Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
Freak game
While yes, we’ve reached a point in the Nintendo Switch’s lifecycle where the handheld console is roughly two full generations of technology behind its PlayStation and Xbox rivals, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s recent technical issues can only be partially attribute to aging hardware. .
In reality, most of this is down to Game Freak, the Pokemon administrators who haven’t figured out how to maximize the Switch’s limited power for the open world of Scarlet and Violet, and seem to be too short of a cycle of development for new games to really give them the care they deserve.
Several technically broken looks at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have been going viral throughout the weekend, though separately, a post showing the difference between the open world of Xenoblade on Switch and Scarlet and Violet is particularly striking:
Beyond that, here’s an animation of a character eating food in Scarlet and Violet, which isn’t a typo, but literally what it looks like:
The mistakes themselves are… hilarious:
I’m not sure what exactly happened here:
Game Freak also seems to be inventing new bugs the likes of which have never been seen before:
And then there’s the not-so-fun issue of the game running terribly in many cases with huge frame drops, pop-ups, and other issues:
While most of the community isn’t a fan of the state of how the game was released, there are the usual Game Freak apologists who say that it’s their first real open-world flagship game and that they need some fluency, but at this point, this is the most profitable video game franchise in history. It needs to be given much, much more investment and care. The game is already being reviewed as the franchise’s lowest-rated mainline entry, and Pokemon may lose its grip on the industry if Game Freak doesn’t get a better handle on things.
The general consensus is that the game is, at its core, fun, but these technical limitations are so obnoxious that they can sink the whole experience. While yes, it’s probably time for Nintendo to invest in some more powerful hardware, given that the Switch is five years old and hasn’t gotten a single performance upgrade, many other series have done a much better job on the Switch. and in this case, most of it falls squarely on Game Freak. Hopefully they will take it to heart.
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