Topic: Pokémon Scarlet & Pokémon Violet

Mmm, that required download banner, such a soggy taco.

At least this means I don't feel bad about already getting the base game instead of waiting for the DLC cartridge.

@Pizzamorg Felt the same way. This DLC really is a complete farce and huge letdown.

I thoroughly enjoyed the two DLC in Sword/Shield, where they actually put some effort in those DLC and I actually spend a lot of time in them. Especially the Crown Tundra was an awesome DLC that had a ton of content.

With this first DLC of Scarlet/Violet, you get all excited, but the quest is finished within an hour and then you practically done. There is nothing else to do in this DLC, other than some photographer in town that will give you something if you catch 150 different Pokemon in this new area (which I am not going to bother with).

Such a huge letdown and laziness effort in this DLC. It's like Gamefreak isn't even trying anymore.
I seriously hope there is more meat to the 2nd DLC, that will bring some real content.... otherwise it ends up as a real rip-off.

Did the performance ever get better from launch. I might get Scarlet on Black Friday if it doesn’t perform so terribly anymore.

Nope. They have not done anything to the performance of the game, even though they made a promise to do so.

Even worse is, the DLC area suffers from even more frame drops. Even if it's a very small map with less than impressive landscape.

Like I said in my previous post... it's like Gamefreak isn't even trying anymore. This first DLC is so tiny in content, boring and small map and yet it runs almost worse than the base game.

Plus their "fix" for the performance issues actually makes the game way more annoying to play. Pokemon pop in like a centimetre before you reach them, otherwise they are invisible, so I was constantly bumping into them by accident triggering battles. It reminded me in a bad way of the old days where you couldn't see the Pokemon on the map.

I agree with the general complaints regarding the performance, but I still tune out the moment someone uses "lazy" unironically to refer to the developers.

Why? Have you actually played the first DLC? It's the very definition of lazy. There is no way to excuse Gamefreak for this terrible DLC. The new zone is tiny and unimpressive. The single quest line is so ridiculously short and repetitive, where the vast majority of it, you just battling the same two persons over and over again. Finish it all within an hour, with nothing left to do other than the Photographer task for catching 150 unique pokemon.

The second part of the DLC better make up for it, with some serious amount of content (including a much more interesting new area), to justify the 35 bucks price tag!

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At this point, you actually have to wonder where Gamefreak has spend all their time on the past year?

They are not bothering to fix the performance issues....that is pretty much clear they not going to bother in doing (even though they promised to do so after the initial backlash), since the new DLC area runs even worse than the base game.

They didn't spend much time and resources in this first part of the DLC either, seeing how boring this new tiny area is, with hardly any content in it.

For me, it feels like Gamefreak has pretty much just given up on Scarlet/Violet and just have a very small team getting the DLC done and over with.

I seriously hope I will be proven wrong with the 2nd part of the DLC....but I just don't hold my hopes up.

If the 2nd part of the DLC is just as bad, I think I will be finally done with Pokemon.

Because it's not laziness, it's the higher-ups overworking the developers to hit unnecessarily restrictive deadlines.

I am not criticizing individual devs, but Gamefreak and TPC as a whole.

For example, Sword/Shield's first DLC actually dropped 3 months earlier in timeframe (June) and had way more content, much more interesting and fleshed out new area.
The 2nd Sword/Shield DLC dropped just a month after this first Scarlet/Violet DLC (October) and was even more impressive with even larger area and insane amount of content.

So there is a lot more going on here at Gamefreak and it all just doesn't make any sense.

We haven't gotten any major patches to address the performance problems plaguing this game, which they had promised and never mentioned a single peep about it anymore, since the initial backlash.
All we got in nearly a year so far, are a couple tiny patches that addressed some balance and other issues in PVP matches, since it directly affects their bottom line with their tournaments.

So it's not like their devs have been overworked working on Scarlet/Violet this past year, seeing what a disgrace of a first DLC they dropped on us last month, that released more than 3 months later in timeframe compared to the DLC's of Sword/Shield.

This far more feels like that Gamefreak has simply given up on Scarlet/Violet and moved their dev team on to their next games and just left a small token dev team to deliver the DLC and get it all over with.

Again, a complete disgrace on Gamefreak and yes it's management! in how they have handled Scarlet/Violet and now literally ripping us off with a complete farce of a DLC, which frankly can't be called a DLC for the 35 bucks we had to drop for it. Again, they better deliver with the second part or they will face another backlash!
Especially compared to the Sword/Shield DLC's, which were both excellent.

@Jeronan I think you have to take into account the relativistic factors at play with these kinds of comparisons. SwSh was a game mainly comprised of standard Pokemon routes (think those seen throughout the 3DS era) with one very big area in the centre. The DLC then added two more areas in the style of that one very big area and thus they feel a lot larger by comparison. SV's DLC meanwhile is basically a similar size to SwSh's Isle of Armor though with one very important difference: the base game of SV is much, much, MUCH bigger than SwSh's base game. Whether that increase in space is actually put to good use is up to personal opinion, but the point still stands that Kitakami, even if it and IoA share the same general size, feels much smaller as a result of coming off of a game that's whole selling point is how damn big it is (having the movement options of Ko/Miraidon compared to SwSh's slower speed doesn't help things either).

I enjoyed the Teal Mask overall myself, though definitely thought it was a bit of a step-down from what we got with SwSh's first DLC. Hoping the Indigo Disk can turn me around but yeah: it's not perfect to put it mildly.

@Jeronan All valid criticisms, but as with any other game development issue, laziness is very unlikely to be the explanation. I'd be shocked if the developers weren't trying their best to make the game as good as possible while being held back by factors beyond their control. I think most DLC these days starts development before the base game releases, but Scarlet and Violet's performance issues suggest they were still working on it right up to launch and didn't have time to optimise it more (not to mention that it came out the same year as Legends: Arceus, so the team must have been spread pretty thin while both were in development). Obviously this is just me speculating without knowing anything about the internal situation, but it seems more plausible to me than 'they've just given up'.

Personally I thought aside from the performance issues, the first DLC was pretty good. It wasn’t perfect, but the area that you got was actually pretty well designed in comparison to Paldea… which wasn’t well designed at all and had a ton of empty space. I liked the little story we got, even if it wasn’t some grand narrative. Isle of Armor was a larger letdown for me in comparison, with it being the same length and the story amounting to nothing more than raising a legendary. The story in this DLC is short, but it’s one half of a whole, along with having a grander character-based narrative which the SwSh DLC didn’t do.

Also yeah, have to agree that Gamefreak isn’t lazy. There’s actual development issues ongoing in the company, and you can tell the devs have ambition. SV at its core is a good pokemon title, but suffers because the higher-ups didn’t give them enough time to fully flesh the game out or fix it. The drive to make these games good was there, at least in some part. They tried a ton of new things that they never did before in SV (mostly in terms of pokemon and narrative), and I’d say the DLC continued that trend.

Sorry if you were disappointed, and if length means that much to you.

So it seems like it may not be worth buying unless the games have a very heavy discount on black friday.

What you mean the DLC? In an absolutely insane year that 2023 is, the first part of the SVs DLC is about as skippable of a title as you will find. It isn't ***** by any means, and you can knock it out in like an hour and change, but when there is so much out there you could be playing instead, why even waste one hour on this?

If you liked the base game, then I'd say get it. What a ton of people ignore in here is that the DLC is one story split into two parts. The first part of the DLC is out currently, but the second half is going to probably be where the actual meat is. I'd wait until the second part releases before grabbing it though. @blindsquarel

@Pizzamorg @VoidofLight
Nah, just the game in general.

I mean if you are interested in SV why wait? It is probably never going to go on a meaningful sale. Nintendo / Pokemon games don't. Personally I still think the best Pokemon game on Switch is Sword and Shield. This comes second for me.

@Pizzamorg I'm mostly just saying it's probably best to wait and see if the second part is any good, since at the current it seems like the DLC is back-loaded, where most of the "good" stuff is in the second part.

I agree with the DLC. I just think if Squirrel is asking about the main game, I dunno why they've waited a year, its still gonna be the same price as it was on launch lol