UK news publication The Guardian has published a new interview with The Pokémon Company COO, Takato Utsunomiya. One of the questions put to Mr. Utsunomiya is the unfortunate state that the latest adventures Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet, launched in. You may remember that upon the game’s release, players flocked to social media to show off a range of glitches and issues they had found within the games. While Mr. Utsunomiya wouldn’t directly comment, he said that they are always paying close attention to the Pokémon community and while they won’t concede to all fan requests, the feedback is something that they have been listening to.
It has not all been rosy for Pokémon in recent years. 2022’s games, Scarlet and Violet, were visually underwhelming and plagued with bugs (of the technical kind, rather than the cutesy collectible kind), their poor technical performance inciting backlash the franchise had never seen before.
“Regardless of whether we publicly respond, we’re always paying very close attention to the feedback and conversations happening in the communities,” Utsunomiya says. “There are certain aspects where we can’t always be 100% aligned with what parts of the community are asking for and what we want to provide. But we do this with the desire to keep Pokémon going for a very long time, and I believe that the fans and players are aligned with us in that respect.”
Is this a late april fools joke?
You really have no idea how many times the game suffer bug problems and framerates. This is exactly why they should take there time on polishing the game. Not make it looking all sloppy.
Straight disrespectful. From what I understand they don’t want to make a game good enough it could last more than a year. They want to keep yearly releases to keep you spending money to “keep Pokémon going for a very long time” rather facing the facts that the new generation of consoles require time to make a good game.
X-Button => Doubt
If you guys really listened to feedback some of the later Switch games like Scarlet and Violet wouldn’t be a broken mess.
“We hear people complain but the numbers don’t lie. Customers love the game so that must the be truth! Let’s keep making money!”
Pokemon will never clean up their act until they take a hit in sales. Remember that. This is truly one of those situations where you gotta “vote with your wallet”
what the community wants is quality games, how difficult is to understand?
they are beyond sonic team levels of ignorance.
Ignorance? TPC knows EXACTLY what they’re doing. They’ve learned over the last 10 years that minimum effort sells.
Right, they’re the most greedy company in the world and now that they learned that DLC sells they put less effort and deliver half baked games.
“There are certain aspects where we can’t always be 100% aligned with what parts of the community are asking for” They Ruined and Destroyed my favorite game franchise, Pokemon for me ended after X and Y
Translation: We gotta pump these babies out annually. Ain’t got time for no polish.
Legends Arceus is the sole outsider to all of the mediocre sludge they’ve been putting out at PokeCo/Gamefreak.
Yeah. No kidding dude. Legends was a stunning Pokemon game.
I know people who stopped playing Pokémon because of Scarlet and Violet.
I did too
I’m pretty tired of this rhetoric, to be honest. Even some big-name fans make this same excuse. No, adding difficulty settings, battle facilities, non-Gym landmarks, dungeons, better, still E-rated, stories like in BW or SM, or even replacing Gyms with original boss battle formats won’t cause sales to drop. The vast majority of people aren’t asking for mature themes or core gameplay changes or anything that wards off children in general. So bizarre to keep saying this.
The only thing they are “paying close attention” to is the sales, and sadly, the mediocre, unpolished garbage that is scarlet/violet became the best-selling game in the franchise, and this is after the fiasco that was sword and shield. The game is already on it’s first year and they haven’t even attempted to fix even the slightlest of problems. This is the most succesfull video game franchise in history and they can’t even hire more people to at least do patches.
What’s worse is that they released dlc before even focusing on fixing the game, and people BOUGHT IT. They’ll never change because everyone keep buying their garbage, and they don’t need to listen because, why would they? the game sells. It’s incredible that Legends Arceus, the game that’s obviously a prototype for scarlet/violet, that is somewhat barebones despite the fun gameplay loop, it’s more fun, and surprisingly a much more polished game than the mainline one, and that’s saying something because Arceus has a lot of flaws.
If that would be the case, the last installment of Pokemon would be playable.
The games are at least in a better spot than when they launched, but the games really should have had a lot of issues fixed by now.
Stuff like framerate drops may be unavoidable given the solution they went with for dynamically spawning in Pokemon and the inherent ram limitations on Switch. But all those aside, I can think of tons of issues that could have and should have been fixed by now:
Camera issues when exiting shops
Flickering NPC and low frame rate characters inside extremely small areas.
Flickering distant landscapes and inconsistent lod objects.
Environmental shadows and lighting disappearing and reappearing randomly during battles.
Camera clipping into ground when battling with Pokemon closer to the ground.
Buggy encounter behavior for Pokemon near objects (Toedscool near trees)
Sandwich ingredients and plates clipping through picnic tables (why is some of this stuff physics based?)
Pokemon spawning inside of objects and walls.
Even if I were to ignore the ram related issues, there’s far too much for me to look at the game and think they’ve put in half the necessary effort they could have to get the game up to the level that it should be at this point. Sure they fixed the issue with boxes loading, and performance levels are more consistent than they were at 1.0 or 1.1, but it’s not enough for me to give the game a pass.
It’s honestly a shame, Scarlet and Violet have some really good characters and story behind it, and from a technical level they have implemented some good things too like Pokemon actually getting dirty, or the characters and environments being affected by weather changes. But both the story and the good details are absolutely marred by the extremely persistent and inconsistent issues that are ultimately unrelated to framerate drops.
I keep holding out that somehow, some way, whether through a massive patch or maybe a “next-gen” update sometime in the future, the game will be able to be enjoyed as I think it should be, but my hopes are wearing thin. I want to be able to recommend the game to my friends because of the good things in it, but I can’t in it’s current state.
I hope GameFreak realizes that it’s next entry better be the most polished game they’ve had in years, because even my casual gamer friends were noticeably put off by the issues in the game.
That’s cute! Did they say that before or after they released the 2 full priced, inconsistent performing games that look amazing but again perform like 2 old people nature dancing.
I highly doubt it’s going to get fixed though.