Pokémon Scarlet / Pokémon Violet - DF Tech Review - Incredibly Poor Visuals + Performance

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.

[dustinshilala]

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.

[luiseduardonunes]

Amazing how, in isolation, Arceus looks not so great, but in comparison with the new game, it looks like an art piece

[ENXGMA_YT]

This thing sold 10M copies in 3 days. They have no reason to ever put in the effort.

[lsramonr]

So, now we finally know what an open world/N64 Pokemon game could have been

[SlamBolts]

One thing to note about BOTW: It was also made with the PREVIOUS SYSTEM IN MIND.

[hectorechavarria]

"Arguibly Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are comprehensive technical failures"
Unreal commentary for 2022, yet so warranted. Well done DF.

[RAMBOHTX]

The classroom scene really got me. I couldn’t believe they ship that out for release.

[healgoth]

12:12 BOTW was a WiiU title too, I think that’d be an even greater example of game optimization

[NitroKittens]

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.

[ebola]

It's crazy that in less than a year we are looking back fondly at Arceus as a nice looking game

[polskibit]

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

[lHckrCmfr]

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.

[AgsmaJustAgsma]

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.

[samdenler]

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.

[Essu_]

Crazy part is that these same issues would kill literally any other game. But not Pokemon.

[StJay]

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.

[FakYuhGoogel]

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...

[chaoscontroller]

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.

[BandedHylian]

The side by side with Legends Arceus was honestly shocking. Like I knew, but seeing it like that was just.. wow

[bayIees]

2:23 the absolute breakdown i went through after finding a shiny lucario after hours and i watched it run away and despawn 😭