Pokémon Scarlet / Pokémon Violet - DF Tech Review - Incredibly Poor Visuals + Performance
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- Опубликовано: 17 окт 2024
- 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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![GEEK TIMË [OFFICIAL AUDIO]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ry-6RvkH880/mqdefault.jpg)
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.
Pokemon will die relativley soon. Only people buying it are kids and people who liked the originals. But the kids buying it today won't remember it nearly as fondly and won't be buying it as adults.
@@WhalesLoveSmash L take, there is no evidence for that and the same has been said ten years ago when the fanbase was "recovering" from X and Y.
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
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
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
"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.
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
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😂
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
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.
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
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
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! 🤣
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.
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
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!
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
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
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 ?
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
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
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!
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.
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
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
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...
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
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.
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
@@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.
And the games keeps getting worse but ppl keep buying it more, pokemon never sold so much and never sucked so much
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.
I didn’t realize how bad the graphics were until these side-by-side comparisons. This makes me want to cry…
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
"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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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?
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 RUclips channel. That was so strange.
@@jordirapper not a sony developer though
i always love and appreciate DF’s technical analysis. They are a well educated diss and praise and they are always so well done. i’m just so sad by the performance of pokémon. Game Freak needs help and or they need to let someone else develop a pokémon game. this is just unacceptable
Game Freak are the ones that own and develop pokemon. They created it. No chance would they let the ONLY game they make go. They have more money than all the other game development companies in the world. And more money on just one project as well as making pokemon games. This is the result of a company not caring and greed, as well as a fanbase not caring. The fan base always buying rather than caring about quality. Buying regardless of innovation. They got what they paid for and what they created pokemon to be.
They do get help. The credits list 20 or so external studios which assist with graphics and programming. I think the problem is rushed development.
Unacceptable indeed. Do as I do and vote with your wallet.
@@JamieZero7 Game freak doesn’t own Pokemon. The License situation around Pokemon is a huge mess with Creatures Inc., Nintendo and The Pokémon Company share each a certain amount of the IP with other shareholders in the mix too. That’s why the Development of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl was given to ILCA Inc. while Legends Arceus was developed by Game Freak.
Yes, Pokémon was almost always developed by Game Freak, but there is still a theoretical possibility that someday a new main Pokémon game get developed by a different company other then Game Freak. And we have seen it already with ILCA and BDSP.
The problem lies more in the fact that Scarlet/Violet was released to early. Or in general, that almost every Pokémon game in the last decade was released to early. The yearly release is a huge problem for a small development company like Game Freak.
And the sad thing is that Game Freak even moved their headquarter to the same building like Nintendo so that they can probably get help by more experienced Nintendo programmers and to be more supervised by Nintendo. But we still got this Pokémon Game with huge technical problems.
@@NeoReibert That's just outright false. Game Freak owns part of the pokemon company along with Nintendo. Just outright lying when you say they don't. You talk like poor "game freak" when in reality the company has been ripping off its customers for years with 2 game releases instead of 1 and the company is worth more than the vast majority of studios and has done nothing in regards to improving itself. You game freak apologists and game freaks lazy and greedy game deserve each other.
I wished they just pushed back Pokémon Arceus I didn't think even that looked the greatest, but it clear they pushed this game out Violet and Scarlet out door quickly for the holidays. They could have had a more polished Arceus out for the holidays, but you know money. I'm more impressed by the visuals of the gamecube pokemon games than this.
at least Arceus wasn't this level bad
There's an early build of Sword from December 2017 (Build 30). With the exception of a few assets like the player characters and their home, most of the maps were in an early, blocked out state, with most of the early buildings more or less sharing the same placement as their final versions.
There's also early stand-ins for Wooloo and Eternatus, along with a texture with an early Galarian Meowth.
There's a -good- very likely chance every game since ~Gen 6 has had a hard ~3 year development cycle. (The vid mentions SV began development in 2019.)
Also the Sword beta has a minimap (using Gen 7 assets) that probably became the basis for SV's minimap.
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.
@Seymowr 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
@Seymowr no amount of being vocal will matter when one of those other 2/3rds is… literally Game Freak. Nintendo has no full say nor real control over the franchise, they only own a third of it.
To be fair though, this is Game Freak’s first open world game, so it was likely to have issues. I think it needed a bit more time in the oven though.
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.
This game looks like it was about 10 months away from release but then some exec said "Fuck it! Release it NOWWWW!!!"
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
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
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.
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
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.
this is probably the tech review i was looking for out of all the games that came out this year
There is a limit to push graphics on the Nintendo hardware!
Bayonetta 3, same story here!
Me too. Most other games aren't a complete trainwreck tech wise like this. This is just embarrassing on all fronts. Gamefreak should be ashamed this even made it to release in this state.
@@sadgiantsfan3690 ever since CP 2077 launched, stuff like like this became widespread!
@@IronMan-jj2fd oh absolutely, i'm 100% on that one, i think is incredible that nintendo hasn't revealed the next gen hardware already, i bet that the majority of the developers are asking for a new switch too, the thing is, if we start comparing breath of the wild and xenoblade chronicles 3, the whole pokemon development (and scam) falls off
@@IronMan-jj2fd don't get me wrong but unlike pokemon, nobody expected cyberpunk 2077 to be that big of a dissaster, they made the witcher 3, which is one of the best open world games ever made, unlike cdpr, gamefreak has been constantly pulling half assed games for like 10 years already since pokemon sun and moon
Great tech review, I especially like the comparison with other Switch titles and appreciate your feelings on “so what’s going on here”.
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.
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 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.
How the hell does violet's tiling look worse than my student work.
Ctrl + V
Pokémon RPG fans both new & ancient deserve so much better than what Game Freak expects them to PAY for. Demand better, great work DF! It's stories like this that make me wish Video Game Doc companies like NoClip covered negative stories as well as positive ones - this deserves some investigative documentarianism!
Unfortunately Pokemon fan diehards will just gobble up anything Game Freak throws out. And they keep making excuses.
True! Why isn't anyone in the staff speaking up? My guess is Game Freak has leaned on some of the darker aspects of Japanese culture and only hire people with a certain attitude.
I hope people continue to bring this Game up 16 Years from now like they do with Sonic 06
They won't, the next game might be even worse and will still sell even more copies
Does this one have fun glitches 'n stuff? It worked hilariously well for Deadly Premonition! 😆
It probably won't be, it isn't as bad as sonic 06 as deep down it is still an enjoyable game. And this is from someone that haven't played any Pokémon games since gen 3. Looking it through streamers, it seems a lot of them are having a blast despite the performance issue.
@@Nameless_JPN-ENG I am playing it right now and it’s honestly really fun, which is the worst part of this situation. It doesn’t look good and it’s poorly optimized but the core gameplay is actually really fun and it would probably be considered one of the better if not the best 3d Pokémon games if these issues didn’t exist.
This is now added to my Switch’s greatest hits list along Fifa 23 and WWE 2K18
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
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.
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.
I said it on a Discord server and I'll repeat it here:
DigitalFoundry might say "Pokemon fans deserve better" and that is absolutely true, but I'll do ya one further. POKEMON... the franchise on the whole deserves better. And with beautiful side projects like New Pokemon Snap, anthology series like Pokemon Origins, Pokemon Generations, Twilight Wings, and Evolutions, you can absolutely see the beauty and potential of what Pokemon has to offer... heck... even older Pokemon games (as imperfect as they were at the time). There's a reason that the Pokemon Black & White quadruped of games have in recent years been looked at... at least more favorable than back when they first came out. They weren't perfect and they aren't my _favorite_ Pokemon games of all time, I have and will always respect what Gamefreak was trying to do.
There is a unique charm to the Pokemon franchise that has allowed it to continue on for over 25 years. It's pretty wild if you really think about it. But... call it a freak accident with the original pair of games on Gameboy causing Pokemon to become the PHENOMENON it would then become, Pokemon hit different and in a way, we still feel that way, for better or worse. There has been some growing pains over the years but these pocket monsters, the characters, etc. have become iconic for a reason and we still have a fondness for them all this time later. Especially those like Cynthia, N, Giovanni, etc. (And of course OUR BOY ASH KETCHUM/SATOSHI)
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.
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.
The framerate dips are caused by loading assets, not by the limitations of Switch's graphical capabilities.
It's a rather simple game that just got ruined by a developer that doesn't know how (or refuses) to properly optimize their assets. The funny thing is that Arceus technically has a steeper hill to climb when it comes to performance simply due to the cellshaded style and yet seems to perform better than Scarlet/Violet's phong shading.
It's amazing how they went from Arceus, which wasn't perfect but a good first step, to totally dropping the ball. I can't wait for developer post mortems on how this happend.
I just can't comprehend it, you've already made a solid base..why deviate so far from it.
Legend Arceus : January 2022
Scarlet / Violet : November 2022
That's probably why...
Arceus has different developers.
Execs rushing games in time for the holidays, everything be damned.
They apparently had 2 teams working parallel projects. Which is weird if you are going to end up sacrificing your main line game like this. They could have probably saved Arceus and just put all their eggs in the V/A basket with a lot of what made Arceus great in V/A, with less issues, like Arceus.
@@alexfirth21 suggests the more seasoned devs wanted to work on the more experimental PLA, leaving SV mostly to the B team, and outsourcing BDSP to some other people.
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
We got em boys!
The world was waiting, and now DF has put its stamp on it!
Even the boxes take a few seconds to load the pokemon sprites on each one, and another few seconds to load the pokemon 3D model of the pokemon you have selected
Yeah absolutely most ridiculous performance issues that should not exist is menu navigation. So muuuuch lag
The drain pipes on the wall at 11:33 are hilarious. It's like they put placeholder art in and just forgot to redo it before the game released.
Also that hedge popping in at 14:48 was nuts lol.
Honestly an embarrassment that anything with a Nintendo logo on it would ship in this state
That's probably not wrong. They left in origin markers in a bunch of the cutscenes too.
@@alexanderunguez9633 I saw a floating pokeball in a cutscene on front door of a gym while inside
Jesus, those grates and the surrounding brickwork would've looked bad on Gamecube, that's like N64 level texturing.
And the way they just slapped them up against the other garbo rock textures with no effort to make them blend... what... the...?
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.
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.
As an old school fan that just recently got back in with Acreus, I thought there was no way it could be worse than that. After watching the video I understand now.
It's terrible what they did to this series.
Same. I took a break after USUM and came back with Legends Arceus. That game made me fall in love with Pokemon again. And seeing how ambitious SV was being I really wanted to play a traditional Pokemon game again. And while I'm having fun gameplay-wise. The poor performance and visuals of this game really hurt my experience. Especially the frame drops.
This game really needed to be delayed until next year. And to those people who are saying they needed a game to line up with products and the anime, they could have easily released DLC for Legends Arceus during the holidays.
It's upsetting how little time they've never put any time into their switch games. The best looking pokemon games are the spinoffs NOT made by gamefreak!
@@justanordinarypigeon1489 and the best-looking GAMEFREAK Pokémon game is Let's Go of all things, it's downright embarrassing
The devs clearly just want to release as much content for the idiot fanbase to gobble up, quality be damned. It is indeed sad. As long as ppl keep buying tho then they'll continue to do this.
Stopped playing after sun and moon after seeing the sheer laziness in USUM. Returned to SV, and idk its not bad but when it comes to visuals and performance, I'll never praise it lol. This feels like a game that was obligated to be made than a game made with care and refinement.
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.
It's pretty funny how when I've played Arceus, I found the game pretty bad visually. But now that I've played Scarlet, it make Arceus not that bad in comparison.
While I have some fun on Scarlet, there's no denying that the game is really bad on the technical side. I haven't had a lot of bugs for now but the clipping and lightning are some of the worst I saw in a game, it's just insane. Also the video didn't really dwelve into it but a lot of time shadows just...disappeared. Like in the middle of a cutscene, without anyone moving or camera changing placement, the whole lightning change, like going from day to night (and nope, it wasn't because of the day/night cycle). I've also encounter that issue during battle where when I've gone to the attack menu the global lightning changed. And if I've canceled and came back to the action menu (the where you select if you want to attack, change pokemon or use an item), the lightning came back to before. And it would happen each time I've done that.
You can like the game, there's nothing wrong with that. But it doesn't excuse the fact that it should (at least in my opinion) never been released in that state. It clearly needed some more month of devs tbh, and GF/TPC really need to fix how they work on these games. I don't even really care if the games aren't visually greats, but there it's just bad and unacceptable
Nintoddler spotted, L
While it still wouldn't excuse bad textures and load-in problems, if they could have the game run at a stable 30fps, it would already fix the biggest issue about the performance part of the game! Because I still have a blast playing these games and the only thing that can and will be very distracting is the framedrops
Add some FXAA while they're on it too. That Aliasing is unacceptable 😐
30fps is garbage
@@MLWJ1993 FXAA is terrible, TAA and MSAA are way better
@@youtubeshadowbannedme Uhh, I doubt they're capable of much more than basic FXAA...
The funniest aspect of this for me is I received an ad for this game while watching this video. Well done Nintendo 😂
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 didn’t know it would be possible but this game makes sword and shield look good.
The sad thing about all of this is that the game itself is fun to play if you are not fighting a constant headache from the frame drops... such a shame.
Sad thing is, the game does a lot of things very right in other ways - but also has issues beyond even what's covered here. The big lake and the fairy star den drop framerates to almost unplayable levels later on, in a way which really just should not have been in the released game. What's also notable is how the issues seem inconsistent between unit to unit - I don't get the hold before transitions, but I do get a few frames immediately after where effectively everything loads in after the camera cut.
If TPC really want Pokemon released at this frequency they really desperately need more people working on it or a serious overhaul to how things are being done, because for all the improvements they're overshadowed by a technical disaster.
The frames get WORSE??? oh man, it already can't even handle prerendered cutscenes lmao
Oh so the fairy star den wasn’t just me then. The framerate was SO BAD.
But they won't do anything because the fanboys will continue to consume
@@fananox2057 I been real lucky, the framerate was almost stable most of the time for me. But the cities are atrocious, I did a gym test with the Sunfloras and was a slide show.
30 hours in and I didn't experience much slow down aside from the biggest cities. Feels like the game runs at 25-30fps most of the time. Definitely not good, but also not unplayable.
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.
Nothing more hilarious than watching a pokemon scarlet/violet video and getting an ad for the game halfway through
I'm shocked by how much this looks like a Steam Asset Flip project.
@@Resetes12 pretty sure it runs on Game Freak's proprietary engine
@@drinkwwwaterrr You're right, I assumed that it was made in Unity because the 4th gen remakes were definately made with Unity and because the lighting and effects are so plain that they look Unity-like.
This is my most awaited DF tech analysis not gonna lie
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.
Thank you for this. I thought it looked really underbaked pre-release, and I thought it would be unpolished at launch. But I wasn't expecting it to be this bad.
Considering there is no shortage of games that are absolutely worth playing released every year (far more than I can keep up with), it's sort of become a rule for me that any game I invest my money and time into has to be loved by the developers as least as much as I love it. If they can't manage that, it's probably not worth it. I think there are many artists, programmers, designers, etc. who love this game and want to do right by the fans. But whoever is calling the shots obviously doesn't care about quality or the fans.
It's been absolutely heartbreaking watching Pokemon deteriorate over the past few years. I really miss being blindly excited for a new Pokemon game, and not being disappointed. I wish so bad that they would slow down and take their time. But of course Scarlet and Violet are still smashing sales records, as many other recent Pokemon games have. It's like the new generation doesn't know how good it used to be or something.
Frankly, I don't need a Pokemon game every year, especially if they are going to be unfinished. Give me one excellent game every 3 years, and a solid DLC pack the year after. I think everyone would be a lot more satisfied that way.
Overall, S&V's biggest sin is the strain it puts on your eyes. Just watching a video as short as this, my eyes are burning from the background and the sudden camera shifts. It's horrifying.
Good Lord, this is embarassing beyond words. Thank you for the analysis DF!
That fact the scarlet/violet continues to be the best selling Pokémon or fasting selling will be why this will never change
Screw The Pokemon Company and their deadlines.
Imagine a Pokemon game with a proper 5 years of development time.
I'm sure gamefreak would be able to make a polished game with enough time and if they work on one game at a time.
@@one_step_sideways It's true but here's to hoping that the tarnishing of their reputation catches up to them eventually
"5 years? You are crazy! think about the anime, the merchandising, the side games!" - Some Pokémon Company manager
It's nuts that we're at the point where playing Nintendo games on emulator day 1 is a better experience than you'd have on native hardware.
This is true of every Switch game though, not just Scarlet/Violet. S/V's problems aren't because of the Switch's hardware, but this is. PCs are so much stronger than the Switch now that it's laughably easy to emulate it at 1440p 60fps.
I really just want Nintendo to fold and become a publisher like Sega. Imagine how fantastic their IP would be natively on current gen consoles and PC. Their ecosystem and platform for so limited and they make up for it by being one of the most greedy and least consumer friendly platforms out there.
@@vullord666 yeah that would be awesome but Nintendo sells so many consoles I can't see it happening in the future. Maybe like Sony does it, publish their games a year later on pc
@@crazzluz1702 While it does apply to every accurately emulated game (emulators can do 4K, the Switch can't!), some games benefit a lot more than others.
Titles like Metroid Dread, Skyward Sword, Smash Bros. Ultimate, and just about any Mario game without Rabbids in it are already running smoothly, and at a decent resolution, so you're still getting a good experience on the original hardware.
@@vullord666 honestly I would kinda hate that. I know the switch is weak but at least it's pretty creative. That's what Nintendo is good at mainly, to lose that would just make me kinda sad. I think it's very unrealistic anyway at the moment considering how big they are in just Japan alone.