Even if we overlook the limited launch Pokémon, the swathe of bugs, and the strange monetisation, Pokémon Champions still had more issues up its sleeve — talk about a dramatic launch, eh?
Those playing in Docked Mode on Switch 2 might have noticed that the latest battler looked... a bit naff. Up on the TV, the game still doesn't hit the promised 4K resolution, with the stretched image looking all the worse as a consequence. Thankfully, there is a fix, but it relies on (you guessed it) another bug.
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As spotted by Serebii's Joe Merrick, you can encourage Champions to improve its docked resolution by starting the game up on the big screen, removing your Switch 2 from the dock, and then reinserting it again. Just like that, the game gets the kick up the backside it needs and pushes things up to a native 3840x2160p. Hardly the neatest solution, but hey, whatever works!
Matthew Reynolds over at One More Catch reached out to Digital Foundry's Tom Morgan for a comment on this bug and received the following:
It's true, Pokemon Champions runs natively at 1920x1080 when booting Switch 2 in docked mode. All signs point to a bug that has the game run in a 'portable state' even when connected to a TV. The problem is made more egregious by the lack of aliasing treatment to the image overall - meaning its rough, jagged edges are scaled from 1080p to 4K to disastrous results. The fix works well, of course - lifting and re-docking your Switch 2 gives the system the necessary trigger to flip to native 3840x2160 - but still it's an issue that needs attending to.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, this was apparently the first time that Tom had seen such a quirk from the Unity Engine, though he recalled that PAYDAY 2 had a similar, but opposite, issue on its Switch 2 launch, where portable play was accidentally boosted up to docked resolution.
It's a slight resolution bump, admittedly, but we've included One More Catch's before and after Pokémon Champions footage at the bottom of this article, so you can see the game as it was meant to be played.
The Champions devs have already announced that they are working on the game's first bug-squashing patch, though the resolution quirk was not one of the issues they specifically mentioned they are targeting. We'll wait and see what other tweaks come to Champions in the coming months because, at launch, it has a long way to go.