Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet

[Mr EliteL]

I take it Sword/Shield, the Pearl/Diamond remakes and Legends Arceus all run better than Scarlet/Violet in comparison then, since I don't remember any or enough to stand out when I played Shield. Damn.

EDIT: I'm a donkey.

[Moonface]

I take it Sword/Shield, the Pearl/Diamond remakes and Legends Arceus all run better than Scarlet/Violet in comparison then, since I don't remember any or enough to stand out when I played Shield. Damn.

EDIT: I'm a donkey.

They do run better, mostly because this game has two glaring problems that are likely huge contributors to the performance issues:

1. There seems to be a memory leak in the game which means the longer you play, the worse the performance will be until you restart the game entirely to flush out the Switch's memory.
   
2. I've seen claims that the entire game map and all entities within it (items, Pokémon, NPC's, etc.) are loaded at all times, rather than the typical approach where things out of sight of the player are unloaded or if at a far distance away are rendered in significantly lower polygon and texture quality.
   

The first one can probably just be fixed by a patch which might help some of the problems that come about after playing the game continuously for a few hours, but the second issue, if true, would probably need some sort of code rewrite or something I'd expect since the game would've been developed to do that on purpose. If that second issue is true I can't imagine why Game Freak would think it's remotely a good idea to load the entire game world at all times; it seems like a pretty common sense thing for any game developer to not do that.

As for my earlier post questioning if the Switch hardware was to blame at all, while I'm sure it can be limiting as @Dragon Lord said plenty of other games do fine on the Switch that are just as big and in most instances more detailed, and after I learned about the two things I listed it's definitely clear most of the fault lies with Game Freak and/or The Pokémon Company.

[Maniakkid25]

If this is a memory leak, good luck finding it to patch it in the first place. Even if that were true, though, most of the bugs I've seen surfing the web have none of the expected issues from a memory leak: performance drops, long loading times, or even crashes. What I keep seeing is collision detection issues, ESPECIALLY with that stupid cycle pokemon and its jumps! If it doesn't land on the floor, it'll lock into an infinite fall animation! Dropping out of bounds, contorted animations, pokemon just straight falling off cliffs; all of that screams "Engine problems" from my experience with bugs in games. This game was, simply put, NOT READY for prime time, and should have been pushed back at least a year, if not more.

I'm sure it will be patched; Cyberpunk 2077 is now vaguely playable, and look how it started. Same thing happened with Fallout: New Vegas. But this is not an acceptable release. I'm really glad I was on the fence about buying this game, because now, I'm not buying it until it's, like, 10 bucks, if I buy it at all.

[Dragon Lord]

I really can't believe how had the Pokemon shills are defending this game. You can say that you're still enjoying the game despite the problems, that's fine, but to come out and say that people are overreacting to the horribly performance and bugs of these games is insane. I've even seen defenders go as far to say that these issues only happen "when you go so far out of your way to find them that it's impossible to happen to casual players."

@Moonface - A memory leak is very likely considering that I've seen so many people reporting that the longer their play session is, the worse the FPS gets to the point where they have to close the game entirely and start it back up in order to fix it. That's got all the markings of a memory leak. Hopefully it doesn't take Gamefreak too long to get a patch out for it, because memory leaks can be extremely deflating when it comes to wanting to play a game.

Also someone else found out that if you're riding your motorcyclemon and you jump up cliffs backwards, you can actually get up them when you're not supposed to. Between that glitch and all of the other issues, this game is basically a 1:1 copy of Skyrim on rele.... never mind, it's a 1:1 copy of current day Skyrim when it comes to how poorly it performs.

[Moonface]

If this is a memory leak, good luck finding it to patch it in the first place. Even if that were true, though, most of the bugs I've seen surfing the web have none of the expected issues from a memory leak: performance drops, long loading times, or even crashes. What I keep seeing is collision detection issues, ESPECIALLY with that stupid cycle pokemon and its jumps! If it doesn't land on the floor, it'll lock into an infinite fall animation! Dropping out of bounds, contorted animations, pokemon just straight falling off cliffs; all of that screams "Engine problems" from my experience with bugs in games. This game was, simply put, NOT READY for prime time, and should have been pushed back at least a year, if not more.

Yeah, as I've seen more of the issues in the game it looks like a lot of them are just bugs rather than issues that would come from a potential memory leak. What's really stupid is that some things, like Jigglypuff's flying away into the air as a despawn animation, are being mistaken as bugs when that is actually an intentional feature, which just tells me that most of the problems are so apparent so often that people can't discern what is and isn't meant to be happening. I'll admit I even thought the Jigglypuff's were broken until I saw enough comments that clarified it was intended behaviour.

As for a delay, I doubt we'll ever see a Pokémon game get delayed. There's just no incentive to do so and I doubt we'd ever see a release so bad that it actually harms profits or the brand name enough to incite change.

I really can't believe how had the Pokemon shills are defending this game. You can say that you're still enjoying the game despite the problems, that's fine, but to come out and say that people are overreacting to the horribly performance and bugs of these games is insane. I've even seen defenders go as far to say that these issues only happen "when you go so far out of your way to find them that it's impossible to happen to casual players."

@Moonface  - A memory leak is very likely considering that I've seen so many people reporting that the longer their play session is, the worse the FPS gets to the point where they have to close the game entirely and start it back up in order to fix it. That's got all the markings of a memory leak. Hopefully it doesn't take Gamefreak too long to get a patch out for it, because memory leaks can be extremely deflating when it comes to wanting to play a game.

Also someone else found out that if you're riding your motorcyclemon and you jump up cliffs backwards, you can actually get up them when you're not supposed to. Between that glitch and all of the other issues, this game is basically a 1:1 copy of Skyrim on rele.... never mind, it's a 1:1 copy of current day Skyrim when it comes to how poorly it performs.

The main defense I keep seeing is "It's only been out for 3 days, give them time to patch it" or "Loads of games/x game released with bugs" and neither should be acceptable for any game, at least not to the extent this game is showing problems. Silly things like what you mentioned with the backwards jumping up cliffs, sure if that was a thing that didn't get ironed out pre-launch it isn't that big of a deal because it doesn't impact the game overall and the player has to choose to do that trick anyway. Camera clipping, frame rate drops, and the multitude of other things that are unavoidable for anyone shouldn't be waved off with a patch because if some day the patches for this game become unavailable, the vanilla cartridge is going to be riddled with these things with no way to avoid it.

Also, there's no way most of this stuff was missed before launch. A Q&A team would've seen this stuff, and either Game Freak lacked the time/resources to address it before launch or opted to just deal with it post-launch. Whatever the reason I would hope it would be addressed going forward, but as I already said in this post I doubt the state of the game right now will be enough to turn heads at TPC.

For anyone curious of some of the crazy stuff happening in this game, here's a list of all the posts I've seen on Twitter showing stuff off:

• Broken Cutscene Animation
  
• Child NPC Wandering into a Battle Mid-Attack
  
• Oversized Pokémon
  
• Partner AI Struggling with Narrow Ledge (not necessarily a bug but still funny)
  
• Compilation Video of Various Bugs
  
• Moon Just Suddenly Shows Up
  
• Two Controller's Equals Double Speed
  
• Backward Slope Jumping
  
• Spinning Fuecoco
  
• Flying Jigglypuff's (not a bug, but the audio overlay on this one is brilliant)
  
• Sprigatito Sliding Around a Ball
  
• Random Pokémon Spawning in Cutscenes
  
• Exorcism NPC
  
• Fuecoco Slides Into The Depths
  
• Invisible Motorcycle
  
• Camera Mode Expression Bug
  
• NPC Randomly Changing Sizes
  
• NPC Gets Stuck in Place then Despawns
  

The only bright side to 99% of these is that it makes for hilarious moments, but I do hope they get addressed sooner than later.

[Maniakkid25]

And now it seems that this has somehow gotten even stupider, somehow. Apparently, someone actually contacted Nintendo Support about this, and they are actively claiming that they haven't heard about these problems, so no patch is being planned. As the article itself points out, this is a load of horseshit; never mind the fandom DUMPING all the game's terrible happenings on Twitter for all the world to see, there is no goddamn way they did not get any warning about this from their QA team! I can assure you, they knew EXACTLY the state of the game when they shipped it, and just did not care because they wanted your money! This happened with GTA Definitive, and it'll happen again with something else! Come Tuesday, there will be a message from The Pokemon Company saying "we're sorry," but never forget this was pre-meditated. I called it with the National Dex, and I'm calling it here!

[Moonface]

Well in Nintendo's defense here, the article you linked @Maniakkid25 does say that it is common practice for support lines to act like a problem being reported is the first time it's being heard about and so it would also make sense for that to be followed up with no statement of a planned fix, since a fix can't be getting worked on if the support line is pretending to be unaware of a problem in the first place. Considering Nintendo's care for quality I can't see them not being aware of the problems and having brought it up, but since they aren't the sole owners of TPC they don't get definitive say over the handling of this game like they would their other properties. There's no way that no one was aware of these issues before the game shipped though, and although it would be better to just outright admit the problem is known about I can understand from a PR perspective why it looks better on paper to claim you didn't intentionally ship a broken product. It's obviously bullshit and they did ship it broken but there's no way they'd ever admit to it.

[Mr EliteL]

OK, the bugs do look so damn funny, but man I think I'd stop playing and wait for the patch if I came across any, if I had the game. Although given so far they responded with no patch planned, looks bleak if true but yeah, do hope a fix is in the near future and they're not sitting on their arses laughing with the money they made.

[Moonface]

I won't be surprised to not see a patch because there's no incentive for Game Freak to bother when this game already sold 10 million units.

Also, Digital Foundry did a really good video talking about the performance and visuals of the game which I'd highly recommend checking out:

[Maniakkid25]

Oh, they'll pay for it in the next release, and then they'll take the wrong lessons and say "OH, PEOPLE DON'T WANT US TO DO THIS WITH POKEMON, SO SCREW IT!"

You can sell 10 million units and still be a laughing stock; just ask Resident Evil 6. The problem is that despite the massive performance problems, the game REVIEWED well, so they aren't going to care despite the fact this game is among the worst reviewed Pokemon games EVER! Nothing is going to change unless we kick them in the ass, and give this game what it deserves: a failing grade. 59 or below will make them see alarm bells, but that's too late, now.

[ShiraNoMai]

Reviews don't mean shit to the big wigs unless it directly affects profits. Besides, we already know what happens when publishers pay review sites to review well or else. And because these games sold so very very well, there's no chance in hell they'll ever consider not doing exactly what they're doing. Now, if the response from this game (after already purchasing) influences future purchases from TPC/GameFreak, then we could very well see them considering something. But you're right, in that they'll perhaps pivot the blame to whatever novel gimmick they added to the next game as the cause for the missed sales, and not the obvious glaring issues of releasing an unfinished product. I actually believe that to be the reason for Black and White's "failure" in their eyes.

[Maniakkid25]

Reviews don't mean shit to the big wigs unless it directly affects profits. Besides, we already know what happens when publishers pay review sites to review well or else. And because these games sold so very very well, there's no chance in hell they'll ever consider not doing exactly what they're doing.

I would again point to Resident Evil 6 as an indication that reviews and fan outrage can (NOT WILL) influence the higher-ups to rethink their positions. That game sold ridiculously well, but they took a look at the divisive review scores and fan backlash, and deemed it a failure, deciding to go back to roots with RE7 instead of continuing the action-oriented bend of RE6. It is possible to slap some sense into developers with our words and not our wallets. Will it happen here? Probably not. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

[Moonface]

Reviews don't mean shit to the big wigs unless it directly affects profits. Besides, we already know what happens when publishers pay review sites to review well or else. And because these games sold so very very well, there's no chance in hell they'll ever consider not doing exactly what they're doing.

I would again point to Resident Evil 6 as an indication that reviews and fan outrage can (NOT WILL) influence the higher-ups to rethink their positions. That game sold ridiculously well, but they took a look at the divisive review scores and fan backlash, and deemed it a failure, deciding to go back to roots with RE7 instead of continuing the action-oriented bend of RE6. It is possible to slap some sense into developers with our words and not our wallets. Will it happen here? Probably not. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

I think what will make it harder for Pokémon to learn a lesson from this is that it isn't controlled by one company like RE is, but technically by three since The Pokémon Company has three owners (Nintendo, Game Freak, Creatures) and while I expect there might be an agreeance on doing better with the games, I doubt more time or resources will be put into them if doing so impacts any of the other ventures that go alongside a new game release. Game Freak may have even known this game could have benefitted from a delay, but doing so means affecting the launch of the TCG, anime, merchandise, and other stuff too which isn't going to fly so they're stuck with what they have.

The best case scenario would be that Game Freak finally expands their studio beyond sub-200 employees so they can better manage the workload, although it doesn't help when they're cranking out two open-world Pokémon games in the same year when they've never done even one of them before. Had they only had to deal with one it probably would have gone better, considering how much better Arceus runs compared to SV.

[ShiraNoMai]

Yeah you're absolutely right. As the IP grew more popular, the games sector fell behind as tech grew more and more in terms of the necessary staff and such to build, rig and render working assets for modern game design. This should really be a wake-up call for them tbh

Anyway I think I'm strongly considering supporting the mod community for making a 60fps mode for the game. I wanna try this game out and it looks so damn acceptable at 60:

[Dragon Lord]

I saw that post on Twitter a couple of days ago and got a huge kick out of reading some of the replies on it. One person saying, "Cool, now we can appreciate how ugly it looks in 60 FPS." KEKW

Another one claiming that's how the game has been running for them on Switch all along, despite the game being hardcoded to cap at 30 FPS.

The things Pokemon fans will say to defend Nintendo/Gamefreak is just absolutely hilarious. I've never seen a gaming community make such ridiculous claims and stretch as far as they are to defend such poor quality work.