Pokémon Scarlet / Pokémon Violet - DF Tech Review - Incredibly Poor Visuals + Performance
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- Опубліковано 22 лис 2022
- We weren't able to go hands-on with Pokémon Scarlet/Pokémon Violet until the game launched, but having compared it to Pokémon Arceus and a bunch of Switch open world titles, it's clear that this game has severe problems and should not be sold in this state. Oliver Mackenzie has the DF review.
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This thing sold 10M copies in 3 days. They have no reason to ever put in the effort.
Alternate take: This game disappointed 10 million (Somewhere between 5 and 10, some buy both) fans in 3 days. They need the next entry to fix that.
Hilarious that the only positive thing he said in the opening was about the character models. You know, the thing Game Freak doesn’t make. They outsource modeling to Creatures Inc.
Wait really..? Oh boi
daaamn
Even the humans!?
Also as far as i know all Models have way to high polygon count that why there are so much performance problems. Sword and shield and also all the 3ds titles had that problem.
@@Gluurak in Scarlet and Violet, Pokémon actually have variable LODs, but this isn't present for the similarly high poly buildings and NPCs.
So, now we finally know what an open world/N64 Pokemon game could have been
Holy crap dude I busted out laughing. Truly one of the games of all time
Honestly, N64 looked better. At least in art design.
N64 games usually had better texture tiling.
First time I got to the main city, the thought 'this reminds me of Super Mario 64' struck me 🤣 and not in a positive.
N64 had far better character animations and actual voice acting
12:12 BOTW was a WiiU title too, I think that’d be an even greater example of game optimization
It's a fair comparison too. They're switch titles using the same piece of technology. It boggles the mind that a franchise making billions like pokemon still can't compete with Zelda BotW, Metroid Prime, and freaking Mario Odyssey! They can't even compete with Mario Galaxy or Zelda Twilight princess for Pete's sake!
@@ColdEmperor Not just both being Switch Titles: They're both open world "Go out and explore anywhere you can see" titles. BotW just does every step of that idea better. And you list Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess... TP in particular makes me think of a certain other Gamecube game. Pokemon Colosseum. Remember that one? It has about the same texture quality, if not slightly better texture quality. And that was an ancient game. Considering pokemon are getting increasingly more detailed I'm starting to wonder why. Like... They don't even look better than they did on Pokemon Colosseum.
@clunkerblunker8132 I like BotW's art style better than Xenoblade. I'm not really a big fan of basically just playing an anime
@@BowlOSoup6661botw is anime too what😂
Amazing how, in isolation, Arceus looks not so great, but in comparison with the new game, it looks like an art piece
Breath of the wild looks like a next-gen title compared to these games tho.
@@DBTHEPLUGPokémon games aren’t ever going to look like a next gen game, they are basically are drive to sell merchandise
@@Mattinator95 Well, why not? A 6 year old game called "Zelda Breath of The Wild" could do it.
@@Mattinator95 and then there's the spinoffs that barely sell, yet looks miles better
Imagine bandai namco making pokemon since pokken tournament DX and new pokemon snap were really nice
@@DBTHEPLUG because actual care and time was put into BOTW , Pokemon main games get rushed out every 3 or so years to help sell new merchandise and trading cards etc as well as spin off games despite the franchise earnings billions no care seems to be put into the game development.
Nintendo should really step in
One thing to note about BOTW: It was also made with the PREVIOUS SYSTEM IN MIND.
Yep, it's a Wii U game.
Can't wait to see if Tears of the Kingdom will look better due to being a Switch exclusive
@@ThibautMahringer xenoblade 3 runs great don't worry
Louder for the people on the back to listen and insisting TOTK is too ambitious for the Switch.
@@ThibautMahringer Well of course TOTK will look better. The real question is how much better it will look, if it's just a small improvement or a substantial difference
@@jemandetwas1 You're right, that's what I wanted to say.
But hey it could look the same but run at higher res and with more stable framerate
To look this bad, and then run this poor?! Unforgivable really.
I think if it ran perfectly whilst looking as it does, it will have likely generated a lot less controversy.
Its not even as much about the Graphics and performance, the actual game content is shocking. Every Gym Test is utterly bare bones, some even lasting less than 1 minute ! The towns are completely empty and you cannot enter a single building or find any hidden treasures or NPCs, , the Shops are simply Menus, that you cannot enter, and have the same Front-panel store and content over and over. You go to a street, and it is literally the same 2-3 shops copy/pasted over and over, all of which you cannot enter. The main mechanic in the game is eating and making sandwiches and there is not even an Eating animation ! you just float and bite into nothing !
@@pg8835 can't disagree, which means the performance even worse to say it is so stripped back. I can't imagine how bare it would need to be to run in its current state.
@@StJay182 You also see the ' Fade Out' screen, because there is simply no transitional animations created for them, so for example, where you pick out the Magical Stakes in the ground to free the seals on the Ruinous Quartet, There is no animation for it, just a black out, it is soooososossososooossosoo
goddamn freaking lazy and unoptomized, so much rushing and corner cutting, it is so godadmn fekking laughable.
This game will have no chance to withstand any Pokemon title from .... GameBoy.... LOL
A good 80% of the assets in these two games are placeholder-tier. And most of the remaining 20% are the Pokémon models and character animations recycled from previous games. Not to mention many of the objects seem to feature some form of heightmaps, not bumpmaps. Bumpmapping usually can't be accounted for in realtime shadow maps, while heightmaps can, and these objects often feature harsh self-shadowing that bumpmaps can't create. That massively increases the virtual polygon count and computing cost to an unreasonable degree, especially if those virtual heightmap polygons are pointlessly recalculated at the pixel shader every frame, as it seems by my admittedly basic visual inspection, and it boils down to test assets that were never supposed to see the light of day in the final game. Asset quality plays as much of a role in game optimization as everything else, because well-made assets are more efficient; they can look better while also taking up less resources.
These games were definitely rushed out the door by management an entire 3 years prior to being finished. It doesn't help that the dev team is tiny for the requirements of open-world game production. You said 170 were stretched across Arceus, Violet AND Scarlet? Never mind having a single team working on 3 projects, any average AAA game production **for one game** sits within that range, 100 to 200 people, but your average AAA _open-world_ production (at least on Ubisoft according to dev interviews) can range from 400 to 600 people.
Either way, the crunch time at Game Freak was definitely suicide-level. I'd hate to be in the devs' place here.
I swear, if the first thing dataminers find in these games is that they're debug builds, I'm done.
The pandemic only exacerbated GF's already horrible management skills to a new level that borders on the level of trashy Unity asset flips made in less than an hour.
The game engine itself is likely fine. But the map, object scripts, and geometry (collision geometry and visual geometry alike) never got their second passes.
The same team was also working on SwSh and their DLCs while working on Legends and ScVi.
They cannot sustain the more than one game per year thing, and nobody wants that (aside the poke-fanatics and the TPC bosses).
They should both give themselves more time to breathe and partner with some competent outside studio (no Ilca) for the technical parts.
They can easily fill the gaps with spinoffs like Snap or Mystery Dungeon, and the other moving parts like the anime and cards would also greatly benefit from having more time to flesh things out.
@@mds_main Or just hire multiple, bigger teams and also make the existing team bigger.
They can sustain the crazy schedule just fine if they divide the task across a large enough amount of people. For something as huge as TPC, and if they wanted to keep their existing schedules, that'd be about 600-800 for each main non-openworld Pokemon game, 1000-1500 just for each main open-world Pokemon game, and 100-200 people for each spinoff. Of course, with a proper schedule that isn't insane, you could also make do with a reasonable team size that doesn't break any world records (the team still needs to be much bigger than it currently is, though). But our systems of economics would rather manufacture idiots and sociopaths that'd rather risk people commiting suicide due to overwork, and shit like this happening.
There's no chance that their game engine is adequate. Gamefreak obviously did everything they could think of to claw back performance to keep the game running. Single digit fps character animations near the player, a terrible draw distance, poor quality heavily tiled textures and low polygon world assets, dynamic resolution scaling etc. And the game still stutters like crazy.
@@strangestecho5088 You're really underestimating the damage poor assets and scripting can do to performance.
The game stutters because the Switch is likely running out of system memory and has to perform desperate cleanup procedures, suddenly deleting and reloading a bunch of objects from memory at once. And that's because the assets and object scripts are THAT awful, and there's likely a bunch of memory leaks involved too.
But assuming they based any of it off of Arceus's engine, the engine itself is absolutely not the problem. They slapped all these drastic measures last-minute because the scripts are likely just one giant ball of half-baked spaghetti. I've been there.
Actor scripts make 95% of the actual game code. From menus, to every single character, item, interactable object, map event, input handling and more, including the ways they interact with each other.
Considering GF is also a bit of a noob when it comes to open-world games, there's also the possibility that they skipped on essential optimizations for those open-world games. ScVi was likely developed in parallel with Arceus, and chances are their engines branched apart at some point and developed differences as well. There's countless things to consider here.
You then realise this engine is virtually something ridiculous like 11 years old, it is a carry-over from the 3DS games
The damage that aggressive pop in does to a game is ridiculous. It not only ruins the promise of open world games by not letting you survey the landscape and choose where you want to go based on what you see, it also just turns the world into a worse version of screen scrolling worlds. This is just insane.
Thats the perfect way of describing it, its like a 2D game put into 3D but without any of the things that makes a 3D game good
I noticed it immediately and thats a bad thing. Good Pop is literally invisible
Pokemon despawning outside of draw distance blows my mind. Imagine all the missed shiny pokemon? Dear god
Seeing this game makes me think I was too harsh on Sonic Frontiers lol
@@obi-wan3916 the shiny pokémon thing is also a huge issue since they removed the sparkle and noise that happened when they spawned in legends arceus so it’s incredibly easy to miss them completely now. i really don’t understand why on top of everything else gamefreak felt the need to remove perfectly fine gameplay mechanics. very disappointing
Crazy part is that these same issues would kill literally any other game. But not Pokemon.
It pretty much did for assassin's creed unity back in 2014
@@quantumstorm0 True that. AC3 had major release issues, it still sold well but sales plummeted with the next installment. I'm expecting the same to happen with Pokémon if they don't recognize this problem.
You know why? Because despite the technical issues, the games are still a lot of fun.
The meaning of a brainwashed cult. I know dudes that would get a new Pokémon game even if it run at 10fps, not kidding.
@@adams3560 There are plenty of games that are fun despite their glaring technical issues. They just get lampooned to shit because glitches = bad.
E-Except for when Nintendo does it!
I saw a NPC walking in the game while I was in a chat with another NPC, walked past us and respawns in the original starting location and starts to walk the same way again...
2:23 the absolute breakdown i went through after finding a shiny lucario after hours and i watched it run away and despawn 😭
OOF
That's rough man.
Reminder that the rival character says something like "Look at this beautiful view" when the camera pans at sub 30FPS over the blurry, tiled, low detail environment in one of the early cutscenes lol
Yea this made me laugh.
They probably added that early in development when they thought they were going to make a good-looking game haha.
It's like how Sword and Shield had a punk rock gym leader performing a concert and there's no music or voice, not even on-screen lyrics...
This made me think that they planned on making the game look much better but did not have time so they rushed it in a Alpha stage.
She also adds "don't forget to snap a pic" xD
It's crazy that in less than a year we are looking back fondly at Arceus as a nice looking game
It’s insane that they managed to underperform this fucking badly
GF seriously needs restructuring
@@theakiwar9118 what's even more insane is that this game is already the best selling opening week Nintendo has ever had
@@hamzabeg6882 yeah but how many refunded copy ?....
@@YC-nc2td Not nearly as many as you think, lol. most places don't even let you refund opened videogames
And PLA was already subpar, it's just astonishing how bad Scarlet & Violet are
I haven't seen it brought up, but the lag in the Pokemon Boxes is so annoying. Flipping between pages is fine, but you have to wait for all the pokemon icons to load. So quick organizing doesn't happen because you'll go to drop a pokemon in a blank space only for an icon to load and swap the two pokemon.
Yea that i s FUCKING annoying. Even more so since that never ever was a issue before.
I was just telling a friend about that and how even back in gen 3 pokemon boxes were instant.
Holy shit this. And it always worked fine too, even on Arceus. We are going back on form AND function
Yep even in the summary option theres a delay aswell.
Yeah it's embarrassing, the game looks like a Wii game but runs like you're trying to play a PS5 game on Switch hardware.
I knew it was bad but oh my goodness I had no idea...
It's completely incomprehensible to me how the people responsible for this mess got into their positions.
Thank you Digital Foundry for this brutally honest tech review. You guys are awesome!
The classroom scene really got me. I couldn’t believe they ship that out for release.
It was pretty bad. Luckily you only see it for about a minute and then never again.
That and the damn windmill really made me question the decision to release the games.
I think that Pokemon's profits depend too much on tie in merchandise to be delayed for any reason, and the yearly release schedule is killing the dev team.
@@adams3560 what gets me is that it’s so bad in that scene, but then when you gain control, their kicking animations look perfectly fine. This game is incredibly inconsistent.
And the thing is, after the cutscene ended, the scholars all look fine. Like, you could get them to look normal in game but not during the cutscene?
What the hell Pokemon company
Wow wow wow. Oliver, I like that you didn't hold back on this one. Every bit of criticism is warranted here, no excuses for the largest and richest IP of all time.
The game got what it deserves. And you're right. It's the richest IP ever. Imagine what they could've made if they tried hard? I'm talking Zelda BOTW level. Sure they sell enough just by making crap every year and selling it to the ready to buy anything pokemon related fans. But it's Zelda that sells the platform. I never heard that some Pokemon game is good enough to buy a switch just to play it. Heard such words a lot about Zelda BOTW. And I definitely agree. Specially now, when the sequel is around the corner.
Which is good, given that Nintendo has been given a free pass on this by most media and gamers, even by John on this channel saying "oh, this isn't Nintendo's fault." It IS their fault, too.
@@stingus do you think the people working on this didn't try their hardest? Did you miss the part of the video where it was explained to you how few people were working on this game and how little time they had?
@@marciamakesmusic Whilst I can't speak for them, it's rather obvious the Pokemon Company and associated publishing (i.e. Nintendo) put basically no effort or budget into developing this title regardless of how much effort the individual devs who did work on it, may or may not have put in. I actually fully believe the company just doesn't care about their IP quality and are aiming to cash in as much as possible, this is just a new lower bar they're testing since people seem to just keep buying them no matter what.
@@marciamakesmusicliterally unironically using the "They're just a poor indie company" joke
"Pokemon fans deserve better"
They really don't, as they keep buying products like these in record numbers.
touché
The sad truth, you could give the average Pokémon fan a looping gm_flatgrass with 50 old Pokémon and 40 new Pokémon (which in actuality are just rehashes of previous ideas) and they'll buy it and say "But the game isn't that bad" while also calling it "the best Pokémon game to date", disgraceful...
@@M0D776 as their mouths are covered in diarrhea that gamefreak shits out they will say: "But i had fun and had no glitches!"
@@M0D776 true
You are correct, but in fairness GameFreak are genius. They know kids are predominantly the consumer and they don’t understand frame rates and graphics like we do. To most parents who don’t play games all they know is their children want the new Pokémon and they buy it.
How the hell does violet's tiling look worse than my student work.
Ctrl + V
"Arguibly Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are comprehensive technical failures"
Unreal commentary for 2022, yet so warranted. Well done DF.
It's not arguably, it's objectively bad.
Lmao as if Gamefreak would give a shit, they know damn well everyone's gonna buy it anyway
@@GeneralKenobi69420 And they'll put the patch with the DLC, so if you don't buy that your game keeps sucking.
"Ultimately", not arguably
@@GeneralKenobi69420 Riding a wave of fanboys doesn't last forever, soon they'll hit the shores and come crashing down.
Showing Scarlet/Violet and Breath of the Wild next to each other makes it look like a generational leap like we've had from N64 to Gamecube. Except that the "nextgen" title already existed for 5+ years...
I liked the gamecube's Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness! 😅
That said, I'm of the opinion that the similar approach to battlesystems as in the 2D games works much better for pokemon in general.
Funny cuz if you put sword and shield next to scarlet and violet, you would think sword and shield is the newer one considering how it looks leagues better than SV.
And this "next gen" title is a wii U game
BOTW is a Wii U game! 🤣
Could you imagine if Sony published a first party game for the ps5 that looked like this?
Wouldn't sell five copies
They'd get ripped apart for it. Pokemon is in a different league, they could sell shit for $100. And Pokemon fans would say "yea it's shit, but it still has nutritional value."
Oh man that would be the day the earth stood still lol
Not first party or PS5 but Sony did have Life of Black Tiger as an exclusive AND promoted it on their official UA-cam channel. That was so strange.
@@jordirapper not a sony developer though
this is how I imagine the Metaverse's graphics to look like
That adds up, imagine Meta outsources the work to GF
Have you seen VRChat? Looks and runs infinitely better than this for sure.
It's honestly really shocking that the most polished and arguably least controversial Pokémon game on the Switch to date is Let's go Pikachu and Eevee, remakes of a Game Boy game.
They show WHY Game Freak was unambitious for the longest time: to get acceptable performance out
Gf is lazy
They're definitely incompetent as hell but I wouldn't immediately use the word lazy. They really need to stop the yearly release cycle ASAP though.
Was that not controversial? I remember people being very made about pokemon go catching mechanics, and the exp share across the entire party.
@@wanderingwobb6300 they can't, they need a game to release so it can tie to the anime and the card game, what they need is to go the CoD route and have 3 separate teams making Pokémon games, 3 years to make a Pokémon game is much better then 1 year.
The general consensus so far is this game was rushed out to market to meet all deadlines. But with the anime also facing production issues and its resulting merchandise being delayed to compensate, I would call this a wake-up call for The Pokémon Company to take better care of its property before something unpredictable happens.
"something unpredictable"
I wouldn't call "people stop caring about the franchise because it's become known for being rushed crap" to be unpredictable. It's the very predictable, very obvious outcome if The Pokemon Company doesn't course correct.
What they need to do is give more time for mainline titles to develop.
Have spinoff titles release in the time between. Outsource to other studios for said spinoffs and even remakes.
Same for the anime, they can literally tell any story they want with pokemon simply being the foundation to build on. So having spinoff series to fill in the gaps would help.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a perfect place start for both games and anime. I would throw my wallet at any studio that make a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon anime series.
Unpredictable you say? Like a pandemic lockdown happening during development? It’s absolutely insane they didn’t delay this a year.
I seriously don't know why they have to rush everything out to be in sync. Back in the red/ blue days they used to introduce new pokemon in the anime and movies and it would both generate hype for Gold and Silver and give them more stuff to make merchandise for. It's not like every single pokemon in a generation gets popular, it's just a handful and typically the ones that get a prominent role in the anime or movies...
they literally just need to slow the fuck down
Given the scope and funding of gamefreak, it's amazing how genius sonority managed to knock it out of the park with their very first game, Pokemon colosseum, with no prior experience in development and funding from Nintendo's pocket change
The first pokemon stadium, the one that only released in Japan was super rough.
lmao colosseum sucked, the only thing good about it were the very high-quality animations. I think to this day they might be the best-looking animations ever in a pokemon game.
And now Tears of the Kingdom has made the "Pokemon Scarlet/Violet was too ambitious for the Switch" talking point look even more ridiculous than it already did.
was someone even saying that?
@@darky1677yes
I appreciate how brutal the ending was with calling them out.
Not nearly brutal enough. I feel sorry that Digital Foundry had to slog through this for testing, considering they are used to cutting edge glorious graphics and performance that devs actually put effort into and then have to cover what is essentially Nintendo's Life of Black Tiger diarrhea dump as if it's an actual serious release
The side by side with Legends Arceus was honestly shocking. Like I knew, but seeing it like that was just.. wow
And then Botw came in. Even more wow.
@@DanielAyy No kidding lol and that game was at launch and multiplatform
@@BandedHylian the switch, switch and switch?
@@highlow8683 the switch and wii u
@@sebastiandiaz5832 ohh I thought they were talking about legends arceus lol
I can’t help but think of how a few hundred Pokémon fans, if given the same resources, tools, and time could pop out a better game than what we got…..
Pretty sure they have before.
Why do you think Nintendo goes Third Reich every single time anyone even thinks about doing anything with their IPs? They know full well the only thing keeping them afloat are the blind fanboys who would buy a literal bag of dog shit if it had the "Pokemon" label on it, but if someone were to give them a taste of a well-made, fan-created Pokemon game, they could lose their main source of easy and guaranteed income.
Pokemon Showdown has better PVP than this crap, and there's no 100% accuracy Sheer Cold exploitation there.
Nintendo knows that 3rd party or fans can do a better job than GameFreak and the TPC. That's why they will send lawyers after people who try to do that so Nintendo is the only provider of Pokèmon games.
@Mahir Shahriar tbh they should band together and make a pokemon inspired game. But, without all the bs, great story, no luvk based mechanics, etc.
15:53
Digital Foundry: Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are technical failures, embarassing artwork, terrible draw distance, poor performance, poor image quality and plague with bugs.
Average Pokemon Fan: Perfect Game 10/10
BotW was made thank to the help of Monolith A team, the "Call this team if you want your game to work" of Nintendo.
Gamefreak did not read this. And will not
Ehh, Monolith only helped with the topology of the terrain, nor the technical aspect of the game related to optimization and perfomance
Why they need to put effort on a title that doesn't need to be ?
No tech artist in their right mind would let something like this out the door unless they had a gun to their head. I would like to think that this is less a case of apathetic developers, but rather appalling mismanagement and scheduling.
Definitely. It was likely pushed out of the door due to an immovable schedule. Most of the devs were likely desperate to keep it in the oven for much longer.
Developers know that the game is in terrible shape but unfortunately they’re not the ones who decide to release it. Pokémon the franchise is bigger than Pokémon the games, everything surrounding the games needs them in order to keep moving so companies get their money.
Scarlet and Violet, and honestly the future of Pokémon games, have been destroyed by greed.
As a dev, I would blame both, but the responsibility ultimately lays on the devs to put out good work.
Apparently there's been a big talent leak over the last few years
@Señor Poodles This is not how AAA game development works. The devs have no control over the management or release of the game. They're doing what they can in the environment they're in.
Everyone working on this game was well aware of all of these problems, but the upper management didn't care enough to extend the release date to address these issues.
They were also likely forced to crunch 50-70 hour weeks to meet the deadline, which only makes things worse.
I’ve also noticed how many animations were changed from Arceus for no reason. One huge one being Pokemon being released from a Pokeball, where in Arceus you can see the model grow quickly with lighting effects and in SV the pokemon literally just pops in. Others being the players throw animations, in SV look really disconnected from the actual Pokeball’s trajectory. Not being able to spawn your entire party in the Overworld is another drawback. Other games like Sword and Shield somewhat try to fix pop in by adding a growth and particle effects when Pokemon spawn, again in SV they just pop. It just feels cheap.
was without a doubt a totally different team making scarlet/violet and it shows
Great tech review, I especially like the comparison with other Switch titles and appreciate your feelings on “so what’s going on here”.
I dont know why it was so Theraputic to listen to Pokemon S/V being thrashed on for 16 minutes straight
It's because so many rabid Pokefans have been bending themselves over backwards to defend these unfinished games with every excuse in the book. It's refreshing to see the truth for a change
Because you’re disappointed and suffered a lot of pain from that. Acknowledge your feelings and just play the damn game lol
What's really sad about this is that the devs made an excuse of not including every Pokémon (and Mega Evolutions) since Sword and Shield for focusing on the graphics, and this is the piece of shit that we all get. And to make matters even worse, they're getting money from doing a terrible job because the games have been selling a lot, but in my opinion they deserve poor sales. I might as well get a copy of Pokémon Y for my Nintendo 3DS (in order to preserve my old save in Pokémon X) instead of getting one of those bad looking games, and re-live my childhood memories. I'm starting to lose faith in the future of Pokémon.
A lot they were trying to do in Scarlet/Violet they already did in Arceus very well so I was really confused when stuff like aiming your pokeball were removed when it made it actually fun catching wild Pokémon.
I’m trying to play Violet but there’s so much going wrong with it that doesn’t make it interesting for me to keep playing it. Not just performance but gameplay and story that just keeps reminding me of past Pokémon games that look and play better. When I was 3 hours in Violet, as I caught a wild shiny hoppip by shear luck while figuring out where I was, I was thinking about playing Sword/Shield again feeling like it being a better experience than I was having right in front of me in Violet.
As stated in the video, Arceus and Scarlet/Violet have a lot of developer overlap, meaning the company was using the teams to work on both games at once. This may be a sign they need to slow down or only focus on one project at a time.
Legends Arceus should’ve been the Holiday 2022 game while Scarlet/Violet got pushed to Holiday 2023. Honestly, it makes me curious about how Nintendo EPD or MonolithSoft would handle mainline Pokémon.
Better, without a damn doubt.
They would take their time.
Man, imagine if Nintendo could supervise the Pokémon games, but I think is near impossible considering GameFreak owns part of Pokémon. I think they'll never stop developing the series, which is a shame because them and TPC are the problem. Not Nintendo and certainly not the hardware.
@@kahp1072 Nintendo still has 1/3 ownership of the IP, so they aren’t entirely free of blame. With that said, I do think these issues wouldn’t be happening if Nintendo had 100% control of Pokémon. At the very least, they would’ve certainly delayed the game(s).
That would be amazing... Look at how good New Pokemon Snap and Pokken looked... Its possible to have an excellent looking pokemon game on Switch
unfortunately nintendo needs gf to push these out every 3 years so new merch can sell too
As a lifetime Pokemon fan, it broke my heart to cancel my pre-order, but watching this... it's so much WORSE than I imagined!
lol, OK dude.
I mean, you do you, my guy. I had a blast, bugs and all. It may not have been as engaging as Arceus for a simple gameplay loop, but exploration has felt much better and I really like the new mons and have high hopes that when we get a new Switch hardware upgrade, a game like this will be running fine and I’ll have a good time.
@@johnbuscher The fact of the matter is that it doesn't run fine now and saying it will run better on the next Switch is speculation based on nothing. I'm glad you're enjoying the game but bring up that it will run better on an imaginary console doesn't stop it from running bad right now.
@@captainthunderbolt7541 Imagine being an apologist for this dumpster fire of a game.
Luckily they are doing refunds and mine was approved in a few hours
I was in Japan when the game dropped - the queues in shops like Yodabashi and the Pokémon Centre in Osaka were insane! Little did people know what they were buying into.
I wonder what the general opinion of the game is in Japan. Are they as focused on the technical shortcomings? Are people returning the game?
@@ThePhenomf4 it is being talked about and sometimes make fun of but definitely not to the point like the west does.
@@Nameless_JPN-ENG Thank you for the info. Controversy definitely gets the views here in the states so we’re more likely to hear about the negative side of things. The people I’ve spoken to that have played it have really enjoyed it so far. We won’t be seeing that in the news, lol.
I was there (and still am in Japan) launch day at 2 Pokemon Center locations.
The lines were insane, with both old and young people.
Yeah, this game sold insanely well here.
I genuinely wonder despite sales figures, how many of these sales were returns.
@@Mikaiii Even in the US I'm sure it's a fraction of a percent.
This is a very well done video review! It covered all the topics I was thinking about! Subscribed.
Gamefreak still doesn’t know how to make a 3D game after all these years and their refusal to expand the staff hurts them. But the worst part is that people still buy these games so nothing will change until they don’t.
Exactly this. It’s getting harder to be excited for the new games when they look and play like shit. I just can bring myself to spend any money on this new title.
@@seanflores3511 I stopped being excited like a decade ago. Gamefreak has always been like this, they constantly refuse to adapt and do the bare minimum. I don't know how so many people still expect great things from this company when they have been disappointing us for so long.
I've put 5,000 hours plus into pokemon over the years and I didn't buy this game. I'm still playing it though, if ya know what I mean ;) they just don't deserve my money for this one
Pokemon Red was my first videogame and I played every iteration of the series following until Ultra Sun/Moon.
Pokemon X/Y was bought off good faith because I really liked what they were doing with Black/White 1/2 - despite some balance issues with that gen, but it ended up being a mess of a game which essentially boiled down to just mashing A during battles and waiting for Wonder Trades to complete.
I bought Sun on sale after people said it was better than X/Y and of course it wasn't. They tried to change up the structure of events in the game, but ignored the fundamentals of what makes Pokemon fun - instead doubling down on most of the problems X/Y had. Then later they created a subseries that people were saying would "service the casual audience and free up main line games to become more involved" when in fact the mainline games continued to be dumbed down and the Let's Go subseries just existed...for some reason??? Didn't bother touching those Let's Go games obviously.
When Sword/Shield came out I passed completely and ignored any positive comments I heard about the game.
Until the series is rebooted with REAL effort and creative vision behind it, I'm staying away. If Game Freak and Nintendo don't want to do that, then at least license it out to the Persona team or something.
It's a shame too, because Pokemon Go captured the attention of seemingly everyone on planet earth when it dropped and Nintendo had the perfect set up for getting their foot in the door on the MMO GaaS hype with Pokemon. And with that they would also have a foot in the door on Metaverse as well. Instead the would be cash cow of a franchise is just degenerating into garbage.
@@MikeSW I had pretty much the exact same reaction as you. I could feel things going sour with each new release and mostly kept going out of nostalgic momentum, but Moon was my last game purchase.
Man, I actually feel kind of bad for chewing out Arceus when it came out now that we have the utterly technically incompetent Scarlet/Violet: Arceus was technically subpar but this is outright shameful; it's embarrassing that this genuinely looks and runs **far** worse than a GameCube title.
Don’t feel bad. Don’t let them move the goalposts on you. Arceus did look rough as hell.
This vid makes me appreciate Arceus way more but yeah, like the other guy who responded said - still very rough. It makes me wonder what either of these games look like in world where GF committed to only developing one. Seems like splitting their relatively small workforce to get both out this year may have been the wrong call.
@@denimchicken104 i feel they're testing the waters to see how much of a minimum viable product they can deliver.
also, the only thing worthwhile about Arceus was the occasionally brilliant music. i felt it was barely competent with dreadful art direction and no soul. a passionless product.
The waterfall textures look like they belong to Ocarina of time and some of the wall texture are from mario sunshines first world.
@@dominicdococo4574 this is hilariously shitty an opinion
As a pokemon fan I agree with most of the video, but I don't think I agree with that we deserve better part. Pokemon's current situation clearly shows how we as a community deserve what we get. Because we never make it clear that unless gamefreak slows down the one game per year pace and bring more quality game we are not going to buy it. Now they can release 3 pokemon games in two years and eveyone of them get a commercial succuss so they will never change that.
As someone who's been with Pokemon my entire life, I'm deeply saddened with the direction the franchise is going. Pokemon Games used to be the prime example of creativity, good use of limited hardware, polish, and re-using a formula in a way that still makes it fun. Recently I gifted a friend of mine Alpha Sapphire (he hasn't played any Pokemon games since Platinum), he's loving the game and I told him ''That's the last true set of Pokemon games they made''. I don't mind a change of pace, I'm all for 3D/open world/exploring boundaries but when we get a mainline Pokemon game that looks and feels like ''Life of Black Tiger'' that's where I draw the line.
I am too. I couldn't play it. I bought it on launch night and picked up my physical copy to play, only to trade it back in less than 48 hours later.
Black and white was good. Team Plasma was the only crew of baddies that were actually morally ambiguous. Also N is cool and the Pokémon designs were good too.
....Then decide to buy these game
Pkmn games had "polish". Man doesn't understand just how buggy the series is in general. If iwata didn't step in for red and blue the games would literally not have worked at all. Gamefreak has been incompetent since the beginning. Why do you think most their games outside of pkmn get 4 or 3/10? Cause they are paid to rate pkmn better than its been and the other games are garbage.
@@epicalglory5099 no, some people actually have standards
That BOTW comparison was Brutal!
Botw has literally like 10-15 times the budget and more time of development and a better dev team that’s literally not a fair comparison lol 😆
@modernyin6275 they're both commercial products sold at the same price on the same system. The comparison is absolutely fair.
@@modernyin6275 Well, all those factors you listed (dev time, dev team, budget) are entirely within Game Freak's control. They could deliver a better product, but they don't want to because they know people will buy it regardless.
@@modernyin6275 Okay, then why _doesn't_ a mainline Pokemon have the same budget as Zelda? We're talking about _Pokemon_ here, a gigantic franchise, possibly bigger and more well known than any Zelda game.
@@obnoxiousNoxy dont know about budget but dev time is decided by TPC not Game Freak
The environment textures and geometry almost make this look like a long lost N64 title, recently revived with GC/PS2 level character models.
Eh, I disagree, but it definitely looks like a GameCube or early third party Wii game at times (resolution and awful animation LOD aside).
Performance would be great if it was on gamecube
I wouldn't even call it "almost". Banjo Kazooie has more varied texture work.
Especially the rock textures. My first thought when I saw them was that they just janked the texture from Mario 64
@@joeydirt420 Except the Gamecube had scores of games that ran at a locked or close to 60fps, F-Zero GX looks next gen compared to this in every way except for resolution and even then it's 480p which on a small screen like the Switch is still reasonably okay.
I think perhaps the issue here, since it does appear they've used several techniques to attempt to get back performance, is that their engine just isn't up-to-snuff. Considering just how well BOTW has been able to perform even in equally demanding scenes (such as Hyrule Caslte outside and Kokiri Forest), it seems a much lower level fix is required. After all, any engine can use the surface level tricks that Pokemon S&V are using here. But sometimes, it's just that the engine itself isn't efficient enough (either through design pattern or through direct hardware utilization strategies) to make it work. It was noticeable in BOTW that some of the same tricks were used as here, but in that game it appears that they can/are used much more sparingly because the background engine can handle much more. Since it appears they're using their own new in-house engine it seems that it's just not anywhere near ready to deal with what they were trying to do with it (at least not on the Switch).
This is the most honest video about these games. No on has highlighted the problems in this depth. Thank you.
Fun Fact!
Scarlet and Violet's differences are based on a flag check (like most, if not all of them are), you can change 2 lines of code and effectively run the other version with the only real glaring issue being that the name of your mount legendary won't change (your Miradon will now be a Koraidon named "Miradon" and vice versa), so its not a matter of if Scarlet should run like Violet. *It will.*
is this a bad thing
The alternative would be to check flags during compile time (which I would guess they’re doing with the mount name logic), not sure why they didn’t just do that for everything. This project screams rush job.
@@smeeby Yes, they're selling one game for the price of two.
@@NinjaPieceLOL haven't they been doing that since gen 1 though
@@smeeby it's the same thing they've always done, just done in a different way. so that just depends on whether you dislike having two versions
Behold, the flagship product for the #1 media franchise on the planet.
It's like the latest Star Wars trilogy, but video games!
And yet it’s still a lot of fun to play despite the performance issues. I haven’t enjoyed a Pokémon game this much since X and Y.
Considering the fact that Game Freak took 20 years to acknowledge the mere existence of a right analog stick, I can conclude that they haven’t updated their Dev Kits since the time they were still competing with the PSP.
On the plus side, cant make fun of the trees if we cant see them. I've had a shadow/light glitch where when I would select a combat move the shadow would go away and I'd see the sun but then it would come back after I selected the attack.
The most shocking thing about these games is there's no reason why it shouldn't be running at 60 FPS with how low quality everything is. It runs and looks like an early PS2 game.
I would say it looks like a late N64 game. Most PS2 games look better.
@@killerkevin27 You need to go look at some PS2 games then. They don’t look better.
@@adams3560 They do, mainly because their art style was at least consistent.
@@adams3560 try and tell me this looks better than Jak and Daxter 🤦🏻♂️
I wonder if they were initially targeting next gen hardware which didn't come as soon as expected. By all accounts the Switch will need to be replaced soon as continuing to create it's SoC is going to eventually be uneconomic for Nvidia.
I didn’t realize how bad the graphics were until these side-by-side comparisons. This makes me want to cry…
Always appreciate the work you do. It's fascinating to see the issues in context. Definitely not as simple as "game unfinished" or "too big for Switch". I'd love to be able to see what went on during development that caused this.
As if the drawbacks and issues on Scarlet&Violet were limited to its development and not by how GameFreak/Nintendo milks their fan base with half-assed PKMN games.
It's laughable.
No one should buy pokemon games anymore until they are actually good.
Gamefreak really doing their best to make the worst experience ever
While Pokemon fans swear that this is either the most beautiful game ever made or say that this is the best graphics possible on the Switch (ignoring that BOTW/Xenoblade 3/Witcher 3 exist).
I really doubt it's entirely their fault. The schedule is immovable. The game MUST come out by the deadline, and crunch time is hardly a benefit.
Maybe all this is bacause the switch is a weak ass console lol🤣
@@sellahuncho5595 look at xenoblade 3 and botw.
@@xoreign and they both have 5+ years of development
You know it’s extremely flawed when Arceus visuals are praised highly when compared
It's funny, when you've been watching Scarlet/Violet for 10 minutes, when visuals from Legends Arceus come up, it legitimately looks brilliant. In few other contexts could Legends Arceus look this good.
@@Cream147player But Legends's Arceus world is pretty barren, only one town and doesn't have anything near the scale of Scarlet and Violet. Looks graphically better but worse for the rest.
For gen 4 fans, they would love it, but for the rest it's a pretty boring game.
Reminder that Breath of the Wild is a Wii U game.
Digital Foundry tend to be lenient when it comes to Switch games, the fact that they took a dump on it for 16 minutes straight is concerning. Game Freak might actually in trouble by next gen. My best hope is that gen 9 will last 4 years instead of three and the next console will at least let the games have stable frame rate.
This game looks like it was about 10 months away from release but then some exec said "Fuck it! Release it NOWWWW!!!"
The environmental textures are just insulting. Everything looks like plastic, they’re blurry even for the Switch, and the tiling is unbelievable.
It baffles me how this came out the door. The level of incompetency from such a successful franchise is astounding. Unfortunately it’s Pokemon and it’ll sell well, so there’s no incentive to make things better.
Game Freak has plenty of incentive. The game itself is fucking great, but the problem is they needed way more time to polish it. Tell that to Nintendo though. God forbid Nintendo ever misses out on day 1/week 1/month 1/etc merchandise sales. Thats the main reason the games are rushed out AND the biggest money maker. Not even the games, but the merchandise. Basically, Nintendo treats the games as advertisement for merch. Otherwise, they'd let Game Freak delay it even a year to polish it further. It sucks. Despite this though, these are easily the best generation Pokemon titles. I can't be convinced otherwise, honestly when compared to basically everything in previous games.
@@zerosolis6664 they can have all the time they want, won’t do too much for the visuals/performance. There’s simply not that many staff at GF, let alone any top notch engineers that could improve their engine and tools.
@@zerosolis6664 Nintendo is one of the few devs that truly take time to make their games.
Nintendo doesn't push gamefreak to release fast, The Pokemon Company does, probably Creatures.
Thats the most agitating part really
343 is still making Failo, excuse me, Halo games.
some parts of the environments look straight up out of Mario 64
This game visually looks almost identical to sonic 06 sometimes
That’s horrible, especially considering the fact that this is the single most successful franchise in existence
This technical overview is extremely light-handed and honestly far more fair than the game deserves.
And yet it's *still* utterly damning.
Pokémon really is the first too-big-to-fail franchise, isn’t it? This does not bode well for Pokémon at all.
Very damming, DF say it shouldn’t be sold.
@@iantaakalla8180 it sold 10x more in 3 days than sun and moon did in 9 days soo yeah. Expect this to be the new norm for pokemon. Release garbage, Patch it, profit.
The next pokemon game will be called "Pokemon T" because all characters will be making a T-pose at all times in texture-free blockout enviroments.
@@JP11999 No bruh, youre wrong
Release garbage, profit.***
I bet my ass the game will go on like this forever
Nice to see gamfreak setting the bar again
Setting the bar lower every new release!
Gamefreak: “LIMBO!!”
The bar is already a tripping hazard in hell, yet here they are, limbo dancing with the devil.
@@BeowulfCav I didn't think it could go any lower once it was resting on the ground, but GameFreak grabbed a shovel and dug a trench to set the bar into.
The bar is set in the asthenosphere, and will march towards the core with every new game. Honestly, after this, there is no reason for any mainstream Pokémon game ever again. This is honestly the best they will ever get, given X and Y’s horrible story and blah scenery.
The landscape design, with the detailing and texture resolution (or lack thereof), reminds me of the stuff I made in that one train simulator's map editor when I was a kid. You know, going to town with the "elevate terrain" brush to make _cough_ mountains, and brushing flat repeated rock textures on the side?
That fact the scarlet/violet continues to be the best selling Pokémon or fasting selling will be why this will never change
It's amazing how far you can push the GameCube . Love Digital Foundry Retro ;)
I knew it! It's not an N64 game after all.
Bro Pokémon colosseum and xd gale of darkness still look better than this game
@@floridaman7206 Plenty of gamecube games look VASTLY better, even if they push less polygons and lower res. The art direction and actual quality of assets in this game are abysmal by any standard.
@@floridaman7206 They’re also not big open world games.
@@adams3560 Not an excuse. Plenty of other open world games that are larger run on the switch and still look and run better than the gamecube pokemon games. Examples are BOTW, Xenoblade 3, witcher 3 etc
09:48 What a difference! Violet and Scarlet are half-baked.
Quarter-baked
@@ktvx.94 Bold of y'all to assume it was baked at all lmao
They both are
To be fair though, Scarlet and Violet is an open word game. Arceus is just a series of large areas.
@@adams3560 why do you feel the need to defend this game? Or any game whatsoever?
Some of those mountains in Scarlet/Violet look like ones I made in RPG Maker 3 on the PS2. When I was twelve.
0:42 I'd never seen Legends Arceus and SV compared side by side, talk about an absolute downgrade in pretty much every way (and I was only like warm on legends at best, so SV really shit the bed in pretty much every sense in my books)
A game made by the highest grossing media franchise ever.
Would like to hear what kind of pressure GameFreak were under from The Pokémon Company over this last year or two.
Doubt we’ll ever know the details.
Won’t lie kinda feel bad for them because they were givin an impossible task to complete and now they probably have Nintendo coming down on them as well
gamefreak owns 33% of The pokemon company
@@felixcontreras4451 Nintendo effectively owns the other 2/3rds
The only franchise that could get away with this because the fans would buy it anyway
It doesn't because the fans complains about everything, even when it's a non issue. But this is where the fans are the more vocal.
So many pokéfans defending the game saying it's really good 😂 high on copium lol
@@mjay8055 but they arent wrong, from a gameplay point of view. Its complete game changer to how pokemon games play
However everything else about the game is horrible. No point emulating it until mods come out for better textures and hopefully LoD
Sometimes i dont even mind the buying. Its the blatant denial and gaslighting. Someone fought tooth and nail to prove on the internet that they didnt experience any fps drops. I wondered if they were lying or just dont know how to tell fps because theyve never played any other game im their life.
@@mjay8055 i mean because most criticisms come from the visuals and performance, not actual gameplay improvements and how the mechanics in general have been improved from past titles. Like don't get me wrong, I love digital foundry and I think their focus on the visual side of things are clearly warranted. But they specialize in reviewing the tech side of things, not the fundamental mechanics and how the series has progressed from previous entries. But that's the main core reason a lot of Pokefans do like the game, mechanically it's pretty sound. Battles, trades, access to poke box, freedom of choice between gyms and exploration, have all been improved and expanded and even with all the bugs and performance it's actually a pretty fun Pokemon game. Honestly if the game looked and performed better this would probably be one of the more highly rated pokemon games. I'm playing through original silver and Pokemon scarlet and realized how far things have changed and how tedious and unnecessarily filler inducing old pokemon games can tend to be.
World of Warcraft Vanilla from the year 2004 looks better.
Great analysis. I'm hopeful there are some future patches to the game to deal with the more egregious visual problems.
when someone as reserved as DF calls you out on your corner cutting bs, you know you've screwed up.
Yet, it's still selling millions no matter what.
Fantastic review. I'm someone that genuinely isn't bothered by bad graphics (while I do praise good graphics), but Violet made me realize that I do actually have a standard for how bad a Pokemon game can look. A shame, because underneath all of this is probably my favorite Pokemon game on the Switch, but the bad performance and visuals actually take a lot of points away from the game.
Fire Emblem Three Houses had pretty shit graphics, but they didn't come in the way of a very very good game. This game's graphics are absolutely jarring
Check out the Ys and Trails games, the devs essentially make PS2 games built for PS4/5, so their games runs incredibly well, even if their visual presentation looks more like an HD remaster of an early PS2 game.
Hi, Hawlo. Didn't expect to find you here.
The fact that Xenoblade 3 released a few months ago and looks like an entire generation ahead is crazy. GameFreak clearly doesn't have the time, but I fear they may also not have the technical competence to be releasing games at a modern standard of quality. SV is the headlining product of the biggest media franchise in the world, which makes it even more insane that their development studio is so bad.
What makes it even worse for Pokemon is that, at least from what I understand, Monolith Soft isn't huge either AND they regularly lend their devs to Nintendo to help with their bigger projects. It's likely there was a big chunk of them working on TotK and other games while XB3 was in development.
Xenoblade 3 looks like shit unless you’re playing it on an emulator.
@@yoso378 I recall MonolithSoft going on a hiring spree after the release of XC2. And last I heard, they're currently at 500+ employees, vs GameFreak with 169 employees.
And thanks to MonolithSoft having as many employees as they do, they were able to develop Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Xenoblade DE, Xenoblade 3, as well as Zelda: ToTK, and Splatoon 3 all around the same time, with dedicated teams working on each game.
Xenoblade doesn’t look that much better. It’s also not an open world game.
Agreed. XC3 doesn't have the most polished/detailed graphic but it was still beautiful and is a well done game. I play it on switch lite and it runs well despite some minor glitches that unlike S/V, did not disrupt the gameplay. TPC deserves all the mockery from the fans esp they're huge compared to Monolith.
Can't believe it's 2022, and there's still a game that tied the animations to the frame rate.
EDIT: holy hell the texture repeats... At least they could used one that has seamless seams.
Half-Life 2 solved that in 2004 with detail textures. Small details that would be randomly applied to tiled textures to make the repeats less noticeable.
? Animations are always tied to the framerate tho.
Do you mean game logic being tied to frame rate?
Do pokemon fans deserve better when they clearly don't want better?
You won’t believe how excited I’m for the tech review of this game from DF lol
Well I hope you are expecting to laugh because given how much care they put into the visuals, gameplay will likely be another lazy snorefest like Sword and Shield, what a pile of cr@p those games were compared to Sun and Moon. Game freak are clearly over it.
@@anasevi9456 The game itself is pretty good, which is what makes the performance so frustrating imo.
If I was on the team who shipped this I'd have driven my therapist to an early retirement with stories about stuttery nightmares narrated by DF staff and overlaid with frametime graphs.
This... is the tech review?
@@anasevi9456 The gameplay is by far its biggest strength. By far superior to any other 3D Pokemon except Arceus's Real time battle and catching system, Terastallization is in every way a better mechanic than dynamax. This is what makes the performance and visuals a more frustrating issues.... Game is great! Graphics are utter sh!t...
I don’t normally comment on DF videos. Damn not holding back at all, completely deserving criticism. I know Nintendo doesn’t develop these games but the state of this is embarrassing for the company. This really does make Legends look like a masterpiece (and I was a bit underwhelmed by that too).
Great video, crazy what happened here, I love Arceus and I am trying to give Violet a good chance! Great video tho! Actually very fairly broke it down , brought in the NX's specs, everything!
I just got to Casseroya Lake and it was genuinely running in slow motion. I could barely even navigate the menu. IT WAS SO BAD.
Man it's so frustrating cos there's definitely a great game in here. But the performance is the worst I've personally experienced in a game, not even close. I just can't get over it. Just when I think I've seen the worse of it, the next area runs even worse.
The game runs so bad it's got me thinking it was made for the rumoured Switch Pro before it got cancelled or something.
That's funny. When I first saw that windmill I jokingly said it was running at 3 fps. It was actually running at 3 fps.
I wonder if they are gonna get around to finish this game. With such a tight development cycle it doesn't seem they will have the time. The day 1 patch was like 4gb when the game was like 6.6gb. That says a lot about the garbage they sent out to be sold.
I'm glad someone else cannot get over the windmill. I couldn't stop thinking on how they dared to put that windmill on so many trailers. And still didn't even fix it.
@@efrainjrivera That windmill is baffling.
1. It's such a huge, noticeable object that it needs to be given priority. Make it run smoothly, and take the performance hit, because people will notice that above most other things.
2. Even at full rate (30fps), I don't see why it would cause a performance hit. It's just a static mesh, with the whole object being rotated. Characters, yeah- they basically have to be recalculated and redrawn in a new pose every frame, so that can hit the CPU hard. But rotating an object with no collision or anything isn't a big deal.
They'll release expansions for it for at least a year, so some amount of continued work should be expected; especially if a better Switch is released in either the spring or fall.
It's forgivable to have a game that looks bad but runs great. It's harder to forgive a game that looks great but runs bad. To look bad AND to run bad is as horrible as it is embarrassing.
This game sold 12 million copies in 3 days. They're not gonna change anything because they're not incentivized to.
I already didn't buy this game because of performance, but seeing you go over everything is still nice
Same, I already wasn’t going to purchase this Pokémon game from the blatant technical and development issues, but this Digital Foundry overview really solidifies it.
From someone who completed it: It feel like it's worth experiencing if it ever gets updated. It feels like the alpha build of the best Pokemon game ever made. The story and characters are great without being annoying and the gameplay loop of exploration is better than anything we've gotten since Gold and Silver.
Despite the flaws, I still enjoyed the game. The multiplayer experience has been the best of most entries for me and my lil' sibling (to a toddler, she could care less about the fps dips).
Underneath all that jank mess is, surprisingly, an actual good game with fun mechanics; Gamefreak just _really_ needs to learn to polish its own games.
I wouldn't skip out on it just because of the performance issues. I played it before looking anything else up online, and I'm honestly surprised by the amount of vitriol it's getting. Most fun I've had in a Pokemon game since HeartGold. Yeah it doesn't look the greatest, and it certainly has its flaws, but it's by no means a bad game, and I think a lot of this is just group think and trying to find things to complain about.
@@Alexander_Grant It's an unfortunate paradox. It's has underlying good gameplay, with a fresh coat of excrement covering it.
As a game developer, this is the kind of visuals done after 1 year learning game dev. Crazy that it's a licensed Pokémon release
As an artist, I learned how to manage a consistent style and work around strict detail limitations in junior high school.
And the interiors/NPCs prove they still have a talented art team working for them...
What the hell is happening here? I'd be shocked if an abandoned fan project looked this bad. And I'm counting asset flips.
As a programmer for more than 20 years, this is the kind of art I could do in Blender for games xD
i feel you cause im also a IT Grad with game dev experience and this shit is just too embarrassing especially for a company that makes so much money and have the funds to have the proper team to work on it but no they still do crappy work they dont listen to us at all and keep on blaming on the hardwares limited capacity when we have games out there made from companies that dont have that much revenue compare to fucking Game Freak but they make graphically looking better games than this one.
and why did it pass nintendo's QC? hehe
@@riceball4244 True.
The problem is they keep pumping them out because the consumer keeps buying them. At this point one of their games is going to have to flop hard before things get any better for the pokemon series.
There's no sugar coating it, this game is just terrible , and all the people who bought this should be refunded by Nintendo. Nintendo should be completely ashamed they let this release like this.
Pokemon fans deserve better, but always settle for less and defend a turd.
Just buy and play the damn game bro
Unbelievable to me that anyone would spend $60 on this let alone $120 for the double pack. It's shocking how low peoples' standards are if they're allowing this to happen.
Average COD & FIFA player grindset.
Nintendotards
It's pokemon. The mind set of the majority is not how it runs or how it looks but that it's pokemon and that it plays like pokemon. With that said you can't blame people for buying this. Not everybody expected this travesty.
people love Pokemon and grow up on that BUT Game Freak love money more so they take advantage of SO SAD
@@atomickaiser1934 The only reason I preordered was the belief that the series was heading back towards great places after Arceus. If I knew the performance would be like this, I would have canceled my preorder.
They should've called these games Pokémon Beta and Pokémon Alpha.
Actually i wouldn't be surprised it they actually do that on future games.
I shall save this comment somehow. See ya in 6 years when it'll happen so we can have a good laugh
I will always defend Legends Arceus, it has been one of my favorite games this year and you did a good job looking at the good and the bad of this game. There were a lot of times I was really immersed in LA and in awe just exploring zones but in Pokemon SV Im really taken out when things stutter and just look very sloppy. I will have to admit they probably spent most of their time on the pokemon textures because they actually look really good up close. I found a grimer in a zone and was actually showed how good it looked. My biggest issue is the frame rate and the animations. I could look the other way about the graphics but game play and performance is a big deal for me. This was a really great watch and I'm glad my friend recommended I check this out.
Jesus, I remember harshly condemning Arceus for its poor visuals, and it still does look terrible, but damn looking back on it now it was just plain better in almost every way.
the pokemon models are outsourced tho
@@see.eye.2361 I wouldn't say it look terrible. It looks basic for sure but the artstyle helped it a lot.
This is probably the most fair break down of things I've seen. It's troubling since we have seen better examples of technical prowess on the Switch even from the same company. I think it's high time Game Freak is given additional technical support from another studio or Nintendo pulls another Colosseum and hands the reigns of the franchise to someone else for a spin. My only hope is that mods can save this because I'm a little doubtful that GF will actually patch it.
Nintendo doesn’t own the franchise - they can’t just take it from GameFreak’s hands.
They should try to persuade them to take on additional resource and support though.
@@Zveebo yeah, Nintendo has 1/3 of Pokemon rights, so they can be pretty vocal
@@PeanutMike Unfortunately they prob won't, this game beat Splatoon 3's launch sales record lol
They probably will patch it, as they've already started allowing refunds (another thing Nintendo despises). Will said future patches fix the game to where it should run/look? Doubtful, but it will probably at least hold 30fps on objects and not have the bugs
@@Eclipse-ew5fc they prob will, since it is the first time I know Nintendo is going out of their way to do refunds, I can bet they will fix this.