The 1.2.0 update to Pokémon Scarlet & Violet brought a lot of nice little additions and improvements to Paldea. A handful of bug fixes — such as accurate reflection of damage done in Tera Raid battles and some quality of life updates for the in-game Pokémon PC boxes — certainly go a long way into taking the Poison Sting out of the continued issues surrounding the technically troubled adventure.
However, booting up Scarlet & Violet after installing this update reveals that, unfortunately, a ton of problems (including an apparent save data bug) still plague the game like a horde of ornery Rattata. We’ve gone ahead and put together a short list of changes and additions we’d still like to see added.
From missing mechanics available in past games to extant performance issues, take a look at five quality of life updates we want to see in future updates – and especially before The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero DLC (which includes The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disk) releases later this year.
More Performance Updates
Let’s get the low hanging Sitrus Berry out of the way: Scarlet & Violet still run like a one-legged Rapidash. Hopping into the game post update shows that little, if nothing, has been done in terms of performance. When rolling around on Miraidon or Koraidon, the game still can’t maintain a steady 30 frames per second. Foliage pops in randomly and NPCs continue to glitch out of existence. The camera loves to clip through the environment as much as a Greedent loves to eat berries, and it still takes several moments too long for mere images of Pokémon to load in PC boxes.
We understand that there is a fundamental issue with how the open world is generated in Scarlet & Violet, and there’s no easy fix to bring it up to the bare minimum standard, yet at this point it’s quite difficult to jump back into the game after playing something that can maintain a solid 30fps — or, Arceus forbid, 60fps or more on another system. We sincerely hope something is done before the first DLC for The Hidden Treasures of Area Zero launches in the fall.
An Option to Mass Release Pokémon
Update 1.2.0 made a couple great improvements to PC boxes, but neglected to fix an issue that has plagued most Pokémon games and, honestly, we’re surprised it still hasn’t been addressed. Breeding for the perfect Pokémon or Shiny hunting results in shoving hundreds of Poképals into your PC box to forever remain trapped – unless you release them before reaching the cap of 960.
With an increasing focus on catching everything you see, it’s odd that there is currently no way to mass release Pokémon. Instead, you have to ditch them one by one which, with how laggy the PC boxes of Paldea are, can take a frustratingly long time. The only way to mass release Pokémon is to send them to Pokémon HOME, software which requires a subscription, and, at the time of writing this, compatibility with HOME is still not available for Scarlet & Violet.
A Jingle for Shinies
Pokémon Legends: Arceus included a little jingle when a shiny Pokémon was nearby. This was a great addition for both accessibility because it made sure you didn’t miss ‘em in the new open-zone format. Yet in Scarlet & Violet, Game Freak did away with this feature, making it near impossible to notice if a shiny Pokémon is nearby unless you’re specifically searching for one or if it's an obvious recolouring like a bright yellow Bellibolt. And considering how small some of these Pokémon are in the wild, this omission seems baffling.
There’s no telling how many Pikachu that are a slightly different shade or Axew with a purple scarf-like bit on its neck you’ve passed on by. And other Pokémon like Charcadet's shinies barely look any different to their normal form. On top of this, Scarlet & Violet’s terrible lighting compounds this issue at dawn or dusk. We often stopped and double checked that a Pokémon wasn’t shiny as we brought down Team Star and defeated Titan Pokémon, and were disappointed every time. This would’ve been made much less annoying with a little jingle that we hope Game Freak reintroduces.
A More Convenient Way to Farm Tera Shards
It takes a frankly ridiculous amount of Tera Shards to change your Pokémon’s Tera type. For competitive battlers, this is especially frustrating because Scarlet & Violet, like Pokémon Sword & Shield before it, introduced a ton of features to make team building much more streamlined and less time consuming. It's one step forward, another step back.
At the moment, the most efficient way to collect Tera Shards en masse is by completing Tera Raids, but it can still take hours to collect the requisite 50 you need. Searching for a raid of the type you want, travelling to said raid, defeating the Tera Pokémon, and hoping for more than one or two shards – rinse, repeat.
Competitive trainers got around this once they collected 50 by sharing their Battle Team online and then resetting their game, in turn allowing them to access their team for competitive play and to get all their Tera Shards back. However, the 1.2.0 update nixed this workaround by requiring you to save before sharing a team online.
Before Pokémon HOME integration comes to Scarlet & Violet – which will bring with it tons of Pokémon without Tera Types – we hope Game Freak introduces a better way to farm them. Or they could just make Tera types changeable without Tera Shards? A radical thought, we know.
A Faster Battle Flow
Pokémon battles are hardly more brisk in 2023 than they were in 1996. Abilities, status afflictions, the raising or lowering of stats, switching out Pokémon (which they somehow made slower in Scarlet & Violet?), Terastalization, and move animations all combine to take up quite a lot of time during any given match. In previous matches, you could turn off battle animations to make grinding or hunting down a specific Pokémon much less tedious, but Scarlet & Violet Machopped this feature entirely.
We totally understand why battle animations can’t be turned off during online matches. However, it seems like it might be either a huge oversight or some kind of technical limitation in single-player, and we hope Game Freak considers bringing the feature back.
Furthermore, a more streamlined system – rather than individual boxes of text – to show that a Pokémon is burned, it fainted, it switched out, instead of clunky text boxes, would go a long way toward making Pokémon battles feel more approachable and is long overdue. Perhaps a little status menu on the side that displays this information with quick, easy-to-understand symbols rather than text would work, but what do we know? We’re writers, not best-selling game designers.
What updates do you want to see in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, whether they’re feature additions or technical improvements? Be sure to vote in our poll below and in the comments below.
Comments 55
After performance patches they need to focus on fixing the mess that is Tera Raids. They are an absolutely tragic, buggy disaster. It's impossible to tell what's happening half the time. You can be waiting to see an attack option only to have the timer be suddenly be the halfway mark with most of the team's Pokemon knocked out. They are not fun in any way, compounded by the fact you have to partake in them if you want to obtain some of the Pokemon not otherwise available in-game e.g. Cinderace, Walking Wake, etc.
well this is going to be fun.
The mass release thing should have happened already. The shiny jingle is also a nice touch. I would also appreciate more modern features for these games (VAs, obviously) and also that feature from Sun and Moon that shows the stat bonuses and negatives during battle
1. You get plenty of Tera Shards from events and herbas.
2. You do not need a shiny jingle. This takes so much away from actually checking and hunting the Pokemon. You can literally just phase out, phase in non stop until one appears with no skill involved.
I was waiting for the patch to actually play this past the main story and until they can hit a decent frame rate, I won't be picking it back up and definitely won't be buying the DLC.
I don't think we need a shiny jingle at all.
Overworld encounters already makes things easier, if anything it just requires a bit more perspicacity now (as well as knowledge of what the shiny variants look like). The 'skill' element of being able to spot shinies now definitely makes it a bit less braindead than simply running around which I actually enjoy.
If anything, I want there to be a shiny jingle when I send my shinies out against wild Pokemon. Currently you only get that when you send out shiny Pokemon in trainer battles.
Gimmighoul coins. That's all I'll say
Along with mass release they should add mass trade.
For the people who say no shiny jimgle: Some of those shinies are hard to tell even without eyesight issues.
I just want them to allow me to change the default form of a Pokémon's entry in the Pokedex. This has been a feature of the games since Black and White and it baffles me how they messed it up in this game.
Just make the game not run like it wants to die most of the time.
Really without the hardware to back things up Nintendo really should have took a step back to return to a 2D game world. It is a mystery how Nintendo saw the game and said “it looks okay to us”.
I was waiting for a performance update before getting back into the game.
Well now there is one, and I'm waiting until there's another patch update that gets rid of the risk of WIPING MY ENTIRE SAVE.
I just want to be able to play my $60 game.
I would like from them to release a new game that was in development for at least 3 years and recall all V/S games from the market and refund ALL purchases.
Farming the tera shards was one of the things that kept me busy in the post-game while building new teams (also made for a nice gameplay loop), but I wouldn't mind them being less scarce if there were other things to do after you finished the story.
VOICE ACTING !!
Better game engine
Developed by BANDAI NAMCO
1. Make it not run like arse.
a better way to get Herba Mystica
i want to make those shiny sandwiches
@DragotheKomodo They’re special and give you an immense buff. They should be hard to grind.
I beat the first gym and haven't gone back to it. Everything wrong with it was too distracting to get as involved/lost as I have in the past.
I want to go back and I almost did this weekend but that shimmer of hope that they will fix it is making me feel like I should wait to play the best version of it. At this rate though, the next game will be out and I'll have simply wasted my money on this one having it sit on the shelf. Life's tough... Come on, Game Freak/Nintendo: the pieces are all there in this one, it's a great game foundation, just sturdy it up a bit.
@Anti-Matter YES... YES YES YES. This is a series where voice acting would go a long way. I'm okay with the random encounters missing VA but all gyms and cutscenes (story elements) should have VA at the very least.
I don't think the shiny jingle will ever make it. Legends Arceus was purposefully easier to acquire shinies
I think the lack of shiny jingle was intentional, they didn't made these awful shinies which are almost identical to regular ones to be easily spoted
Shouldn't that be "Hopping into the game post update shows that little, if anything, has been done in terms of performance." rather than "Hopping into the game post update shows that little, if nothing, has been done in terms of performance."?
A way to sort your pokemon in the boxes (by catch date, dex #, etc.) And a way to lock boxes so if you sort, nothing will go into or out of the locked boxes unless you manually move them.
Edit: I very much want this for Pokemon Home too.
I loved Scarlet and Violet, not gonna lie. But fixing Tera Raids would really help with the postgame content. Not only is 50 Tera Shards way too much farming for just one Pokémon, but it takes forever to join raids and they can be buggy as hell. I had one raid where we knocked out the Pokémon just in time, only for the game to not count it and unceremoniously boot everyone back to the overworld. I feel the frustration of Tera Raid farming is the main reason people have been turned off competitive battling in this gen, so a patch to fix these issues would breathe a lot more life into the scene.
It’s called getting another team to work on Pokémon.
A nice QoL update would be better GameFreak devs.
How about the Arceus update where it plays like a decent Pokémon game?
What about an update that makes sure you don't permanently lose hundreds of hours of save data?
@Joeynator3000 You're right, someone should write an article about quality of life improvements.
Performance is an absolute priority over anything for me, the game really struggles functioning at a basic level. Quality of life can follow critical performance fixes.
I'm all for having the jingle return. Some shinies aren't all that different in look from the original which makes it near impossible to know you're encountering a shiny variant. Charcadet's difference, for example, only involves having blue eyes instead of their usual red.
I get it though. It isn't necessarily hard to see you are encountering a shiny if, for most Pokemon, their coloring dramatically differs from the normal one. However, people have to know what the shiny looks like to begin with as well. With that being said, it's not always clear to know what you're looking for if you don't know what it looks like, to begin with. So the jingle was great in that respect.
I also don't think the jingle made it any easier to find shinies. I think I've found more shinies in this game than in Legends.
Also, bring back shift vs set battle mode already!!
I was overlooking the performance issues for the first month simply because I was enjoying myself. Now they're a little more obvious (it runs like butt lol).
I really want different sort options for the PC Boxes. Please just let me click something to sort them by #, type, etc.
AU$52.50 freaking dollars for the DLC.
For this stinking, embarrassing mess.
I thought TPCi/Game Freak/Nintendo had some serious gall when pulling this crap with Sword/Shield, but, my... the sheer freaking audacity!
The biggest quality of life improvement would be to remove Game Freak from ever making a Pokémon game again, because they are just feeding like vampires on unknowing kids who don’t know where the gold standard used to be, and that was miles higher than where it is now! One of my favourite franchises turned into a joke!
I want us to be able to use Synchronize to get wild Pokémon with the nature we want.
@KingOhger I noticed if you throw your pokeball at wild Pokemon to initiate the battle, you get the shiny jingle. You don't when you run into them. Weird, I know.
@Fuecoco What about people who are colour-blind or have sone kind of vision impairment? Some of these Pokemon are tiny!
My top three quality of life requests would be:
1. Non-school-uniform clothing. Just give me normal cute clothes!
2. The ability to rename Pokemon multiple times; trading is basically useless when the other player names all their Pokemon BestPokeEvwr or (more commonly) Japanese characters I can't read.
3. I want my boxes to explicitly say a Pokemon is shiny. If I lose track, I don't want to have to search them all looking for different shades of Yellow. Relatedly I wish they glowed or something out in the wild; even a jingle isn't useful if your sound is off.
Faster battles for me on the poll but would really like performance issues sorted out as well.
I just want new clothes.
I mean. It’s a Pokémon game.. on the switch. It isn’t gonna run like a FPS on a multi-thousand dollar gaming PC. When ruby and sapphire came out no one was complaining about performance or bugs or graphical errors because it was just so cool to have a full color Pokémon game (both of which also cost $60 by the way). I’ve never had any performance problems with scarlet and violet that were game-breaking. I’ve seen bugs and lag, but who cares — I can still catch Pokémon in a 3D open world, I can still do raids and play with friends — in a 3D pokemon region. Y’all spoiled.
Trimming the Pokédex — again — and stifling our clothing options are the biggest issues I have had and still have with SV, and I won’t be buying the DLC until I can get out of this hideous school uniform.
I'm with everyone on saying that the performance needs some severe work. But I must also say I would like the option to speed up battles/animations/text as well. The idea for the easily identifiable status icon needs to be a thing as well,rather than the pop-up text with the occurring status.
I really want an option for turning off move animations. I don’t know if I’d ever use it, but it would help speed things up a bit.
I would like for their to be a better performance update implemented & please bring back Pokémon Day Cares.
I played and loved the game but they need to fix the performance and glitches. It's probably the best Pokemon game behind such a messy window of bugs and stutters.
Outside of that, the only other thing I really want is some post-game battles in the form of a Battle Tower or Battle Frontier. I was very disappointed to see them omitted. Now that I beat the main story and small post-game, all there is to do is shiny hunt and do Tera-raid battles. The DLC will probably fix this but it's a shame this is one of the few Pokemon games without a proper battle tower.
How about side quests, dungeons, collectables, random events/encounters, actually challenging battles, battle tower or a fun multiplayer mode (like dynamax adventure was)? This game is a skeleton 😂
@Ascenser No one is expecting this game to look like a next gen title at 60fps, they are simply expecting a consistent 30fps and with the game looking like it does, that should be more than achievable. There are a whole host of games that look better and run better than this game on the Switch going as far back as launch titles, so there are no excuses for a company as big as TPC.
@RainbowGazelle I believe the term is actually colour deficient!
Since I doubt they'll be able to patch performance much more (and honestly shouldn't if it causes actual game breaking bugs like we've just seen) I'll take any quality of life feature instead (the addition of being able to change nicknames, moves etc. in boxes has been invaluable for me) like the option to mass release Pokémon, the shiny jingle or others like those suggested by various previous comments!
The command menu shouldn't disappear during raids just because an animation is happening. It can take so long to get your attack or action queued up because the menu can(and often does) vanish while you are interacting with it. Its baffling.
@NinjaNicky Buddy if it was a hardware issue then all of the Nintendo Switch games on the system would run as badly as Scarlet and Violet.
Might be something about the developers' coding issues - and considering people are blaming Nintendo instead of GameFreak, it's obvious people don't know who makes the games.
I might be on the unpopular side on this one, but I only care about having more clothes options, a better camera mode, the ability to share out trainer cards with friends and let strangers join raid battles while in an union room
Can you no longer tell whether a Pokémon is shiny before catching it? Otherwise, why would you be catching everything you find while Shiny hunting? Just make sure you have a strong enough monster up front to be able to run away from all encounters but not too strong as to make the battles automatic.
As for breeding, just release them one at a time when they hatch upon determining it a failure.
EDIT: Oh wait, does that mechanic that increases the chances of Shinies appearing require chain captures? Like EV training and IV breeding, it requires such a stupid amount of work in what is supposed to be a fun game that I've never bothered with it myself.
@Fuecoco Since when has Shiny hunting ever involved skill? Most players don't want it to involve skill!
It's a system where you either get really lucky when you run into one by chance, or you use the chain method that is tedious busywork but not something you need to think hard about, while it would be nice if it could be made somewhat less tedious. Besides, while you could just phase in and out repeatedly, wouldn't you be resetting the chain, and thus your odds of finding one would again be absolutely abysmal?
@NinjaNicky 30 FPS is just fine for many genres including turn-based RPGs, and every system ever released except maybe the current Sony and Microsoft consoles has had a lot of good games that don't hit 60 FPS. Even nowadays, It's just part of the graphical sacrifice you make to take advantage of Nintendo's awesome hardware features dating all the way back to the Wii and DS.
Though, Scarlet and Violet do have much worse performance issues that aren't acceptable even on the Switch.
As for a theoretical Switch 2, resolution vs. performance modes becoming standard is a good idea, but good luck getting a 4K screen on a handheld. Although, maybe handheld and tabletop modes would run exclusively in performance mode.
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