Pokémon Scarlet & Violet update changes little as Nintendo apologizes over technical issues
The new Pokémon game has been heavily criticized for having performance issues, glitches and countless bugs
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Buggy-type Pokémon
🤐 Nintendo has broken its silence on Pokémon Scarlet & Violet’s technical issues
🆕 A new update for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is out now but does little to address the problems
🙇 Nintendo has apologized for “the inconvenience” and said it takes “feedback from players seriously”
😱 Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is the fastest-selling Nintendo game of all time
It may have taken over two weeks, but Nintendo has finally apologized for the litany of technical issues present in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet. And judging by the number of bugs, glitches and glaring performance problems we’ve seen, it has a lot to be sorry for.
A new update for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is out now – version 1.1.0 – which addresses the following issues:
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.
The patch notes also contain an admission from Nintendo that the game’s performance simply isn’t up to scratch, something which has been made abundantly clear by critics, players and technical experts like Digital Foundry, who highlighted just how badly the new Pokémon games run in the extensive video analysis below. The game hasn’t a chance of landing a spot on our list of the best Nintendo Switch games.
Nintendo’s statement reads:
We are aware that players may encounter issues that affect the games' performance. 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.
It’s going to be a long road before the Pokémon games reach the standard Nintendo is usually known for, and some of the issues – like pop-in, low resolution and blurry textures – may never be fixed.
One of the workarounds to improve the game’s subpar performance is the equivalent of turning it off and on again. Simply reboot the game each time you enter a town by backing up to the home screen, closing the game down and reloading it again – you can plug a hole in the presumed memory leak and stop Scarlet & Violet from hemorrhaging resources.
Even though the latest Pokémon game was released in a frankly inexcusable state, that didn’t stop it from becoming the fastest-selling game in Nintendo’s history. In a press release, Nintendo confirmed Scarlet & Violet achieved “the highest number ever for global and domestic sales in the first three days after the release of software for all Nintendo game consoles, including Nintendo Switch”.
Despite the game’s issues, Pokémon Scarlet & Violet achieved a respectable OpenCritic score of 72 after 78 critic reviews, but only 48% of critics would recommend it.
Like Cyberpunk 2077 before it – which was deemed a disaster at launch on PS4 and Xbox One consoles – the trend of developers releasing games that clearly aren’t finished continues. Let’s hope Nintendo and Game Freak can turn the game around like CD Projekt Red has and learn from this mistake when the next entry in the franchise rolls around.