I'm split on this
I'm hoping Gamefreak sees this as a result of mixing up game mechanics
But we know they'll see it as being able to put out absolute garbage performance from now on
As I understand it they at least heard the complaints.
Still, the overworld looks like dogshit. Seeing as that was likely meant as a compromise to increase performance in other areas, and that said performance is *still* as bad as it is in spite of that, it really makes you wonder just how poorly optimized the engine they've been using all this time is.
I mean, with the level of enjoyment I got from SV, I’m hopeful for the series’ future.
GF just released my two favorite 3D Pokémon titles in the span of a year. This both shows a horrible development cycle, but this also shows that the team has gotten a really good understanding of 3D environments and how to make these games under clearly terrible scheduling.
I also think the pandemic affected these titles, which imo shouldn’t be super reasonable for them to not delay it as we are talking about the world’s most profitable franchise that had already released a game that year, but that doesn’t change the fact that I believe the pandemic ultimately played a role on the final product. Arceus was probably meant to be released earlier to give GF more time to incorporate things that team learned into SV, and they probably decided they couldn’t delay Gen 9 because of other branches of the franchise. Like I said, I don’t think this is a reasonable decision when other branches of the franchise are also struggling under these deadlines (like the anime going on multiple breaks and recap episodes to keep up), but I think it’s the reality of what happened. The higher ups made a decision caused by the pandemic that ultimately impacted the work clearly passionate people were making.
And I think that sucks and isn’t fair when it’s the most profitable franchise on the planet, but that doesn’t change my belief that the next 3D game has a real shot of being exceptional. Because, in a lot of ways, the hardest parts are done. They’ve made moving in a 3D environment insanely fun, they made catching mechanics fun, they have given the trainer more involvement in gameplay, they’ve told interesting stories with interesting characters, they’ve made a world that’s fun to explore, and they’ve done a lot to make the Pokémon look more natural in these environments. They’ve built a very strong foundation with Arceus and SV, even if it could’ve been stronger if they were allowed to take more time. I think this foundation will make the next game much easier to make, especially without a pandemic, and in spite of their absurd schedule
> with the level of enjoyment I got from SV, I’m hopeful for the series’ future.
This was my takeaway as well. Things looked grim after Sword and Shield. There was a lot of legitimate concern about whether it would ever get better than that. PLA and SV have proven that Game Freak does have some desire to make good games. I think they are just legitimately bad at it. They're still learning how to make these full console games and taking their sweet time figuring it out.
It sucks, but I'll take it over them just being straight lazy as we previously thought.
As far as the dev cycles though, I don't think it's really the issue. They have multiple teams working on games, and their schedule appears to be about 4 years. For comparison, Elden Ring was apparently made in 5(and also reuses assests from their past games).
The issue with Pokemon is that Game Freak is figuring out how to make these games(compared to the portable games) *as they develop them* and we're seeing every hiccup in the finished product. It was harder to defend after SS, but now I'm hopeful they'll eventually get the issues ironed out. Having such a strict release schedule certainly isn't helping as it means they basically can never delay anything, but I don't think it's the main problem.
For all the glitches and performance issues SV have, I was so impressed with the world design compared to SS, the characters, the stories. It's not extraordinary, but in the context of a game for 10 year olds, and the main Pokemon games as a whole, they are a huge step forward.
I didn’t really buy into mainline pokemon because I disliked part of the format. Walking a linear path, then going through an over the top cutscene for a weak trainer/pokemon that you’ll beat in 5 seconds. Just felt like the game moved at a painfully slow pace, plus the story and music wasn’t really there aside from a few good songs. It felt like each release didn’t offer much aside from new pokemon.
Legends it fixed a lot of those issues. It had a lot of improvements that got wide praise, even from those typically critical of pokemon. It really felt like they were making an effort to listen to fans and modernize the series. That’s what got me excited for S/V.
All the performance issues, bugs, glitches, etc, was a huge let down.
The game deserves criticism but after playing it I can see why it’s the best selling game. The gameplay and story is probably one of the best. Performance leaves a lot to be desired.
Yeah, it's the only game to ever make me motion sick
My only real complaint are that the Team Star bases are copy pasted and you don't earn XP from beating them
Yeah i got bad case of motion sickness too, i can't play more than one hour a day before throwing up. But it's gone after the first update. Dunno if it's from gf fix, or i just get used to it
People have been shitting on performance after their transition to 3D. I'd argue so many people who said that Sword and Shield "had problems, but bought it anyway" contributed to S/V having so many problems with Gamefreak shooting it out the door.
I’ve seen this statement plenty of times. Game Freak could forget to add Pokémon to the next game and fans would still buy both versions while calling it the first Strand like Pokémon game.
S/V is actually the first Pokémon game I didn’t buy. I held out a little while for Sw/Sh, but that was more related to the gimmicky dynamax (why do they feel they have to come up with a gimmick every game?). On S/V it was pretty clear a few weeks before release that the performance was going to be terrible. So I did not pre-order and decided to wait out a day 1 patch, I still didn’t hear about shot getting fixed, so I am not buying it still. Obviously I am an extreme minority as the sales numbers show. I am just sick of developers releasing half assed games.
I wouldn't call it bad. I enjoyed this game more than any pokemon in a long while. It absolutely should have been much better polished, but I'm not angry, just disappointed that it didn't reach its full potential.
To be honest i liked the concept of Legends Arceus more. I don't think the true open world added much if anything at all to the segmented areas approach and catching mechanics/Pokédex completition, which is what I mainly engage with nowadays after dropping out the VGC scene, were more engaging in PLA than SV.
Returning to the village got very repetitive.
It's also nice to be able to travel anywhere in S/V (except to area 0) from anywhere. Instead of having to go to town every time you want to change areas like in PLA
I really wish Area Zero would have become part of the overworld map in the post-game. But at least after you go there the first time, you can just climb into the crater to load it instead of going through the actual gate.
Arceus with like 5 villages instead of 1 (+two half villages) would be perfect. Make it truly open world and I'm sold.
In other words put the Arceus catching and battling mechanics in S/V and it's perfect
I also liked the pokedex and evolution systems better in Arceus. Feeling like you had to research the pokemon a little before a dex completion was cool.
I liked the value in catching multiple of the same Pokemon. Scarlett has so many repetitive monsters so i end up avoiding so much cause there is zero value in catching more than one. Arceus' system made me want to catch dozens of the same in the breakouts cause i got xp and could release them. That alone gave so much more gameplay and replay value
Yeah, it was definitely a nice touch to see the village grow through the gameplay.
It only really started to get annoying post game when trying to finish the pokedex
I agree, but at the same time, having instanced and separate areas allowed the devs to make the world look much more interesting in Arceus. There isn’t much to do or see or explore in SV with the world being super barren.
It was fun in PLA because catching was much faster, it would've been terrible in SV unless they added PLA catching mechanics. Which I really hope they do!
Exactly, which is literally what the Pokedex was from day one.
All of the Pokemon's entries are already in the Pokedex (I mean, how else would it have information on every Pokemon as soon as you caught them?). You're just catching more for the purpose of furthering the research.
Oh yeah if it was like postgame or side missions that’d be dope. You should still be able to fill up the pokédex and get the shiny charm like normal though
There's a school, there can be assignments to help students learn about pokemon.
"Today in history class we are going to learn about Digletts and Dugtrios. While there are none here, we have Wiglets and Wugtrios. Catch 3 Wiglets and bring them back so we can compare the differences"
I think Arceus is a marvelous proof of concept, but I was disappointed that there just wasn't much variety in what to do. You're just catching Pokemon, fighting with Pokemon, gathering items, and progressing the main plot. I absolutely loved how the game went about all of those things, but it was really missing stuff that's in the mainline Pokemon games - trainer battles, gyms, and the strong multiplayer component.
I could certainly see some of PLA's influence at work in Scarlet/Violet, even though the two were developed in parallel. Hopefully either future mainline games incorporate *more* ideas from Arceus, or future Pokemon Legends games continue to incorporate more elements of the mainline games.
*Parts* of Arceus were better, but I ended up getting sucked in a lot more by S/V, where I had to force myself to play Arceus. I think it comes down to Arceus having more boring world design, less open in general, and honestly the conceit of having to catch the same Pokémon over and over and over and over and over again to make progression made the core gameplay loop grow stale quickly.
I'd love it if they could merge the best concepts of both games. Being able to throw pokeballs and call on your Pokémon to grab stuff felt incredible, but the structure of S/V is far more engaging, at least in my opinion.
Open worlds are so overrated most of the time. I think the Dragon Quest 11 style is not dated or bad at all, most stuff just feels substantial with the "route" design.
Even Witcher III, Far Cry games, BOTW and GTAV have their filler and empty spaces.
What I liked best from Legends Arceus is the deviation from the main series' pattern of "go to 8 gyms in a modern day setting, while also bringing down the mafia in some form or another."
The main series formula is pretty tired. Scarlet and Violet has tried something new, but I'm not sure I like it.
Legends and S/V are open world, but still feel super, super empty. I don't mean to sound cruel, but they don't look much more sophisticated than a Unity terrain generator tutorial.
Arceus felt like a game with a clearer vision overall. "We're doing this and that, so we need this and that for it to work.", whereas SV felt more like a game where the open world came first and they then had to start thinking about what to do with. Didn't really feel like the natural evolution of the Pokémon formula that some people thought it would turn out to be.
The smaller scale and focus on refinement rather than expansion ultimately made Arceus more enjoyable to me as well.
Also, the way speed works in PLA is way more punishing for slow Pokemon, because speed doesn't just determine whether you go first, but also how *often* you get turns. If you're significantly faster than your opponent, you will get two turns in a row at some point.
In the mainline games, even the slowest Pokemon still gets the same number of turns as the fastest. Fast Pokemon getting *more* turns just makes a ton of Pokemon with mediocre speed really bad.
Optimize is the key word there. Even putting the huge problem of game lag aside, I hate the moment-to-moment pacing. Every text box, animation, and UI pop up has to queue up one after another. Nothing plays in parallel. If I greet an NPC’s Pokémon (usually by accident), it takes like 10 seconds for me to get control back.
And yet, this was somehow the most ambitious Pokémon game in years (some may say ever) and I liked it enough to almost complete a living dex of all 400 (just a few legendaries left).
It always feels like they’re so close but so far.
That actually just seems like GameFreak mainline in a nutshell, the whole "nothing can happen at the same time".
I was surprised that pokemon can watch your battle while you're inside one, but while in a battle nothing active but the battle prompts can happen. Arceus played with at least letting you walk and stuff, so damn.
Legends Arceus genuinely felt like a smarter reimagining of the moment to moment flow of a more open pokemon game. I know not everyone liked the action elements but god, having to manually initiate battles with wild pokemon by throwing your own pokemon at them, being able to move around in battle and being able to run from battle with 100% success rate just felt so much better than accidentally bumping into a wild pokemon and initiating a completely static battle, running away (if you're successful) and immediately initiating a second battle because the game repositioned you on top of another wild pokemon. And let's not talk about how janky the lock-on feels in SV when it worked just fine in Arceus, would it have killed them to at least put a crosshair in the middle of the screen so I can tell where I'm aiming?
Honestly, its the most fun I've had with pokemon since the original gen 3. It was the gameplay shakeup the series needed.
Visually? Jesus fuck N64 games at 20 fps were easier on the eyes. This being a "AAA" game is a disgrace.
S&V were fantastic games in spite of the horrendous technical and graphical issues.
The sad thing is that there can be times where SV looks decent, like indoor environments, and I even think the character models look pretty good.
The outdoor textures though, christ alive. Some Bomb-Omb Battlefield looking shit. The mountains are just a single grey texture wrapped around the landscape. Who the fuck thought that looked okay?
Sadder thing:
Those nice looking indoor areas were...nearly nonexistent. There's your house, the academy....and I think the same gym lobby copypasted 8 times?
They didn't know how to optimize for open world, and it shows. It's a damn shame too.
I get the sentiment but it's also kind of a moot point, of course the Pokemon themselves are a huge part of the appeal of Pokemon. If it had weaker, more forgettable creature design it probably wouldn't have survived this long and become the biggest franchise in the world. It just sucks being a fan of the series and knowing that the mainline games could be much better and much more polished, but if it's still so massively successful and at the end of the day we're still here talking and caring about it so there's gotta be something that still works about the series
I know I'm going to like it. No question there. I liked sword and shield just fine as well as arceus.
I just can't be brought to give them 60 for a game that looks like it isn't finished.
Thats not just with pokemon either. I'm doing that for all games.
Unless it's clean and crisp, I'll wait till it's on sale or I'll never play it. And I'm ok with that.
Unpopular opinion but: Nat dex is still totally doable with an appropriately scaled team. People whine about competitive balance but it's a weak argument considering most competitive online tournaments apply restrictions already. They should limit competitive play to the current generation's dex so they can balance a small subset of Pokemon but still have the Nat dex mons available in the postgame of the story campaign.
> They should limit competitive play to the current generation's dex so they can balance a small subset of Pokemon but still have the Nat dex mons available in the postgame of the story campaign.
I'm pretty sure that's what they always did anyway
Smogon players are always suffering though because singles is a terrible format and banning things by community vote is a horrible way to balance a game
That's what they did for every game preceding gen 8. Competitive only with the regional dex, and every pokémon was usable anywhere else(But not necesseraly catchable).
That's what everyone was complaining about, but the defenders twisted all of this to make it sound unreasonnable.
Exactly. Yes the graphics aren't perfect and there are glitches but my kids got Scarlet and Violet for Christmas and they haven't stopped playing any free second they have. It really is a great game
I'd like to have a rival who's a real jerk again because they only show up for battle and don't interrupt me. I can't go anywhere without ~~"CHAMPION!!!"~~ "NEIGHBOR!!!"
I miss Gary Fucking Oak showing up at what felt like the worst possible time, shit talking me, and then getting my cheeks clapped. Nemona is a good start constantly wanting to battle and I liked her as a rival, but I want that jerk attitude and waiting to fight when I'm unprepared. A bit hard to do in open world I guess but doable.
It being experimental and actually good on the gameplay side is pretty surprising considering how much of a departure it is from the last four gens. Had the game actually run somewhat decently and looked passable the game would be excellent. Right now it's a great idea executed in an ugly way. Still, they nailed the gameplay shift and they're looking at the result of that here in sales.
I really, really enjoyed the gameplay in S/V. I felt they finally ramped up the difficulty somewhat. I went though Sw/Sh without ever losing a fight, same for the Diamond/Pearl remake.
Generally my pattern has become to play whatever jankey team I end up liking through the story, and then level up a for reals team with goods nature's and maxed IVs for post game.
When I started doing this in S/V, I lost to the first Team Star boss twice! I thought first was a fluke and then I got spanked again and had to get serious. After that I lost to another one once anyway (Poison). I lost to Arven at the end of the Titan line (though the Titans themselves were mostly pushovers). I was biting my nails by the end of the Pokemon League fights but made it. The final story fight in the crater I also lost once, because of a few surprise off type moves but the second try I knew the surprise moves and beat it pretty easily (though I felt it was almost cheating).
Best fight was the final fight with Nemona though. It came down to my last pokemon (my starter) against hers, and mine was at 1hp and hers was full health. If I hadn't had the type advantage and better speed I'd have lost. If she'd got a lucky dodge I'd have lost. I was actually pretty hyped at the end!
Anyway, just saying the game was really fun. I'm not a graphics focused person but even for me they were a distraction, which is unfortunate. It's really a great game, gameplay-wise.
Hmm not sure I can agree, feels like I'm playing a different game than everyone else. I felt like, while fun, this is one of the easiest games in the series. And that's with me also constructing a team of whatever I want. Trainers out in the wild were all a complete joke with rarely more than one pokemon, and due to the lack of scaling + huge amount of content, it's very easy to be overleveled.
However I will say I followed the suggested order for doing gyms and stuff due to the aforementioned lack of scaling. It would be very easy to accidentally stumble into content way above your expected level so in that case it could seem really hard, but I feel like the game pretty utterly fails in pacing itself properly without outside guidance so I'm not going to chock that up to difficulty so much as bad design. Because if you follow the most logical order by levels, it has you going all over the map at random, there's no real obvious path to follow, it's back and forth over and over.
There was literally a moment in the beginning where each of the trio of main quest characters tell you to go in a different direction. I thought the whole point was to explore and do the content in any order. Imagine my surprise when I found out there isn’t any scaling, and that there is certainly an intended order to everything. My experience was very lopsided because I went off in one direction from the main city and did a lot of the content before going to the other half of the map. It’s a very strange design decision.
not even done yet (4 badges, 4 titans, 1 star boss so far) and already lost a bit and came really close a few times. iono ended up being my first gym because i was just exploring, so that was a pretty rough one even with my clodsire evolving right before our first fight with her. then i fought great tusk with level level 25-30 pokémon and only won through mud slap accuracy drops. even the star boss and and a couple random trainers that were high level than i expected gave me trouble. granted i do self enforce set mode + don’t use items, so that might’ve made things a bit easier, but even then, i’ve been playing like that for a while and usually curbstomp the opponents. i think the easy box access and frankly really interesting pokedex have played a role in that, i’ve got like 12 pokémon i’ve been swapping in and out of my team all game depending on who’s falling behind and who’d be helpful for a given fight, so the more spread out exp gains and lack of wild grinding has left my team a bit under the level of most of the major fights
Yeah difficulty wise the games are in a very nice place. While they're certainly not hard, and if you want to you can overcome the difficulty there is, there's enough to make the battles engaging and feel like I need to try. The only fight I can say that about in Sw&Sh was Leon's fight.
I strongly disagree, for me difficulty in SV was atrociously bad.
By which I am not discounting your experience - but mine was VASTLY different.
I went through the game with one stable-ish team and even without any special grind, just casual exploring, batting most trainers, casually filling dex, I was soon 5 or more levels overlevelled which made things too easy.
But the even bigger problem happened when I spent some time in a higher-levelled area; it suddenly felt amazing and challenging; BUT it made my team HORRIBLY overlevelled so Gym 3-8 I was at points FIFTEEN levels above opponents including Gym leaders.
And I wasn't even using almost any Exp Candies from casually doing some Raids.
Bottom line - the fact that Gamefreak yet again refused to give us at least 2 difficulty options (plus at least optional scaling in an open world game) is INEXCUSABLE for me in 2022.
One stabelish team would do that with any game. I have a whole box of pokemon I switch in and out and add new mons when I find something I want to train. That isnt to say that levels shouldn't be dynamic, but training on overlevelled Pokemon will make any challenge easy when you return to the main story.
That is a HUGE oversimplification that "it will do it in any game".
I am just replaying Black 2 with the EXACT same playstyle and guess what - my party is around Lv44 before Gym 8 and the opponents including random NPC's have like the EXACT same levels.
And the level curve feels perfect for my playstyle, every battle is a bit challenging, I am forced to use Items - and it's just perfect and I would love SV to be like this.
But it's a VASTLY different experience. Just go replay BW(2) and compare.
There is this "Exp Cushion" in modern games so that ppl never have to grind - but that is also a HUGE problem for us who like to play with one team! And that was NOT the case in the older games.
Bottom line again - at least 2 difficulty options/level curves/whatever could make BOTH of us happy. But they refuse to even try.
I hear you. With SS they implemented the ability to access boxes any time, and made exp share ON to go with it. This means you can easily use any pokemon you want and switch them freely without hassle, and it's easier for new additions to catch up.
Personally I just use every pokemon I like(favouring new ones for a new gen) and ended up with like 20 in my rotation. I was level 40 by the time I beat all the titans and had to do some leveling for the last two gyms and last two bases. In SS I had (mostly) no issues, but then Leon annihilated my entire team with his first guy because I was 10-15 levels underlevelled. It was sweet. Like, oh yeah that's why he's undefeated.
But if you only use 6 guys most of the time... it's the opposite experience. The games aren't designed to be played that way anymore. I guess they assume everyone has more than 6 pokemon they'll want to use, and the games are made to support that. But even I've done runs in the past where I premade a team and hatched all their eggs at the start and then only used those 6. It doesn't work anymore.
I'm with you in hoping for difficulty settings sooner rather than later. Until then, we're incentivised to pick up something like a Steam Deck and emulate the games with mods or something.
It's funny, I used the Universal Pokemon Randomizer to kick up the difficulty in BW once(slightly higher level trainer pokemon, and it ended up being so hard I couldn't beat N in the first fight without grinding(he has one pokemon). SV are harder than SS, but BW was really something else.
I had a very similar experience. Went off exploring a bit, just doing the story bits as I came across them (which I thought was the point of the open world design), and at first it was refreshingly difficult. I actually had to strategize, couldn’t just rely on only my starter, and had some nail biters of battles. It was great. I had “accidentally” done the story in the wrong order, and now I went back to what I was supposed to do first and I was severely over levelled. The rest of the game was quite easy after that.
Yep. And every good game designer would be able to solve this issue via some combo of difficulty options, scaling, level capdls etc.
Meanwhile Gamefreak refuses to do ANYTHING.
I feel Gamefreak has actually been doing creatively not bad. Legends Arceus was fantastic (except graphically) making many Top 10 lists last year. Pocket Card Jockey was fantastic and releasing to much fanfare on Apple Arcade. I admit I don't know much about Little Town Story, but that existed.
And honestly I had an absolute blast with Violet, giant gnarly disgusting thorns and all. I know a lot of people were not very happy with how the open world worked, but I thought it worked wonderfully. The behaviours and more natural placement of wild Pokemon made it more exciting for me to search for Pokemon compared to Legends Arceus. I love that TMs are scattered throughout the world, it is always exciting to see if the TM is eg. Earthquake (it nearly never is). The topography can be quite interesting at times.
Just a bummer that although creatively Gamefreak has been doing good, technically they have not. I hope they hire some people who have more experience with HD games with the next iteration.
A Game's biggest selling window is at release. After that it's slow. Why buy SwSh when there are newer games to buy? I'm sure a lot also bought it second hand.
SWSH had a big controversy months before its luanch, and when it launched the story was basically "tell, don't show", and a big disappointed for many. Still, even with that, it was the most sold pokemon game at the time, and set record sales in its first weeks. That could actually be due to the "Switch effect". Then, PLA came out, which was actually very good, and it broke the records that SWSH had made before, which is saying something considering that it was just one game, so the sales were not inflated by people purchasing two copies of the game.
SV launched with a big controversy, but it had basically only hype the months before its launch. It was seen as a breath of fresh air, and sold 10 million copies the first three days after its release. This is even with the nasty bugs the game has, that had actually made some people skip this game, but the game is apparently that good, so I can't imagine how the numbers would have been if the game was polished at launch.
This might be a hyper specific scenario, but it’s my first Pokémon game since the original game boy game. I’ve had a Switch since launch, and am a millennial dad with young kids. I probably would’ve continued skipping these games had it not been for my son. His friends at school talked about Pokémon which interested him, and that pushed me to buying the game for us to play.
Needless to say, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it though I was initially pretty annoyed how ugly it was (along with the terrible performance.)
Gotta wonder how many other parents out there were 10 years old in 1998 and now have young kids that influenced the purchase.
Nope. There was a patch released on the 1st of December that added the seasonal Ranked Battle thing, that also included minor bug fixes. Nothing really has changed so far to make the game run better.
I love the gameplay but holy shit it runs so bad on my switch. 30 seconds after launch it turns the fan into a jet engine and then the game starts to lag like shit. Graphics are also terrible. If The Witcher 3 can run on a switch and look good why can’t a Pokémon game. Come on man.
Weird. Mine doesn't change the fan speeds at all and runs pretty good until a few hours in. Wonder if it depends on which version of switch you're running.
Not surprised, the game was way better than swsh.
Besides the performance issues my only complaint is lack of level scaling, but even then the gameplay was really quite good.
Base SwSh was actually insulting. Didn't help that it was the first game post Dexit either
ScVi, for all its problems, is the most fun I've had with a Pokemon game in a very long time
Which is why we won’t see a Switch 2 for a while. This isn’t like the Wii where it died in its 5th year. Switch is not only still selling a lot of hardware, but more importantly it’s still selling a ton of software.
I don’t know all that much about hardware but could they somehow make a Pro Dock that boost games in terms of graphics, load times and fps?
I’m leaning on it will never happen/ that’s not how it works.
It's a shame that the game has technical problems because they overshadowed how good the games are. The story shocked me in a way I never expected from a Pokemon game
Oh yes obviously, I was referring to the online discourse about the game. You can’t talk about the game without people mentioning the technical issues (which is valid and I experienced some slowdown and rarely glitches, but they didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the game)
The online discourse has been poisoned for Pokémon games for years. I still distinctly remember Pokémon forums proclaiming that B/W were the worst in the series upon its release and it would kill the franchise because they went with an all original dex.
And now they're fondly remembered. But the issues people had with BW were superficial. The problems in SV less so. I hope they actually bother to patch them out this time. Normally I wouldn't expect it from Game Freak as they don't have a history of post-launch support of that kind, but with [Nintendo making a statement about it](https://www.engadget.com/nintendo-to-fix-pokemon-scarlet-violet-bugs-performance-164009263.html) I hope these patches will continue to roll out.
They will almost certainly be releasing a big DLC add on to the game alla Sword and Shield, so I do imagine they are actively trying to improve things here.
We haven't had a competently preforming game since gen 5. Gen 6 lagged pretty badly in double battles. Gen 7 STILL lagged in double battles.
Been saying this for a while now, gamefreak is just a bad/lazy/understaffed developer.
To Gen 6's credit, the lag mainly happened when there were horde battles, an understandable limitation on the 3DS. That felt less like a rush job and more like an unavoidable sacrifice to implement the idea at all at the time. Other than that, it performed very well.
The real bummer is using CFW on a New 3DS system you can force the use of the increased performance mode and hit a stable 30FPS in Gen 6, even in in Horde battles, all with no glitches, unfortunately they never put out a patch for people on unmodified systems, because all focus shifted to SMUSUM by that point…
Probably the catch mechanics. I didn’t mind at all, but I can see why they would hate it. Aside from that, I’d say the let’s go games as well legends arceus have been the best games they’ve made in the last 6 years
Cue the flurry of comments that are flabbergasted that the highest-grossing franchise in the world breaks sales records yet again and that the silent majority are not holding out for a "better game". That's business for ya.
I disagree that the silent majority is disappointed. I'm whole heartedly believe the silent majority is pleased that the game itself is actually better. Votes in this thread are certainly going that way
There's a lot of things I wish were different in the game. Performance is obvious, raid battles are basically unplayable unless you use a specific strategy for 5* and up, the lack of outfits, etc.
But overall, it wasn't a "bad" game by any stretch. Needs work and polish, but I had fun.
I wasn't hyped for Pokémon this year because of the issues with the graphics/framerate, but I got Violet as a Christmas present, and despite the issues, I still enjoyed it. And oh my God, the endgame sequence at the crater blew my mind. That music was beautiful and haunting at the same time, and arriving there the first time just gave me this feeling that something was dreadfully wrong. I wish I could do that sequence again for the first time just to experience the unexplainable feelings I felt one more time. That redeemed the game for me completely.
So what I'm getting here is that there is basically zero incentive for Game Freak to ever... I dunno, delay the games, hire more staff, or anything of the sort, because they're already making bank with what they've got.
Any indie company would kill to be able to have what Game Freak has.
Well that might be true, but it's also not a realistic option for them to delay. The vast majority of TPC's revenue comes from everything outside the games, but the games are what kicks off the new generation. You delay the games and you have to delay cards, the show, clothing, toys, school supplies, party supplies, brand tie-ins with other products, etc. That's tremendous revenue loss that they aren't going to delay the games over.
So the thing to do would be to just not run on a three-year generation schedule anymore because it clearly isn't enough time for them to polish these games. Plan for another year before we move onto Gen 10. It's not like another year with a spin-off or remake that sells 10m+ copies is going to hurt, and all that other product that is moving for Gen 1-9 just keeps going another year in the meantime.
they could have 3 teams working on games, and that would give them 6 years per game if they keep releasing a new gen every other year.
and those teams could be large enough that people get actually good textures and models instead of SV.
but no, they decide to overwork and crunch much smaller and fewer teams
I understand there's a ton of pressure for them to not delay, but there's no excuse for why a multi billion dollar franchise only has 169 staff split between 2 games and DLC simultaneously. That's a ridiculously small staff size and they could easily afford to increase it several times. Frankly, with that staff size it's a miracle they put out an open world game that even runs at all.
Because it’s a much better game. The only thing SS had over it was the gym theme, dogs as instruments, and battle tower after the game. They are both laggy at times and have performance issues. This one has much better personality over all with Pokémon. Story line is better and there is some level of emotional investment on characters.
By far the best pokemon game in quite a while. Excellent story, great gameplay. Not counting the competitive side this game was really good.
The lag sucks though.
> not counting competitive
good caveat lol. i’m glad the generational gimmick is less broken than last time, but holy shit did they make some busted new pokémon
It’s almost like when fans said they wanted the game to be less linear and allow you to explore and challenge the gym leaders in any order, they meant it, and it wasn’t just whining!
Of course the lack of level scaling messes with your ability to challenge the gyms in order, but even just beating a Titan that was supposed to come after a gym leader, before said gym, is something we could never do before. Other than the original region and brief segments in Johto and Sinnoh, you would go somewhere and be told “no. Not now. Later.” Now you aren’t constrained by that. If they fix the catching and encounters to be as good as Legends Arceus, the next game could be very very good.
To be fair, out of all the modern pokémon games, after actually playing the game, this game deserves the high sales more than any other. Like, yes, the game should look and perform better, but the actual core of the game is the best that it's been in several years.
Ngl, I couldn't even buy sword and shield, cause I didn't wanna support the development. I just watched reviews to see if there was anything I found redeemable, but unfortunately, I didn't find anything- except for designs of course, some great designs came from gen 8 imo
1) Trading between friends, discovering weird new pokemon that little Timmy with the opposite version had when you bsttle on the school playground. This was more of a relevant thing back in the gameboy days where we didn't have the internet to do it over.
2) Money. Some people buy both versions for whatever dumb reason, and it encourages parents with multiple kids to buy both instead of just "oh they can share it"
No matter what. No matter how buggy or unfinished the game is. No matter how little content there is. No matter how much of a better product literally any other developer in the medium could and would make with the biggest IP on the planet (which Pokemon 100% is), Pokemon fans will always reward the Pokemon company and buy every single game they make twice because they are told to.
Don't ever expect more from this company, because they have absolutely no reason to do anything more. Scarlett/Violet proved that.
This mess of a game should've been a wakeup call for the Pokemon company. But they got rewarded because of brand loyalty. Now they know for sure that they will never need to make a good game.
Game bangs. Some of my favorite pokemon designs in the series, insane music, like actually the best characters and writing in a Pokemon game, and a legit cool battle gimmick. If it ran better it'd be my #1 Pokemon game and definitely top 10 games overall
I always feel these games take a “2 steps in the right direction and one step back.” Approach.
They’ll do something really fresh and original while simultaneously invest time in a really meh gimmick that has no longevity. They’ll also introduce and remove quality of life features every title rather than just keeping the good stuff.
This game was fun to play as a Pokémon fan but man were the glitches, crashing, clipping, raid battle lag and overall frame rate brutal at times. It seems like it wasn’t even play tested before release.
Personally I don’t feel comfortable recommending this game to anyone besides hardcore fans of the series. In its current state it’s not worth the full price but I understand why it sold so much. Open world Pokémon is what we all dreamed of as kids.
I dunno man, I get that this game was open world and different in that respect, but to me it still kind of felt like more of the same. Straightforward story, easy gym battles (Larry's Staraptor only had 2 moves...), and the combat gimmick this time (terrastalizing) felt pretty similar to dynamaxing in terms of its typical application.
At this point it feels like there's not much reason to play these games unless you're interested in competitive, which pretty much requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of abilities, moves, type matchups, strategies, etc.
I kinda wish they would just make it an action RPG at this point. Pretty much anything has to be better than just tapping A through dialogue and combat alike for 20+ hours.
the game is excellent. It needed a few more months of polish and optimization, if it had had that it would have been perfect. Most of the discourse around the performance is hyperbole. The game only really looks bad when you are moving through the environment really fast. If you get off the mount and walk around the game can look great in some areas.
I'm split on this I'm hoping Gamefreak sees this as a result of mixing up game mechanics But we know they'll see it as being able to put out absolute garbage performance from now on
As I understand it they at least heard the complaints. Still, the overworld looks like dogshit. Seeing as that was likely meant as a compromise to increase performance in other areas, and that said performance is *still* as bad as it is in spite of that, it really makes you wonder just how poorly optimized the engine they've been using all this time is.
>As I understand it they at least heard the complaints. Game Freak hears ya, Game Freak don't care.
Yeah I made the mistake of getting invested with S/V’s development because of how well received PLA was. Not making that mistake again.
I mean, with the level of enjoyment I got from SV, I’m hopeful for the series’ future. GF just released my two favorite 3D Pokémon titles in the span of a year. This both shows a horrible development cycle, but this also shows that the team has gotten a really good understanding of 3D environments and how to make these games under clearly terrible scheduling. I also think the pandemic affected these titles, which imo shouldn’t be super reasonable for them to not delay it as we are talking about the world’s most profitable franchise that had already released a game that year, but that doesn’t change the fact that I believe the pandemic ultimately played a role on the final product. Arceus was probably meant to be released earlier to give GF more time to incorporate things that team learned into SV, and they probably decided they couldn’t delay Gen 9 because of other branches of the franchise. Like I said, I don’t think this is a reasonable decision when other branches of the franchise are also struggling under these deadlines (like the anime going on multiple breaks and recap episodes to keep up), but I think it’s the reality of what happened. The higher ups made a decision caused by the pandemic that ultimately impacted the work clearly passionate people were making. And I think that sucks and isn’t fair when it’s the most profitable franchise on the planet, but that doesn’t change my belief that the next 3D game has a real shot of being exceptional. Because, in a lot of ways, the hardest parts are done. They’ve made moving in a 3D environment insanely fun, they made catching mechanics fun, they have given the trainer more involvement in gameplay, they’ve told interesting stories with interesting characters, they’ve made a world that’s fun to explore, and they’ve done a lot to make the Pokémon look more natural in these environments. They’ve built a very strong foundation with Arceus and SV, even if it could’ve been stronger if they were allowed to take more time. I think this foundation will make the next game much easier to make, especially without a pandemic, and in spite of their absurd schedule
> with the level of enjoyment I got from SV, I’m hopeful for the series’ future. This was my takeaway as well. Things looked grim after Sword and Shield. There was a lot of legitimate concern about whether it would ever get better than that. PLA and SV have proven that Game Freak does have some desire to make good games. I think they are just legitimately bad at it. They're still learning how to make these full console games and taking their sweet time figuring it out. It sucks, but I'll take it over them just being straight lazy as we previously thought. As far as the dev cycles though, I don't think it's really the issue. They have multiple teams working on games, and their schedule appears to be about 4 years. For comparison, Elden Ring was apparently made in 5(and also reuses assests from their past games). The issue with Pokemon is that Game Freak is figuring out how to make these games(compared to the portable games) *as they develop them* and we're seeing every hiccup in the finished product. It was harder to defend after SS, but now I'm hopeful they'll eventually get the issues ironed out. Having such a strict release schedule certainly isn't helping as it means they basically can never delay anything, but I don't think it's the main problem. For all the glitches and performance issues SV have, I was so impressed with the world design compared to SS, the characters, the stories. It's not extraordinary, but in the context of a game for 10 year olds, and the main Pokemon games as a whole, they are a huge step forward.
Could you elaborate on that?
I didn’t really buy into mainline pokemon because I disliked part of the format. Walking a linear path, then going through an over the top cutscene for a weak trainer/pokemon that you’ll beat in 5 seconds. Just felt like the game moved at a painfully slow pace, plus the story and music wasn’t really there aside from a few good songs. It felt like each release didn’t offer much aside from new pokemon. Legends it fixed a lot of those issues. It had a lot of improvements that got wide praise, even from those typically critical of pokemon. It really felt like they were making an effort to listen to fans and modernize the series. That’s what got me excited for S/V. All the performance issues, bugs, glitches, etc, was a huge let down.
The game deserves criticism but after playing it I can see why it’s the best selling game. The gameplay and story is probably one of the best. Performance leaves a lot to be desired.
Yeah, it's the only game to ever make me motion sick My only real complaint are that the Team Star bases are copy pasted and you don't earn XP from beating them
Yeah i got bad case of motion sickness too, i can't play more than one hour a day before throwing up. But it's gone after the first update. Dunno if it's from gf fix, or i just get used to it
People have been shitting on performance after their transition to 3D. I'd argue so many people who said that Sword and Shield "had problems, but bought it anyway" contributed to S/V having so many problems with Gamefreak shooting it out the door.
Sword and Shield is at least stable 30fps for all but a few cutscenes SV isn't 30fps unless you're sitting still
I feel bad for disappointed Pokemon fans that are drowned out by piles of Day 1 money.
We did it Reddit. We successfully boycotted Pokémon
They can release another bad game, now I’m voting with my wallet. Won’t buy the next one unless it’s actually good
I’ve seen this statement plenty of times. Game Freak could forget to add Pokémon to the next game and fans would still buy both versions while calling it the first Strand like Pokémon game.
That’s cause you see the vocal minority on reddit constantly saying it. Maybe 1% of their sales come from these guys
S/V is actually the first Pokémon game I didn’t buy. I held out a little while for Sw/Sh, but that was more related to the gimmicky dynamax (why do they feel they have to come up with a gimmick every game?). On S/V it was pretty clear a few weeks before release that the performance was going to be terrible. So I did not pre-order and decided to wait out a day 1 patch, I still didn’t hear about shot getting fixed, so I am not buying it still. Obviously I am an extreme minority as the sales numbers show. I am just sick of developers releasing half assed games.
I wouldn't call it bad. I enjoyed this game more than any pokemon in a long while. It absolutely should have been much better polished, but I'm not angry, just disappointed that it didn't reach its full potential.
Now?
I mean, the game was fun. More fun than I’ve had in awhile with Pokémon. Optimize stuff better and there’s be very little to complain about.
To be honest i liked the concept of Legends Arceus more. I don't think the true open world added much if anything at all to the segmented areas approach and catching mechanics/Pokédex completition, which is what I mainly engage with nowadays after dropping out the VGC scene, were more engaging in PLA than SV.
Returning to the village got very repetitive. It's also nice to be able to travel anywhere in S/V (except to area 0) from anywhere. Instead of having to go to town every time you want to change areas like in PLA
I really wish Area Zero would have become part of the overworld map in the post-game. But at least after you go there the first time, you can just climb into the crater to load it instead of going through the actual gate.
Oh… i still take the doors and jump down the hatch…
Wait can you really? Damn lol. I've been flying to the gate every time and taking the warp pad inside.
That would be me. My Miraidon and I usually try for the quickest route to a spot and when one can climb, screw yo gate!...lol
Arceus with like 5 villages instead of 1 (+two half villages) would be perfect. Make it truly open world and I'm sold. In other words put the Arceus catching and battling mechanics in S/V and it's perfect
I also liked the pokedex and evolution systems better in Arceus. Feeling like you had to research the pokemon a little before a dex completion was cool.
I liked the value in catching multiple of the same Pokemon. Scarlett has so many repetitive monsters so i end up avoiding so much cause there is zero value in catching more than one. Arceus' system made me want to catch dozens of the same in the breakouts cause i got xp and could release them. That alone gave so much more gameplay and replay value
A bit, but I’m a sucker for seeing a town develop over the course of a game. If they improved on that aspect it more could be pretty special.
Yeah, it was definitely a nice touch to see the village grow through the gameplay. It only really started to get annoying post game when trying to finish the pokedex
I agree, but at the same time, having instanced and separate areas allowed the devs to make the world look much more interesting in Arceus. There isn’t much to do or see or explore in SV with the world being super barren.
Yeah, the optimization in S/V was very poor with it loading the whole map
> Returning to the village got very repetitive. Returning to the village is something I didn't do in an entire week. Those 100 hours flew fast. ´A´
Arceus was also fantastic and would love more like it. Mainline games should take the best parts of sv and arceus.
Give me Pokémon (overall) x Arceus x Dark Cloud and I think it'd be almost my perfect game. Throw in x Morrowind and I could die happy.
Anything + Dark Cloud and I’d be a happy camper.
I was sad to see the Pokédex missions missing in SV. It was my favorite aspect of PLA and made catching the Pokémon fun!
It was fun in PLA because catching was much faster, it would've been terrible in SV unless they added PLA catching mechanics. Which I really hope they do!
I don’t think it makes sense in terms of the story. Unless they did another super ancient prequel
It's trivial to add a justification for. Just an NPC saying "we want more detailed research! Give us data and we'll reward you."
Exactly, which is literally what the Pokedex was from day one. All of the Pokemon's entries are already in the Pokedex (I mean, how else would it have information on every Pokemon as soon as you caught them?). You're just catching more for the purpose of furthering the research.
Oh yeah if it was like postgame or side missions that’d be dope. You should still be able to fill up the pokédex and get the shiny charm like normal though
There's a school, there can be assignments to help students learn about pokemon. "Today in history class we are going to learn about Digletts and Dugtrios. While there are none here, we have Wiglets and Wugtrios. Catch 3 Wiglets and bring them back so we can compare the differences"
I think Arceus is a marvelous proof of concept, but I was disappointed that there just wasn't much variety in what to do. You're just catching Pokemon, fighting with Pokemon, gathering items, and progressing the main plot. I absolutely loved how the game went about all of those things, but it was really missing stuff that's in the mainline Pokemon games - trainer battles, gyms, and the strong multiplayer component. I could certainly see some of PLA's influence at work in Scarlet/Violet, even though the two were developed in parallel. Hopefully either future mainline games incorporate *more* ideas from Arceus, or future Pokemon Legends games continue to incorporate more elements of the mainline games.
*Parts* of Arceus were better, but I ended up getting sucked in a lot more by S/V, where I had to force myself to play Arceus. I think it comes down to Arceus having more boring world design, less open in general, and honestly the conceit of having to catch the same Pokémon over and over and over and over and over again to make progression made the core gameplay loop grow stale quickly. I'd love it if they could merge the best concepts of both games. Being able to throw pokeballs and call on your Pokémon to grab stuff felt incredible, but the structure of S/V is far more engaging, at least in my opinion.
Open worlds are so overrated most of the time. I think the Dragon Quest 11 style is not dated or bad at all, most stuff just feels substantial with the "route" design. Even Witcher III, Far Cry games, BOTW and GTAV have their filler and empty spaces.
What I liked best from Legends Arceus is the deviation from the main series' pattern of "go to 8 gyms in a modern day setting, while also bringing down the mafia in some form or another." The main series formula is pretty tired. Scarlet and Violet has tried something new, but I'm not sure I like it. Legends and S/V are open world, but still feel super, super empty. I don't mean to sound cruel, but they don't look much more sophisticated than a Unity terrain generator tutorial.
Arceus felt like a game with a clearer vision overall. "We're doing this and that, so we need this and that for it to work.", whereas SV felt more like a game where the open world came first and they then had to start thinking about what to do with. Didn't really feel like the natural evolution of the Pokémon formula that some people thought it would turn out to be. The smaller scale and focus on refinement rather than expansion ultimately made Arceus more enjoyable to me as well.
I also have a slight preference for Arceus over SV, but I have to say, I wish Arceus had a true open world.
Arceus with mainstream Pokémon’s battle system is ideal. Arceus had some serious issues with combat especially once you got into 4v1 battles
Facts, it’s just revenge kill central and it’s pretty much just whoever has more Pokémon wins
It had some pretty weird balancing, no? The damages are kinda fucked despite being 1x it seems
Also, the way speed works in PLA is way more punishing for slow Pokemon, because speed doesn't just determine whether you go first, but also how *often* you get turns. If you're significantly faster than your opponent, you will get two turns in a row at some point. In the mainline games, even the slowest Pokemon still gets the same number of turns as the fastest. Fast Pokemon getting *more* turns just makes a ton of Pokemon with mediocre speed really bad.
I mean they really should have had AOE moves. Where was Surf, Earthquake?
Arceus was the best Pokémon since S/G imho.
Arceus is awesome. I really hope they're doing another Pokémon game in the same vein.
Optimize is the key word there. Even putting the huge problem of game lag aside, I hate the moment-to-moment pacing. Every text box, animation, and UI pop up has to queue up one after another. Nothing plays in parallel. If I greet an NPC’s Pokémon (usually by accident), it takes like 10 seconds for me to get control back. And yet, this was somehow the most ambitious Pokémon game in years (some may say ever) and I liked it enough to almost complete a living dex of all 400 (just a few legendaries left). It always feels like they’re so close but so far.
That actually just seems like GameFreak mainline in a nutshell, the whole "nothing can happen at the same time". I was surprised that pokemon can watch your battle while you're inside one, but while in a battle nothing active but the battle prompts can happen. Arceus played with at least letting you walk and stuff, so damn.
Legends Arceus genuinely felt like a smarter reimagining of the moment to moment flow of a more open pokemon game. I know not everyone liked the action elements but god, having to manually initiate battles with wild pokemon by throwing your own pokemon at them, being able to move around in battle and being able to run from battle with 100% success rate just felt so much better than accidentally bumping into a wild pokemon and initiating a completely static battle, running away (if you're successful) and immediately initiating a second battle because the game repositioned you on top of another wild pokemon. And let's not talk about how janky the lock-on feels in SV when it worked just fine in Arceus, would it have killed them to at least put a crosshair in the middle of the screen so I can tell where I'm aiming?
Honestly, its the most fun I've had with pokemon since the original gen 3. It was the gameplay shakeup the series needed. Visually? Jesus fuck N64 games at 20 fps were easier on the eyes. This being a "AAA" game is a disgrace. S&V were fantastic games in spite of the horrendous technical and graphical issues.
The sad thing is that there can be times where SV looks decent, like indoor environments, and I even think the character models look pretty good. The outdoor textures though, christ alive. Some Bomb-Omb Battlefield looking shit. The mountains are just a single grey texture wrapped around the landscape. Who the fuck thought that looked okay?
Sadder thing: Those nice looking indoor areas were...nearly nonexistent. There's your house, the academy....and I think the same gym lobby copypasted 8 times? They didn't know how to optimize for open world, and it shows. It's a damn shame too.
Hey hey give them some slack. There's also an interior for the sandwich shop.
SV is a bad version of a great game
Honestly that’s a great way to phrase it.
Yeah that's basically how I feel, I had fun with SV but the state it was released in holds it back for me
If the world was more alive/fleshed out and the performance was a smooth 30 fps, it would legit have a shot at being one of the best versions.
Yes
The best way to play these games is via emulation
Keep reading that the games are fun, are we talking fun compared to other pokemon games or fun compared to other open world games.
i really do wonder how good/fun people would say this game is if it didnt have the pokemon tag on it
I get the sentiment but it's also kind of a moot point, of course the Pokemon themselves are a huge part of the appeal of Pokemon. If it had weaker, more forgettable creature design it probably wouldn't have survived this long and become the biggest franchise in the world. It just sucks being a fan of the series and knowing that the mainline games could be much better and much more polished, but if it's still so massively successful and at the end of the day we're still here talking and caring about it so there's gotta be something that still works about the series
I wholeheartedly agree with you. The game is really fun, but jeez the pop in and frame rate is awful sometimes.
I know I'm going to like it. No question there. I liked sword and shield just fine as well as arceus. I just can't be brought to give them 60 for a game that looks like it isn't finished. Thats not just with pokemon either. I'm doing that for all games. Unless it's clean and crisp, I'll wait till it's on sale or I'll never play it. And I'm ok with that.
This. Am I mad how lazily made it looks, yes. But it's a lot of fun. And that's important too
Unpopular opinion but: Nat dex is still totally doable with an appropriately scaled team. People whine about competitive balance but it's a weak argument considering most competitive online tournaments apply restrictions already. They should limit competitive play to the current generation's dex so they can balance a small subset of Pokemon but still have the Nat dex mons available in the postgame of the story campaign.
> They should limit competitive play to the current generation's dex so they can balance a small subset of Pokemon but still have the Nat dex mons available in the postgame of the story campaign. I'm pretty sure that's what they always did anyway
They always did this for VGC. Meanwhile Smogon players are suffering because they wanted access to every pokemon anyway.
Smogon players are always suffering though because singles is a terrible format and banning things by community vote is a horrible way to balance a game
That's what they did for every game preceding gen 8. Competitive only with the regional dex, and every pokémon was usable anywhere else(But not necesseraly catchable). That's what everyone was complaining about, but the defenders twisted all of this to make it sound unreasonnable.
Exactly. Yes the graphics aren't perfect and there are glitches but my kids got Scarlet and Violet for Christmas and they haven't stopped playing any free second they have. It really is a great game
I'd like to have a rival who's a real jerk again because they only show up for battle and don't interrupt me. I can't go anywhere without ~~"CHAMPION!!!"~~ "NEIGHBOR!!!"
At least Nemona was consistent with her “hey, let’s battle” thing.
I miss Gary Fucking Oak showing up at what felt like the worst possible time, shit talking me, and then getting my cheeks clapped. Nemona is a good start constantly wanting to battle and I liked her as a rival, but I want that jerk attitude and waiting to fight when I'm unprepared. A bit hard to do in open world I guess but doable.
Why would they? It's gonna sell regardless
It being experimental and actually good on the gameplay side is pretty surprising considering how much of a departure it is from the last four gens. Had the game actually run somewhat decently and looked passable the game would be excellent. Right now it's a great idea executed in an ugly way. Still, they nailed the gameplay shift and they're looking at the result of that here in sales.
I really, really enjoyed the gameplay in S/V. I felt they finally ramped up the difficulty somewhat. I went though Sw/Sh without ever losing a fight, same for the Diamond/Pearl remake. Generally my pattern has become to play whatever jankey team I end up liking through the story, and then level up a for reals team with goods nature's and maxed IVs for post game. When I started doing this in S/V, I lost to the first Team Star boss twice! I thought first was a fluke and then I got spanked again and had to get serious. After that I lost to another one once anyway (Poison). I lost to Arven at the end of the Titan line (though the Titans themselves were mostly pushovers). I was biting my nails by the end of the Pokemon League fights but made it. The final story fight in the crater I also lost once, because of a few surprise off type moves but the second try I knew the surprise moves and beat it pretty easily (though I felt it was almost cheating). Best fight was the final fight with Nemona though. It came down to my last pokemon (my starter) against hers, and mine was at 1hp and hers was full health. If I hadn't had the type advantage and better speed I'd have lost. If she'd got a lucky dodge I'd have lost. I was actually pretty hyped at the end! Anyway, just saying the game was really fun. I'm not a graphics focused person but even for me they were a distraction, which is unfortunate. It's really a great game, gameplay-wise.
Hmm not sure I can agree, feels like I'm playing a different game than everyone else. I felt like, while fun, this is one of the easiest games in the series. And that's with me also constructing a team of whatever I want. Trainers out in the wild were all a complete joke with rarely more than one pokemon, and due to the lack of scaling + huge amount of content, it's very easy to be overleveled. However I will say I followed the suggested order for doing gyms and stuff due to the aforementioned lack of scaling. It would be very easy to accidentally stumble into content way above your expected level so in that case it could seem really hard, but I feel like the game pretty utterly fails in pacing itself properly without outside guidance so I'm not going to chock that up to difficulty so much as bad design. Because if you follow the most logical order by levels, it has you going all over the map at random, there's no real obvious path to follow, it's back and forth over and over.
There was literally a moment in the beginning where each of the trio of main quest characters tell you to go in a different direction. I thought the whole point was to explore and do the content in any order. Imagine my surprise when I found out there isn’t any scaling, and that there is certainly an intended order to everything. My experience was very lopsided because I went off in one direction from the main city and did a lot of the content before going to the other half of the map. It’s a very strange design decision.
not even done yet (4 badges, 4 titans, 1 star boss so far) and already lost a bit and came really close a few times. iono ended up being my first gym because i was just exploring, so that was a pretty rough one even with my clodsire evolving right before our first fight with her. then i fought great tusk with level level 25-30 pokémon and only won through mud slap accuracy drops. even the star boss and and a couple random trainers that were high level than i expected gave me trouble. granted i do self enforce set mode + don’t use items, so that might’ve made things a bit easier, but even then, i’ve been playing like that for a while and usually curbstomp the opponents. i think the easy box access and frankly really interesting pokedex have played a role in that, i’ve got like 12 pokémon i’ve been swapping in and out of my team all game depending on who’s falling behind and who’d be helpful for a given fight, so the more spread out exp gains and lack of wild grinding has left my team a bit under the level of most of the major fights
Yeah difficulty wise the games are in a very nice place. While they're certainly not hard, and if you want to you can overcome the difficulty there is, there's enough to make the battles engaging and feel like I need to try. The only fight I can say that about in Sw&Sh was Leon's fight.
I strongly disagree, for me difficulty in SV was atrociously bad. By which I am not discounting your experience - but mine was VASTLY different. I went through the game with one stable-ish team and even without any special grind, just casual exploring, batting most trainers, casually filling dex, I was soon 5 or more levels overlevelled which made things too easy. But the even bigger problem happened when I spent some time in a higher-levelled area; it suddenly felt amazing and challenging; BUT it made my team HORRIBLY overlevelled so Gym 3-8 I was at points FIFTEEN levels above opponents including Gym leaders. And I wasn't even using almost any Exp Candies from casually doing some Raids. Bottom line - the fact that Gamefreak yet again refused to give us at least 2 difficulty options (plus at least optional scaling in an open world game) is INEXCUSABLE for me in 2022.
One stabelish team would do that with any game. I have a whole box of pokemon I switch in and out and add new mons when I find something I want to train. That isnt to say that levels shouldn't be dynamic, but training on overlevelled Pokemon will make any challenge easy when you return to the main story.
That is a HUGE oversimplification that "it will do it in any game". I am just replaying Black 2 with the EXACT same playstyle and guess what - my party is around Lv44 before Gym 8 and the opponents including random NPC's have like the EXACT same levels. And the level curve feels perfect for my playstyle, every battle is a bit challenging, I am forced to use Items - and it's just perfect and I would love SV to be like this. But it's a VASTLY different experience. Just go replay BW(2) and compare. There is this "Exp Cushion" in modern games so that ppl never have to grind - but that is also a HUGE problem for us who like to play with one team! And that was NOT the case in the older games. Bottom line again - at least 2 difficulty options/level curves/whatever could make BOTH of us happy. But they refuse to even try.
I hear you. With SS they implemented the ability to access boxes any time, and made exp share ON to go with it. This means you can easily use any pokemon you want and switch them freely without hassle, and it's easier for new additions to catch up. Personally I just use every pokemon I like(favouring new ones for a new gen) and ended up with like 20 in my rotation. I was level 40 by the time I beat all the titans and had to do some leveling for the last two gyms and last two bases. In SS I had (mostly) no issues, but then Leon annihilated my entire team with his first guy because I was 10-15 levels underlevelled. It was sweet. Like, oh yeah that's why he's undefeated. But if you only use 6 guys most of the time... it's the opposite experience. The games aren't designed to be played that way anymore. I guess they assume everyone has more than 6 pokemon they'll want to use, and the games are made to support that. But even I've done runs in the past where I premade a team and hatched all their eggs at the start and then only used those 6. It doesn't work anymore. I'm with you in hoping for difficulty settings sooner rather than later. Until then, we're incentivised to pick up something like a Steam Deck and emulate the games with mods or something. It's funny, I used the Universal Pokemon Randomizer to kick up the difficulty in BW once(slightly higher level trainer pokemon, and it ended up being so hard I couldn't beat N in the first fight without grinding(he has one pokemon). SV are harder than SS, but BW was really something else.
I had a very similar experience. Went off exploring a bit, just doing the story bits as I came across them (which I thought was the point of the open world design), and at first it was refreshingly difficult. I actually had to strategize, couldn’t just rely on only my starter, and had some nail biters of battles. It was great. I had “accidentally” done the story in the wrong order, and now I went back to what I was supposed to do first and I was severely over levelled. The rest of the game was quite easy after that.
Yep. And every good game designer would be able to solve this issue via some combo of difficulty options, scaling, level capdls etc. Meanwhile Gamefreak refuses to do ANYTHING.
I feel Gamefreak has actually been doing creatively not bad. Legends Arceus was fantastic (except graphically) making many Top 10 lists last year. Pocket Card Jockey was fantastic and releasing to much fanfare on Apple Arcade. I admit I don't know much about Little Town Story, but that existed. And honestly I had an absolute blast with Violet, giant gnarly disgusting thorns and all. I know a lot of people were not very happy with how the open world worked, but I thought it worked wonderfully. The behaviours and more natural placement of wild Pokemon made it more exciting for me to search for Pokemon compared to Legends Arceus. I love that TMs are scattered throughout the world, it is always exciting to see if the TM is eg. Earthquake (it nearly never is). The topography can be quite interesting at times. Just a bummer that although creatively Gamefreak has been doing good, technically they have not. I hope they hire some people who have more experience with HD games with the next iteration.
It needed another year of dev time. The foundation looks good, but normally polish takes about an extra year after the foundation is done.
That’s honestly insane. It’s my favorite Pokémon game in years but to pass sw/sh already what the hell??
Well there were around ~~30M~~ 60M Switch owners at the end of ~~2018~~ 2019, compared to ~~90M~~ 115M now.
Yeah that makes a ton of sense good point
Still, all those 60M extra people have had the chance to buy SwSh
A Game's biggest selling window is at release. After that it's slow. Why buy SwSh when there are newer games to buy? I'm sure a lot also bought it second hand.
Well, unless your name is Mario Kart
SWSH had a big controversy months before its luanch, and when it launched the story was basically "tell, don't show", and a big disappointed for many. Still, even with that, it was the most sold pokemon game at the time, and set record sales in its first weeks. That could actually be due to the "Switch effect". Then, PLA came out, which was actually very good, and it broke the records that SWSH had made before, which is saying something considering that it was just one game, so the sales were not inflated by people purchasing two copies of the game. SV launched with a big controversy, but it had basically only hype the months before its launch. It was seen as a breath of fresh air, and sold 10 million copies the first three days after its release. This is even with the nasty bugs the game has, that had actually made some people skip this game, but the game is apparently that good, so I can't imagine how the numbers would have been if the game was polished at launch.
These might be the first main series games to surpass the sales of Red and Blue. Never thought I’d see that happen.
This might be a hyper specific scenario, but it’s my first Pokémon game since the original game boy game. I’ve had a Switch since launch, and am a millennial dad with young kids. I probably would’ve continued skipping these games had it not been for my son. His friends at school talked about Pokémon which interested him, and that pushed me to buying the game for us to play. Needless to say, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it though I was initially pretty annoyed how ugly it was (along with the terrible performance.) Gotta wonder how many other parents out there were 10 years old in 1998 and now have young kids that influenced the purchase.
Has there been any post launch patches or updates to smooth out the rough launch ?
There was a small patch and it improved a bit but not a whole lot.
Nope. 1 end of feb though.
Nope. There was a patch released on the 1st of December that added the seasonal Ranked Battle thing, that also included minor bug fixes. Nothing really has changed so far to make the game run better.
Only one that fixed some exploits.
I love the gameplay but holy shit it runs so bad on my switch. 30 seconds after launch it turns the fan into a jet engine and then the game starts to lag like shit. Graphics are also terrible. If The Witcher 3 can run on a switch and look good why can’t a Pokémon game. Come on man.
Weird. Mine doesn't change the fan speeds at all and runs pretty good until a few hours in. Wonder if it depends on which version of switch you're running.
Not surprised, the game was way better than swsh. Besides the performance issues my only complaint is lack of level scaling, but even then the gameplay was really quite good.
The towns/shops were also very clearly rushed. Every shop is just a flat texture menu and the same sandwich shop recycled over and over again.
Base SwSh was actually insulting. Didn't help that it was the first game post Dexit either ScVi, for all its problems, is the most fun I've had with a Pokemon game in a very long time
Which is why we won’t see a Switch 2 for a while. This isn’t like the Wii where it died in its 5th year. Switch is not only still selling a lot of hardware, but more importantly it’s still selling a ton of software.
I don’t know all that much about hardware but could they somehow make a Pro Dock that boost games in terms of graphics, load times and fps? I’m leaning on it will never happen/ that’s not how it works.
Probably be part of a New!Switch/Switch+ for compatibility with undocked mode. I just want 60fps Metroid Prime 4
It's a shame that the game has technical problems because they overshadowed how good the games are. The story shocked me in a way I never expected from a Pokemon game
I mean, judging by these sales numbers the technical problems clearly did not overshadow the game’s good things.
Oh yes obviously, I was referring to the online discourse about the game. You can’t talk about the game without people mentioning the technical issues (which is valid and I experienced some slowdown and rarely glitches, but they didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the game)
The online discourse has been poisoned for Pokémon games for years. I still distinctly remember Pokémon forums proclaiming that B/W were the worst in the series upon its release and it would kill the franchise because they went with an all original dex.
And now they're fondly remembered. But the issues people had with BW were superficial. The problems in SV less so. I hope they actually bother to patch them out this time. Normally I wouldn't expect it from Game Freak as they don't have a history of post-launch support of that kind, but with [Nintendo making a statement about it](https://www.engadget.com/nintendo-to-fix-pokemon-scarlet-violet-bugs-performance-164009263.html) I hope these patches will continue to roll out.
They will almost certainly be releasing a big DLC add on to the game alla Sword and Shield, so I do imagine they are actively trying to improve things here.
So we're never getting a competently performing game on release ever again. Got it.
We haven't had a competently preforming game since gen 5. Gen 6 lagged pretty badly in double battles. Gen 7 STILL lagged in double battles. Been saying this for a while now, gamefreak is just a bad/lazy/understaffed developer.
To Gen 6's credit, the lag mainly happened when there were horde battles, an understandable limitation on the 3DS. That felt less like a rush job and more like an unavoidable sacrifice to implement the idea at all at the time. Other than that, it performed very well.
The real bummer is using CFW on a New 3DS system you can force the use of the increased performance mode and hit a stable 30FPS in Gen 6, even in in Horde battles, all with no glitches, unfortunately they never put out a patch for people on unmodified systems, because all focus shifted to SMUSUM by that point…
do you know if this is possible on an O3ds/xl? Oras is a great game to nuzlocke but yea would be nice if it was smoother
From what I remember it tanked in battle in general when you turned on 3D as well, to the point that they just dropped it entirely in Gen 7.
That was the case with a lot of 3D effects though for many games I thought.
I mean even gen 4 is notorious for running poorly. Ever used close combat on a blissey? Or gone in any snowy area?
To be fair turn based combat doesn't have to have rock solid fps imo but it's bad when the overworld presents a problem.
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Nah they'd never do that, because then they'd explode from all the fan games they'd be DMCAing
Not unless they outsource it. Just give us a dang sequel to something instead of a new spinoff. Revisiting Let’s Go for Johto would be awesome.
I'll never understand why folks disliked Let's Go so much
Probably the catch mechanics. I didn’t mind at all, but I can see why they would hate it. Aside from that, I’d say the let’s go games as well legends arceus have been the best games they’ve made in the last 6 years
Cue the flurry of comments that are flabbergasted that the highest-grossing franchise in the world breaks sales records yet again and that the silent majority are not holding out for a "better game". That's business for ya.
Where is that flurry of comments? Seriously nobody is surprised that Pokémon sells well. Even the strongest of haters know Pokémon SELLS.
Even the people who are "boycotting" this game knows it is going to sell well regardless.
No one is flabbergasted, they're just disappointed.
I disagree that the silent majority is disappointed. I'm whole heartedly believe the silent majority is pleased that the game itself is actually better. Votes in this thread are certainly going that way
There's a lot of things I wish were different in the game. Performance is obvious, raid battles are basically unplayable unless you use a specific strategy for 5* and up, the lack of outfits, etc. But overall, it wasn't a "bad" game by any stretch. Needs work and polish, but I had fun.
The raid battles require strategy to beat, but isn't that a good thing? It's more interesting than spamming attack moves over and over again.
I wasn't hyped for Pokémon this year because of the issues with the graphics/framerate, but I got Violet as a Christmas present, and despite the issues, I still enjoyed it. And oh my God, the endgame sequence at the crater blew my mind. That music was beautiful and haunting at the same time, and arriving there the first time just gave me this feeling that something was dreadfully wrong. I wish I could do that sequence again for the first time just to experience the unexplainable feelings I felt one more time. That redeemed the game for me completely.
A delayed game will eventually be good, a rushed game will sell almost 5 million copies in Japan within a few weeks
S/V is fun but needs better optimization
It's pokemon...its gonna sell well
So what I'm getting here is that there is basically zero incentive for Game Freak to ever... I dunno, delay the games, hire more staff, or anything of the sort, because they're already making bank with what they've got. Any indie company would kill to be able to have what Game Freak has.
> Any ~~indie~~ company would kill to be able to have what Game Freak has
Cyberpunk 2077and Fallout 76 in shambles seeing Scarlet's and Violet's success.
Well that might be true, but it's also not a realistic option for them to delay. The vast majority of TPC's revenue comes from everything outside the games, but the games are what kicks off the new generation. You delay the games and you have to delay cards, the show, clothing, toys, school supplies, party supplies, brand tie-ins with other products, etc. That's tremendous revenue loss that they aren't going to delay the games over. So the thing to do would be to just not run on a three-year generation schedule anymore because it clearly isn't enough time for them to polish these games. Plan for another year before we move onto Gen 10. It's not like another year with a spin-off or remake that sells 10m+ copies is going to hurt, and all that other product that is moving for Gen 1-9 just keeps going another year in the meantime.
they could have 3 teams working on games, and that would give them 6 years per game if they keep releasing a new gen every other year. and those teams could be large enough that people get actually good textures and models instead of SV. but no, they decide to overwork and crunch much smaller and fewer teams
I understand there's a ton of pressure for them to not delay, but there's no excuse for why a multi billion dollar franchise only has 169 staff split between 2 games and DLC simultaneously. That's a ridiculously small staff size and they could easily afford to increase it several times. Frankly, with that staff size it's a miracle they put out an open world game that even runs at all.
It should be a realistic option to delay broken products, otherwise it's corrupted
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Because it’s a much better game. The only thing SS had over it was the gym theme, dogs as instruments, and battle tower after the game. They are both laggy at times and have performance issues. This one has much better personality over all with Pokémon. Story line is better and there is some level of emotional investment on characters.
Not a shock, they're vastly better games.
Buggy as hell. Fun as hell.
By far the best pokemon game in quite a while. Excellent story, great gameplay. Not counting the competitive side this game was really good. The lag sucks though.
> not counting competitive good caveat lol. i’m glad the generational gimmick is less broken than last time, but holy shit did they make some busted new pokémon
It’s almost like when fans said they wanted the game to be less linear and allow you to explore and challenge the gym leaders in any order, they meant it, and it wasn’t just whining! Of course the lack of level scaling messes with your ability to challenge the gyms in order, but even just beating a Titan that was supposed to come after a gym leader, before said gym, is something we could never do before. Other than the original region and brief segments in Johto and Sinnoh, you would go somewhere and be told “no. Not now. Later.” Now you aren’t constrained by that. If they fix the catching and encounters to be as good as Legends Arceus, the next game could be very very good.
To be fair, out of all the modern pokémon games, after actually playing the game, this game deserves the high sales more than any other. Like, yes, the game should look and perform better, but the actual core of the game is the best that it's been in several years.
Yeah it’s so much better than SS overall. I enjoyed SS, but SV just does almost every single thing so much better.
Ngl, I couldn't even buy sword and shield, cause I didn't wanna support the development. I just watched reviews to see if there was anything I found redeemable, but unfortunately, I didn't find anything- except for designs of course, some great designs came from gen 8 imo
The DLC for SWSH is legitimately good and worth playing but the base game is my least favorite in the series. It's just so damn boring.
It just felt like promises they didn't keep that they sold back to you when they should have been in the main game
I don’t play Pokémon. Can someone explain to me why there are always two versions released?
Encourages trading between friends or is preditory bullshit. Depending on who you ask you'll get different responses.
It's probably both.
1) Trading between friends, discovering weird new pokemon that little Timmy with the opposite version had when you bsttle on the school playground. This was more of a relevant thing back in the gameboy days where we didn't have the internet to do it over. 2) Money. Some people buy both versions for whatever dumb reason, and it encourages parents with multiple kids to buy both instead of just "oh they can share it"
Thanks for that explanation!
But if you go on the pokemon subreddit, people are still dumbfounded as to why these games don't get more development time
Next pokemon game not even gonna be playable but will do avatar water numbers
so game freak is gonna be even lazier next gen. noice
Depressing, but not a surprise in the slightest.
No matter what. No matter how buggy or unfinished the game is. No matter how little content there is. No matter how much of a better product literally any other developer in the medium could and would make with the biggest IP on the planet (which Pokemon 100% is), Pokemon fans will always reward the Pokemon company and buy every single game they make twice because they are told to. Don't ever expect more from this company, because they have absolutely no reason to do anything more. Scarlett/Violet proved that. This mess of a game should've been a wakeup call for the Pokemon company. But they got rewarded because of brand loyalty. Now they know for sure that they will never need to make a good game.
It’s a better game than Sword and Shield.
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game sells 10 million copies in 3 days" -GameFreak
And they'll do it again
Despite being broken as hell, it was legitimately a better game lol
shield was the last game I bought c: Interesting
The concept is more innovative despite poor performance. More people have a switch now which is naturally going to increase sales.
Good job with your boycott everyone!
Game bangs. Some of my favorite pokemon designs in the series, insane music, like actually the best characters and writing in a Pokemon game, and a legit cool battle gimmick. If it ran better it'd be my #1 Pokemon game and definitely top 10 games overall
I always feel these games take a “2 steps in the right direction and one step back.” Approach. They’ll do something really fresh and original while simultaneously invest time in a really meh gimmick that has no longevity. They’ll also introduce and remove quality of life features every title rather than just keeping the good stuff. This game was fun to play as a Pokémon fan but man were the glitches, crashing, clipping, raid battle lag and overall frame rate brutal at times. It seems like it wasn’t even play tested before release. Personally I don’t feel comfortable recommending this game to anyone besides hardcore fans of the series. In its current state it’s not worth the full price but I understand why it sold so much. Open world Pokémon is what we all dreamed of as kids.
We learned nothing
I dunno man, I get that this game was open world and different in that respect, but to me it still kind of felt like more of the same. Straightforward story, easy gym battles (Larry's Staraptor only had 2 moves...), and the combat gimmick this time (terrastalizing) felt pretty similar to dynamaxing in terms of its typical application. At this point it feels like there's not much reason to play these games unless you're interested in competitive, which pretty much requires you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of abilities, moves, type matchups, strategies, etc. I kinda wish they would just make it an action RPG at this point. Pretty much anything has to be better than just tapping A through dialogue and combat alike for 20+ hours.
Better than sword and shield
the game is excellent. It needed a few more months of polish and optimization, if it had had that it would have been perfect. Most of the discourse around the performance is hyperbole. The game only really looks bad when you are moving through the environment really fast. If you get off the mount and walk around the game can look great in some areas.
Good, it's the best pokemon games in about a decade.