Pokémon Scarlet And Violet’s Legacy Is Squandered Potential
Pokémon Scarlet And Violet’s Legacy Is Squandered Potential
by Turbostrider27
33 Comments
Dukemon102
That’s the Legacy of every single generation since X and Y.
HarkARC
Pokémon ~~Scarlet And Violet~~’s Legacy Is Squandered Potential
Lunar_Lunacy_Stuff
I did enjoy Violet but the performance was just such a bummer. The storylines on the game were all really fun and well written. The end game stuff with terra raids was also really well done and actually super hard for some of them. If they would have given this game the same love they give Mario and Zelda games this would have been one of the best Pokémon games in years. Now it will forever been known as a bad game.
DarkAlatreon
Literally just:
1) Make the levels scale so you can do gyms in any (or almost any) order so the open world actually makes sense
2) Bring back Battle Frontier
3) Fix technical issues with performance and Tera Raids
And it easily gets into my top 3 along with HGSS and B2W2
eternal_edenium
Movement is everything in this kind of exploration game, and running as the mc or with the bike is a horrible horrible experience.
There is a lot to do and explorations to do but the bad performance just removes my fun.
The next pokemon game is having a lot of pressure on it due to how scarlet performed.
ThePurplePantywaist
> It’s just a matter of how long the community is willing to put up with being crammed inside the machine.
Ignoring scrutinizing the concept and reality of community in this context, the answer to the question how long the consumers will put up with being “crammed inside the machine” (ie getting technically subpar, unpolished Pokemon games) is since “Dexit” and Swod/Shield apparent:
for a very long time, probably even permament.
JohnnyNole2000
I’m almost impressed they managed to make the performance worse with each DLC
FruitJuice617
Scarlet and Violet certainly had technical issues, but I was okay with *most* of it. I can ignore graphical only hitches and moments of stutter. So that stuff didn’t bother me too much.
2 things did bother me a lot:
1 – Raids are so GD glitchy. It was a main selling point of the games and barely works.
2 – I don’t enjoy competitive battling like I did way back in Gens 4 thru 6. So there’s virtually no post game for me. I can shiny hunt and do glitchy raids tho. So..yay? I desperately need something like the Battle Frontier from Gen 4. That would honestly be perfect.
Other than those 2 complaints, Scarlet and Violet were nearly perfect Pokemon games. If raids worked better and they had any kind of meaningful post game content I’d put it right up in the top 3 Pokemon games of all time.
owenturnbull
The games are great. I love them. Yeah they aren’t perfect but they are incredibly fun. They just need to have more time or employ more people to get the game optimised
sliceanddic3
the story, characters, region, and gimmick in this game is incredible. if it was allowed even one more year to develop, it would have been the GOAT pokemon game imo. the updated pokemon models and textures are all great as well.
DrMantisTabboggn
It was the most fun I’ve had playing a Pokémon game in years, but I can’t argue against any of the complaints. Good article
Spino1905
I think the games were overall pretty good. The performance could have been better I but i really had fun with the base game and both DLCs. Defineitly a better storyline than sword and shield.
axb2002
I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I fortunately never experienced any game breaking bugs that I myself didn’t go out of my way to try to do. Outside of notable frame drops and slow down I had a pretty smooth experience and an overall great time. I enjoyed the new characters and their storylines, I enjoyed the new Pokemon introduced, I enjoy the new regional gimmick, and I like some changes they made like how you can basically just breed eggs from wherever you want.
But there are some issues I can’t deny, outside of the obvious frame drops and slowdown, game breaking glitches, etc that other people experienced. The open world felt both huge and lifeless at the same time, you do get rewarded sometimes for exploring every nook and cranny but it doesn’t feel….fulfilling? Not sure if that’s the right word but you get the idea. Lack of level scaling makes it to where while you can *technically* do anything in any order, there is definitely a recommended order which is lame. For some people still a lack of voice acting is baffling (me personally I can live with or without it, but I think taking the BotW/TotK approach to voice acting and only having it in cutscenes and just random sounds and grunts during texts would be cool). And outside of certain Pokémon’s models, graphically it doesn’t hold up to a lot of other games.
Overall I’d say Gen 9 is like a 6/10.
Astrower5
S/V has been an absolute blast for me. I agree the performance sucks. It looks like garbage a lot of times. But I really enjoyed the story and characters for once, and just wandering around with my Pokemon was relaxing and fun. Playing through the DLC now and still loving it. I usually describe it to people as the best Pokemon game ever, but the worst game about Pokemon ever. If any other developer released this it would be critically destroyed. But Pokemon is Pokemon.
Asinhasos
The article translates perfectly what the community feels right now. It seems that for each high, there’s a low; for each high-high, there’s a low-low.
-Open world? Terrible performance.
-Amazing pokémon models and designs? Bad visuals and bland world.
-Great story and “ending”? Bad scaling
-Secret legendary quartet, which you have to work to get? Open world misses on little to no secrets and easer eggs.
And the most infuriating part is that it could all be fixed with as little as one more year in the oven. Hell, even less! And the DLCs were just adding insult to injury.
The Indigo Disk was announced for Winter 2024. Which means any time from January to March. Instead of leaving it on that deadline, keeping it more time to polish, fix bugs, maybe throw in some more quests and/or secrets, what do they do? Release even earlier, in the first half of December. Why? “HOLIDAY SEASON”.
This is just too much to take in. It’s like they don’t even learn from what even they said “we’ll try to keep quality high with the same release schedule”, well it can’t be done if the schedule is actually PUSHED BACK from what it was supposed to be.
LeviathanLX
Yes. Again. And every single generation this happens we spend the first year or so of the game’s lifespan trying to explain why a steady decline in quality should prompt a critical response.
Generation 10 will not be better.
henryuuk
“squandered potential” has been the running theme for pokemon for like well over half the series’ lifetime now IYAM
Ninjas4cool
for as bad as Kotaku has become lately,I have to admit their not wrong in this assessment.
ITouchedHerB00B5
The newer models are largely great. The characters were certainly an improvement over the gang we had from X/Y. The new Pokemon, along with the paradox Pokemon, were an interesting twist. Area Zero was a neat idea in theory. Having the legendary be a better bike was also a good choice, but not sure if it’s something they should replicate with each new entry. Spain is a great inspiration for a new region, I just went there for 2 weeks before I played Violet for the first time.
The performance is pretty unacceptable for a Nintendo published game. You never see this type of quality from Nintendo’s first party main entries (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Smash) or from there other partners (Hal with Kirby or Intelligent Systems Fire Emblem). GF are actively making decisions that are upsetting long term fans (shiny locks, removing move sets when depositing in Home, lore dumping and then just not answering most questions) and the raids are still pretty poorly optimized.
I think SV would have been the next great entry if GF can just focus on this being a great video game; rather then a piece of the media pie the Pokemon Company needs to sell the anime, playing cards and toys. The quality has to start raising flags with Nintendo at some point, how long before they publish a game that’s truly broken? It only takes one giant misstep for the next generation of young fans to not care about Pokemon at all and crush the franchise.
Hateful_creeper2
The game is an example of good ideas but bad execution.
DistortionR
I wonder what the Japanese Pokémon videogame fans think about this. We all seem to agree on most points here from a western perspective, we voice our dislikes and any review you see of the game points at the performance issues. But I doubt anyone at game freak or Nintendo cares much for that as they have always catered for their Japanese audience first and foremost. Do you know if they are just as vocal and if the reviews in Japan were equally damning of the performance?
overlordkai
Pokémon has become a lost cause to me. Poor performance and quality control leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes gameplay can remedy low performance, but Pokemon has failed to do so (for me). With each successive generation, I realize that this franchise is no longer for me. It lacks any sort of marvel that people of all ages should discover.
ibeenbornagain
That’s been the legacy of the series for many years
newbatthis
I’ve given up on Pokemon years ago. Which is kinda sad. Pokemon was one of the franchises I was looking forward to most for the Switch. But I’ve ended skipping out on this generation of Pokemon games entirely due to what an unoptimized mess they are. Also SV has some of the WTF designs I’ve ever seen (no I’m not some genwunner, i liked plenty of designs in later gens).
TotalSpeech
Oh look, it’s that time of the year where I remind this sub that Sword and Shield were pretty solid games in retrospect, dexit aside.
crunchypillooww
Every 3d pokemon game because of the 3 year cycle
Yojimbra
Honestly for a single play through game it’s pretty amazing. The vast expanses of land with visible pokemon was amazing and there was some real challenge to the game at times.
Especially in the dlc.
The lack of end game stuff is a bit of a bummer since the only things to do are shiny hunt and terra raid battles.
But the performance issues are so frustrating. But there’s also just a lot of wasted time. Like throwing out my shiny iron valiant takes 30 seconds longer than my ceruledge.
Jof_spades
I did enjoy the games but personally the performance did ruin the experience for me, I haven’t touched the games in months
Thepower200
I’ve been saying this, but the switch generation where almost all Nintendo ip’s have strived and been getting better scores and better sales. Pokemon games have been overwhelming this generation. For me the best generations of Pokemon will always be the DS and 3DS era of pokemon.
Full_Metal18
It’s Pokemon, what else is new? Each new game feels like the alpha build of a potentially really good next gen Pokemon game. In a few years they’ll probably pump out a game that’s worth it’s triple A price but until then diehard fans and parents will keep buying these underdeveloped games.
duckofdeath87
Gamefreak’s legacy is squandered potential
Finito-1994
I really wanted and was looking forward for SV but I saw the videos online and goddamn it looks like shit and runs like shit. I’ve held off on buying it since. I wanted to play it and every now and then I do, but I just watch the videos online and my desire goes away.
At least Cyberpunk eventually got their shit relatively together.
EMI_Black_Ace
Alternative take from a software developer:
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet reveal internal problems at GameFreak.
It isn’t laziness, it’s just bad business decisions that are finally stacking up. What we’re looking at with how S/V work is that the company has a metric assload of *technical debt.* Basically taking profits by releasing now, at the expense of *how hard it’s going to be for them to make the next game.* It *will* financially bite them in the ass in the future *if they don’t pay off that tech debt now.*
Not through lost sales, because people will buy any Pokemon thing no matter how bad it is, so long as it meets the most low-bar standard of playability.
The loss will come through *delays,* because with how hard it is to use their crusty and rusty old tooling to churn out a new game that feels like a passable iterative improvement over the last one, it’s likely that they *won’t be able to churn out something passable at all* by their next major release deadline. It’ll set the entire franchise back six months relative to schedule, effectively costing billions of dollars compared to projections — and worse, they won’t be in any better a position next time to hit their deadlines, repeating the losses ad infinitum.
If the franchise isn’t ready for a death march, they will need to accept a short-term L — contract another studio to generate a spinoff or remake (deliberately limited in scope) to fill a release gap while GameFreak takes a year to update their tooling. Doing so much as striking a deal to use Unity, Unreal or Nintendo’s internal tooling and taking that year to migrate their commonly used functionality (or better, *scrap* their garbage like the message box system and replace it with something that feels up to date) would put them in a much better position to crank out reasonable quality games instead of screwing themselves with stuff they can’t finish in time.
33 Comments
That’s the Legacy of every single generation since X and Y.
Pokémon ~~Scarlet And Violet~~’s Legacy Is Squandered Potential
I did enjoy Violet but the performance was just such a bummer. The storylines on the game were all really fun and well written. The end game stuff with terra raids was also really well done and actually super hard for some of them. If they would have given this game the same love they give Mario and Zelda games this would have been one of the best Pokémon games in years. Now it will forever been known as a bad game.
Literally just:
1) Make the levels scale so you can do gyms in any (or almost any) order so the open world actually makes sense
2) Bring back Battle Frontier
3) Fix technical issues with performance and Tera Raids
And it easily gets into my top 3 along with HGSS and B2W2
Movement is everything in this kind of exploration game, and running as the mc or with the bike is a horrible horrible experience.
There is a lot to do and explorations to do but the bad performance just removes my fun.
The next pokemon game is having a lot of pressure on it due to how scarlet performed.
> It’s just a matter of how long the community is willing to put up with being crammed inside the machine.
Ignoring scrutinizing the concept and reality of community in this context, the answer to the question how long the consumers will put up with being “crammed inside the machine” (ie getting technically subpar, unpolished Pokemon games) is since “Dexit” and Swod/Shield apparent:
for a very long time, probably even permament.
I’m almost impressed they managed to make the performance worse with each DLC
Scarlet and Violet certainly had technical issues, but I was okay with *most* of it. I can ignore graphical only hitches and moments of stutter. So that stuff didn’t bother me too much.
2 things did bother me a lot:
1 – Raids are so GD glitchy. It was a main selling point of the games and barely works.
2 – I don’t enjoy competitive battling like I did way back in Gens 4 thru 6. So there’s virtually no post game for me. I can shiny hunt and do glitchy raids tho. So..yay? I desperately need something like the Battle Frontier from Gen 4. That would honestly be perfect.
Other than those 2 complaints, Scarlet and Violet were nearly perfect Pokemon games. If raids worked better and they had any kind of meaningful post game content I’d put it right up in the top 3 Pokemon games of all time.
The games are great. I love them. Yeah they aren’t perfect but they are incredibly fun. They just need to have more time or employ more people to get the game optimised
the story, characters, region, and gimmick in this game is incredible. if it was allowed even one more year to develop, it would have been the GOAT pokemon game imo. the updated pokemon models and textures are all great as well.
It was the most fun I’ve had playing a Pokémon game in years, but I can’t argue against any of the complaints. Good article
I think the games were overall pretty good. The performance could have been better I but i really had fun with the base game and both DLCs. Defineitly a better storyline than sword and shield.
I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I fortunately never experienced any game breaking bugs that I myself didn’t go out of my way to try to do. Outside of notable frame drops and slow down I had a pretty smooth experience and an overall great time. I enjoyed the new characters and their storylines, I enjoyed the new Pokemon introduced, I enjoy the new regional gimmick, and I like some changes they made like how you can basically just breed eggs from wherever you want.
But there are some issues I can’t deny, outside of the obvious frame drops and slowdown, game breaking glitches, etc that other people experienced. The open world felt both huge and lifeless at the same time, you do get rewarded sometimes for exploring every nook and cranny but it doesn’t feel….fulfilling? Not sure if that’s the right word but you get the idea. Lack of level scaling makes it to where while you can *technically* do anything in any order, there is definitely a recommended order which is lame. For some people still a lack of voice acting is baffling (me personally I can live with or without it, but I think taking the BotW/TotK approach to voice acting and only having it in cutscenes and just random sounds and grunts during texts would be cool). And outside of certain Pokémon’s models, graphically it doesn’t hold up to a lot of other games.
Overall I’d say Gen 9 is like a 6/10.
S/V has been an absolute blast for me. I agree the performance sucks. It looks like garbage a lot of times. But I really enjoyed the story and characters for once, and just wandering around with my Pokemon was relaxing and fun. Playing through the DLC now and still loving it. I usually describe it to people as the best Pokemon game ever, but the worst game about Pokemon ever. If any other developer released this it would be critically destroyed. But Pokemon is Pokemon.
The article translates perfectly what the community feels right now. It seems that for each high, there’s a low; for each high-high, there’s a low-low.
-Open world? Terrible performance.
-Amazing pokémon models and designs? Bad visuals and bland world.
-Great story and “ending”? Bad scaling
-Secret legendary quartet, which you have to work to get? Open world misses on little to no secrets and easer eggs.
And the most infuriating part is that it could all be fixed with as little as one more year in the oven. Hell, even less! And the DLCs were just adding insult to injury.
The Indigo Disk was announced for Winter 2024. Which means any time from January to March. Instead of leaving it on that deadline, keeping it more time to polish, fix bugs, maybe throw in some more quests and/or secrets, what do they do? Release even earlier, in the first half of December. Why? “HOLIDAY SEASON”.
This is just too much to take in. It’s like they don’t even learn from what even they said “we’ll try to keep quality high with the same release schedule”, well it can’t be done if the schedule is actually PUSHED BACK from what it was supposed to be.
Yes. Again. And every single generation this happens we spend the first year or so of the game’s lifespan trying to explain why a steady decline in quality should prompt a critical response.
Generation 10 will not be better.
“squandered potential” has been the running theme for pokemon for like well over half the series’ lifetime now IYAM
for as bad as Kotaku has become lately,I have to admit their not wrong in this assessment.
The newer models are largely great. The characters were certainly an improvement over the gang we had from X/Y. The new Pokemon, along with the paradox Pokemon, were an interesting twist. Area Zero was a neat idea in theory. Having the legendary be a better bike was also a good choice, but not sure if it’s something they should replicate with each new entry. Spain is a great inspiration for a new region, I just went there for 2 weeks before I played Violet for the first time.
The performance is pretty unacceptable for a Nintendo published game. You never see this type of quality from Nintendo’s first party main entries (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Smash) or from there other partners (Hal with Kirby or Intelligent Systems Fire Emblem). GF are actively making decisions that are upsetting long term fans (shiny locks, removing move sets when depositing in Home, lore dumping and then just not answering most questions) and the raids are still pretty poorly optimized.
I think SV would have been the next great entry if GF can just focus on this being a great video game; rather then a piece of the media pie the Pokemon Company needs to sell the anime, playing cards and toys. The quality has to start raising flags with Nintendo at some point, how long before they publish a game that’s truly broken? It only takes one giant misstep for the next generation of young fans to not care about Pokemon at all and crush the franchise.
The game is an example of good ideas but bad execution.
I wonder what the Japanese Pokémon videogame fans think about this. We all seem to agree on most points here from a western perspective, we voice our dislikes and any review you see of the game points at the performance issues. But I doubt anyone at game freak or Nintendo cares much for that as they have always catered for their Japanese audience first and foremost. Do you know if they are just as vocal and if the reviews in Japan were equally damning of the performance?
Pokémon has become a lost cause to me. Poor performance and quality control leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes gameplay can remedy low performance, but Pokemon has failed to do so (for me). With each successive generation, I realize that this franchise is no longer for me. It lacks any sort of marvel that people of all ages should discover.
That’s been the legacy of the series for many years
I’ve given up on Pokemon years ago. Which is kinda sad. Pokemon was one of the franchises I was looking forward to most for the Switch. But I’ve ended skipping out on this generation of Pokemon games entirely due to what an unoptimized mess they are. Also SV has some of the WTF designs I’ve ever seen (no I’m not some genwunner, i liked plenty of designs in later gens).
Oh look, it’s that time of the year where I remind this sub that Sword and Shield were pretty solid games in retrospect, dexit aside.
Every 3d pokemon game because of the 3 year cycle
Honestly for a single play through game it’s pretty amazing. The vast expanses of land with visible pokemon was amazing and there was some real challenge to the game at times.
Especially in the dlc.
The lack of end game stuff is a bit of a bummer since the only things to do are shiny hunt and terra raid battles.
But the performance issues are so frustrating. But there’s also just a lot of wasted time. Like throwing out my shiny iron valiant takes 30 seconds longer than my ceruledge.
I did enjoy the games but personally the performance did ruin the experience for me, I haven’t touched the games in months
I’ve been saying this, but the switch generation where almost all Nintendo ip’s have strived and been getting better scores and better sales. Pokemon games have been overwhelming this generation. For me the best generations of Pokemon will always be the DS and 3DS era of pokemon.
It’s Pokemon, what else is new? Each new game feels like the alpha build of a potentially really good next gen Pokemon game. In a few years they’ll probably pump out a game that’s worth it’s triple A price but until then diehard fans and parents will keep buying these underdeveloped games.
Gamefreak’s legacy is squandered potential
I really wanted and was looking forward for SV but I saw the videos online and goddamn it looks like shit and runs like shit. I’ve held off on buying it since. I wanted to play it and every now and then I do, but I just watch the videos online and my desire goes away.
At least Cyberpunk eventually got their shit relatively together.
Alternative take from a software developer:
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet reveal internal problems at GameFreak.
It isn’t laziness, it’s just bad business decisions that are finally stacking up. What we’re looking at with how S/V work is that the company has a metric assload of *technical debt.* Basically taking profits by releasing now, at the expense of *how hard it’s going to be for them to make the next game.* It *will* financially bite them in the ass in the future *if they don’t pay off that tech debt now.*
Not through lost sales, because people will buy any Pokemon thing no matter how bad it is, so long as it meets the most low-bar standard of playability.
The loss will come through *delays,* because with how hard it is to use their crusty and rusty old tooling to churn out a new game that feels like a passable iterative improvement over the last one, it’s likely that they *won’t be able to churn out something passable at all* by their next major release deadline. It’ll set the entire franchise back six months relative to schedule, effectively costing billions of dollars compared to projections — and worse, they won’t be in any better a position next time to hit their deadlines, repeating the losses ad infinitum.
If the franchise isn’t ready for a death march, they will need to accept a short-term L — contract another studio to generate a spinoff or remake (deliberately limited in scope) to fill a release gap while GameFreak takes a year to update their tooling. Doing so much as striking a deal to use Unity, Unreal or Nintendo’s internal tooling and taking that year to migrate their commonly used functionality (or better, *scrap* their garbage like the message box system and replace it with something that feels up to date) would put them in a much better position to crank out reasonable quality games instead of screwing themselves with stuff they can’t finish in time.