Nintendo Apologizes for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Performance Issues, Working on Improvements - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 December 2022 / 4,662 Views
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet may have broken multiple sales records selling over 10 million units worldwide in its first three days, however, the game is full of performance issues and bugs.
Nintendo in the patch notes for Update 1.1.0 for the game that released today acknowledged the issues with the game and apologized. They have promised to work on improvements.
"We are aware that players may encounter issues that affect the games' performance," said Nintendo. "Our goal is always to give players a positive experience with our games, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We take the feedback from players seriously and are working on improvements to the games."
Read the Ver. 1.1.0 patch notes below:
- Season 1 of Ranked Battles will kick off, allowing you to enjoy Ranked Battles through the Battle Stadium.
- Please check the in-game notice for more details about Ranked Battles Season 1.
- An issue has been fixed that caused the music to not play correctly during the battles with the Elite Four and the Top Champion in the Victory Road path.
- Other select bug fixes have been made.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Nintendo should not be free from blame on this. I’m absolutely sure they knew the state the game was in, but this was their big Holiday release.
I'm glad Nintendo is reassuring that the problems will be fixed as much as possible, but this was also inevitable since Nintendo doesn't have any control over Game Freak. Game Freak sees big sales, they then don't feel like they need to improve.
The Pokemon Company pushes Game Freak too hard, IMO. The game has to come out, no matter how buggy or incomplete it is, because there are new Pokemon cards coming out, and there's a new anime coming out, and the game has to come out in conjunction with them. If Game Freak spends a bunch of time fixing the last game, then that puts even more pressure on the next one. It's a lose-lose scenario for Game Freak, so either Game Freak needs more resources or they need more time between releases, IMO.
When releasing a game knowing of the problems I truly don't accept these empty excuses. Are they going to improve the game, the development team or their culture? And if people say Nintendo had no power due to the pokemon company calling the shots so how can they promise anything?
Nintendo tends to be one of the better (if not best) publishers in the industry to not release buggy or poor performing games. But with Pokemon, it seems the deadlines need to be met. I would all but guarantee Game Freak has had crunch in the present, recent past, or the far past.
I have only played about an hour or two of old Pokemon games back in the day, but even I find the issues with Gen 9 frustrating.
Gonna be honest, but in this day and age, investors and holiday sales are far harder to ignore than ignoring us typing out our performance gripes on the internet and trying to get partial refunds.
This is just the way the big corps work these days. It'll only ever change when we stop buying day 1 and decide if bad perf is worth not buying into.
Strange. If it's so buggy, why was it allowed to ship? Shouldn't the testers have caught most of these things?
All Nintendo does is distribute the console games. The Pokémon Company is the one that funds and markets the game and allows Game Freak to decide when it's ready to ship. At least that's how I'm aware of the process since there's so many owners of Pokémon lol. So there may be details that I'm missing.
But Nintendo doesn't have much say as to a certain level of quality the games need to be in since they handle just distribution.
Nintendo have a very big stakeholder position in both GF and TPC doesn't them? I haven't seem a single Pokemon game releasing on PC and any other console for that matter to distance Nintendo from the problem.
Let's be honest, Nintendo wanted to make it a Holiday release at all costs. They knew it needed a delay, the game in it's current state needed at least 3 more months of optimization and bug fixes, if not more.
Well they had a holiday release schedule to hit. If they push it back it would have missed the holidays. The issues are such that obviously they were fully aware of them but the game was just very rushed considering they just had two pokémon games come out in the past year. They just ran out of dev time and released a buggy project. Just poor planning/scheduling. At some point earlier this year they should have brought in more people to put on the finishing touches of the game and to work on bugs. The really they just need to hire a more competent team that's better at making modern games than what they currently have.
Investors. Due to the nature of corporations in the modern era, EVERYTHING is about quarterly reports and profits and trends.
Basically, it was decided that Pokemon was going to be released in November of this year no matter what, and despite being responsible for the largest media empire ever, the Pokemon Company (The game devs) Aren't that big. Basically given a hard deadline and a 'too bad, ship it anyway' ultimatum.
Because they knew it would sell like mad. And they were right.
I know in the past Shiggy-san has said it's better to delay a game and get it right, but we don't live in a world where you can't update your games anymore. Patches exist, so this is just the nature of our interconnected world and profit-driven corporations.
Personally I found the game was fun enough to excuse the performance issues but it seems I'm in the minority.
Still a lot of companies, with games that would profit less (and suffer bigger backlash) have pushed the game back.
Honestly, given the sales figures, you seem to be in the majority, remembering that most people posting in game forums and Facebook pages are a noisy few.
Fair. just finished the game last night and have to say it may very well be one of my favourite pokemon games. Top three gens, easily. (Red/blue for purity and nostalgia, Black/White for refining and perfecting that original formula, and Scarlet/violet for making it open world and actually having a good story and characters and making it oddly difficult at times again!)
I'm glad that you enjoyed the game a lot despise any shortcomings.
Yeah. T he things it does well it does so well that I'm willing to forgive the visual glitches and piss-poor framerate. Because it basically gave me like 95% of everything I wanted in an open world pokemon game and the soundtradk/world were just so engrossing.
Nobody's pretending the issues don't exist or that the company shouldn't do better (They are prevalent and their virtually limitless resources absolutely should have gone towards cleaning the game up), but it is important to note that for a vast majority of people playing the game, the negatives don't even begin to outweigh the positives.
The sheer consistency of joy I experienced playing this game made it an easy choice to forgive its shortcomings. IT's so annoying how so many people are so angry about this. It's not GOOD, but again, it's just...ugh.
I love games but gamers can be so toxic.
I'm certain you aren't denying the issues (there are some that do it or close to it, but they don't matter), and I can certainly see you enjoying the game so much that you can overlook the issues, there have been plenty of games I felt similarly in the past.
Just hope Nintendo do really tackle the issues and the next Pokemon can be even better because of it.
Nintendo gamefreak the pokemon company get a free pass
But fcken cyberpunk 2077 and cd projekt red gets crucified...
Back to back sword and shield and now this trash
Some have defended saying GF, TPC, and N didn't break promises, maybe shipping a functional product isn't considered "promise".
Get to work fixing this!
Well this was inevitable. Obviously they aren't going to leave a mainline Pokemon game a buggy mess. Hopefully they get it to the kind or performance you would actually expect from a pokemon game, and quickly. You'd think they will want to fix most of the problems before when millions of people pop in the game for the first time on Christmas day.
Surprised. I was of the camp that the game sells well no matter what so why would they give a damn.
It could be all PR speak and the update won't do much, but maybe I'm wrong.
An awful lot of AAA games sell no matter what, i.e. Bethesda. Most of them still get patched, because it's a show of good faith, and even the almighty Call of Duty was sagging after a few years of less than stellar releases. Unfortunately, patching games after release is the precedent we've set through a decade of a half of buying Skyrim. Fallout, or Call of Duty in spite of numerous issues at launch.
It would sell no matter what, and likely even if they didn't patch the sales would still come, but it would be problematic to just say "suck it up".
Exactly.
You know if this was Activision or Blizzard people would be ripping into them relentlessly.
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