5 Changes
Image: Nintendo Life / Pokemon

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

Draw Distance
Image: Nintendo Life

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

Mass Release
Image: Nintendo Life

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

Arceus Shiny
Image: Nintendo Life

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

Tera Shards
Image: Nintendo Life

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

Battle Ability
Image: Nintendo Life

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.

What quality of life update do you most want to see in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet?