The Trouble(s) with Scarlet and Violet

A little over a couple of weeks have passed since the release of the Scarlet and Violet games, and people's reception to those games have been good - more on that in my "uptake" post coming at some point. Before that happens, though, I want to discuss a darker side of those games. That would be the trouble that some has had with them, specifically the bugs that currently exist for them. Bugs are nothing new for Pokémon games, of course, especially for the main series games (see my post on them years and years ago below), but these ones seem particularly concerning, which is why I've taken to write about them.

The list, as it turns out, is quite extensive, more so than I can possibly cover in a single post. So, I've chosen to highlight some of the most important ones, as discovered through some reports. One of the biggest problems is "clipping", which in simple terms is being able to go or see through 3D models when one isn't supposed to. Some have reported being able to see the "insides" of Pokémon, moving past certain internal parts of the environment, or even almost "falling through the world". I've seen a few of these similar issues in the past with a different game, and that game is fully about exploration; in that game, they would be an obvious detractor, and as such they have been fixed since. Here, exploration is still a key part, so it becomes obvious that the problem has to be minimized as well.

One of the other issues is a classic one: frame rate. It's known that even on the predecessor console, as the 3DS, some parts of the main series games there have begun to lag in several parts, notably in battle scenes. Yet it is evident that here, the problem is exacerbated and occurs even in the general landscape. Some parts of the landscape appear to have been designed to appear with minimal frame rates from far away and greater up close. Further, some instances of the game, like moving through towns and progressing through cutscenes appear rather slow due to decreased frame rates. Something suggests that the development team had to try to make as many cutbacks as possible in order to make the game even run, and the classic problem returning is a big hint to that.

Getting past the two problems above, one may encounter other "tidbit" problems. Some Pokémon might not appear, then they suddenly appear, suggesting that the appearances are not well managed; human characters may have the same appearance problems. Then there are other 3D models that either don't appear or behave unnaturally or strangely in specific settings, which becomes major takeaways from realism. Yet the biggest problem may be that the games might crash at certain moments, which may become outright unacceptable. The development team may have foreseen this and thus had included a "backup data" mechanism, but even then, that's mostly a stopgap solution rather than a workable one. These issues and more may make the games something less desired.

It would be expected that some games these days may have bugs from the get-go, but Scarlet and Violet seem to tell another story entirely. They involve undue appearance compensations, flawed mechanisms, and intricate programming slipups, and all of these form the dark side story of the games, which is more concerning than ever before. In order to resolve them, there has to be the usual answer of patches and updates, and they have to be developed soon in order to maintain the reception and uptake that the games have had, for the times ahead.

One year ago: Glacial Scaling

Two years ago: Go Beyond... Features

Three years ago: The Social Aspect of Pokémon

Four years ago: More Weather Boosts for Types?

Five years ago: Game Bugs and Fixing Them