[Digital Foundry] Pokémon Scarlet / Violet - "Comprehensive technical failures"

[Quad Damage 1,717]

 

• object detail is pretty sparse, textures tile in an ugly fashion
• normal maps clash with the poor asset quality
• really poor draw distance, NPCs pop in very close
  • pokemon aren't tracked, so once they pop out, they're literally despawned
• NPCs are time sliced (reduced animation rate) at extremely short distances
  • at far distances, animated objects just stop animating
• cutscenes transitions drops frames
• camera clips through geo a lot
• many visual glitches
• indoor areas look nice, character designs are good and have good animation (for important characters)
• 720p to 1080p, 864p average
• 576p to 720p, near 720p outside of towns
• no AA
• constant frame rate drops under 30fps, can hit 20fps often
• battles perform the best
• animation slows down when frame rate is lowered
• game seems cpu limited
• game is not bound by hardware
• Legends Arceus ran much better and has a better visual makeup
  • animation rate, texture quality, resolution, frame rate etc
• Oliver thinks the development was truncated, but this game was in development at the same time as Arceus and has a larger staff count
• Game Freak's tech needs an overhaul

 

Quote

Ultimately, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are comprehensive technical failures. Embarrassing artwork, terrible draw distance, poor performance, mediocre image quality and a litany of bugs, plague this pair of very troubled games.

 

 

[Playstation Tablet 1,725]

Pokemon has one of the least memorable JRPG soundtracks.

[Twinblade★ 3,893]

Good god that texture tiling. Its like an unfinished Unity prototype by a 12 year old discovering game development for the first time. No full priced game made by professionals should have textures like that.

[Ike★ 2,906]

And GameFreak will never change because sheep bought 10+ million copies already. Franchise could be so much more too.

[Sabo 442]

This is a multi-billion dollar franchise, it's made more money than Star Wars. Theres literally no excuse for such lackluster entries besides lack of talent, lack of vision, and lack of passion. It's just pure laziness and no motivation to even try to do better.

 

Just hand the series off to someone else. Gamefreak clearly doesn't give a shit and only cares about doing the bare minimum for maximum profit.

[Remij 4,670]

14 minutes ago, Sabo said:

This is a multi-billion dollar franchise, it's made more money than Star Wars. Theres literally no excuse for such lackluster entries besides lack of talent, lack of vision, and lack of passion. It's just pure laziness and no motivation to even try to do better.

 

Just hand the series off to someone else. Gamefreak clearly doesn't give a shit and only cares about doing the bare minimum for maximum profit.

What I want to know is what the fuck ever happened to this:

 

Edited November 26, 2022 by Remij

[TLHBO 2,160]

13 hours ago, Sabo said:

This is a multi-billion dollar franchise, it's made more money than Star Wars. Theres literally no excuse for such lackluster entries besides lack of talent, lack of vision, and lack of passion. It's just pure laziness and no motivation to even try to do better.

 

Just hand the series off to someone else. Gamefreak clearly doesn't give a shit and only cares about doing the bare minimum for maximum profit.

We call this the Microsoft approach