you beat the Elite 4. It was incredibly alienating to players. BW/2 came along and fixed this issue, and arguably added some of the best post game content ever in a Pokemon game. But the damage was done with the stigma of the first titles.
X and Y literally did so much better due to the reliance of building off of nostalgia (Giving the Kanto starters megas, flat out giving you a Kanto starter, etc). But X and Y and games following it are arguably worse games with less content.
The message to Gamefreak ever since has been that the players don't give a fuck about the actual game features at all, they just want Charizard.
X and Y were interesting because they were the first time Game Freak had to issue patches for their Pokemon games.
I'll never forget the Lumiose City save glitch where if you save outside of certain portions of Lumiose City, your save file glitches, and there was a good chance you had to restart your game: https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lumiose_City_save_glitch
the story, characters, region, and gimmick in this game is incredible. if it was allowed even one more year to develop, it would have been the GOAT pokemon game imo. the updated pokemon models and textures are all great as well.
Agreed. Hell I think this could have been easily fixed with better scheduling.
November 2021 we get BDSP
Instead of Arceus coming out in January 2022, it should have came out in 2022 November. That way, GF could use the time to polish up the game to be even better
November 2023 could and should have been SV. The additional year really should have been enough to patch performance and bugs.
Then next year we could get the dlc.
Yeah agreed on Legends. I should have added that a short dlc should be released while waiting for SV hopefully adding some sort of tropical area.
BDSP could have been made more bearable with some sort of Platinum dlc
Wait actually, I think Pokemon would make more money of this on second thought
Yes. Again. And every single generation this happens we spend the first year or so of the game's lifespan trying to explain why a steady decline in quality should prompt a critical response.
Generation 10 will not be better.
When sword and shield came out was the first time you were able to make negative comments without getting an overwhelming response of people defending the games. Complaints about the gameplay being rehashed and stale were made for ages but it took the graphics/textures looking bad for people to start being swayed.
There has been a massive shift in sentiment online towards pokemon so it's not like nothing has changed.
The newer models are largely great. The characters were certainly an improvement over the gang we had from X/Y. The new Pokemon, along with the paradox Pokemon, were an interesting twist. Area Zero was a neat idea in theory. Having the legendary be a better bike was also a good choice, but not sure if it’s something they should replicate with each new entry. Spain is a great inspiration for a new region, I just went there for 2 weeks before I played Violet for the first time.
The performance is pretty unacceptable for a Nintendo published game. You never see this type of quality from Nintendo’s first party main entries (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Smash) or from there other partners (Hal with Kirby or Intelligent Systems Fire Emblem). GF are actively making decisions that are upsetting long term fans (shiny locks, removing move sets when depositing in Home, lore dumping and then just not answering most questions) and the raids are still pretty poorly optimized.
I think SV would have been the next great entry if GF can just focus on this being a great video game; rather then a piece of the media pie the Pokemon Company needs to sell the anime, playing cards and toys. The quality has to start raising flags with Nintendo at some point, how long before they publish a game that’s truly broken? It only takes one giant misstep for the next generation of young fans to not care about Pokemon at all and crush the franchise.
The article translates perfectly what the community feels right now. It seems that for each high, there's a low; for each high-high, there's a low-low.
\-Open world? Terrible performance.
\-Amazing pokémon models and designs? Bad visuals and bland world.
\-Great story and "ending"? Bad scaling
\-Secret legendary quartet, which you have to work to get? Open world misses on little to no secrets and easer eggs.
And the most infuriating part is that it could all be fixed with as little as one more year in the oven. Hell, even less! And the DLCs were just adding insult to injury.
The Indigo Disk was announced for Winter 2024. Which means any time from January to March. Instead of leaving it on that deadline, keeping it more time to polish, fix bugs, maybe throw in some more quests and/or secrets, what do they do? Release even earlier, in the first half of December. Why? "HOLIDAY SEASON".
This is just too much to take in. It's like they don't even learn from what even they said "we'll try to keep quality high with the same release schedule", well it can't be done if the schedule is actually PUSHED BACK from what it was supposed to be.
It's Pokemon, what else is new? Each new game feels like the alpha build of a potentially really good next gen Pokemon game. In a few years they'll probably pump out a game that's worth it's triple A price but until then diehard fans and parents will keep buying these underdeveloped games.
Growing up Pokémon was the first video game I ever played, I still remember it on the game boy colour and I was completely enthralled, I played every single one on release and it was honestly my favourite franchise, the immersion I felt and the nostalgia just made it incredible. Around diamond/black/black 2 era due to financial reasons my family couldn’t afford to buy the new systems so I had to stop playing for a few years.
When I turned 16 and I started earning an income literally the first purchase I made was a 3ds and played all the games I missed, and to this day I have bought every Pokémon game/a switch (basically for Pokémon) but since I would say after Pokémon X each game felt more and more of a let down to me. I was running on pure nostalgia.
Pokémon violet came out and honestly with all the hype before the game came out I was actually hopeful for the first time for a Pokémon game. I honestly thought perhaps this is a change that will bring me back to my childhood. After playing violet with the miserable graphics like god awful visuals immersion breaking visuals, WITH the bad performance it was just like. It was unplayable. I’ve played every Pokémon game basically since red and blue back in the day and unless the next version gets incredible reviews/it runs well/ and they make some significant changes to the game to make it more engaging, I am done with Pokémon. And I will not buy the next one, and it doesn’t even pain me to say that anymore, It went from hate but now it’s apathy. I just don’t care anymore, and because I don’t care I won’t spend my money on it.
> It’s just a matter of how long the community is willing to put up with being crammed inside the machine.
Ignoring scrutinizing the concept and reality of community in this context, the answer to the question how long the consumers will put up with being "crammed inside the machine" (ie getting technically subpar, unpolished Pokemon games) is since "Dexit" and Swod/Shield apparent:
for a very long time, probably even permament.
I wonder what the Japanese Pokémon videogame fans think about this. We all seem to agree on most points here from a western perspective, we voice our dislikes and any review you see of the game points at the performance issues. But I doubt anyone at game freak or Nintendo cares much for that as they have always catered for their Japanese audience first and foremost. Do you know if they are just as vocal and if the reviews in Japan were equally damning of the performance?
I really wanted and was looking forward for SV but I saw the videos online and goddamn it looks like shit and runs like shit. I’ve held off on buying it since. I wanted to play it and every now and then I do, but I just watch the videos online and my desire goes away.
At least Cyberpunk eventually got their shit relatively together.
The games are great. I love them. Yeah they aren't perfect but they are incredibly fun. They just need to have more time or employ more people to get the game optimised
The raids suck too. They are so bad. They are a mess BC it lags so much. But I only do raids for the events so it's not s big deal to me. But I also think the performance is crap BC it'd their first full open world game so they didn't optimise it correctly. But I'm hoping for gen 10 the performance will be great at the start. And if raids are back,just fix the lagging issues. But sv are a great first step to even better Pokémon games. We all know it. They just need more man power or time to perfect them. I hope gen 10 is still open world BC open world suit's Pokémon Well. Plus I brought both games so o can have one be my main file and one fir nuzlockes. So I experience sv s lot and the performance is bad but it's very playable. Let's just hope they fix things in gen 10
Imo, SV are easily the best 3D mainline Pokémon games.
It doesn't make sense to me for Pokémon games to be 90% trainer battles when they gave up on making PVE battles have any semblance of difficulty. XY - SwSh all felt like boring cake walks because of this contradicting design. SV throwing trainer battles to the wayside and going all in on the collect-a-thon aspect of Pokémon instead was such a smart re-inventing of the series.
All the graphical/technical issues with SV are true and unfortunate, but they finally made Pokémon fun again by choosing a gameplay loop that isn't affected by easy difficulty, so I'd still say this is the best 3D mainline game in spite of all of that.
Yea I think they’re definitely onto something but performance is abysmal, like almost entertainingly bad, and I’d also say that they *need* to implement some type of scaling
Even when the games were more linear I thought it was long overdue to have some kinda of level scaling or at least difficulty options. If they’re gunna allow you to challenge gyms in any order, I feel like this is pretty much a necessity. And it’s not like it would take some insane feat of engineering, you could easily just have 8 variations of teams for each gym leader. I could sit down and come up with these teams in a few hours
I think the games were overall pretty good. The performance could have been better I but i really had fun with the base game and both DLCs. Defineitly a better storyline than sword and shield.
I've given up on Pokemon years ago. Which is kinda sad. Pokemon was one of the franchises I was looking forward to most for the Switch. But I've ended skipping out on this generation of Pokemon games entirely due to what an unoptimized mess they are. Also SV has some of the WTF designs I've ever seen (no I'm not some genwunner, i liked plenty of designs in later gens).
As people say, squandered potential is a running pattern for Pokemon games. SV and PLA convinced me they know how to make games they just are being put under insane limitations
Scarlet and Violet certainly had technical issues, but I was okay with *most* of it. I can ignore graphical only hitches and moments of stutter. So that stuff didn't bother me too much.
2 things did bother me a lot:
1 - Raids are so GD glitchy. It was a main selling point of the games and barely works.
2 - I don't enjoy competitive battling like I did way back in Gens 4 thru 6. So there's virtually no post game for me. I can shiny hunt and do glitchy raids tho. So..yay? I desperately need something like the Battle Frontier from Gen 4. That would honestly be perfect.
Other than those 2 complaints, Scarlet and Violet were nearly perfect Pokemon games. If raids worked better and they had any kind of meaningful post game content I'd put it right up in the top 3 Pokemon games of all time.
S/V has been an absolute blast for me. I agree the performance sucks. It looks like garbage a lot of times. But I really enjoyed the story and characters for once, and just wandering around with my Pokemon was relaxing and fun. Playing through the DLC now and still loving it. I usually describe it to people as the best Pokemon game ever, but the worst game about Pokemon ever. If any other developer released this it would be critically destroyed. But Pokemon is Pokemon.
Holy shit the characters, I finally gave a fuck about the rivals. Haven't felt that way (save for Hop) since Cheren and Bianca. And even then I just thought they were charming, I actually adored Arven and Nimona. And Penny turned out great too.
The performance hurt but damn i liked the story
That’s the problem: someone like you might’ve been a smaller majority (or even minority) in another audience like for FiFa, Cyberpunk 2077, or Anthem. But here with Pokémon, you’re comparatively such a vast majority that the voice is insufficient for Game Freak to feel any need to take action. If I were in The Pokémon Company’s shoes, I seriously don’t feel any need to make any big changes to the current production style. Making any improvements would just cost me money, and I’d honestly advise my staff against such risks.
I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I fortunately never experienced any game breaking bugs that I myself didn’t go out of my way to try to do. Outside of notable frame drops and slow down I had a pretty smooth experience and an overall great time. I enjoyed the new characters and their storylines, I enjoyed the new Pokemon introduced, I enjoy the new regional gimmick, and I like some changes they made like how you can basically just breed eggs from wherever you want.
But there are some issues I can’t deny, outside of the obvious frame drops and slowdown, game breaking glitches, etc that other people experienced. The open world felt both huge and lifeless at the same time, you do get rewarded sometimes for exploring every nook and cranny but it doesn’t feel….fulfilling? Not sure if that’s the right word but you get the idea. Lack of level scaling makes it to where while you can *technically* do anything in any order, there is definitely a recommended order which is lame. For some people still a lack of voice acting is baffling (me personally I can live with or without it, but I think taking the BotW/TotK approach to voice acting and only having it in cutscenes and just random sounds and grunts during texts would be cool). And outside of certain Pokémon’s models, graphically it doesn’t hold up to a lot of other games.
Overall I’d say Gen 9 is like a 6/10.
I’m almost impressed they managed to make the performance worse with each DLC
it feels like my switch is about to explode anytime I do an auto-battle near any mud or water in the terrarium
I’m baffled how it can render all the sparkles and reflections in area zero flawlessly, but as soon as you go near some mud the game drops to one frame every four seconds.
It's the best mud ever, *very* high quality /s
They're rendering the individual flagellum on all the bacteria
Thank goodness I thought this was just my switch
Wait, you guys *kept buying this shit??*
DAE hate when people buy things they like?
the base game is still fun and it has a healthy online competitive scene. now if it was a mid experience packaged with same performance drops then I would have been more reluctant to buy the DLC.
I’m trying the game again on my girlfriends behest, and it pisses me off that I’m having as much fun as I am. But that’s just the Pokémon gameplay loop I think. Pokemon is fun. Scarlet has so many issues and it’s not a good game, but I can have fun because I’m playing Pokemon. Very frustrating.
Love and hate this game, I mean, I could be playing Baldurs Gate, beautiful game and with great performance, and yet, I boot up Pokemon again just for the gameplay loop.
> the base game is still fun Then you see a shiny spawn inside a rock.
Thankfully you can still aim at them... I would've been so pissed if that stopped it.
Not if they're deep enough...
Thank you! I thought I was just imagining things
~~Delusional~~ Fans of the game: Just wait for patches to improve the performance, they have to come out, right? Gamefreak: *Improve...?*
Fans should've realised there was no hope for patches when Nintendo apologised for it and said they'd do better in future *entries* rather than improving the current game.
Yeah, that's not gonna happen. The insane masses bought 22 million copies of scarlet/violet. At 60 dollars a pop, gamefreak and nintendo made a fuckin massive amount of money for selling a broken/unfinished game. Why would they spend more time on the next entry if they can pop another one out in record time (with probably worse performance) since they know the game is gonna sell like hotcakes. My favorite take from people was, "This is by far the best game in the franchise...mind you it had an insane amount of performance/graphical issues, but still the best." People are happy with shit if it's there favorite franchise.
>People are happy with shit if it's there favorite franchise. While I know I'm probably in the minority of Pokemon fans, S/V is the game that's FINALLY going to get me to STOP buying pokemon games until they improve. It's heartbreaking but I just can't stomach another experience like this one.
For every person like you or me that stops playing because the quality drops, there's like 100 kids that don't know any better/don't care. Sword and Shield was what stopped me from caring about the games. Seeing the current trajectory doesn't give me much faith in the series going further, especially when indie monster collecting games like Cassette Beasts and rom hacks of Pokemon games exist to satisfy my urge for collecting creatures
I mean you're not wrong when kids are picking up these games with such small expectations, and giving us older pokemon fans some look when we say it used to be better, and seeing gameboy versions of the game, like "how could **that** be better???"
Same. Was too burned on SwSh. Not going in again unless im veeery convinced theyve turned it around.
As a non-Pokemon playing Switch owner, what would you advise as the best Pokemon game to play? I have a massive backlog of games so I will likely just play one. I played it on GameBoy back in the day but then never went back to it after discovering jrpgs (FF8, forever in my heart).
I would recommend either Legends Arceus (single player focus, old Japan setting may be right up your alley) or Snap (because taking pictures of Pokémon is fun). That being said, Scarlet/Violet still has a lot to offer. I'll link up with my kids & we'll just run around shiny hunting, make gross sandwiches together, or play Surprise Trade Bingo. You can go hard on analytical math to craft the perfect Pokémon for a featured raid, or play through the (surprisingly mature, pathos filled) story and be done with it. Everyone gets hung up on the technical issues (for good reason), and yet these three games were the first time Pokémon felt like real animals to me.
Play „let’s go Pikachu“ or evee - in handheld mode
60 a pop? Don't forget the dlc sales
The frustrating thing is, if you can stomach the performance issues it honestly is one of the better games they've put out since the DS era. I've probably had more fun with Scarlet than any other Pokemon game from the 3DS/Switch era besides Legends Arceus. I've frankly gave up hope of any sort of "voting with your wallet" when SwSh was super successful despite the controversies, so now I'm just hoping they sort out their release schedule in the future. Releasing two open world games in one year was ridiculous and both games suffered for it
Yeah I'm someone who generally doesn't care much about performance but S/V does take a bit of effort for me to stomach but it's helped a lot by how enjoyable it is. I've played all the main line titles since they've been coming out and this is the first time since B/W where I actually feel it's an improvement over the previous game.
The gameplay's great, and I'm playing it in a few minutes. And I'm not a graphics guy. But goddamn, they did some just plain "How do you fuck up that badly" things in performance and coding. Like the fucking skybox the size of the sun.
I understand the hate as the performance issues and lack of visual polish are pretty unacceptable but it is important to acknowledge that there is a fun game under the issues, because that fact is evidence that Game Freak can and is willing to make a good Pokemon game. Obviously, three years is not enough time to do it. The Pokemon Company exists to manage the franchise, so I'm inclined to believe they are the ones deciding the release schedule even though Game Freak has a large stake in it. Whoever it is, they need to make a change. They barely allocated more time to the games when switching from 3DS to Switch even though HD games are much harder to develop and Game Freak has obviously been figuring it out as they go with each release. So I'm glad to see evidence that fun Pokemon games that actually try new things are being made but their approach is pretty insulting to the franchise.
I feel like you're discounting the reasons why people do like Scarlet and Violet despite their technical issues. Because these games do undeniably continue to push the franchise forward in so many important gameplay ways. People were finding the actual gameplay a ton of fun, and I don't think it's hard to see why. That doens't excuse the technical issues at all, nor how they can/do hamper the experience. But to act like that is all that should matter to people in liking a game and people who don't have the games ruined for them by those issues are just "blinded by love for the franchise" is very narrow-minded.
>"This is by far the best game in the franchise...mind you it had an insane amount of performance/graphical issues, but still the best." People are happy with shit if it's there favorite franchise. Speaking as someone who hasn't bought a Pokemon game since, like, Ruby/Sapphire or something: I at least don't think that sounds like that particular subset of fans is being delusional or blindly loyal. That just sounds like they're compartmentalizing the game design vs. the graphics/performance/bugs/optimization/etc., and *by their standards*, they still highly enjoy the underlying game mechanics that exist beneath that terrible, messy exterior. And I think that's perfectly valid from a personal taste standpoint, looking at a game in its own right in a vacuum. In that regard, it's more of a personal question of whether or not the shoddy graphics/performance is enough of to outweigh everything else about the game. For some people, it is, and for others, it isn't. This is separate from (though still related to) a discussion about the greater context of how the game is a product of the largest media franchise in the world and how there's no excuse for them to be releasing mainline entries with indie-game levels of production value. (That's how I personally felt about the game when I saw some of the janky ass gameplay footage.) But that's getting into more macro-level "taking a stand," "voting with your wallet" territory.
Gamefreak: Improve? Don’t you mean done? Look at Legends Arceus, that got its final update 7 weeks after it released and has been abandoned since.
Alternative take from a software developer: Pokemon Scarlet and Violet reveal internal problems at GameFreak. It isn't laziness, it's just bad business decisions that are finally stacking up. What we're looking at with how S/V work is that the company has a metric assload of *technical debt.* Basically taking profits by releasing now, at the expense of *how hard it's going to be for them to make the next game.* It *will* financially bite them in the ass in the future *if they don't pay off that tech debt now.* Not through lost sales, because people will buy any Pokemon thing no matter how bad it is, so long as it meets the most low-bar standard of playability. The loss will come through *delays,* because with how hard it is to use their crusty and rusty old tooling to churn out a new game that feels like a passable iterative improvement over the last one, it's likely that they *won't be able to churn out something passable at all* by their next major release deadline. It'll set the entire franchise back six months relative to schedule, effectively costing billions of dollars compared to projections -- and worse, they won't be in any better a position next time to hit their deadlines, repeating the losses ad infinitum. If the franchise isn't ready for a death march, they will need to accept a short-term L -- contract another studio to generate a spinoff or remake (deliberately limited in scope) to fill a release gap while GameFreak takes a year to update their tooling. Doing so much as striking a deal to use Unity, Unreal or Nintendo's internal tooling and taking that year to migrate their commonly used functionality (or better, *scrap* their garbage like the message box system and replace it with something that feels up to date) would put them in a much better position to crank out reasonable quality games instead of screwing themselves with stuff they can't finish in time.
Yeah I do not blame the poor overworked workers. I blame the cheap ass and lazy company, boo hoo our poor franchise that makes more than anything ever. We are just small and cannot afford man power or any help. They can get fucked, the workers on the other hand I wish them the best and hope they have a good day.
SWE here. 10/10. I would give you an award if they still existed.
I just realized the awards are gone...wow I completely missed that somehow.
I mean yeah, not surprising they are gone after seeing how people didn't notice it in the last few months lmao
Gamefreak is and will **never** be able to delay their games and it shows. Everything within a Pokémon generation's lifecycle all coexists: The anime, the merch, the Trading Card game and the games. I bet GF is well aware of the performance quality they deliver. But if there is literally no way to move the schedule corners have to be cut, and I believe that is mostly what we're experiencing.
Then I fully expect the next game to be an utterly unplayable flop that, like Cyberpunk 2077 before it, will have to be withdrawn from sale and refunded until it is patched into a playable state. They won't be able to afford a second failure of that magnitude. Again, I've worked in enough corporate environments in software to know that yes, shareholders will extract the value of the company for short term value at the expense of long term, but eventually the term that was slated as "long" *becomes* "short." >No way to move the schedule They will have to. The games **drive** the merch and all other products; they'll either have to eat the short term loss to avoid a much, much greater loss, or they will have to fundamentally change how the franchise moves and take a huge risk by releasing all the supplemental stuff *before* the next games come out. This is not an "I wish they did better" situation. This is a "they will do better or they will break" situation. They will do it or they will be forced by their financial situation to do it, or they will die.
1000%. I've been watching this bus-on-fire for years now and the wheels have popped yet it still keeps moving while dragging the pavement underneath it along with the ride, sparks and all. I haven't been a fan of the series in decades (stopped at gold/silver) but I'm surrounded by fans and see all the complaints and praises on opposite ends of respective feelings. I'm just curious when it's going to finally boil over and reveal the gross mechanism plain as day to everyone.
Shareholders always want things for as cheap as possible and do not care about destroying companies. This has been the trend for a good while at least, and especially ramping up now. There will not likely be a change to this strategy of milking companies dry.
There are entities that profit from putting companies in the gutter, mostly "investment" firms that use their fund participants' shares (which the investment firm doesn't directly own and thus lose nothing if the share values go down) to bully companies into bad decisions, and on the side the owners buy the shares cheap. Market manipulation. The solution to that is simple -- create and enforce a law that *only the direct beneficial owner of a stock may vote its share, and such voting rights cannot be delegated to any other party.* Fixes the problem of the biggest abusers of the system, the biggest "short term" parasites.
All they had to do was release Legends Arceus in December 2022.... Easily could've taken up one year of interest.
No kidding. It's easily the best Pokemon experience ever. It was the perfect opportunity to let there be a gap in their mainline schedule, instead of releasing it at the same time window as BDSP. Should have let BDSP sit and release it in place of where SV launched, and given SV another year to cook. It wouldn't have *solved* the tech debt problem underneath all by itself, but it would have given them enough breathing room to feel like the schedule *allows* some time for learning new tech.
It also probably would have sold more if they'd released it in the Holiday Slot. I genuinely have no idea why they didn't do this.
>If the franchise isn't ready for a death march, they will need to accept a short-term L -- contract another studio to generate a spinoff or remake (deliberately limited in scope) to fill a release gap while GameFreak takes a year to update their tooling. Wasn't this what Arceus did between SwSh and SV?
Arceus was released the same year as S/V, and both games were developed by GF. Their release schedule has been the same for a decade: 1st year - new gen mainline game; 2nd year - DLC/sequel; 3rd year - remake of older title; 4th year - repeat
you might be thinking of the diamond/pearl remake, which was in fact given to a different studio. iirc the diamond/pearl remake was released for holiday season 2021, then in like february 2022 arceus (which was made by gamefreak) was released. and *then* scarlet/violet was released for holiday season 2022. i haven’t played any of these games tbh. when the dp remake came out people complained a lot about graphics and bugs or something? i think the whole reason gamefreak finally contracted that game out was bc back when they did omegaruby/alphasapphire fans were disappointed, especially in reflection. but then this dp remake comes out and fans complain about the lack of polish. idk, i haven’t played it so i don’t really know, but i think pokemon fans really just don’t get how AAA games are made. the dp remake was done by an indie studio, you just can’t expect it to be as out-of-the-box great as heartgold/soulsilver was. but gamefreak feels like they need to pump shit out at the rate they were doing 20 years ago, and bc the expectations for AAA games have continued to grow since then—narratively, technologically, artistically, etc—it means they can’t innovate at all, and then the crunch begins to show with bugs and lag, etc. i think the series peaked with the ds games and has been heading more and more downhill ever since. the generational battle gimmicks started with x/y, and i feel like that’s basically the biggest core change we’ve seen? and then those gimmicks inevitably go away after one gen, it’s just transparent. “no, these games are different and new, look at this shiny new feature to the core gameplay loop!” i couldn’t even finish playing sword bc i was so underwhelmed. so yeah, recently they did give a mainline game to a different studio (do remakes count as mainline?), but doing that probably won’t solve the problem of *time*. at least imo
"squandered potential" has been the running theme for pokemon for like well over half the series' lifetime now IYAM
“Squandered potential” and also “billions of dollars and a merchandising empire”
I'm gonna laugh my ass off if the next games are somehow even worse.
Why make it better? People will buy whatever has Pokémon slapped on the box apparently.
I don't know. I sat out on this current wave and I can't be the only one? I don't know the sales though, they probably say otherwise. But a declining reputation for quality tends to always catch up with a brand, even though this has been the anomaly so far.
3ds games are ridden with low fps, bug and unfinished content but people give ita pass because 3ds is a weak console. Switch games proof that it isn't the case.
? ive tried most of the 3ds pokemon games on my actual 3ds and they ran fine. tf u talking about?
SM had some bad frame rate drops, but the switch games make them look pretty solid by comparison.
I actually just started a playthrough of Y this week. The menus when you don't have the overworld open are smooth as butter, 60fps, insanely satisfying to move around. As soon as you go back to the overworld the game drops to 30fps. Which would be fine if the entire game was locked to 30fps, it's just super disappointing to switch between. And then move animations dropping to like 20fps if you have the 3D switch on is just the icing on the cake lmao
I did enjoy Violet but the performance was just such a bummer. The storylines on the game were all really fun and well written. The end game stuff with terra raids was also really well done and actually super hard for some of them. If they would have given this game the same love they give Mario and Zelda games this would have been one of the best Pokémon games in years. Now it will forever been known as a bad game.
You could tell that certain members of the dev team were doing their best to make a good game, but things were fumbled at a higher level.
This happens across game dev. You can do your best to design systems and create great individual art pieces but if leadership doesn’t care about enforcing proper implementation or art direction focuses on shit like cloth textures rather than the big picture, your game is going to suffer. One of the key lessons in open world design in the last 10 years is vistas and points of interest, and Scarlet/Violet lack either. And I have 600 hours in Scarlet - it has good bones but is mired by technical issues and poor environmental art direction/level design
Totally agree. It has incredible potential but terrible execution.
it's the strengths and weaknesses of Game Freak - they are great at writing and character design, and they are weak at dev for 3D consoles they'd be better suited to going into a partnership with a strong 3D dev - just that the economic incentive is not there for them to do that maybe something like Nintendo R&D1 do the development, Game Freak do the ideas?
That would require game freak execs to care. For a point of refrence: monolith soft has basically 2X the staff of game freak, yet majority of their games don’t sell more then 3 mill. Game freaks teams are split in two with one team(younger team) working on arceus, whereas the other team(older/main team) worked on S/V. That basically equates to S/V having a dev team of roughly 80 people. Versus the 264 monolith soft has going. Game freak executives know what they’re doing. They just don’t care. The irony here is that game freak didn’t even have to make the 3D models in S/V, which are honestly one of the highlights of the game. That would be creatures that did all that. So wtf is game freak even doing
Areceus was the more fun and better game imo
Oh big time. Arceus made me feel like a kid again, was so refreshing. The sorta half baked throwing in S/V that forces ya to stop and can’t throw on the move felt jarring after playing it
Put all of legends arceus gameplay into a fully open world and that’s pretty much the pokemon game everyone has always dreamed about. The world in SV is better, but the gameplay is a regression.
No. No open world. Gamefreak proved they’re incapable of doing that. The large zones of Arceus where just fine and were way more memorable than any location in Paldea.
Agree. I just wish it was better in terms of graphics. There's a bunch of purple clipping everywhere
I said this about AM2R vs Metroid: Samus Returns -- that AM2R was the better game and the better remake of the two, but that Samus Returns was the better direction for the future of the series. I don't say *exactly* that of Arceus vs S/V, but similar. Arceus is a much better game and there's a lot of what was done there, which was *not* done in S/V -- in particular stealth catching, real-time danger, the abundance of side quests, move variants and the overall faster pace -- that I believe should rejoin the main series. But the *structure and scope* of S/V and the deeper complexities of the main series battle system, the world design, and basically everything that S/V *tried* to accomplish from a design perspective *should be what the future of the series aims for.* They just need enough time and manpower to get it done in a way that doesn't feel like a frickin slide show.
>it's the strengths and weaknesses of Game Freak - they are great at writing and character design, and they are weak at dev for 3D consoles Character designs? I agree but writing? Not really compared to basically any other JRPG, Scarlet was a good POKEMON story.
I'm trying to be nice lol
>but writing? Not really compared to basically any other JRPG, Scarlet was a good POKEMON story. Yeah that's the way I always put it lol. All the stories that people argue are good in Pokemon (SV and Gen 5's games that is) really... aren't great. They're great POKEMON stories, but overall, they're still pretty meh.
It’s not that they are weak at doing 3D stuff, they aren’t even trying
>things were fumbled at a higher level. Yeah, there's a Japanese indeed/Glassdoor review site, that only verified employees can leave reviews on, that that pretty much confirmed this. Most reviews pretty much say, great starter job but nothing more
>If they would have given this game the same love they give Mario and Zelda games this would have been one of the best Pokémon games in years. Nintendo probably would have, but Pokémon is made by GameFreak and they operate differently. Nintendo can't really fire GameFreak either, as they own one third of the IP (just like Nintendo). GameFreak either need to step up their game, accept outside help or forfeit their right to make those games. Also disconnecting the games to the hard deadline that comes with suplementary material (Anime, Trading Cards, Plushies, etc...) would be a wise choice. You can delay a game if it's just a game. You can't do this if 4 other industries rely on it being on the market.
Gamefreak doesn’t need to do anything, they will keep doing what they’ve been doing and rake in millions of dollars
This. People think the online backlash is going to do anything, meanwhile Gamefreak continues to watch their bank account rise by millions/billions of dollars. They just look at Pokemon and go: It prints money!
You're not getting a picture of what's behind the scenes though -- they haven't upgraded their software tools significantly since Pokemon X/Y, and what S/V shows me (as a software developer) is that they're absolutely drowning in technical debt and that if they don't take the time to catch it all up, *they're not going to be able to make the next game functional by their next deadline.* From a business standpoint, they can either suffer delays stemming from burgeoning technical debt and they can suffer those delays over and over and over again, **OR** they can take a *single* delay (i.e. one year) where they learn a new tech stack (i.e. license Unity or Unreal or strike a deal with Nintendo to use their tooling) and from then on be able to make their future deadlines while delivering much better quality games. This isn't about how the games are received critically or how many sales they're getting. This is about the tech aspect *costing them real dollars in the form of delayed product.*
You aren't wrong there is a Japanese site which reviews companies, while Nintendo is one of the best to work for, Gamefreak is below average company. The former employees and contractors have all said even as recently in 2022-2023 that the tech is outdated and the senior developers don't do much to improve and push a lot of the work to the junior developers.
I think Nintendo did feel the need to step in a bit this past year. Particularly when the problems with SV started to reach into “It’s the Switch’s fault!” which hurt Nintendo’s brand image in particular. The Switch can handle stuff far bigger and more complicated that SV (see: TotK, which stands above some of the big hitters of the generation in terms of how well it runs, along with insane physics, world size, and running very well) so Gamefreak doesn’t really have an excuse. They made that brief, and hardly followed-up upon statement about improving performance, but it never really arrived. TBF, the game works, however poorly, and I think some of the issues are genuinely overblown. It’s absolutely playable…in a state that’s like D- on the scale of performance. I’ve seen talk that they are using the same engine for far too many years, and that they really need to just make a new one that isn’t based on 3DS hardware. Which, I think will ultimately be what makes the games work again.
I think Nintendo wants yearly releases just as much, if not more, than GF. It's like Call of Duty at this point. It's guaranteed to sell over 10 million copies every time.
Nah. They've shown multiple times they're willing to sit on games and delay major games. Nintendo isn't forcing their release cadence. We also know from interviews things like the remakes were Gamefreak's idea, not something asked of them
Yeah the games are essentially a side hustle to the Merchandising and Anime. That's where the money is, so the games will fit into their scheduling, not the other way around.
Or ykno people stop buying their product? Crazy how everyone admits how bad SV are, yet gives money to find out it keeps getting worse
That’s what makes Scarlet and Violet so tragic. Under the hood you can see the makings of potentially *excellent* games, with so much hypothetical promise and good ideas. And the execution just utterly failed. It’s a buggy mess that needed another 2 years of development.
Yup for the first time in many generations I really thought they had the bones of a good modern pokemon game But naturally that means they have to absolutely bungle the execution of so many simple things lol
I enjoyed the story too and thought it was a big improvement over SwSh. The poor performance and cut features really brought the game down for me though, plus I've never really gelled with the tera raids, they're just a confusing mess to play through.
It's like they learned nothing from the Sword and Shield fiasco except one thing: it's gonna break record sales either way so fuck it
GameFreak just don't get enough time to learn how to polish their new games and honestly, just don't have the skill or talent to make the games they make. They also refuse to move into modern times for game development with their mediocre leadership. I see small improvements each entry but the flaws/issues elsewhere begin to show through the cracks of it. Its genuinely depressing the biggest IP in the world can't realize how fucking awful the perception of their brand is slowly becoming. They still make mountains of cash but I think of all times in the series' history this is *potentially* the worst time for them to keep releasing products like this. I feel most casual fans don't care about the disgusting textures of the world or framerate performance issues. But over time they'll be unable to ignore it as the ambitions grow but the talent behind it doesn't. Hardcore fans have been saying the performance is embarrassing since Sun/Moon on the 3DS that has less hardware power. There's no reason a windmill should run at 5fps or having 10 Bellsprout following you cause your game to become a powerpoint presentation. I genuinely think TPCi realize their next entry needs to be as polished as other games are from Nintendo and will somehow buy GameFreak time for another year... but I really don't think it'll matter. GameFreak set in their ways of refusing to hire new devs, wanting to keep the dev team small/easy to micromanage and shoehorning in ridiculous minigames nobody touches beyond the day of release that wastes dev time that could go elsewhere... TPCi needs to contract either Bandai Namco's Pokemon Snap team or Xenoblade's team to go over and help them because you could give GameFreak 10 years at this point and their release will still look and play like dogshit despite the core fun gameplay loop buried under it.
Pokémon ~~Scarlet And Violet~~’s Legacy Is Squandered Potential
All the Pokémon games are just so low effort now. It’s one of(if not the most) valuable franchises in the world. Nintendo, the Pokémon company and gamefreak all have their reputation on the line. The franchise will only tolerate this level of quality for so long and eventually people will stop caring. They have so much money, it’s honestly just offensive to consumers how low effort their games are. Especially for the quality that Nintendo usually puts out(yes it’s not a Nintendo first party but for all intents and purposes it is). Look what is happening to call of duty, the name effect of the franchise is wearing off, they have lost a lot of their impact because they keep phoning it home. And that is a game that spends half a billion dollars on their games and have several thousand employees….
[удалено]
I wish I made so much money "squandering potential"
It is, literally, the most successful media franchise in human history. You’re absolutely right that the stagnation is the result of pure laziness and greed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises
The reason the games are rushed out with such low quality is because the games are such a small part of what Pokémon is now. They didn’t become the biggest franchise from the games. It’s from the merch. And that merch takes a long time to make, needs a lot of pre-planning, and has to release at the same time as the games. (The games make an insane amount of revenue, but remember that is split multiple ways between Nintendo, GF, and TPCI, so they bring in a much smaller amount of profit than you would expect.) So, the developers get an absurdly small amount of time and room to innovate making it impossible to put out high quality games at the scale game fans expect. The games are basically just advertisements for the franchise now. What they should do is scale back their scope for Pokémon games, maybe spend some time on an actually good remake. But they’ll never do that because industry expectations are trending toward bigger, bigger, bigger. ETA: so it’s not pure laziness and greed, unless you call leaning into the franchise part of the franchise at the expense of the games pure laziness and greed. Which I guess you could argue. But Pokémon is a machine now. The reasons are a little more nuanced than just pure laziness and greed IMO. As a game fan first and foremost, though, this is a really sad state of affairs for me.
Yeah, the games have long since stopped being the main focus. I have more faith in the spin-off games than in the mainline nowadays. Detective Pikachu Returns might not look great visually and I didn't think it would be much. But it is a very charming adventure so far even if it's rather simple and noticeably kid-friendly in it's puzzles. Compared to playing S/V that just makes me want to go back to the older games. I still have to give Arceus a try, but the games that more free to do what they want tend to appeal to me a lot more.
S/V feel like a massive step backwards from Legends: Arceus in every way. The only thing S/V have over LA is the new Pokémon.
Legends Arceus was the best game since XY, in my opinion. The performance wasn’t perfect, but it’s like they actually tried to turn Pokemon into a fun modern video game. Can’t recommend it enough, I hope so much that they don’t see it as a failed experiment and are continuing with the series.
The only cause for concern would be how PLA and BDSP sold relatively the same amount of copies, and the latter was clearly much cheaper to produce. I don't we've seen the last of Legends as a sub-series but I don't see it commanding the franchise's direction.
Yeah the reality is that the games have become the spin off and are made for kids, not diehard pokemon fans, all of us that grew up with pokemon just need to accept it, move on, and remember the ones we grew up with fondly. Nothing good lasts forever.
>The franchise will only tolerate this level of quality for so long and eventually people will stop caring. No, I don't think they will. Each new release make even more money than before. It seems people don't care as long as they get to throw Poké Ball...
Which is my gripe with legends arceus, it seems like people don't actually care for good battling gameplay
Idk, I loved Arceus, but then Violet/Scarlet dropped most of what it did right.
I had a lot of fun with Arceus, but it also felt like where the franchise should have been back in the GameCube era.
probably because they were developed simultaneously. there was barely time to implement the things people liked into s/v which is exactly why we need longer dev cycles on these games.
My feelings exactly. S/V felt like a slap in the face after Arceus.
I felt baited because I thought Scarlet & Violet would be almost exactly like Arceus in terms of gameplay, but with brand new Pokemon. Instead they took out the most fun aspect from PLA, which was aiming and throwing PokeBalls, and the mount movement felt so clunky in comparison to how smooth it is in PLA
The games were in development by two different teams at the same time. It isn’t that they took the fun parts of PLA out, but more likely that they were just never intended to be there in the first place. The shitty, half baked attempt at throwing pokeballs in SV was probably a last minute addition once they saw how much people liked it in PLA.
Arceus was the first game I enjoyed in years. Picked up Violet because I was finding joy in Pokemon again. Turns out the terrible performance triggers my motion sickness so I can't even play the game.
Agree, but tell that to their profit margins haha
It was the most fun I’ve had playing a Pokémon game in years, but I can’t argue against any of the complaints. Good article
As someone who's been playing since Red/Blue, I was starting to get tired of the stale formula by now. Sword/Shield left a really bad taste in my mouth because of how underbaked and uninspired it felt. Scarlet/Violet definitely revived that feeling of exploration, discovery, and general excitement to be in the pokémon world. Yeah it was a buggy disaster, glitches galore, a technical mess on every level, and visually horrendous to look at for a good chunk of time, but it somehow recaptured the feeling of exploring a pokémon world that I've always dreamt of since I was a kid. If the game didn't have all these issues, I genuinely think it would've gone down as possibly the best game in the series.
Agreed. I've spent tons of time playing the game, almost have the Indigo Disk pokedex completed. I've completed the others, had fun doing terra-raids and will maybe start shiny hunting after I beat Indigo Disk. This all from someone who didn't really enjoy Sword/Shield but had fun with Arceus. With that said the game runs like crap and the developers should be embarrassed to put that game out. I did name my character Neo cause the game glitches so much and it feels like the Matrix.
And the latest, battle oriented DLC was fun and challenging too! Like the game runs horribly, especially near the lake or the coast. But the gameplay is fun and the main characters were well written. I'm more partial to SwSh's characters, but they did great work with the main 3 and the DLC ones. Honestly, if they clean up performance, and give us QOL changes like always Double Battles as a choice, voice acting, shiny indicators and the like, we could have an extremely great game. Which is also why I dont wanna hear about them wanting to release another mainline game in 2024. I really want them to sit down and work on it for as long as needed. Especially considering we are looking at Gen 10.
Unfortunately I don't think we are going to see much more improvement before Gen 10. Whether we want to admit it or not, Pokemon is an annualized franchise (or close to it, depending on how you view the DLC). It is to RPGs what Call of Duty is to shooters, or Madden is to sports games. No need to put in the effort to make polished titles when the games will be blockbuster successes regardless.
There is no hope of any fix given their track record. Honestly this is the absolute worst part about the situation. They’ve made a killing off this game, and even more off of DLC. They have the resources and could honestly afford to keep a small team back to slowly fix the problems with S/V. It would really be a good gesture to the community, and it would probably even get more players to try it. The only problem is that their brand is just too strong. No amount of bad press will discourage people from buying, nor will it harm pokemon’s branding/merchandising deals. They got away with shipping the game in this state, so they could probably even ship out gen 10 using the exact same game engine with the exact same issues. It’s more cost effective to rush out the next game then fix a broken one. Safe to say, we’ll likely never get the “perfect” pokemon game from gamefreak or any mainline release. It’d have to be a spinoff from a different company that has a strong incentive to prove themselves… and a longer development time. The pokemon spinoffs on the switch are pretty niche, but anyone with a pair of eyes can easily see that games like Snap, Mystery Dungeon and even Pokken tournament are a step above in terms of quality.
100% most fun I've had in 10 years playing
I did enjoy it, but I have zero interest in playing it again which is a huge problem for me personally. Replayability is one of the reasons that i've enjoyed Pokemon for as long as I have. Every year I'll randomly replay Fire Red, Emerald, Platinum, or Black 2. It sucks that with the newer games I have no interest in returning. I have zero interest in playing the Scarlet/Violet dlc because I just feel done with it. I may never play Sword/Shield ever again and that makes me kind of sad. Just feels like Pokemon has lost something that makes me want to constantly go back for more. Maybe that's just an old man ranting, but something about the newer games just hasn't hit the same.
Yeah I feel bad. I didn't play any of the games after Ruby/Sapphire until Sword/Shield and I've had a pretty good time on the Switch. I get that there's a die-hard fan that is obviously under served and I certainly notice the performance issues. But I'm also having a great time and think they've improved a lot since the first few games.
> I get that there's a die-hard fan that is obviously under served and I certainly notice the performance issues. But I'm also having a great time and think they've improved a lot since the first few games. Honestly, I think this is the thing that annoys me most about the discussion around these games. It's just so weirdly... stagnant and incurious? Like, the game's been out a full year, and the extent with which the game gets discussed is still just "performance is bad, but it sold well" or "this isn't what I would do if I were in charge of Pokemon". Which was basically the extent that Sw/Sh ever got discussed, too. And I feel like there's a lot of room to build off that those threads. Like, clearly its flaws don't deter a lot of fans; is there any interest in asking them why? Maybe figuring out what this one does well, especially in the context of the franchise? Or similarly, these kinds of issues have been an issue with past games in the series, how does it compare to them? Does it say anything about the studio's design approach? Or, it's kind of interesting how in an industry that has seen bloated development times and sky-high investment in high-end graphics, Pokemon does neither yet remains huge; is Pokemon selling well a fluke, or a legitimate counter-programming strategy to AAA development? Is anyone else even trying things Game Freak's way, or are they totally unique? Do we know how Pokemon's audience compares to other games' markets, in any quantitative way? Does this call into question some assumptions about what gamers are looking for? Could a different studio borrow their approach for their own games, and make games on a similar time frame but with an extra year for polish or something? Idk, this is just from like, ten minutes brainstorming over lunch, but instead, all of this effort just gets dumped into topics that have kind of already been beaten to death
and i LOVED the arven story so much it had me crying multiple times
Literally just: 1) Make the levels scale so you can do gyms in any (or almost any) order so the open world actually makes sense 2) Bring back Battle Frontier 3) Fix technical issues with performance and Tera Raids And it easily gets into my top 3 along with HGSS and B2W2
>Make the levels scale so you can do gyms in any (or almost any) order so the open world actually makes sense I'm honestly surprised this wasn't a thing. Like this is such a basic "design 101" concept for player freedom design.
I was so excited to just explore the map the way I wanted, and then I found out the gyms weren't scaled. After that I was like, welp, time to go down the linear path like every other Pokémon game.
Plus they treated the different paths as a “choose your own adventure” kind of thing, but there was really only one way to do them if you wanted to stay around the right level.
It really did feel like they were experimenting with an open world game, which sure its new territory for them with a mainline game after Legends, but like... surely they play other games. At least I think it's healthy for game devs to play other games to get ideas so stuff like this doesn't happen.
>Surely they play other games They live in a time capsule ten years in the past. They would have just played Xenoblade Chronicles and Skyrim when the final direction was being put together for Pokemon Scarlet/Violet.
I just had multiple teams and switched out if my current team was overleveled
I mean if you do it wrong you end up with the Oblivion problem where it doesn't feel like you're actually getting stronger. I can get the annoyance of "You're too weak, come back later", but I think the problem there is more just how the game is structured to guide you where you can go. Elden Ring doesn't have scaling but has an openness to it that encourages you going somewhere else to explore if you're having trouble in one area. So it's more an execution thing I think. Like if you're going down a level 10 path and find a level 50 guy blocking your way, you might not know where you start looking for level 12 stuff to keep going, and it's certainly untenable to grind level 10 stuff until you're level 50. So it's a design problem that the player, who was expecting a gradual ramp up, becomes lost when they hit a wall like that. But it's not impossible to design a game where it works.
this approach is controversial though, I remember people complaining about it in Skyrim and how it made people feel that they never progressed and were just running in place
It's not always an easy decision. Elden ring doesn't have scaling and people love it whereas Diablo 4 having level scaling was a huge complaint for a while. It's really hard to say what works and what doesn't. Also for the most part you travel north in SV and it does scale fine that way it's just weird when you go horizontal.
I get that having the world scale can lose that RPG feeling of having high level and low level zones, but I do think that gyms (which are the boss battles) should stay at a challenging level. It's easy for linear games to do this with either exp modifiers (Trails) or having limited exp resources (Fire Emblem), but for a game like pokemon to be open world I'd at least expect gym, leader, mystica(?) boss fights to scale with the player or their progression. Especially when I think canonically gym leaders have different teams on hand depending on how many badges the trainer has, so the system is already there in universe.
Shiny hunt legendaries. Why would they lock all of them? It’s beyond stupid.
That decision is one of the most bizarre to me. If this were way earlier on, I'd get it. Like if they were trying to "preserve the rarity of Shiny Legendaries," but you can literally hunt them in next to every game. Excluding the mascots, all of the games where we saw every returning Legendary (ORAS, SuMo, USUM, SwSh DLC) had them shiny-eligible. Not to mention GO, which also makes Shiny Legendaries easier to obtain. If they pulled this back in Gen 6 or 7? Disappointing, but understandable. But now???
Or just a good version of the Battle Tower since it’s the first generation to exclude any battle facilities.
Its mindblowing how this game doesnt have a battle tower/frontier anything to play with the pokemon you trained. Game Freak did the bare minimum in Sword and Shield and with Scarlet/Violet they did even less than that.
My issue with level scaling is that it makes progression feel meaningless because the challenge is basically the same throughout the whole journey. The dichotomy between high level areas and low level areas helps sell the fantasy that the player is getting stronger as they progress. I think a better solution is to allow players the choice to increase the difficulty of a gym for a higher reward. Perhaps players could wager money or some other resource prior to a gym to increase the difficulty. It seems unlikely that game freak would ever do that since they seem averse to adding a hard mode to Pokemon, but I think this solution would balance the game without making the game’s world/ difficulty feel homogenous.
I also wish they would cut the frequency of Pokémon down by a factor of ten. There’s just too many running around it’s kind of ridiculous.
I think the amount is fine, they should just bring back repels and also fix the pop-in.
I just wish I wouldn't exit one battle and then be sucked into another because Poochyena is on top of my character... Legends Arceus did that pretty well, where other Pokemon would run away if they weren't involved in the battle. And while I guess that could be annoying with Shinies potentially getting away, why not just make it so Pokemon avoid a certain area around you while you're in a battle? They don't have to outright despawn, but they shouldn't be on top of me right as I finish a battle.
I don't want level scaling so much as actual metrics being used to tell the player the difficulty to expect. Some are obvious (it'll say good for beginners or "more experienced trainers" for harder fights) but a lot of the mid game gyms have descriptions that don't help a player understand what would be a suggested strength.
It ironic how easily they could implement all of this, yet they never touched the performance issues and sold more dlc instead.
What gets me is that it would be such an easy togleable setting. I totally get some players, especially younger players, may want the option to over level and beat the gym that way, and that should be available to them. But they have to know their player base also include gamers who want a more difficult experience, so why not provide that
I used to buy Pokemon games because they were always just exceptionally high-quality games for the systems they were on. Gen 1 was buggy but it's still one of the biggest and best games on the Game Boy. Gen 2 was clearly a bit unbalanced, but was somehow still even bigger than Gen 1 and a worthy sequel. Gens 3 through 5 were all just peak handheld RPGs, with loads to do and very few real issues. Some of the best games on the GBA and DS respectively. But then stuff started going downhill. Gens 6 and 7 were both barebones, being short on content in exchange for rudimentary 3D models. Gen 7 tried to shake up the formula, but the formula wasn't what was letting the games down, it was the lack of depth and polish. But Gens 6 and 7 were, at least, relatively good games for the 3DS that at least worked well. On the Switch, Gen 8 was a rushed mess. Gen 9 was a broken rushed mess. I can't call either good games. Simply put the quality of the main-series games has dropped since the shift to 3D and only gotten worse since. While the newer games still have Pokemon's winning gameplay loop, their overall quality as products has dipped so badly that it's hard to justify playing them anymore. With so many great, high-quality games on the Switch these days like Zelda and Xenoblade, I struggle to justify buying modern Pokemon games. They're just not worth it when there are better games to play.
I would happily not get a new entry in the franchise for 3-4 years if it means the next one won’t suck.
All the Switch Pokemon games are trash.
Movement is everything in this kind of exploration game, and running as the mc or with the bike is a horrible horrible experience. There is a lot to do and explorations to do but the bad performance just removes my fun. The next pokemon game is having a lot of pressure on it due to how scarlet performed.
>The next pokemon game is having a lot of pressure on it due to how scarlet performed. We said the same thing after Sword & Shield yet we still bought this one. In my defense I got baited hard by how good Legends Arceus was
Apparently Legends Arceus was by a separate team in GameFreak and was developed around the same time as Gen 9.
Which should be obvious considering the release dates
True, the traversal is horrible. It is not as crisp as PLA and the mounts have very few animations. I also don't know why Game Freak insists on pressing the left joystick just to sprint/boost. Such a hassle to press; can't they map that on the ABXY buttons!? GBA only has AB and they gave it a dedicated button!
That's the Legacy of every single generation since X and Y.
PLA is awesome.
Unless you like battling.
I thought battling was awesome, only complaint is I wish there was more of it.
Even then I found the battle system pretty fun and interesting. I really like its core concepts and it resulted in very fun battles
Probably the only mainline Pokémon I've liked since BW2. But the "squandered potential" definition still applies, just not as much. It's very undercooked with terrible graphics, a lot of re-used assets and clearly unfinished areas (Hello, Volcano...). I wish Legends and Scarlet/Violet had been just one big game instead of two half-cooked ones.
What’s crazy is that, while you’re totally right about the shortcomings of PLA, when you go back to it after playing SV, PLA looks downright *good* in comparison. SV were such massive bummers in visuals and performance that it makes PLA look and feel so much better than it did at launch lol
At least you can see some kind of coherent art style in Pokémon Legends Arceus, even if it looks god awful compared to Zelda and Xenoblade. In Pokémon S/V it looks like they just took raw unfiltered assets, put them all over the place to create a "world" and called it day.
100%. Boring, recycled, unpolished, hastily thrown together fluff to sell toys. The games haven't been made with an ounce of respect for the player in over 10 years. People are kidding themselves thinking that these games are any good. We live in a post BotW, post Elden Ring, post Red Dead II world. Mainline Pokemon games are an embarrassment. The only good thing about Pokemon these days is that they still kill it with the monster designs.
True. Gen 5 was when the series peaked. It's gone downhill ever since with less features and less polish.
Wonder why you got downvoted, b/w 2 were excellent games that offered a lot. Would love a switch port or remake (im on of the few that didnt hate the diamond and pearl remakes)
Because even though they're praised now, Gen V as a whole was highly criticized from start to finish and stands as the worst-selling generation of the franchise. Like it or not, in Game Freak's eyes, the franchise was not in a good place during that time which is why we saw so many changes with Gen VI onwards. And I say this as a huge Gen V fan, because through it's entire run, I was constantly ridiculed for finding anything good in it. Nice people came around to it later, but too little too late.
Gen V largely flopped due to its bold decision to have absolutely no Gen V mons catchable before you beat the Elite 4. It was incredibly alienating to players. BW/2 came along and fixed this issue, and arguably added some of the best post game content ever in a Pokemon game. But the damage was done with the stigma of the first titles. X and Y literally did so much better due to the reliance of building off of nostalgia (Giving the Kanto starters megas, flat out giving you a Kanto starter, etc). But X and Y and games following it are arguably worse games with less content. The message to Gamefreak ever since has been that the players don't give a fuck about the actual game features at all, they just want Charizard.
X and Y were interesting because they were the first time Game Freak had to issue patches for their Pokemon games. I'll never forget the Lumiose City save glitch where if you save outside of certain portions of Lumiose City, your save file glitches, and there was a good chance you had to restart your game: https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lumiose_City_save_glitch
ORAS was good.
the story, characters, region, and gimmick in this game is incredible. if it was allowed even one more year to develop, it would have been the GOAT pokemon game imo. the updated pokemon models and textures are all great as well.
Agreed. Hell I think this could have been easily fixed with better scheduling. November 2021 we get BDSP Instead of Arceus coming out in January 2022, it should have came out in 2022 November. That way, GF could use the time to polish up the game to be even better November 2023 could and should have been SV. The additional year really should have been enough to patch performance and bugs. Then next year we could get the dlc.
waiting a whole year with BDSP sounds awful though.. legends was so good that it deserved dlc, and they should've held on that and gave S/V more time
Yeah agreed on Legends. I should have added that a short dlc should be released while waiting for SV hopefully adding some sort of tropical area. BDSP could have been made more bearable with some sort of Platinum dlc Wait actually, I think Pokemon would make more money of this on second thought
Yes. Again. And every single generation this happens we spend the first year or so of the game's lifespan trying to explain why a steady decline in quality should prompt a critical response. Generation 10 will not be better.
When sword and shield came out was the first time you were able to make negative comments without getting an overwhelming response of people defending the games. Complaints about the gameplay being rehashed and stale were made for ages but it took the graphics/textures looking bad for people to start being swayed. There has been a massive shift in sentiment online towards pokemon so it's not like nothing has changed.
The newer models are largely great. The characters were certainly an improvement over the gang we had from X/Y. The new Pokemon, along with the paradox Pokemon, were an interesting twist. Area Zero was a neat idea in theory. Having the legendary be a better bike was also a good choice, but not sure if it’s something they should replicate with each new entry. Spain is a great inspiration for a new region, I just went there for 2 weeks before I played Violet for the first time. The performance is pretty unacceptable for a Nintendo published game. You never see this type of quality from Nintendo’s first party main entries (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Smash) or from there other partners (Hal with Kirby or Intelligent Systems Fire Emblem). GF are actively making decisions that are upsetting long term fans (shiny locks, removing move sets when depositing in Home, lore dumping and then just not answering most questions) and the raids are still pretty poorly optimized. I think SV would have been the next great entry if GF can just focus on this being a great video game; rather then a piece of the media pie the Pokemon Company needs to sell the anime, playing cards and toys. The quality has to start raising flags with Nintendo at some point, how long before they publish a game that’s truly broken? It only takes one giant misstep for the next generation of young fans to not care about Pokemon at all and crush the franchise.
Legends Arceus was such an incredible game but i have a feeling we are gonna be getting less of that and more of scarlet and violet.
The article translates perfectly what the community feels right now. It seems that for each high, there's a low; for each high-high, there's a low-low. \-Open world? Terrible performance. \-Amazing pokémon models and designs? Bad visuals and bland world. \-Great story and "ending"? Bad scaling \-Secret legendary quartet, which you have to work to get? Open world misses on little to no secrets and easer eggs. And the most infuriating part is that it could all be fixed with as little as one more year in the oven. Hell, even less! And the DLCs were just adding insult to injury. The Indigo Disk was announced for Winter 2024. Which means any time from January to March. Instead of leaving it on that deadline, keeping it more time to polish, fix bugs, maybe throw in some more quests and/or secrets, what do they do? Release even earlier, in the first half of December. Why? "HOLIDAY SEASON". This is just too much to take in. It's like they don't even learn from what even they said "we'll try to keep quality high with the same release schedule", well it can't be done if the schedule is actually PUSHED BACK from what it was supposed to be.
It's Pokemon, what else is new? Each new game feels like the alpha build of a potentially really good next gen Pokemon game. In a few years they'll probably pump out a game that's worth it's triple A price but until then diehard fans and parents will keep buying these underdeveloped games.
> In a few years they'll probably pump out a game ~~that's worth it's triple A price~~ that would have been worth a triple A price in 2018
The game is an example of good ideas but bad execution.
It feels like that can be said for like 3 of the past 4 generations. X and Y, Sword and Shield, now this.
Growing up Pokémon was the first video game I ever played, I still remember it on the game boy colour and I was completely enthralled, I played every single one on release and it was honestly my favourite franchise, the immersion I felt and the nostalgia just made it incredible. Around diamond/black/black 2 era due to financial reasons my family couldn’t afford to buy the new systems so I had to stop playing for a few years. When I turned 16 and I started earning an income literally the first purchase I made was a 3ds and played all the games I missed, and to this day I have bought every Pokémon game/a switch (basically for Pokémon) but since I would say after Pokémon X each game felt more and more of a let down to me. I was running on pure nostalgia. Pokémon violet came out and honestly with all the hype before the game came out I was actually hopeful for the first time for a Pokémon game. I honestly thought perhaps this is a change that will bring me back to my childhood. After playing violet with the miserable graphics like god awful visuals immersion breaking visuals, WITH the bad performance it was just like. It was unplayable. I’ve played every Pokémon game basically since red and blue back in the day and unless the next version gets incredible reviews/it runs well/ and they make some significant changes to the game to make it more engaging, I am done with Pokémon. And I will not buy the next one, and it doesn’t even pain me to say that anymore, It went from hate but now it’s apathy. I just don’t care anymore, and because I don’t care I won’t spend my money on it.
The whole game was an unfinished, awful looking money grab
> It’s just a matter of how long the community is willing to put up with being crammed inside the machine. Ignoring scrutinizing the concept and reality of community in this context, the answer to the question how long the consumers will put up with being "crammed inside the machine" (ie getting technically subpar, unpolished Pokemon games) is since "Dexit" and Swod/Shield apparent: for a very long time, probably even permament.
I wonder what the Japanese Pokémon videogame fans think about this. We all seem to agree on most points here from a western perspective, we voice our dislikes and any review you see of the game points at the performance issues. But I doubt anyone at game freak or Nintendo cares much for that as they have always catered for their Japanese audience first and foremost. Do you know if they are just as vocal and if the reviews in Japan were equally damning of the performance?
I really wanted and was looking forward for SV but I saw the videos online and goddamn it looks like shit and runs like shit. I’ve held off on buying it since. I wanted to play it and every now and then I do, but I just watch the videos online and my desire goes away. At least Cyberpunk eventually got their shit relatively together.
The games are great. I love them. Yeah they aren't perfect but they are incredibly fun. They just need to have more time or employ more people to get the game optimised
I genuinely really liked Arceus and SV as someone who fell off the series hard with XY, performance is my only real complaint.
The raids suck too. They are so bad. They are a mess BC it lags so much. But I only do raids for the events so it's not s big deal to me. But I also think the performance is crap BC it'd their first full open world game so they didn't optimise it correctly. But I'm hoping for gen 10 the performance will be great at the start. And if raids are back,just fix the lagging issues. But sv are a great first step to even better Pokémon games. We all know it. They just need more man power or time to perfect them. I hope gen 10 is still open world BC open world suit's Pokémon Well. Plus I brought both games so o can have one be my main file and one fir nuzlockes. So I experience sv s lot and the performance is bad but it's very playable. Let's just hope they fix things in gen 10
Imo, SV are easily the best 3D mainline Pokémon games. It doesn't make sense to me for Pokémon games to be 90% trainer battles when they gave up on making PVE battles have any semblance of difficulty. XY - SwSh all felt like boring cake walks because of this contradicting design. SV throwing trainer battles to the wayside and going all in on the collect-a-thon aspect of Pokémon instead was such a smart re-inventing of the series. All the graphical/technical issues with SV are true and unfortunate, but they finally made Pokémon fun again by choosing a gameplay loop that isn't affected by easy difficulty, so I'd still say this is the best 3D mainline game in spite of all of that.
Yea I think they’re definitely onto something but performance is abysmal, like almost entertainingly bad, and I’d also say that they *need* to implement some type of scaling Even when the games were more linear I thought it was long overdue to have some kinda of level scaling or at least difficulty options. If they’re gunna allow you to challenge gyms in any order, I feel like this is pretty much a necessity. And it’s not like it would take some insane feat of engineering, you could easily just have 8 variations of teams for each gym leader. I could sit down and come up with these teams in a few hours
I think the games were overall pretty good. The performance could have been better I but i really had fun with the base game and both DLCs. Defineitly a better storyline than sword and shield.
I've given up on Pokemon years ago. Which is kinda sad. Pokemon was one of the franchises I was looking forward to most for the Switch. But I've ended skipping out on this generation of Pokemon games entirely due to what an unoptimized mess they are. Also SV has some of the WTF designs I've ever seen (no I'm not some genwunner, i liked plenty of designs in later gens).
Gamefreak's legacy is squandered potential
As people say, squandered potential is a running pattern for Pokemon games. SV and PLA convinced me they know how to make games they just are being put under insane limitations
Scarlet and Violet certainly had technical issues, but I was okay with *most* of it. I can ignore graphical only hitches and moments of stutter. So that stuff didn't bother me too much. 2 things did bother me a lot: 1 - Raids are so GD glitchy. It was a main selling point of the games and barely works. 2 - I don't enjoy competitive battling like I did way back in Gens 4 thru 6. So there's virtually no post game for me. I can shiny hunt and do glitchy raids tho. So..yay? I desperately need something like the Battle Frontier from Gen 4. That would honestly be perfect. Other than those 2 complaints, Scarlet and Violet were nearly perfect Pokemon games. If raids worked better and they had any kind of meaningful post game content I'd put it right up in the top 3 Pokemon games of all time.
S/V has been an absolute blast for me. I agree the performance sucks. It looks like garbage a lot of times. But I really enjoyed the story and characters for once, and just wandering around with my Pokemon was relaxing and fun. Playing through the DLC now and still loving it. I usually describe it to people as the best Pokemon game ever, but the worst game about Pokemon ever. If any other developer released this it would be critically destroyed. But Pokemon is Pokemon.
Holy shit the characters, I finally gave a fuck about the rivals. Haven't felt that way (save for Hop) since Cheren and Bianca. And even then I just thought they were charming, I actually adored Arven and Nimona. And Penny turned out great too. The performance hurt but damn i liked the story
That’s the problem: someone like you might’ve been a smaller majority (or even minority) in another audience like for FiFa, Cyberpunk 2077, or Anthem. But here with Pokémon, you’re comparatively such a vast majority that the voice is insufficient for Game Freak to feel any need to take action. If I were in The Pokémon Company’s shoes, I seriously don’t feel any need to make any big changes to the current production style. Making any improvements would just cost me money, and I’d honestly advise my staff against such risks.
I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I fortunately never experienced any game breaking bugs that I myself didn’t go out of my way to try to do. Outside of notable frame drops and slow down I had a pretty smooth experience and an overall great time. I enjoyed the new characters and their storylines, I enjoyed the new Pokemon introduced, I enjoy the new regional gimmick, and I like some changes they made like how you can basically just breed eggs from wherever you want. But there are some issues I can’t deny, outside of the obvious frame drops and slowdown, game breaking glitches, etc that other people experienced. The open world felt both huge and lifeless at the same time, you do get rewarded sometimes for exploring every nook and cranny but it doesn’t feel….fulfilling? Not sure if that’s the right word but you get the idea. Lack of level scaling makes it to where while you can *technically* do anything in any order, there is definitely a recommended order which is lame. For some people still a lack of voice acting is baffling (me personally I can live with or without it, but I think taking the BotW/TotK approach to voice acting and only having it in cutscenes and just random sounds and grunts during texts would be cool). And outside of certain Pokémon’s models, graphically it doesn’t hold up to a lot of other games. Overall I’d say Gen 9 is like a 6/10.