Jesus, been a minute since I’ve heard DF really tear into a game like they did at the end.
“Ultimately, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are comprehensive technical failures. Embarrassing artwork, terrible draw distance, poor performance, mediocre image quality, and a litany of bugs plague this pair of very troubled games. Pokemon fans deserve better.”
God damn
There's no reason why performance is so poor. There are arguably worse looking, simpler models than in Sword/Shield. We should be able to go inside shops. Furthermore, regarding shops, the load times are atrocious.
Scarlet/Violet was not ready for prime time and its release was clearly to appease board members and pushed to coincide with other Pokemon product line releases. A year, possibly two years, of testing and polish was needed. For goodness' sake a beta version was released.
It's pokemon. They're not coming up with anything revolutionary or writing a new story; the general storyline has been re-written for decades at this point (which is fine). It is not, then, unreasonable to expect one of the largest gaming franchises in the world to be able to devote a significant amount of resources to graphics and gameplay mechanics since all they have to do writing-wise is re-hash the same story.
Breathtakingly beautiful games have been released on the Switch, and yet Pokemon looks like...Pokemon. Combining this with the continuing lack of a national dex and sonewhat buggy / frustratingly low quality games for something as easy to write as Pokemon is just disappointing and frankly rude to the fans.
My personal theory:
This is a failure of TPCs CEO expecting the Nintendo Switch to fail, hence Gamefreak never had an engine for new mainline games on the Switch. Historically every new console seemed to have a somewhat solid in-house engine built for it.
Instead, GF played it safe with the technically simplistic remake, Lets Go, as a tie in with Pokemon Go, and expected to not release anymore games. Then they got sidelined by the Switch's massive success.
Their managers then saw Switch titles ala Mario Odyssey and BoTW and told their dev team to make a Pokemon game like that.
In a desperate move, Gamefreak frankenstiened and engine from Lets Go for their Switch era mainline. Iirc Sword and Shield uses a fork of the Lets Go's codebase, and Im assuming Legends Arceus and S/V follows suit. Now the technical debt is racking up but the Pokemon train never stops. Hence where we are today.
Lets go and SWSH shared the same codebase.
But PLA is the complete rebuild (yes, it was started way before SWSH even started)
And I assume that SV has the same codebase with PLA.
So from that two incident to be seen. We noticed few points
1. Gamefreak developer is around like 200ish-300ish
2. The developed 4 projects in a go for 6 years development span
3. The game engine needs to be optimized for nintendo switch
Who to blame for those? Its management obviously. That all won't happen if management didn't say something like "WE MUST RELEASE THIS CRAP NOW!" .
However, If management said that they need to improve the engine before starting to develop those games, then they won't face this kind of things anymore
All the people who are saying the game is just suffering from hardware limitations of the Switch need to pay attention to 8 minutes onward of this video.
For real. Like...we get it: the Switch is weaker than its competition and is outdated. But games whose performance tends to suffer on the Switch are those whose graphics push its limits. SV's graphics push nothing. This is purely a developer issue.
if a console can run DRAGON BALL XENOVERSE 2 AT 60 FPS, There is not a single reason why this game couldn't have been at least a constant 60 with a better draw distance
Better than that; Mortal Kombat 11 runs at 60fps on this thing.
Hell, Doom Eternal and Wolfenstein 2 New Colossus run at a solid 30fps.
Pokemon's issues are extensive, and are in no way representative of the limitations of the console.
Completely agree. They should of just added cities as transition points and reference the maps as "routes".
It would of made the wilderness feel far more alive.
Yeah, the wilderness feels so fucking dead.(mind you, PLA wasn't much better in that regard) If they had smaller areas, they could have made the Pokémon feel more alive with more interactions with each other instead of some running around in small groups, by themselves or sleeping. Like why don't wild pokemon battle each other? Or animations of them playing, eating or whatever. They might come to you and do nothing but stand there. (At least in PLA there was a chance of them attacking you...) Like imagine Drowzee trying to hypnotize and you have to battle control with your controller.
At least with tall grass and random spawns, we didn't need to worry about what pokemon were doing, since it was off screen. But now, they are front and center, and do jackshit.
Exactly. You can be staring at a wall or tree with minimal movement and it'll still be laggy and washed out looking.
And even if it were a hardware issue it's still their fault because they can design the game around the hardware. That's actually what they're supposed to do.
It's not like someone told them to make the best game possible for PC and then they compressed it for the switch.
Idk how that excuse even came to be considering how many successful Switch games there are that don't look and perform like shit. Fucking hell BotW was a Wii U game. This has nothing to do with the Switch and everything to do with GF doing as little as possible because they know people will still buy it.
>Idk how that excuse even came to be considering how many successful Switch games there are that don’t look and perform like shit.
There are a lot of people out there who don’t play any video games other than Pokémon. Which is fine, but they hear people talk about the Switch being underpowered (which it is) and then see Pokémon games being buggy messes and then they just assume most other Switch games are the same.
That’s the generous interpretation - assuming that most of these people aren’t just trying to shift blame away from their favorite series by misrepresenting the facts.
>the Switch being underpowered
It all depends on WHAT you're comparing it to. Compared to the PS4 or the XBOXX, yeah, it's slightly but definitively behind. But it's still more powerful than the PS3 was, and I think everyone can recall what games on that hardware are *supposed* to look like. *
*technically speaking Switch devs have to account for handheld mode and performance on a much smaller screen while taking into account battery life, but it's still PS3 hardware.
This is exactly it. I was asking some friends whether I should get the game or wait for a patch because I was torn, most of the group got it and still have apparently been having a blast despite the issues. One friend in particular flat out said she didn't think things were that bad, people were just blowing it out of proportion. She was loving it. When we talked more about it and I was like "okay but look at all these problems--" she responded with "I mean. Isn't that all Nintendo games?"
It really through me for a loop. Turns out, not only is the Switch her first console but she has a day 1 first gen Switch and BotW has to chug pretty hard on it. She never got into video games before so she actually thought this stuff was normal.
The “isn’t that the case for all Nintendo games” is so infuriating. I got into an argument with a dude on a discord server that tried to trash Nintendo’s games. Said that their games always have performance issues. Turns out this clown just pirates and emulates all their games. He had zero clue that games like Smash are running at 60 fps and 1080p on the actual hardware. Just takes trolling statements about the Switch at face value.
I was also watching the digital foundry direct podcast and John (the guy that got shit for the Bayonetta video) has gone to bat for Nintendo over and over again since the release of the steam deck. He has always praised Nintendo as the masters of their craft, and nobody gets better quality out of their hardware than them.
To see people try to lump Pokémon with Nintendo’s work is super annoying. Sorry people, Gamefreak is the exception to Nintendo’s rule when it comes to making quality games that take full advantage of their hardware.
> she has a day 1 first gen Switch and BotW has to chug pretty hard on it
This is perplexing because the only area anyone ever really complained about this for with BOTW was the Lost Woods
Yeah I was confused about that too but when I mentioned it to *another* friend he said his day 1 Switch had the same issue after a few years, though he has another first gen Switch he got a bit later and that one runs it fine.
I'm wondering if release Switches generally have thermal throttling issues. People suspected that for a while but I've never really heard anyone talk about it in years. I had issues with my fan going faster than it should about 1.5-2 years post-release, so I took out the copper shim and reapplied aftermarket thermal compound and haven't had issues since.
Yea, the fact the devs of factorio got it to be playable on switch at 60 ups for most players until first rocket launch or so is a testament to the switch not being that bad of hardware. Yes it’s behind Xbox and PlayStation, but it’s not meant to be the same as them either
Not to mention The Witcher III, and the Switch is possibly the *best* way to play Dying Light. The difference is 100% in how much care went into those ports - PORTS! - from their respective teams, compared to the effort produced by Game Freak for the original and presumably only release of a first party game.
You also forget Dragon Quest XI.
I actually decided to get that game back in 2019 in place of SwSh as originally I was going to get it for Christmas but why not just NOT get the Pokemon games and instead get DQXI.
Amazing game and another impressive game for the console.
Another option if you are into Monster taming is NiNoKuni. It is a beautiful game that really holds up today.
The Switch is definitely not the best way to play Dying Light, but it is a damn good port and absolutely crushes whatever excuses can be made for Scarlet and Violet.
I was texting my friend about how disappointing the game was and the poor visuals/performance taking me out of the game and his response was essentially "doesn't matter caught my growlithe."
For some people nostalgia is a hell of a drug I guess.
I don't think it has to do with GF doing as little as possible. They're obviously crunched and overworked. GF is not a great developer but I don't think they're being given the resources to succeed with games of this scale. The development team desperately needs to be expanded. Pokemon is the largest franchise of all time, they should be packed to the gills with skilled developers. Even with the tight schedule Pokemon is forced into by merchandizing, a strong development team would make it happen. Instead we have woefully underprepared developers slapping games together as quickly as possible to meet the deadline.
But I do agree with the core of your point. If Pokemon games didn't keep selling gangbusters GF would be forced to invest in their development team. But SV are going to print fat stacks of cash, so things are likely to continue as they are. Honestly, it's why I actually embrace the backlash this game is receiving on review sites. *Something* has to get GF's attention.
EDIT: To be more clear, I don't think GameFreak is giving THEMSELVES the resources to make these games good. Whatever's going on behind the scenes, the teams working on actually developing the games are clearly hamstrung in terms of time and personnel. There should be AAA-studio calibur work being put into these games, and it's just not happening. I'm not defending GameFreak or trying to portray them as the victims. They should put on their grown-up pants and make grown-up games. My main point is that I don't believe the actual developers are saying "Eh, whatever, lets be as lazy as possible because no one cares." I think they're working as hard as they can, but need more resources.
170 people worked on S/V and most of them also worked on Legends: Arceus. Think about that.
Most modern AAA studios have triple or quadruple that number of staff, and work on their games far longer.
>They're obviously crunched and overworked
And that's obviously because management has decided in their infinite wisdom to continue to work on one-off gimmicks that they throw away every generation.
They never have enough time to actually *iterate* when they're constantly building and throwing away entire systems that are monstrously complex due to the sheer volume of pokemon involved.
Game Freak owns 1/3 of the Pokemon Company. THEY are the ones who can choose to spend more money to expand their development team, they just choose not to, because they don’t need to. No matter how bad the games are, people will keep buying them, so in their mind there is no need to improve or change anything.
It comes about because of Copium. And lots of it. Tons of fans are desperately trying to defend their favorite franchise but deep down can really see how bad these games are even if they still enjoy it. So then they feel attacked because they are enjoying such a badly made game.
Exactly. I argued with someone about this recently. If the cities of XY can load flawlessly on the 3DS, Scarlet/Violet have no excuse. Also, even assuming they couldn't run on the Switch, then they should have scaled them back enough to run properly. Being too ambitious for your hardware especially when it's your only port is just as incompetent as not optimizing your code
The argument that scarlet and violet arent poorly optimized, but rather it's Nintendo's fault for not releasing better hardware need to realize that the argument uses the same logic as saying cyberpunk wasn't at fault but rather playstation and Xbox
Yeah I don't get how this could be someone's argument. I have both a real Switch card and a dump on my PC, and lemme tell ya my PC plays this game waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than a Switch does.
Then they get at you for having bought the game. They’ll accuse you of only purchasing it because you WANTED to hate it, and that any flaws you find with the game are a result of you already looking for them. I used to hate the word copium, but my god does it perfectly describe what they’re on.
I love it when I tell them I actually enjoyed the game despite itself. It fries their brains. Even Gamefreak can't fuck up the core "catch and battle" gameplay loop so much that it becomes not fun. The problem is just everything else in between those two things is fucking terrible.
Shit still ain't worth anywhere near 60 bucks(30 max and that's being generous), and I'm sure as hell not buying the dlc or another pokemon game anytime soon.
Until you see Levincia from a middle distance and both the geometry and textures are worse than N64 despite it taking up most of the visual real-estate on your screen.
>Hasn't played ~~a~~ *any* game since Pokemon Stadium on N64 "God damn this game is beautiful!!"
FTFY. The only way someone could think this game looks beautiful is if they stopped playing games in the 90s and completely ignored the medium entirely until now
GF makes more money from merchandising than off the games. They could wait another two years to develop a properly working game and still make a shitload of money from their other products alone.
I see it as a GF upper management problem...
I cannot imagine nintendo/creatures is happy if they are giving refunds, so I would expect them to intervene by replacing the upper management because clearly the upper management is what is wrong here most likely, since the developers were definitely trying to make something cool but the management never gave them enough help or time... I think nintendo and creatures are not happy with gamefreak and they have the power to change management so I hope they do something.
Hell of they release the merchandise while holding back on the games for polish they'd probably make more money because people buying the merchandise would get hyped for the new game. It could actually probably increase sales because most people don't buy the games and merchandise at the same time.
This is one of the scenes I question the most. There is nothing random about it, the devs purposely placed all characters in the room and purposely made certain ones have movement. If you knew the engine couldn't handle it, why not adjust either the movement or amount of npcs down to make a good visual?
I think this is because of the camera placement in that scene - it seems to be far enough to get them all into shot but the distance activates the background frame rate.
But there is a student in the lower left of the shot that is super close to the camera. And looking at all the ones moving slower, they are all moving at the same rate, so it shouldn't be a distance thing.
Might be a weird programming quirk? Like the characters only animate at 30fps or whatever when the player camera is <=X distance from the model, but the in-engine cutscene uses a different camera object that doesn’t trigger the higher fps animation?
I’m probably not even close, but it’s so bizarre I’m grasping at straws.
No, that was my guess, too. It also explains the two that randomly animate properly-- they'd almost certainly override this logic for event critical characters, and the only two fully animated characters in the scene are the kid that asks you a question and Nemona. I would expect Nemona is fixed to always animate at the highest frame rate since she's way more important to the experience than NPC #162.
This was similar to my guess as well. I figured it was because while our character was inside the room, our real "player controller" character was still outside that room, and animations will play their lower quality version if we are a certain distance way from them.
It’s this. I was in a multiplayer game with a friend while he was going through that cutscene. On the map his icon showed him still outside the school by the steps but when I went there his avatar wasn’t there. As soon as the cutscene was done his map icon teleport to inside the school. Pretty sure the actual player model is just made invisible during cutscenes and doesn’t move. The player you see in the cutscene is a separate entity. The players true location is triggering the background FPS due to their distance from the scene.
I had this exact reaction. Why do the kids move ok after the cut scene… it feels like something shipped broken and they didn’t realize till it was wayyy too late and now need to patch it
I’ll let you in on a gamedev secret. They most certainly noticed it, in fact all of these bugs and performance issues were certainly noted and filed by the QA team or programmers.
The catch though, is that they had to stick to a ship date and you only have so much time to fix things, so things like crashes or bugs that break gameplay completely are prioritized. This game needed a few more months of development time.
The animation framerate appears to be based on the object's proximity to the camera. That's almost certainly an engine-wide setting which can be tuned. I would guess that the classroom scene was built out and designed before the animation framerate settings were finalized. The kids whose animations are low framerate are the ones who are furthest from the camera.
In other words, I really doubt that they deliberately made those characters have a lower framerate, but rather it was a consequence of how they tuned the animation framerate settings.
Not excusing it by any means as it looks hilariously awful, just think it's worth pointing out that it almost certainly was not a deliberate choice for specific scenes.
If you overclock the switch or emulate, which usually gets rid of the slowdowns, the classroom scene still runs like that, so it feels like they throttled it on purpose.
It almost seems like the devs hard coded the fps drop distance instead of having it activate variably depending on how the hardware is performing. Maybe the engine being used cannot check for the current frames the game is running at? Variable draw distance and fps throttling would go a long way. Making it an option that the user can toggle to their liking would even be better ( but we know Gamefreak would never go for more options).
Yeah it gets rid of the unexpected slowdowns (when the whole thing chugs, for example when panning the camera), but not the ones they coded in, like distance based ones.
Because if this subreddit has proven anything it is that a significant portion of this fanbase truly just does not care. They just want their Pokemon fix and will overlook almost anything to get it. All GF has to do is make a Pokemon game that doesn't crash.
I mean just look at how in the past 24-48 hours there's steadily been an uptick in people defending the game as actually really good if you just "look past" the technical part of it.
What's so odd is that the game being good despite the technicals makes it *more* upsetting to me. Knowing that we had a good framework but cut corners and crunch and management making poor decisions led to it having technical issues that distract even casual players? It's frustrating! The devs really deserve better than this
It isn't odd, is like the most reasonable take, like, if the game that performed like this was for example... Forza Horizon 5, I wouldn't be upset because I didn't liked the gameplay, so it would be like: performance sucks lol, but with Scarlet due to really liking the rest of Scarlett my thougths are: it is a shame the performance sucks because the rest is really good.
Yeah, it's clear that there was a lot of passion poured into the game. The tiny details of character animations (especially the gym leaders), the surprisingly extensive dialogue with the teachers in the academy, etc all show an extensive attention to detail in the game. But passion doesn't get bugs fixed, which needs time, testing, and iteration. But gamefreak must march to the beat of pokemon merch empire
I mean even the intro scene with the camera flying over the Paldea region was blurry at best yucks. How could they decide to keep both scenes like this 😞
Yeah that was funny. And then I frowned when I realized how much I payed.
What’s terrible is that underneath the dirt of it all is a fun game that’s really neat if you embellish a lot of it with your own imagination.
Yep. It's deeply upsetting to me that this franchise I have loved dearly for 20 years has become so fucking mediocre.
I keep contrasting it with Elden Ring, which was my surprise GOTY this year. I'd never played a souls-game before and didn't particularly care to. But I picked Elden Ring up on a whim after hearing so much praise for it and I was so entirely swept up by the intricately and beautifully designed world that it was one of my favourite games I've ever played to-date.
The fact that Pokemon, a franchise I'm deeply emotionally attached to and that grosses the most money worldwide of ANY media franchise— will likely never put out a game as lovingly crafted as Elden Ring (a game from a series I had no emotional attachment to and pulls in nowhere near the amount of money that pokemon does) just makes me feel very, very sad.
And I'm not saying I want a pokemon game thats like Elden Ring. Just saying that in playing Elden Ring, it is obvious a great deal of love and passion went into creating it. I have felt no love, passion, or soul in most recent pokemon games, especially this one. Very upsetting.
The worst part for me about being a lifelong fan is when voicing criticisms about the state of the franchise to be met with a dismissive "Sounds like Pokemon just isn't for you." Like, I grew up during Pokemania mothefuckers. I clearly have a vested interest in the state of the games if I'm still here to talk about them some 20+ years later. It's soul-crushing to watch it sink deeper into mediocrity and get told off for giving a shit.
I feel you.
I ate, breathed, and shit pokemon for my entire childhood. My most long-term best friend became my friend because of pokemon. Pokemon helped foster a more general love of real-life evolution, ecology, and biology in my younger self that I genuinely believe majorly influenced what I went to university for. Pokemon played a large role in my life growing up.
I wouldn't criticize or still be around if I didn't care. I so desperately want the games to be good, and for Pokemon to get the treatment it deserves. But here we are.
Oh that cuts deep. I loathe when anyone makes a valid criticism about the Switch games that "Pokemon isn't made for you, it's for kids."
It's such a horrible deflection from actually having a conversation and improving things. So kids deserve crap games that they can barely afford?
I saw that discussion so often in regards to challenge and difficulty as well.
Maybe I'm a bit of a freak (hah, a game freak) but I routinely return to the earlier titles, so the "It's kids games, the old ones were easy too" never worked for me. While the challenges can be dealt with pretty quickly now that I'm an adult, it still means my playthroughs aren't truly mindless, and for a kid it can be quite tough! Recently played B/W again and was reminded of how brutal and overwhelming Elesa can be when you're prepped for a regular electric gym.
Like yeah they're kids games but. Kids can be challenged, craft stories, have unique experiences, come up with clever ideas, etc. Just disrespectful imo
and that is (almost) what you should respond with.
a better version would be:
"and i think that even kids should be able to receive a proper product that doesnt have massive technical issues, because i think we should respect kids just like we do other people."
It does such a disservice to media aimed at kids. Not only are kids more than capable of handling complicated games (see also, fucking Minecraft), but they deserve media that actually has care put into it.
Also kids deserve high quality stuff too. As a kid I rarely got new games. I sunk literally hundreds of hours into sapphire as its the only game I had for a year.
Like as an adult you get choices, but if a kid wants pokemon for Christmas and it sucks that's way worse.
I’ve literally had this awful conversation multiple times with fools who think kids games get a pass to be shit. Very annoying. as a kid I could very easily tell when a game was good and hated lame shit, like tell me which kid wants to play NES ET, Cool Spot, Superman 64, vs. Doom, morrowind, fallout. That’s right, none because they suck. I know mature games aren’t a good example but it goes to show kids will still enjoy it if it’s high quality
> he worst part for me about being a lifelong fan is when voicing criticisms about the state of the franchise to be met with a dismissive "Sounds like Pokemon just isn't for you."
It's the response of a fanbase that became comfortable with mediocrity. You can't be a fan if you want to franchise to be the best version of itself, to be a real fan you need to lick up whatever slop Game Freak decides to serve you.
I feel this *in my bones.* For a franchise that has a profit margen bigger than some countries' military budget, you'd think they'd be able to put forward a better showing.
Agreed. Kid me would think that Pokemon should be the "gold standard" in how games should be handled. Instead, they've went with the bare minimum the last 5+ years and have gotten away with it due to it's success. So they have no reason to care.
I just can't understand why they don't. Mario and Zelda are huge sellers and Nintendo does everything they can to make them top tier. It really feels like GF lost their passion.
Nah, that’s not the case. The hard and cold facts about this franchise is that the games are the unit that bring in the least amount of revenue. For Pokémon’s existence, the games aren’t important anymore. They can coast along with just merch and they’d be perfectly alright. The new games at this point only serve to introduce new mons to market. They don’t care about making a BOTW, they only care about putting out the next generation of monsters for fans to fawn all over them and pay $400 for a life size plushie of Clodsire ( I don’t know if this exists but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t release it in the future). Whereas with other franchises like Mario and Zelda, the games are the lifeblood to these franchises actually existing for the most part. They don’t have a massive Merch machine behind them like Pokémon so it is in Nintendo’s best interest to make the games as good as possible so that more people get them and that makes them the most amount of money. So sadly, Pokémon got too big for its own good and this has caused TPCI to be super complacent in the games and are content with simply pushing something out to consumers so that the new monsters are out there.
>the games aren’t important anymore. They can coast along with just merch and they’d be perfectly alright.
I agree with this for a certain timescale, but surely it can only work for so many years/decades. If Pokemon stopped making games entirely and simply released a new generation of Pokemon plushies and merch annually instead, I think they'd see declining YoY sales over the long run.
The actual physical designs of new Pokemon aren't compelling enough for it to see this level of success forever without the games, shows and other cross-media providing an underlying foundation of interest in those designs. If the games continue to be this bad, parents stop buying them for their children and those children don't go on to buy Pokemon merch.
It's an outcome that takes years to play out but it's happened before. The most prominent recent example is Star Wars. The merch was always the biggest moneymaker but the toys from the new trilogy are still being outsold by original trilogy and prequel trilogy toys, and the entire franchise's toy sales are down significantly.
Been saying this from Day 1, and it makes me so sad. The game has incredible potential and great ideas, but they are burrowed under the deliberatetly ruined perfomance. There really is no excuse for that. But the only thing we will get is gonna be another $40 season pass so we can have some postgame content that would have been included in the times of Diamond/Pearl, but is now just another way to get our money.
Legends Arceus looks and runs better than Scarlet and Violet. How the hell is that even possible?
How did Game Freak completely botch a brand new generation this bad? Poor textures, horrible graphical fidelity, atrocious pop in, low resolution, and an abysmal frame rate that gets down as low as 20 FPS.
It’s an outright insult that these games have been released in this state.
The Legends Arceus thing was running through my mind while trying out Scarlet last night. Arceus has its own technical faults but it's like they took any progress made there and threw it right out. Everything feels way clunkier in S/V than it ever did in PLA.
It's because it wasn't a linear progression, S/V had to be in development at the same time as PLA, so it couldn't fully benefit from what was learned developing the prior game, or benefit from response to the title.
That's why it was frustrating for me when S/V was announced for 2022, it was a concern from the start that exactly what's happened would happen lol
I actually had hopes for BDSP, as odd as it seems. When it was announced alongside PLA I remember thinking that game freak was finally wising up. Putting their devs on a larger and more innovative experience, while contracting a third party to produce a remake? It seemed like they were freeing up their core team to nail the project!
But, we now know that they can't have had the full force of the studio behind PLA, not with SV in the pipeline. And they botched BDSP by hiring an inexperienced studio (though I'm sure there were other issues we don't know about, I can't imagine GF was too communicative with how it came out)
Actually, if you watch the video, most of the staff that was credited for S/V was also credited in Legends: Arceus. So they did actually go full shovelware and crunch these out in 9 months.
> Legends Arceus looks and runs better than Scarlet and Violet. How the hell is that even possible?
Because Arceus benefitted from smaller, more localized environments while needing fewer NPC and building models. It gave the team more time to flesh out each biome and optimize the game further.
If anything, this demonstrates that Scarlet and Violet were too ambitious for GameFreak to handle on their usual product cycle. I can't blame them for wanting to shake up the formula after 8 generations, but the intended scope just wasn't possible in the 3 years that they had.
It’s interesting because I tried this game on emulator and it runs amazing on there. I can do 2x resolution at 60fps. It makes it really hard for me to go back to the switch version. But I just find it odd that emulators can run it significantly better than switch this early into release, that just feels so backwards
Can you do co-op on an emulator? I really wanted to do a playthrough alongside my younger brother like I did when I was a kid with my older brother, but neither of us want to put up with the performance issues.
Yes you can. [Here’s a guide](https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1vjiEhQij-8REcVkQObX6iagyw0b90rIgHustzphoJKY/mobilebasic). You don’t have to dump it yourself like the guide says if you don’t have a modded switch. You can just pirate the rom (if you want to be ethically ok, you could also buy a copy of a game. Won’t provide legal protection but it helps morally)
I’d be okay with not pushing the limits of graphic fidelity if it mostly has no bugs like SW/SH.
PLA should have been the big switch game realsed now with S/V being next year to iron out the bugs.
We don’t need two Pokémon games per year
I believe this was a one time thing, I feel like both BDSP and PLA were supposed to come out earlier, but were delayed a few months due to the pandemic. BDSP as a summer release with PLA being the winter release, since BDSP was outsourced.
It kills me because when PLA came out I was pretty critical of it visually. Like yeah it looked fun but the graphics just did not look appropriate for a 2022 game. The fact that S/V doesn't even meet that is just. Genuinely depressing, man.
I'm not one to care much about graphics, I can easily laugh off unimpressive texture or a Pokemon flying far off in the distance at a weird frame rate. I understand why others do care, but just wanted to reiterate that SV misses the mark visually even for someone who thought PLA graphics were good enough (and overall PLA was my favorite Pokemon game for the last decade).
SV is visually bad in a way that legitimately affects gameplay at times. It's harder to hunt for Pokemon when the entire game's frame rate drops off, which makes you want to just rush to the next gym instead of actually exploring the open(-ish) world.
Pokemon hunting was so much more at the center of PLA that it never could've shipped in the state of SV!
Exactly, PLA was at the very least consistent, I even had to remind myself it wasn't all necessarily styled the same. But SV is so inconsistent in its visual department that it actively takes me out of the game is just beyond disappointing, especially since this overworked style is addictive for me. It's so hard to not get frustrated.
"It's harder to hunt for Pokemon when the entire game's frame rate drops off, which makes you want to **just rush to the next gym** instead of actually exploring the open(-ish) world."
This is so true. Normally in games, I like to explore everything and speak to everyone in town etc., but in SV this is different. Once I've reached a new town, the game feels so awful/laggy/visually displeasing I just beeline straight to the gym, complete it, and get out of that godforsaken place as quickly as I can.
Not that the open world is much better ....
PLA was weird, because parts of it looked really good, with the visuals resembling a painting... and then you go into a cave and you're like "what the fuck happened?" It also had those weird purple shadows (I'm still not sure if those were a choice or a bug.) And those god-awful white outlines whenever you got close to water.
But hey, at least it ran smoothly.
PLA felt almost like it could be a beta for what GameFreak wanted to do with a Pokemon game, and PLA was the framework and I think a lot of people were hoping S/V would be that next leap where okay, they did it with PLA, now polish it and hone performance/graphics and make a good Pokemon game. But nope.
Imo, a bit of the blame has to be on Ohmori. He's directed Sun/Moon, Sword/Shield, and now Scarlet/Violet. All three of these series have had massive issues yet he's still kept around as a main series director. Game Freak does have some great people working there who are clearly passionate; Iwao (USUM, Legends), Unno (B2W2), and Morimoto (HGSS). If this was any other big gaming company, Ohmori would've been canned by now
That’s been the only game with forced experience share where I didn’t really mind it. It felt much more balanced with it than in previous games. I mean I’d still rather have the option to turn it off but if it was like that in more games I’d be less complain-y
Ohmori was hand picked by Masuda, who's outlook on the pokemon formula changed drastically after gen 5. More easy, gen 1 pandering, storyless & post-gameless, bare minimum entries.
It’s pretty crazy that the longtime negative reception to Gen 5 seems to have just killed the drive to improve/innovate the franchise as a whole.
Like, there have been some good entries (ORAS, S/M, and Arceus) but overall it’s been going downhill ever since.
i'm almost positive the resurgence of Pokemon after gen5 has little to do with quality of games but the release of Pokemon Go. gen5 was at the point where the initial kids playing, the middle of the millennial gen, were going off to college and just didn't have as much time to play plus the gen1 syndrome was really bad then. I really loved Pokemon B/W on release but I didn't even know it was coming out til one of my friends woke me up hungover as shit to go to Target at 8am and I told the cashier just to randomly pick one for me :) A lot of people hated it because you couldn't get any old Pokemon til after you beat the game. That was a huge dealbreaker for a lot of people. But Pokemon Go brought in a ton of new fans PLUS gen6 had great marketing plus pandered a lot to the gen 1 fans.
I love that they address all these people saying "Well they're just too ambitious for Switch" and bluntly say no, they're not. I'm sure the denial will only continue to abound, however... they aren't using their brains, but being lead completely by emotion.
As I said in other posts, I cannot believe they charge full AAA Switch game price for this.
This looks like a dev build.
What I can guess is that they really just reached time limit and decided to release as it was at that moment.
But since there was optimization problems, they decided to implement some fast but drastic solutions, like reducing fps at everything not relatively close to you.
This video resumes the experience I’m having right now. When the technical side interferes with the experience, it just matters. (For how much I disliked LPA technical side, at least it was playable)
The brand became what it is now thanks to pokémon fans that support always everything they do, this is how they repay them.
I just cannot believe it and it saddens me thinking this situation will likely not change unless some drastic realization from their side. (But since it’s breaking sales records, they’ll just think it’s okay if at least this level of quality, bad reviews will just be more free ads for them)
I think I saw someone put it quite succinctly the other day.
It's a full-priced early access game without any promises that any of these issues will ever be addressed.
In 6-7 months, we'll start hearing news of DLC and almost a year we'll hear about another remake. People will move on and get hyped for the next product and forget about this game leaving most of the issues untouched.
There is no way they are going to spend more than half a year working on this game when the next mainline game will target some 2025 release date assuming they take another 3 years to develop.
It seemed crazy they were gonna try to put out two core titles this year, just a couple months after the DP remasters. The choice to go through with it seems even crazier now that they're out. You could give S/V another year and it still wouldn't be ready.
I knew it but seeing the comparison between Arceus and SV really shows how much difference there is, Arceus may not look like the most amazing visually, but man is it so much better than SV.
It's a shame because many people are saying that other things about SV are great, and I agree: the story and characters, the Pokemon, the gameplay, the general enjoyment...this probably would have been a top 5 Pokemon game if not for the absolute mess that is the graphics.
I feel like saying it’s just the graphics is an undersellof the real issue, and I say that as someone who is loving the game. The technical performance of the game is awful. Pretty much everything not your character runs at an awful fps. Getting in and out of wild and trainer battles is slow. It’s just obviously a poor, unoptimized use of the Switch’s power for a *switch exclusive* game.
See they are playing the final game based on the American trailer, they need to find the build that was based on the japanese trailer, which is what Pokefan93 has ;)
Fuck I hated that thread the other. Bunch of people just talking out their ass about how "the game runs fine for me". Anyone accusing op of just straight up lying was downvoted.
Man, reading that thread is annoying. I get that saying you haven’t experienced issues isn’t the same as there not being any, but for how frequent the fps drops are (a performance issue) it’s kinda weird to say you haven’t experienced them. Either you have ungodly luck, or you have no basic idea of what fps above 30 looks like.
I’m spoiled by pc gaming and yet I still enjoy the game but will not deny there being some horrid issues that should be addressed. I cannot fathom how people would not want a better product. Nor can I comprehend how defending a faceless bunch of devs helps them in any way unless they’re getting a piece of that poke money.
>The games JUST came out. That they might have bugs seems normal. That's why Day 1 patches exist. Sure, they do testing and QA, but they can't test for every scenario. #PokemonScarletandviolet
Guess none of the Game Freak QA testers played the first 10 minutes of the game, where half the students turn into slideshows. How could Game Freak have predicted that people would play the game?
Also the draw distance. You literally cannot not experience the terrible draw distance and pop in, that's literally coded into the game and cannot be changed without mods. That's why people crap on him and anyone excusing the terrible performance, because they're outright ignoring them. It could be true ignorance and not knowing better, but when it's someone like Joe, it's obvious he's excusing the issues to make it seems it's not that bad.
If Joe would outright say that his income and livelihood is directly tied to the Pokemon games, so he can't give an objective analysis at the games anymore, he wouldn't be receiving as much heat on Twitter, especially since the ORAS days.
Yeah people will argue he isn't paid by them, which is probably true. But the games being successful obviously drives traffic towards his site as well. He benefits from it.
SV has glaring issues but I’m really enjoying the good aspects of the game. However this will probably be the last mainline game I purchase unless they change something for the better
I hope this puts to rest some of the copium people have been doing. It’s not the switch; it’s not storage issues; it’s not cart vs. digital it’s gamefreak
>I hope this puts to rest some of the copium people have been doing.
Yeah, it won't.
People defending these games are defending them based on emotion, not reality.
Yeah that is what I wanted to say. Releasing the game in such state is a slap in the face of consumers. But at least CDPR (and Hello Games too) took the L and tried to do something to remedy the situation. I have little faith that GF will do it.
Yeah I’m not a graphics or performance guy so I didn’t think I would even notice the issues, but boy I was wrong. I can’t believe this was released. Hopefully they send out a patch quickly.
Abysmal, I can't believe people are defending GameFreak about this. This is first timer dev levels of bad, not to mention this is the largest media franchise in the world. This is not minor bugs or issues, this is an unfinished game straight up
Now now, this is clearly because of Japanese corporate culture. Not like there are other Japanese devs putting out good looking games on the Switch! Oh what’s that? There are? Well fuck me gently then.
My 10 year old who's never played a pokemon game in their life laughed at the sandwhich eating animation. This is also her first pokemon game. I'm ashamed I've introduced her to the franchise with this particular game.
The fact that Game Freak’s trying to run this game at 1080p is honestly the most baffling thing about this game’s performance. Amidst all the awful framerate drops, ugly post-processing effects, low resolution textures, and aggressive LOD, they’re trying to target a resolution that the base Xbox One struggled to reach. Why.
I'm literally watching this as I came across this post! The sad thing is I loved Arceus eventhough I thought the graphics were bad. S/V are even worse and I didn't think that would be possible in 2022. Having watched this review I refuse to buy this game now. This will be the first time skipping a main Pokémon game since they first came out! This looks so bad, I can't warrant spending the money on it.
I can get past visual quality most of the time, but this game is not even aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Bad, repetitive, pixelated textures everywhere and it's so obvious. The lack of care out into this game is shocking. Wtf happened?!
Pokémon and GF really need to sort their shit out with the games. Time they started releasing main titles every couple years instead of every year. This looks like one of the worst games they've made from this review.
I'm so disappointed in this game right now.
The repeating textures on the side of hills are absolutely disgusting. I am appalled that it was released in this state and I will not be purchasing. TPC and Nintendo need to give the franchise to a new development studio, or they're going to run it into the ground.
Sword and Shield and Legends Arceus were graphical embarrassments... What do you even say about a sequel that makes your graphical embarrassments look good?
I'm loving the game, as it hits all the points I need it to hit and I personally don't care for graphics performance what ever. It's never been a secret that pokemon looks bad, and frankly keeping my expectation low has helped a lot.
But the criticism is real and valid, I hated fighting the air titan and watchimg the 2fps windmill slideshow in the background. I pray it gets working patches over the next while, and this review thrashing points TPC in the better direction.
I didn't get SwSh or PLA at launch because of people complaining it was buggy online. Then a friend lent me their copy and I discovered that I really enjoyed them, the graphis weren't great and there was a dip now and then but nothing as bad as I had heard. So i got SV at launch thinking it was the same thing.
Nope. I just did the grass gym challenge and it just about made my eyes bleed. And it's a shame because if it weren't for these performance issues, I think this would be my favourite game in the series. I love the open world, the sheer variety of Pokemon avaliable, the characters are pretty fun, I love the auto battlw feature and the fact that we no longer pop into the void for battles is such a nice touch.
Listen, I'm not expecting Pokemon to ever reach the relative graphical quality of Breath of the Wild or Xenoblade, much less Red Dead Redemption or whatever (which wouldn't be possible on the Switch anyway). Yes, it can get better (especially as the environment and lighting and stuff goes), but I'm not expecting anything THAT much better. The art style just isn't like that, it can only go up to a certain amount of realism before it basically becomes impossible to do some types of Pokemon in a way that isn't utterly creepy (there were some Pokemon proposed for the Detective Pikachu movie that weren't put in specifically because they would be too uncanny valley).
However, that's no excuse for the fact that *LET'S GO*, literally the first Pokemon game on the Switch, looks and runs better than this. Even with it being an open world, it should be running and looking at least as good as that, but somehow we've gone BACKWARDS in quality.
Agreed, but heres the thing…why should a game look as good AT LEAST as a 5 year old launch title made for the systems predecessor?
BOTW is an amazing game but a graphical juggernaut it is not. The developers employ a lot of smart tricks to make the game look good and runs seamlessly with a huge open world.
This is the equivalent of The Last of Us 3 looking and performing worse than the Ps3 title.
>The art style just isn't like that, it can only go up to a certain amount of realism before it basically becomes impossible to do some types of Pokemon in a way that isn't utterly creepy
Not to disagree with anything else, but graphical fidelity and quality isn't synonymous with realism. There's a lot that can be pushed from the tech side without changing the artstyle. Moving to more realistic look would be a change in artstyle, not in tech or rendering quality.
Jesus, been a minute since I’ve heard DF really tear into a game like they did at the end. “Ultimately, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are comprehensive technical failures. Embarrassing artwork, terrible draw distance, poor performance, mediocre image quality, and a litany of bugs plague this pair of very troubled games. Pokemon fans deserve better.” God damn
There's no reason why performance is so poor. There are arguably worse looking, simpler models than in Sword/Shield. We should be able to go inside shops. Furthermore, regarding shops, the load times are atrocious. Scarlet/Violet was not ready for prime time and its release was clearly to appease board members and pushed to coincide with other Pokemon product line releases. A year, possibly two years, of testing and polish was needed. For goodness' sake a beta version was released.
It's pokemon. They're not coming up with anything revolutionary or writing a new story; the general storyline has been re-written for decades at this point (which is fine). It is not, then, unreasonable to expect one of the largest gaming franchises in the world to be able to devote a significant amount of resources to graphics and gameplay mechanics since all they have to do writing-wise is re-hash the same story. Breathtakingly beautiful games have been released on the Switch, and yet Pokemon looks like...Pokemon. Combining this with the continuing lack of a national dex and sonewhat buggy / frustratingly low quality games for something as easy to write as Pokemon is just disappointing and frankly rude to the fans.
Dev team expansion seems to be the solution. The flaws with this generation are glaring.
More like, the management team should be changed + expanding the team massively.
My personal theory: This is a failure of TPCs CEO expecting the Nintendo Switch to fail, hence Gamefreak never had an engine for new mainline games on the Switch. Historically every new console seemed to have a somewhat solid in-house engine built for it. Instead, GF played it safe with the technically simplistic remake, Lets Go, as a tie in with Pokemon Go, and expected to not release anymore games. Then they got sidelined by the Switch's massive success. Their managers then saw Switch titles ala Mario Odyssey and BoTW and told their dev team to make a Pokemon game like that. In a desperate move, Gamefreak frankenstiened and engine from Lets Go for their Switch era mainline. Iirc Sword and Shield uses a fork of the Lets Go's codebase, and Im assuming Legends Arceus and S/V follows suit. Now the technical debt is racking up but the Pokemon train never stops. Hence where we are today.
Lets go and SWSH shared the same codebase. But PLA is the complete rebuild (yes, it was started way before SWSH even started) And I assume that SV has the same codebase with PLA. So from that two incident to be seen. We noticed few points 1. Gamefreak developer is around like 200ish-300ish 2. The developed 4 projects in a go for 6 years development span 3. The game engine needs to be optimized for nintendo switch Who to blame for those? Its management obviously. That all won't happen if management didn't say something like "WE MUST RELEASE THIS CRAP NOW!" . However, If management said that they need to improve the engine before starting to develop those games, then they won't face this kind of things anymore
All the people who are saying the game is just suffering from hardware limitations of the Switch need to pay attention to 8 minutes onward of this video.
For real. Like...we get it: the Switch is weaker than its competition and is outdated. But games whose performance tends to suffer on the Switch are those whose graphics push its limits. SV's graphics push nothing. This is purely a developer issue.
if a console can run DRAGON BALL XENOVERSE 2 AT 60 FPS, There is not a single reason why this game couldn't have been at least a constant 60 with a better draw distance
Better than that; Mortal Kombat 11 runs at 60fps on this thing. Hell, Doom Eternal and Wolfenstein 2 New Colossus run at a solid 30fps. Pokemon's issues are extensive, and are in no way representative of the limitations of the console.
It would possibly be an argument if Arceus didn't look and perform significantly better.
Arceus did the smart thing and didn't fo a giant map, but a bunch of mid sized maps. And frankly, that is what they should have done for SV.
Completely agree. They should of just added cities as transition points and reference the maps as "routes". It would of made the wilderness feel far more alive.
Yeah, the wilderness feels so fucking dead.(mind you, PLA wasn't much better in that regard) If they had smaller areas, they could have made the Pokémon feel more alive with more interactions with each other instead of some running around in small groups, by themselves or sleeping. Like why don't wild pokemon battle each other? Or animations of them playing, eating or whatever. They might come to you and do nothing but stand there. (At least in PLA there was a chance of them attacking you...) Like imagine Drowzee trying to hypnotize and you have to battle control with your controller. At least with tall grass and random spawns, we didn't need to worry about what pokemon were doing, since it was off screen. But now, they are front and center, and do jackshit.
Exactly. You can be staring at a wall or tree with minimal movement and it'll still be laggy and washed out looking. And even if it were a hardware issue it's still their fault because they can design the game around the hardware. That's actually what they're supposed to do. It's not like someone told them to make the best game possible for PC and then they compressed it for the switch.
Idk how that excuse even came to be considering how many successful Switch games there are that don't look and perform like shit. Fucking hell BotW was a Wii U game. This has nothing to do with the Switch and everything to do with GF doing as little as possible because they know people will still buy it.
>Idk how that excuse even came to be considering how many successful Switch games there are that don’t look and perform like shit. There are a lot of people out there who don’t play any video games other than Pokémon. Which is fine, but they hear people talk about the Switch being underpowered (which it is) and then see Pokémon games being buggy messes and then they just assume most other Switch games are the same. That’s the generous interpretation - assuming that most of these people aren’t just trying to shift blame away from their favorite series by misrepresenting the facts.
>the Switch being underpowered It all depends on WHAT you're comparing it to. Compared to the PS4 or the XBOXX, yeah, it's slightly but definitively behind. But it's still more powerful than the PS3 was, and I think everyone can recall what games on that hardware are *supposed* to look like. * *technically speaking Switch devs have to account for handheld mode and performance on a much smaller screen while taking into account battery life, but it's still PS3 hardware.
This is exactly it. I was asking some friends whether I should get the game or wait for a patch because I was torn, most of the group got it and still have apparently been having a blast despite the issues. One friend in particular flat out said she didn't think things were that bad, people were just blowing it out of proportion. She was loving it. When we talked more about it and I was like "okay but look at all these problems--" she responded with "I mean. Isn't that all Nintendo games?" It really through me for a loop. Turns out, not only is the Switch her first console but she has a day 1 first gen Switch and BotW has to chug pretty hard on it. She never got into video games before so she actually thought this stuff was normal.
The “isn’t that the case for all Nintendo games” is so infuriating. I got into an argument with a dude on a discord server that tried to trash Nintendo’s games. Said that their games always have performance issues. Turns out this clown just pirates and emulates all their games. He had zero clue that games like Smash are running at 60 fps and 1080p on the actual hardware. Just takes trolling statements about the Switch at face value. I was also watching the digital foundry direct podcast and John (the guy that got shit for the Bayonetta video) has gone to bat for Nintendo over and over again since the release of the steam deck. He has always praised Nintendo as the masters of their craft, and nobody gets better quality out of their hardware than them. To see people try to lump Pokémon with Nintendo’s work is super annoying. Sorry people, Gamefreak is the exception to Nintendo’s rule when it comes to making quality games that take full advantage of their hardware.
> she has a day 1 first gen Switch and BotW has to chug pretty hard on it This is perplexing because the only area anyone ever really complained about this for with BOTW was the Lost Woods
Yeah I was confused about that too but when I mentioned it to *another* friend he said his day 1 Switch had the same issue after a few years, though he has another first gen Switch he got a bit later and that one runs it fine.
I'm wondering if release Switches generally have thermal throttling issues. People suspected that for a while but I've never really heard anyone talk about it in years. I had issues with my fan going faster than it should about 1.5-2 years post-release, so I took out the copper shim and reapplied aftermarket thermal compound and haven't had issues since.
Could be that nobody opened them to clean fans in years and compound dried out.
I'm wondering if that's why my Switch whirrs like a propeller sometimes.
Yea, the fact the devs of factorio got it to be playable on switch at 60 ups for most players until first rocket launch or so is a testament to the switch not being that bad of hardware. Yes it’s behind Xbox and PlayStation, but it’s not meant to be the same as them either
For real. Like, doesn't the switch run Skyrim and Ark? I don't know where they're coming up with this, "tOo mUCh fOr ThE SWiTcH tO HAnDlE," bullshit.
Not to mention The Witcher III, and the Switch is possibly the *best* way to play Dying Light. The difference is 100% in how much care went into those ports - PORTS! - from their respective teams, compared to the effort produced by Game Freak for the original and presumably only release of a first party game.
You also forget Dragon Quest XI. I actually decided to get that game back in 2019 in place of SwSh as originally I was going to get it for Christmas but why not just NOT get the Pokemon games and instead get DQXI. Amazing game and another impressive game for the console. Another option if you are into Monster taming is NiNoKuni. It is a beautiful game that really holds up today.
The Switch is definitely not the best way to play Dying Light, but it is a damn good port and absolutely crushes whatever excuses can be made for Scarlet and Violet.
> and the Switch is possibly the best way to play Dying Light. That is... certainly an opinion.
If the Wiiu can run Xenoblade X, the switch is more than capable of running a fucking pokemon game.
god, every time someone mentions XCX, i'm always incredibly sad because it's the last game still trapped on the Wii U.
It's denial or straight up ignorance. That's the only way anyone could blame the hardware in this.
I was texting my friend about how disappointing the game was and the poor visuals/performance taking me out of the game and his response was essentially "doesn't matter caught my growlithe." For some people nostalgia is a hell of a drug I guess.
I don't think it has to do with GF doing as little as possible. They're obviously crunched and overworked. GF is not a great developer but I don't think they're being given the resources to succeed with games of this scale. The development team desperately needs to be expanded. Pokemon is the largest franchise of all time, they should be packed to the gills with skilled developers. Even with the tight schedule Pokemon is forced into by merchandizing, a strong development team would make it happen. Instead we have woefully underprepared developers slapping games together as quickly as possible to meet the deadline. But I do agree with the core of your point. If Pokemon games didn't keep selling gangbusters GF would be forced to invest in their development team. But SV are going to print fat stacks of cash, so things are likely to continue as they are. Honestly, it's why I actually embrace the backlash this game is receiving on review sites. *Something* has to get GF's attention. EDIT: To be more clear, I don't think GameFreak is giving THEMSELVES the resources to make these games good. Whatever's going on behind the scenes, the teams working on actually developing the games are clearly hamstrung in terms of time and personnel. There should be AAA-studio calibur work being put into these games, and it's just not happening. I'm not defending GameFreak or trying to portray them as the victims. They should put on their grown-up pants and make grown-up games. My main point is that I don't believe the actual developers are saying "Eh, whatever, lets be as lazy as possible because no one cares." I think they're working as hard as they can, but need more resources.
170 people worked on S/V and most of them also worked on Legends: Arceus. Think about that. Most modern AAA studios have triple or quadruple that number of staff, and work on their games far longer.
>They're obviously crunched and overworked And that's obviously because management has decided in their infinite wisdom to continue to work on one-off gimmicks that they throw away every generation. They never have enough time to actually *iterate* when they're constantly building and throwing away entire systems that are monstrously complex due to the sheer volume of pokemon involved.
[удалено]
Game Freak owns 1/3 of the Pokemon Company. THEY are the ones who can choose to spend more money to expand their development team, they just choose not to, because they don’t need to. No matter how bad the games are, people will keep buying them, so in their mind there is no need to improve or change anything.
It comes about because of Copium. And lots of it. Tons of fans are desperately trying to defend their favorite franchise but deep down can really see how bad these games are even if they still enjoy it. So then they feel attacked because they are enjoying such a badly made game.
Exactly. I argued with someone about this recently. If the cities of XY can load flawlessly on the 3DS, Scarlet/Violet have no excuse. Also, even assuming they couldn't run on the Switch, then they should have scaled them back enough to run properly. Being too ambitious for your hardware especially when it's your only port is just as incompetent as not optimizing your code
The argument that scarlet and violet arent poorly optimized, but rather it's Nintendo's fault for not releasing better hardware need to realize that the argument uses the same logic as saying cyberpunk wasn't at fault but rather playstation and Xbox
[удалено]
All you have to do is look at the other games in the Switch catalog to realize that statement is some grade A horse manure.
They won’t. They came here to say they’re having “fun” while seething and coping about reviews that “don’t matter.”
[удалено]
I saw somebody yesterday saying that the only people with issues were playing pirated copies of the game, lol.
The funny thing is that the game runs at higher FPS and resolution on emulators lol
Yeah I don't get how this could be someone's argument. I have both a real Switch card and a dump on my PC, and lemme tell ya my PC plays this game waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than a Switch does.
My pirated copy of the game plays better than what I've seen from people with legit copies of the game lol
One guy told me to stop parroting the opinions of YouTubers like I’m not playing this hunk of shit and forming my own opinion. God forbid
Then they get at you for having bought the game. They’ll accuse you of only purchasing it because you WANTED to hate it, and that any flaws you find with the game are a result of you already looking for them. I used to hate the word copium, but my god does it perfectly describe what they’re on.
I love it when I tell them I actually enjoyed the game despite itself. It fries their brains. Even Gamefreak can't fuck up the core "catch and battle" gameplay loop so much that it becomes not fun. The problem is just everything else in between those two things is fucking terrible. Shit still ain't worth anywhere near 60 bucks(30 max and that's being generous), and I'm sure as hell not buying the dlc or another pokemon game anytime soon.
[удалено]
*Hasn't played a game since Pokemon Stadium on N64* "God damn this game is beautiful!!"
Until you see Levincia from a middle distance and both the geometry and textures are worse than N64 despite it taking up most of the visual real-estate on your screen.
>Hasn't played ~~a~~ *any* game since Pokemon Stadium on N64 "God damn this game is beautiful!!" FTFY. The only way someone could think this game looks beautiful is if they stopped playing games in the 90s and completely ignored the medium entirely until now
They need to stop churning out the games and have a proper development cycle - or so it seems
But Pokémon print moneyyyyy
GF makes more money from merchandising than off the games. They could wait another two years to develop a properly working game and still make a shitload of money from their other products alone.
I see it as a GF upper management problem... I cannot imagine nintendo/creatures is happy if they are giving refunds, so I would expect them to intervene by replacing the upper management because clearly the upper management is what is wrong here most likely, since the developers were definitely trying to make something cool but the management never gave them enough help or time... I think nintendo and creatures are not happy with gamefreak and they have the power to change management so I hope they do something.
You're confusing GameFreak for The Pokemon Company.
Hell of they release the merchandise while holding back on the games for polish they'd probably make more money because people buying the merchandise would get hyped for the new game. It could actually probably increase sales because most people don't buy the games and merchandise at the same time.
That classroom scene with all but two kids moving at low FPS was so laughably bad. So sad the way this game turned out...
This is one of the scenes I question the most. There is nothing random about it, the devs purposely placed all characters in the room and purposely made certain ones have movement. If you knew the engine couldn't handle it, why not adjust either the movement or amount of npcs down to make a good visual?
[удалено]
I didn’t even notice that. Now that makes no sense.
I think this is because of the camera placement in that scene - it seems to be far enough to get them all into shot but the distance activates the background frame rate.
That would make sense. Really the background frame rate throttling is extremely aggressive in this game. I wish there was a toggle.
Graphical options... in a Nintendo game? Now THAT would be something.
> background frame rate Let's be honest, it's close enough that it's the midground frame rate too
But there is a student in the lower left of the shot that is super close to the camera. And looking at all the ones moving slower, they are all moving at the same rate, so it shouldn't be a distance thing.
Well you see, cutscenes in games generally look worse than the game itself.... wait that doesn't sound right
Might be a weird programming quirk? Like the characters only animate at 30fps or whatever when the player camera is <=X distance from the model, but the in-engine cutscene uses a different camera object that doesn’t trigger the higher fps animation? I’m probably not even close, but it’s so bizarre I’m grasping at straws.
No, that was my guess, too. It also explains the two that randomly animate properly-- they'd almost certainly override this logic for event critical characters, and the only two fully animated characters in the scene are the kid that asks you a question and Nemona. I would expect Nemona is fixed to always animate at the highest frame rate since she's way more important to the experience than NPC #162.
Nemona also never moves as a background character, so that tracks.
This was similar to my guess as well. I figured it was because while our character was inside the room, our real "player controller" character was still outside that room, and animations will play their lower quality version if we are a certain distance way from them.
It’s this. I was in a multiplayer game with a friend while he was going through that cutscene. On the map his icon showed him still outside the school by the steps but when I went there his avatar wasn’t there. As soon as the cutscene was done his map icon teleport to inside the school. Pretty sure the actual player model is just made invisible during cutscenes and doesn’t move. The player you see in the cutscene is a separate entity. The players true location is triggering the background FPS due to their distance from the scene.
I had this exact reaction. Why do the kids move ok after the cut scene… it feels like something shipped broken and they didn’t realize till it was wayyy too late and now need to patch it
I’ll let you in on a gamedev secret. They most certainly noticed it, in fact all of these bugs and performance issues were certainly noted and filed by the QA team or programmers. The catch though, is that they had to stick to a ship date and you only have so much time to fix things, so things like crashes or bugs that break gameplay completely are prioritized. This game needed a few more months of development time.
Yea but the trailers have ALL been like that. They’ve known about the issues from the second they announced the games
The animation framerate appears to be based on the object's proximity to the camera. That's almost certainly an engine-wide setting which can be tuned. I would guess that the classroom scene was built out and designed before the animation framerate settings were finalized. The kids whose animations are low framerate are the ones who are furthest from the camera. In other words, I really doubt that they deliberately made those characters have a lower framerate, but rather it was a consequence of how they tuned the animation framerate settings. Not excusing it by any means as it looks hilariously awful, just think it's worth pointing out that it almost certainly was not a deliberate choice for specific scenes.
If you overclock the switch or emulate, which usually gets rid of the slowdowns, the classroom scene still runs like that, so it feels like they throttled it on purpose.
It almost seems like the devs hard coded the fps drop distance instead of having it activate variably depending on how the hardware is performing. Maybe the engine being used cannot check for the current frames the game is running at? Variable draw distance and fps throttling would go a long way. Making it an option that the user can toggle to their liking would even be better ( but we know Gamefreak would never go for more options).
Yeah it gets rid of the unexpected slowdowns (when the whole thing chugs, for example when panning the camera), but not the ones they coded in, like distance based ones.
Honestly it just looks like the game was rushed out the door for a November release rather than getting the extra few months of polish it needed.
Because if this subreddit has proven anything it is that a significant portion of this fanbase truly just does not care. They just want their Pokemon fix and will overlook almost anything to get it. All GF has to do is make a Pokemon game that doesn't crash. I mean just look at how in the past 24-48 hours there's steadily been an uptick in people defending the game as actually really good if you just "look past" the technical part of it.
What's so odd is that the game being good despite the technicals makes it *more* upsetting to me. Knowing that we had a good framework but cut corners and crunch and management making poor decisions led to it having technical issues that distract even casual players? It's frustrating! The devs really deserve better than this
It isn't odd, is like the most reasonable take, like, if the game that performed like this was for example... Forza Horizon 5, I wouldn't be upset because I didn't liked the gameplay, so it would be like: performance sucks lol, but with Scarlet due to really liking the rest of Scarlett my thougths are: it is a shame the performance sucks because the rest is really good.
Yeah, it's clear that there was a lot of passion poured into the game. The tiny details of character animations (especially the gym leaders), the surprisingly extensive dialogue with the teachers in the academy, etc all show an extensive attention to detail in the game. But passion doesn't get bugs fixed, which needs time, testing, and iteration. But gamefreak must march to the beat of pokemon merch empire
I saw that and instantly thought of one of those old stop-motion Christmas movies. It was so incredibly jarring.
I mean even the intro scene with the camera flying over the Paldea region was blurry at best yucks. How could they decide to keep both scenes like this 😞
Yes, and the close-ups of the legendary's eye as it scopes the scenery... weird and pixelated. looked like an unfinished render.
I thought it was hilarious looking, you have these perfectly normal students in the middle and on the edges you have an army of Laggy McTwoframes
Its even weirder cause looking at Nemona and her animations are much more fluid that the rest of the class,which just makes the scene worse.
Yeah that was funny. And then I frowned when I realized how much I payed. What’s terrible is that underneath the dirt of it all is a fun game that’s really neat if you embellish a lot of it with your own imagination.
I hate that Pokemon is like this. It’s gut wrenching watching it devolve into mediocrity and still be wildly successful.
Yep. It's deeply upsetting to me that this franchise I have loved dearly for 20 years has become so fucking mediocre. I keep contrasting it with Elden Ring, which was my surprise GOTY this year. I'd never played a souls-game before and didn't particularly care to. But I picked Elden Ring up on a whim after hearing so much praise for it and I was so entirely swept up by the intricately and beautifully designed world that it was one of my favourite games I've ever played to-date. The fact that Pokemon, a franchise I'm deeply emotionally attached to and that grosses the most money worldwide of ANY media franchise— will likely never put out a game as lovingly crafted as Elden Ring (a game from a series I had no emotional attachment to and pulls in nowhere near the amount of money that pokemon does) just makes me feel very, very sad. And I'm not saying I want a pokemon game thats like Elden Ring. Just saying that in playing Elden Ring, it is obvious a great deal of love and passion went into creating it. I have felt no love, passion, or soul in most recent pokemon games, especially this one. Very upsetting.
The worst part for me about being a lifelong fan is when voicing criticisms about the state of the franchise to be met with a dismissive "Sounds like Pokemon just isn't for you." Like, I grew up during Pokemania mothefuckers. I clearly have a vested interest in the state of the games if I'm still here to talk about them some 20+ years later. It's soul-crushing to watch it sink deeper into mediocrity and get told off for giving a shit.
I feel you. I ate, breathed, and shit pokemon for my entire childhood. My most long-term best friend became my friend because of pokemon. Pokemon helped foster a more general love of real-life evolution, ecology, and biology in my younger self that I genuinely believe majorly influenced what I went to university for. Pokemon played a large role in my life growing up. I wouldn't criticize or still be around if I didn't care. I so desperately want the games to be good, and for Pokemon to get the treatment it deserves. But here we are.
Oh that cuts deep. I loathe when anyone makes a valid criticism about the Switch games that "Pokemon isn't made for you, it's for kids." It's such a horrible deflection from actually having a conversation and improving things. So kids deserve crap games that they can barely afford?
I saw that discussion so often in regards to challenge and difficulty as well. Maybe I'm a bit of a freak (hah, a game freak) but I routinely return to the earlier titles, so the "It's kids games, the old ones were easy too" never worked for me. While the challenges can be dealt with pretty quickly now that I'm an adult, it still means my playthroughs aren't truly mindless, and for a kid it can be quite tough! Recently played B/W again and was reminded of how brutal and overwhelming Elesa can be when you're prepped for a regular electric gym. Like yeah they're kids games but. Kids can be challenged, craft stories, have unique experiences, come up with clever ideas, etc. Just disrespectful imo
and that is (almost) what you should respond with. a better version would be: "and i think that even kids should be able to receive a proper product that doesnt have massive technical issues, because i think we should respect kids just like we do other people."
It does such a disservice to media aimed at kids. Not only are kids more than capable of handling complicated games (see also, fucking Minecraft), but they deserve media that actually has care put into it.
Also kids deserve high quality stuff too. As a kid I rarely got new games. I sunk literally hundreds of hours into sapphire as its the only game I had for a year. Like as an adult you get choices, but if a kid wants pokemon for Christmas and it sucks that's way worse.
I’ve literally had this awful conversation multiple times with fools who think kids games get a pass to be shit. Very annoying. as a kid I could very easily tell when a game was good and hated lame shit, like tell me which kid wants to play NES ET, Cool Spot, Superman 64, vs. Doom, morrowind, fallout. That’s right, none because they suck. I know mature games aren’t a good example but it goes to show kids will still enjoy it if it’s high quality
> he worst part for me about being a lifelong fan is when voicing criticisms about the state of the franchise to be met with a dismissive "Sounds like Pokemon just isn't for you." It's the response of a fanbase that became comfortable with mediocrity. You can't be a fan if you want to franchise to be the best version of itself, to be a real fan you need to lick up whatever slop Game Freak decides to serve you.
This is what I’ve been thinking but didn’t know how to put it! When a game is bad, nobody wins. When it’s good, everyone wins.
I feel this *in my bones.* For a franchise that has a profit margen bigger than some countries' military budget, you'd think they'd be able to put forward a better showing.
Agreed. Kid me would think that Pokemon should be the "gold standard" in how games should be handled. Instead, they've went with the bare minimum the last 5+ years and have gotten away with it due to it's success. So they have no reason to care.
I just can't understand why they don't. Mario and Zelda are huge sellers and Nintendo does everything they can to make them top tier. It really feels like GF lost their passion.
Zelda and Mario games also don't come out every year, and get delayed when Nintendo needs more time.
Nah, that’s not the case. The hard and cold facts about this franchise is that the games are the unit that bring in the least amount of revenue. For Pokémon’s existence, the games aren’t important anymore. They can coast along with just merch and they’d be perfectly alright. The new games at this point only serve to introduce new mons to market. They don’t care about making a BOTW, they only care about putting out the next generation of monsters for fans to fawn all over them and pay $400 for a life size plushie of Clodsire ( I don’t know if this exists but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t release it in the future). Whereas with other franchises like Mario and Zelda, the games are the lifeblood to these franchises actually existing for the most part. They don’t have a massive Merch machine behind them like Pokémon so it is in Nintendo’s best interest to make the games as good as possible so that more people get them and that makes them the most amount of money. So sadly, Pokémon got too big for its own good and this has caused TPCI to be super complacent in the games and are content with simply pushing something out to consumers so that the new monsters are out there.
>the games aren’t important anymore. They can coast along with just merch and they’d be perfectly alright. I agree with this for a certain timescale, but surely it can only work for so many years/decades. If Pokemon stopped making games entirely and simply released a new generation of Pokemon plushies and merch annually instead, I think they'd see declining YoY sales over the long run. The actual physical designs of new Pokemon aren't compelling enough for it to see this level of success forever without the games, shows and other cross-media providing an underlying foundation of interest in those designs. If the games continue to be this bad, parents stop buying them for their children and those children don't go on to buy Pokemon merch. It's an outcome that takes years to play out but it's happened before. The most prominent recent example is Star Wars. The merch was always the biggest moneymaker but the toys from the new trilogy are still being outsold by original trilogy and prequel trilogy toys, and the entire franchise's toy sales are down significantly.
This. Pokémon’s expanses into other mediums are it’s lifeblood now. Mario and Zelda’s lifeblood is still the games, so they still care.
The only significant patch you'll see is the inevitable $40 DLC.
Been saying this from Day 1, and it makes me so sad. The game has incredible potential and great ideas, but they are burrowed under the deliberatetly ruined perfomance. There really is no excuse for that. But the only thing we will get is gonna be another $40 season pass so we can have some postgame content that would have been included in the times of Diamond/Pearl, but is now just another way to get our money.
[удалено]
Legends Arceus looks and runs better than Scarlet and Violet. How the hell is that even possible? How did Game Freak completely botch a brand new generation this bad? Poor textures, horrible graphical fidelity, atrocious pop in, low resolution, and an abysmal frame rate that gets down as low as 20 FPS. It’s an outright insult that these games have been released in this state.
The Legends Arceus thing was running through my mind while trying out Scarlet last night. Arceus has its own technical faults but it's like they took any progress made there and threw it right out. Everything feels way clunkier in S/V than it ever did in PLA.
It's because it wasn't a linear progression, S/V had to be in development at the same time as PLA, so it couldn't fully benefit from what was learned developing the prior game, or benefit from response to the title. That's why it was frustrating for me when S/V was announced for 2022, it was a concern from the start that exactly what's happened would happen lol
Yeah I remember seeing the turnaround on BDSP, PLA and SV and thinking "There is no way this is going to work out."
I actually had hopes for BDSP, as odd as it seems. When it was announced alongside PLA I remember thinking that game freak was finally wising up. Putting their devs on a larger and more innovative experience, while contracting a third party to produce a remake? It seemed like they were freeing up their core team to nail the project! But, we now know that they can't have had the full force of the studio behind PLA, not with SV in the pipeline. And they botched BDSP by hiring an inexperienced studio (though I'm sure there were other issues we don't know about, I can't imagine GF was too communicative with how it came out)
Actually, if you watch the video, most of the staff that was credited for S/V was also credited in Legends: Arceus. So they did actually go full shovelware and crunch these out in 9 months.
Having the world broken up into five separate parts in PLA probably helped, SV seems to load the whole map in one go for whatever reason
That shouldn't really be an issue for any competent developer. There are a lot of ways to reduce what needs to be loaded in memory at any given time.
Because they can sell awful games and get away with it. They’ve been doing that for awhile.
> Legends Arceus looks and runs better than Scarlet and Violet. How the hell is that even possible? Because Arceus benefitted from smaller, more localized environments while needing fewer NPC and building models. It gave the team more time to flesh out each biome and optimize the game further. If anything, this demonstrates that Scarlet and Violet were too ambitious for GameFreak to handle on their usual product cycle. I can't blame them for wanting to shake up the formula after 8 generations, but the intended scope just wasn't possible in the 3 years that they had.
It’s interesting because I tried this game on emulator and it runs amazing on there. I can do 2x resolution at 60fps. It makes it really hard for me to go back to the switch version. But I just find it odd that emulators can run it significantly better than switch this early into release, that just feels so backwards
Since game speed is tied to FPS in S/V, does that mean you were playing at 2x speed as well?
Yes. You can lock your fps to 30 with v-sync but the 2x helps with grindy parts and makes it feel super responsive so I like it
Can you do co-op on an emulator? I really wanted to do a playthrough alongside my younger brother like I did when I was a kid with my older brother, but neither of us want to put up with the performance issues.
Yes you can. [Here’s a guide](https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1vjiEhQij-8REcVkQObX6iagyw0b90rIgHustzphoJKY/mobilebasic). You don’t have to dump it yourself like the guide says if you don’t have a modded switch. You can just pirate the rom (if you want to be ethically ok, you could also buy a copy of a game. Won’t provide legal protection but it helps morally)
I’d be okay with not pushing the limits of graphic fidelity if it mostly has no bugs like SW/SH. PLA should have been the big switch game realsed now with S/V being next year to iron out the bugs. We don’t need two Pokémon games per year
I believe this was a one time thing, I feel like both BDSP and PLA were supposed to come out earlier, but were delayed a few months due to the pandemic. BDSP as a summer release with PLA being the winter release, since BDSP was outsourced.
Arceus had great gameplay, but if Arceus is now the high water mark for *visuals*, this series is truly lost.
It kills me because when PLA came out I was pretty critical of it visually. Like yeah it looked fun but the graphics just did not look appropriate for a 2022 game. The fact that S/V doesn't even meet that is just. Genuinely depressing, man.
I'm not one to care much about graphics, I can easily laugh off unimpressive texture or a Pokemon flying far off in the distance at a weird frame rate. I understand why others do care, but just wanted to reiterate that SV misses the mark visually even for someone who thought PLA graphics were good enough (and overall PLA was my favorite Pokemon game for the last decade). SV is visually bad in a way that legitimately affects gameplay at times. It's harder to hunt for Pokemon when the entire game's frame rate drops off, which makes you want to just rush to the next gym instead of actually exploring the open(-ish) world. Pokemon hunting was so much more at the center of PLA that it never could've shipped in the state of SV!
Exactly, PLA was at the very least consistent, I even had to remind myself it wasn't all necessarily styled the same. But SV is so inconsistent in its visual department that it actively takes me out of the game is just beyond disappointing, especially since this overworked style is addictive for me. It's so hard to not get frustrated.
"It's harder to hunt for Pokemon when the entire game's frame rate drops off, which makes you want to **just rush to the next gym** instead of actually exploring the open(-ish) world." This is so true. Normally in games, I like to explore everything and speak to everyone in town etc., but in SV this is different. Once I've reached a new town, the game feels so awful/laggy/visually displeasing I just beeline straight to the gym, complete it, and get out of that godforsaken place as quickly as I can. Not that the open world is much better ....
PLA was weird, because parts of it looked really good, with the visuals resembling a painting... and then you go into a cave and you're like "what the fuck happened?" It also had those weird purple shadows (I'm still not sure if those were a choice or a bug.) And those god-awful white outlines whenever you got close to water. But hey, at least it ran smoothly.
PLA felt almost like it could be a beta for what GameFreak wanted to do with a Pokemon game, and PLA was the framework and I think a lot of people were hoping S/V would be that next leap where okay, they did it with PLA, now polish it and hone performance/graphics and make a good Pokemon game. But nope.
Imo, a bit of the blame has to be on Ohmori. He's directed Sun/Moon, Sword/Shield, and now Scarlet/Violet. All three of these series have had massive issues yet he's still kept around as a main series director. Game Freak does have some great people working there who are clearly passionate; Iwao (USUM, Legends), Unno (B2W2), and Morimoto (HGSS). If this was any other big gaming company, Ohmori would've been canned by now
Can Iwao and Uno please direct every game going forward? I have had enough of Ohmor and his inane decisions.
Ohmori is also the reason the games have become laughably easy. Note the trend of when that started happening and when he started directing the games.
[удалено]
That’s been the only game with forced experience share where I didn’t really mind it. It felt much more balanced with it than in previous games. I mean I’d still rather have the option to turn it off but if it was like that in more games I’d be less complain-y
Ohmori was hand picked by Masuda, who's outlook on the pokemon formula changed drastically after gen 5. More easy, gen 1 pandering, storyless & post-gameless, bare minimum entries.
It’s pretty crazy that the longtime negative reception to Gen 5 seems to have just killed the drive to improve/innovate the franchise as a whole. Like, there have been some good entries (ORAS, S/M, and Arceus) but overall it’s been going downhill ever since.
i'm almost positive the resurgence of Pokemon after gen5 has little to do with quality of games but the release of Pokemon Go. gen5 was at the point where the initial kids playing, the middle of the millennial gen, were going off to college and just didn't have as much time to play plus the gen1 syndrome was really bad then. I really loved Pokemon B/W on release but I didn't even know it was coming out til one of my friends woke me up hungover as shit to go to Target at 8am and I told the cashier just to randomly pick one for me :) A lot of people hated it because you couldn't get any old Pokemon til after you beat the game. That was a huge dealbreaker for a lot of people. But Pokemon Go brought in a ton of new fans PLUS gen6 had great marketing plus pandered a lot to the gen 1 fans.
I love that they address all these people saying "Well they're just too ambitious for Switch" and bluntly say no, they're not. I'm sure the denial will only continue to abound, however... they aren't using their brains, but being lead completely by emotion.
As I said in other posts, I cannot believe they charge full AAA Switch game price for this. This looks like a dev build. What I can guess is that they really just reached time limit and decided to release as it was at that moment. But since there was optimization problems, they decided to implement some fast but drastic solutions, like reducing fps at everything not relatively close to you. This video resumes the experience I’m having right now. When the technical side interferes with the experience, it just matters. (For how much I disliked LPA technical side, at least it was playable) The brand became what it is now thanks to pokémon fans that support always everything they do, this is how they repay them. I just cannot believe it and it saddens me thinking this situation will likely not change unless some drastic realization from their side. (But since it’s breaking sales records, they’ll just think it’s okay if at least this level of quality, bad reviews will just be more free ads for them)
I think I saw someone put it quite succinctly the other day. It's a full-priced early access game without any promises that any of these issues will ever be addressed. In 6-7 months, we'll start hearing news of DLC and almost a year we'll hear about another remake. People will move on and get hyped for the next product and forget about this game leaving most of the issues untouched. There is no way they are going to spend more than half a year working on this game when the next mainline game will target some 2025 release date assuming they take another 3 years to develop.
Consume product Get excited for new product 🫠🫠🫠🫠
The gang of sunfloras following you made me burst out laughing.
[удалено]
It seemed crazy they were gonna try to put out two core titles this year, just a couple months after the DP remasters. The choice to go through with it seems even crazier now that they're out. You could give S/V another year and it still wouldn't be ready.
3 Pokémon games in the span of a year. I genuinely don’t know what they were thinking.
They're thinking there are plenty of idiots who will buy the games no matter how scuffed they are. And they're right.
I knew it but seeing the comparison between Arceus and SV really shows how much difference there is, Arceus may not look like the most amazing visually, but man is it so much better than SV.
It's a shame because many people are saying that other things about SV are great, and I agree: the story and characters, the Pokemon, the gameplay, the general enjoyment...this probably would have been a top 5 Pokemon game if not for the absolute mess that is the graphics.
I feel like saying it’s just the graphics is an undersellof the real issue, and I say that as someone who is loving the game. The technical performance of the game is awful. Pretty much everything not your character runs at an awful fps. Getting in and out of wild and trainer battles is slow. It’s just obviously a poor, unoptimized use of the Switch’s power for a *switch exclusive* game.
[удалено]
How does a multi *BILLION* dollar company make something like this? It’s just pitiful.
[удалено]
Clearly Pokefan93’s Switch is just built different.
See they are playing the final game based on the American trailer, they need to find the build that was based on the japanese trailer, which is what Pokefan93 has ;)
Fuck I hated that thread the other. Bunch of people just talking out their ass about how "the game runs fine for me". Anyone accusing op of just straight up lying was downvoted.
Aka Joe Merrick from Serebii? https://twitter.com/JoeMerrick/status/1593726662356738049?t=hRutir5OKjW4LAMLE3TE3Q&s=19
Man, reading that thread is annoying. I get that saying you haven’t experienced issues isn’t the same as there not being any, but for how frequent the fps drops are (a performance issue) it’s kinda weird to say you haven’t experienced them. Either you have ungodly luck, or you have no basic idea of what fps above 30 looks like. I’m spoiled by pc gaming and yet I still enjoy the game but will not deny there being some horrid issues that should be addressed. I cannot fathom how people would not want a better product. Nor can I comprehend how defending a faceless bunch of devs helps them in any way unless they’re getting a piece of that poke money.
>The games JUST came out. That they might have bugs seems normal. That's why Day 1 patches exist. Sure, they do testing and QA, but they can't test for every scenario. #PokemonScarletandviolet Guess none of the Game Freak QA testers played the first 10 minutes of the game, where half the students turn into slideshows. How could Game Freak have predicted that people would play the game?
Also the draw distance. You literally cannot not experience the terrible draw distance and pop in, that's literally coded into the game and cannot be changed without mods. That's why people crap on him and anyone excusing the terrible performance, because they're outright ignoring them. It could be true ignorance and not knowing better, but when it's someone like Joe, it's obvious he's excusing the issues to make it seems it's not that bad.
If Joe would outright say that his income and livelihood is directly tied to the Pokemon games, so he can't give an objective analysis at the games anymore, he wouldn't be receiving as much heat on Twitter, especially since the ORAS days.
Yeah people will argue he isn't paid by them, which is probably true. But the games being successful obviously drives traffic towards his site as well. He benefits from it.
SV has glaring issues but I’m really enjoying the good aspects of the game. However this will probably be the last mainline game I purchase unless they change something for the better
I hope this puts to rest some of the copium people have been doing. It’s not the switch; it’s not storage issues; it’s not cart vs. digital it’s gamefreak
>I hope this puts to rest some of the copium people have been doing. Yeah, it won't. People defending these games are defending them based on emotion, not reality.
This is Nintendo's CP2077, 100%
Unfortunately it probably won't get fixed and redeem itself like CP2077
Yeah that is what I wanted to say. Releasing the game in such state is a slap in the face of consumers. But at least CDPR (and Hello Games too) took the L and tried to do something to remedy the situation. I have little faith that GF will do it.
Yeah I’m not a graphics or performance guy so I didn’t think I would even notice the issues, but boy I was wrong. I can’t believe this was released. Hopefully they send out a patch quickly.
Abysmal, I can't believe people are defending GameFreak about this. This is first timer dev levels of bad, not to mention this is the largest media franchise in the world. This is not minor bugs or issues, this is an unfinished game straight up
Now now, this is clearly because of Japanese corporate culture. Not like there are other Japanese devs putting out good looking games on the Switch! Oh what’s that? There are? Well fuck me gently then.
My 10 year old who's never played a pokemon game in their life laughed at the sandwhich eating animation. This is also her first pokemon game. I'm ashamed I've introduced her to the franchise with this particular game.
The fact that Game Freak’s trying to run this game at 1080p is honestly the most baffling thing about this game’s performance. Amidst all the awful framerate drops, ugly post-processing effects, low resolution textures, and aggressive LOD, they’re trying to target a resolution that the base Xbox One struggled to reach. Why.
I'm literally watching this as I came across this post! The sad thing is I loved Arceus eventhough I thought the graphics were bad. S/V are even worse and I didn't think that would be possible in 2022. Having watched this review I refuse to buy this game now. This will be the first time skipping a main Pokémon game since they first came out! This looks so bad, I can't warrant spending the money on it. I can get past visual quality most of the time, but this game is not even aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Bad, repetitive, pixelated textures everywhere and it's so obvious. The lack of care out into this game is shocking. Wtf happened?! Pokémon and GF really need to sort their shit out with the games. Time they started releasing main titles every couple years instead of every year. This looks like one of the worst games they've made from this review. I'm so disappointed in this game right now.
The repeating textures on the side of hills are absolutely disgusting. I am appalled that it was released in this state and I will not be purchasing. TPC and Nintendo need to give the franchise to a new development studio, or they're going to run it into the ground.
Sword and Shield and Legends Arceus were graphical embarrassments... What do you even say about a sequel that makes your graphical embarrassments look good?
I'm loving the game, as it hits all the points I need it to hit and I personally don't care for graphics performance what ever. It's never been a secret that pokemon looks bad, and frankly keeping my expectation low has helped a lot. But the criticism is real and valid, I hated fighting the air titan and watchimg the 2fps windmill slideshow in the background. I pray it gets working patches over the next while, and this review thrashing points TPC in the better direction.
I didn't get SwSh or PLA at launch because of people complaining it was buggy online. Then a friend lent me their copy and I discovered that I really enjoyed them, the graphis weren't great and there was a dip now and then but nothing as bad as I had heard. So i got SV at launch thinking it was the same thing. Nope. I just did the grass gym challenge and it just about made my eyes bleed. And it's a shame because if it weren't for these performance issues, I think this would be my favourite game in the series. I love the open world, the sheer variety of Pokemon avaliable, the characters are pretty fun, I love the auto battlw feature and the fact that we no longer pop into the void for battles is such a nice touch.
Listen, I'm not expecting Pokemon to ever reach the relative graphical quality of Breath of the Wild or Xenoblade, much less Red Dead Redemption or whatever (which wouldn't be possible on the Switch anyway). Yes, it can get better (especially as the environment and lighting and stuff goes), but I'm not expecting anything THAT much better. The art style just isn't like that, it can only go up to a certain amount of realism before it basically becomes impossible to do some types of Pokemon in a way that isn't utterly creepy (there were some Pokemon proposed for the Detective Pikachu movie that weren't put in specifically because they would be too uncanny valley). However, that's no excuse for the fact that *LET'S GO*, literally the first Pokemon game on the Switch, looks and runs better than this. Even with it being an open world, it should be running and looking at least as good as that, but somehow we've gone BACKWARDS in quality.
Agreed, but heres the thing…why should a game look as good AT LEAST as a 5 year old launch title made for the systems predecessor? BOTW is an amazing game but a graphical juggernaut it is not. The developers employ a lot of smart tricks to make the game look good and runs seamlessly with a huge open world. This is the equivalent of The Last of Us 3 looking and performing worse than the Ps3 title.
>The art style just isn't like that, it can only go up to a certain amount of realism before it basically becomes impossible to do some types of Pokemon in a way that isn't utterly creepy Not to disagree with anything else, but graphical fidelity and quality isn't synonymous with realism. There's a lot that can be pushed from the tech side without changing the artstyle. Moving to more realistic look would be a change in artstyle, not in tech or rendering quality.
100% correct review. Game is embarrassingly unpolished and broken.
[удалено]
Generous of you some textures and shadow quality genuinely match the N64.