Pokemon Scarlet & Violet turns a year old in November, and performance-wise, there isn't a lot to show for it. We mean in-game performance of course - sales-wise, it broke records. But for anyone hoping that patches would make the game prettier or at least more stable, it's been a disappointing first year.
Over on Reddit, players who have dropped back in to see how the game is doing have been left frustrated. Many wish fans would vote with their wallets, refusing to buy Pokemon games that clearly could have done with more time in the oven. Especially when 2023 has given us The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, proving that the Switch hardware doesn't have to get in the way of a game's visuals.
This latest round of discourse comes from a viral thread on the subreddit r/games, titled: "Pokemon Scarlet almost a year later". Attached, we see an image of incredibly low-quality textures, both close to the player and far away. But it isn't just the visuals getting in the way of the player's enjoyment.
"Pokemon is the highest-grossing franchise in existence and the distant buildings look like Nintendo 64 graphics," says Reddit user Lobisa. "It is an astronomical insult that Nintendo and Gamefreak haven’t updated this game to be more stable. I just started playing and have already had framerate issues and a crash."
Others agree, sharing their own frustrations with the game. "Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is on the same console... so sad to see this from Pokemon," says unsaturatedfats. "Honestly, I myself could look away from the graphics, it's the 10 fps that kills it for me."
While many others are also disappointed by the continued poor quality of the game's performance, they point out that as long as the series is selling well, there will be little incentive for Game Freak to make improvements.
That being said, it seems that the more glaring bugs have been removed for the most part. Before these were addressed, Scarlet & Violet was an absolute mess to play through, with distracting character model glitches and framerate crashes so severe that players were having to reset every hour. Many players demanded refunds over these issues, and some even claimed that they were being issued outside of the usual restrictions. That didn't hurt the game's sales in the long run though, with Game Freak revealing that Scarlet & Violet sold ten million copies in its first month alone. This had risen to 22 million by March of this year.
In better news, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet has two lots of DLC coming this year. The trailers for them look a lot better than many parts of the base game, so it's possible that they will make performance improvements.