Game Freak While yes, we’ve reached a point in the Nintendo Switch’s lifecycle where the handheld console is roughly two full generations of technology behind its PlayStation and Xbox rivals, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s recent technical problems can only partially be attributed to the aging material. . In fact, most of this falls on Game Freak, Pokemon’s custodians, who haven’t figured out how to maximize the Switch’s limited power for Scarlet and Violet’s open world, and it seems to be too close to a development cycle for new toys to really give them the care they deserve. Various technically broken aspects of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have been going viral all weekend, though separately, a post showing the difference between the open world of Xenoblade on Switch and Scarlet and Violet is particularly striking: After that, here’s an animation of a character eating food in Scarlet and Violet, which isn’t a bug, just literally what it looks like: The bugs themselves are… hilarious: Not sure exactly what happened here: Game Freak also seems to be inventing new never-before-seen bugs like these: And then there’s the not-so-funny issue of the game simply performing terribly in many cases with massive frame drops, pop-ins and other issues: While most of the community isn’t a fan of how the game started, there are the usual Game Freak apologists who say it’s their first real open-world game and need some slacking, but at this point, that’s the most profitable video game franchise in history. There needs to be much, much more investment and care. The game is already being looked at as the lowest-rated entry in the franchise, and Pokemon may lose its iron grip on the industry if Game Freak doesn’t handle things better. The general consensus is that the game is, at its core, fun, but these technical limitations are so annoying that they can sink the entire experience. While yes, it’s probably time for Nintendo to invest in some more powerful hardware, considering the Switch is five years old and hasn’t gotten so much as a single performance upgrade, many other series have done a much better job on the Switch. and in this case, most of it falls directly on Game Freak. Hopefully they will take it into consideration. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content collection newsletter, God Rolls. Take my science fiction novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
