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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I haven't seen it brought up, but the lag in the Pokemon Boxes is so annoying. Flipping between pages is fine, but you have to wait for all the pokemon icons to load. So quick organizing doesn't happen because you'll go to drop a pokemon in a blank space only for an icon to load and swap the two pokemon.

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

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

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

I knew it was bad but oh my goodness I had no idea... It's completely incomprehensible to me how the people responsible for this mess got into their positions. Thank you Digital Foundry for this brutally honest tech review. You guys are awesome!

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.

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

I saw a NPC walking in the game while I was in a chat with another NPC, walked past us and respawns in the original starting location and starts to walk the same way again...

Could you imagine if Sony published a first party game for the ps5 that looked like this?

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.

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...

How the hell does violet's tiling look worse than my student work.

"Pokemon fans deserve better" They really don't, as they keep buying products like these in record numbers.

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.

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

this is how I imagine the Metaverse's graphics to look like

Given the scope and funding of gamefreak, it's amazing how genius sonority managed to knock it out of the park with their very first game, Pokemon colosseum, with no prior experience in development and funding from Nintendo's pocket change

I appreciate how brutal the ending was with calling them out.

Legends Arceus should’ve been the Holiday 2022 game while Scarlet/Violet got pushed to Holiday 2023. Honestly, it makes me curious about how Nintendo EPD or MonolithSoft would handle mainline Pokémon.

I’ve also noticed how many animations were changed from Arceus for no reason. One huge one being Pokemon being released from a Pokeball, where in Arceus you can see the model grow quickly with lighting effects and in SV the pokemon literally just pops in. Others being the players throw animations, in SV look really disconnected from the actual Pokeball’s trajectory. Not being able to spawn your entire party in the Overworld is another drawback. Other games like Sword and Shield somewhat try to fix pop in by adding a growth and particle effects when Pokemon spawn, again in SV they just pop. It just feels cheap.

15:53 Digital Foundry: Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are technical failures, embarassing artwork, terrible draw distance, poor performance, poor image quality and plague with bugs. Average Pokemon Fan: Perfect Game 10/10

BotW was made thank to the help of Monolith A team, the "Call this team if you want your game to work" of Nintendo.

No tech artist in their right mind would let something like this out the door unless they had a gun to their head. I would like to think that this is less a case of apathetic developers, but rather appalling mismanagement and scheduling.

And now Tears of the Kingdom has made the "Pokemon Scarlet/Violet was too ambitious for the Switch" talking point look even more ridiculous than it already did.

I can’t help but think of how a few hundred Pokémon fans, if given the same resources, tools, and time could pop out a better game than what we got…..

As a lifetime Pokemon fan, it broke my heart to cancel my pre-order, but watching this... it's so much WORSE than I imagined!

Fun Fact! Scarlet and Violet's differences are based on a flag check (like most, if not all of them are), you can change 2 lines of code and effectively run the other version with the only real glaring issue being that the name of your mount legendary won't change (your Miradon will now be a Koraidon named "Miradon" and vice versa), so its not a matter of if Scarlet should run like Violet. *It will.*

Considering the fact that Game Freak took 20 years to acknowledge the mere existence of a right analog stick, I can conclude that they haven’t updated their Dev Kits since the time they were still competing with the PSP.

What's really sad about this is that the devs made an excuse of not including every Pokémon (and Mega Evolutions) since Sword and Shield for focusing on the graphics, and this is the piece of shit that we all get. And to make matters even worse, they're getting money from doing a terrible job because the games have been selling a lot, but in my opinion they deserve poor sales. I might as well get a copy of Pokémon Y for my Nintendo 3DS (in order to preserve my old save in Pokémon X) instead of getting one of those bad looking games, and re-live my childhood memories. I'm starting to lose faith in the future of Pokémon.

Gamefreak still doesn’t know how to make a 3D game after all these years and their refusal to expand the staff hurts them. But the worst part is that people still buy these games so nothing will change until they don’t.

Man, I actually feel kind of bad for chewing out Arceus when it came out now that we have the utterly technically incompetent Scarlet/Violet: Arceus was technically subpar but this is outright shameful; it's embarrassing that this genuinely looks and runs **far** worse than a GameCube title.

Great tech review, I especially like the comparison with other Switch titles and appreciate your feelings on “so what’s going on here”.

A lot they were trying to do in Scarlet/Violet they already did in Arceus very well so I was really confused when stuff like aiming your pokeball were removed when it made it actually fun catching wild Pokémon. I’m trying to play Violet but there’s so much going wrong with it that doesn’t make it interesting for me to keep playing it. Not just performance but gameplay and story that just keeps reminding me of past Pokémon games that look and play better. When I was 3 hours in Violet, as I caught a wild shiny hoppip by shear luck while figuring out where I was, I was thinking about playing Sword/Shield again feeling like it being a better experience than I was having right in front of me in Violet.

The environment textures and geometry almost make this look like a long lost N64 title, recently revived with GC/PS2 level character models.

That BOTW comparison was Brutal!

I was in Japan when the game dropped - the queues in shops like Yodabashi and the Pokémon Centre in Osaka were insane! Little did people know what they were buying into.

As someone who's been with Pokemon my entire life, I'm deeply saddened with the direction the franchise is going. Pokemon Games used to be the prime example of creativity, good use of limited hardware, polish, and re-using a formula in a way that still makes it fun. Recently I gifted a friend of mine Alpha Sapphire (he hasn't played any Pokemon games since Platinum), he's loving the game and I told him ''That's the last true set of Pokemon games they made''. I don't mind a change of pace, I'm all for 3D/open world/exploring boundaries but when we get a mainline Pokemon game that looks and feels like ''Life of Black Tiger'' that's where I draw the line.

I didn’t realize how bad the graphics were until these side-by-side comparisons. This makes me want to cry…

As a pokemon fan I agree with most of the video, but I don't think I agree with that we deserve better part. Pokemon's current situation clearly shows how we as a community deserve what we get. Because we never make it clear that unless gamefreak slows down the one game per year pace and bring more quality game we are not going to buy it. Now they can release 3 pokemon games in two years and eveyone of them get a commercial succuss so they will never change that.

Can't believe it's 2022, and there's still a game that tied the animations to the frame rate. EDIT: holy hell the texture repeats... At least they could used one that has seamless seams.

The environmental textures are just insulting. Everything looks like plastic, they’re blurry even for the Switch, and the tiling is unbelievable. It baffles me how this came out the door. The level of incompetency from such a successful franchise is astounding. Unfortunately it’s Pokemon and it’ll sell well, so there’s no incentive to make things better.

This technical overview is extremely light-handed and honestly far more fair than the game deserves. And yet it's *still* utterly damning.

Digital Foundry tend to be lenient when it comes to Switch games, the fact that they took a dump on it for 16 minutes straight is concerning. Game Freak might actually in trouble by next gen. My best hope is that gen 9 will last 4 years instead of three and the next console will at least let the games have stable frame rate.

That fact the scarlet/violet continues to be the best selling Pokémon or fasting selling will be why this will never change

Fantastic review. I'm someone that genuinely isn't bothered by bad graphics (while I do praise good graphics), but Violet made me realize that I do actually have a standard for how bad a Pokemon game can look. A shame, because underneath all of this is probably my favorite Pokemon game on the Switch, but the bad performance and visuals actually take a lot of points away from the game.

I dont know why it was so Theraputic to listen to Pokemon S/V being thrashed on for 16 minutes straight

0:42 I'd never seen Legends Arceus and SV compared side by side, talk about an absolute downgrade in pretty much every way (and I was only like warm on legends at best, so SV really shit the bed in pretty much every sense in my books)

The landscape design, with the detailing and texture resolution (or lack thereof), reminds me of the stuff I made in that one train simulator's map editor when I was a kid. You know, going to town with the "elevate terrain" brush to make _cough_ mountains, and brushing flat repeated rock textures on the side?

09:48 What a difference! Violet and Scarlet are half-baked.

Gamefreak really doing their best to make the worst experience ever

I think perhaps the issue here, since it does appear they've used several techniques to attempt to get back performance, is that their engine just isn't up-to-snuff. Considering just how well BOTW has been able to perform even in equally demanding scenes (such as Hyrule Caslte outside and Kokiri Forest), it seems a much lower level fix is required. After all, any engine can use the surface level tricks that Pokemon S&V are using here. But sometimes, it's just that the engine itself isn't efficient enough (either through design pattern or through direct hardware utilization strategies) to make it work. It was noticeable in BOTW that some of the same tricks were used as here, but in that game it appears that they can/are used much more sparingly because the background engine can handle much more. Since it appears they're using their own new in-house engine it seems that it's just not anywhere near ready to deal with what they were trying to do with it (at least not on the Switch).

Everyone's talking about the horrible textures and overall bad performance, but in reality, it wouldn't even matter if the game LOOKED good, because there's nothing to look at. The world is just, empty. There is NOTHING of interest to do. There is nothing that makes any one borin beach different from the other boring beaches. Every bland dirt path is just that. Another dirt path. There's no landmarks that give the world any personality. Even the older games had some areas that set them apart. Graveyards, abandoned ruins, mossy caves, old factories, stuff like that. They had a hell of a lot personality and identity, and I don't even like those games all that much!

The most shocking thing about these games is there's no reason why it shouldn't be running at 60 FPS with how low quality everything is. It runs and looks like an early PS2 game.

It's amazing how far you can push the GameCube . Love Digital Foundry Retro ;)

Some of those mountains in Scarlet/Violet look like ones I made in RPG Maker 3 on the PS2. When I was twelve.

This is a very well done video review! It covered all the topics I was thinking about! Subscribed.

A game made by the highest grossing media franchise ever. Would like to hear what kind of pressure GameFreak were under from The Pokémon Company over this last year or two. Doubt we’ll ever know the details.

Behold, the flagship product for the #1 media franchise on the planet.

It’s crazy the games are literally not complete comparing to Arceaus. Really hope a patch comes in to fix the performance.

On the plus side, cant make fun of the trees if we cant see them. I've had a shadow/light glitch where when I would select a combat move the shadow would go away and I'd see the sun but then it would come back after I selected the attack.

You won’t believe how excited I’m for the tech review of this game from DF lol

That's funny. When I first saw that windmill I jokingly said it was running at 3 fps. It was actually running at 3 fps. I wonder if they are gonna get around to finish this game. With such a tight development cycle it doesn't seem they will have the time. The day 1 patch was like 4gb when the game was like 6.6gb. That says a lot about the garbage they sent out to be sold.

This is the most honest video about these games. No on has highlighted the problems in this depth. Thank you.

Always appreciate the work you do. It's fascinating to see the issues in context. Definitely not as simple as "game unfinished" or "too big for Switch". I'd love to be able to see what went on during development that caused this.

You know it’s extremely flawed when Arceus visuals are praised highly when compared

This game looks like it was about 10 months away from release but then some exec said "Fuck it! Release it NOWWWW!!!"

No one should buy pokemon games anymore until they are actually good.

They should've called these games Pokémon Beta and Pokémon Alpha. Actually i wouldn't be surprised it they actually do that on future games.

Nice to see gamfreak setting the bar again

The only franchise that could get away with this because the fans would buy it anyway

World of Warcraft Vanilla from the year 2004 looks better.

Reminder that Breath of the Wild is a Wii U game.

I already didn't buy this game because of performance, but seeing you go over everything is still nice

I don’t normally comment on DF videos. Damn not holding back at all, completely deserving criticism. I know Nintendo doesn’t develop these games but the state of this is embarrassing for the company. This really does make Legends look like a masterpiece (and I was a bit underwhelmed by that too).

The problem is they keep pumping them out because the consumer keeps buying them. At this point one of their games is going to have to flop hard before things get any better for the pokemon series.

It's forgivable to have a game that looks bad but runs great. It's harder to forgive a game that looks great but runs bad. To look bad AND to run bad is as horrible as it is embarrassing.

The fact that Xenoblade 3 released a few months ago and looks like an entire generation ahead is crazy. GameFreak clearly doesn't have the time, but I fear they may also not have the technical competence to be releasing games at a modern standard of quality. SV is the headlining product of the biggest media franchise in the world, which makes it even more insane that their development studio is so bad.

I just got to Casseroya Lake and it was genuinely running in slow motion. I could barely even navigate the menu. IT WAS SO BAD. Man it's so frustrating cos there's definitely a great game in here. But the performance is the worst I've personally experienced in a game, not even close. I just can't get over it. Just when I think I've seen the worse of it, the next area runs even worse. The game runs so bad it's got me thinking it was made for the rumoured Switch Pro before it got cancelled or something.

Do pokemon fans deserve better when they clearly don't want better?

This is probably the most fair break down of things I've seen. It's troubling since we have seen better examples of technical prowess on the Switch even from the same company. I think it's high time Game Freak is given additional technical support from another studio or Nintendo pulls another Colosseum and hands the reigns of the franchise to someone else for a spin. My only hope is that mods can save this because I'm a little doubtful that GF will actually patch it.

this is probably the tech review i was looking for out of all the games that came out this year

All of that. Another thing that bugged me was the color of the grass in „normal“ terrain. Why did they choose to make it the same unnatural green as playdough?

This game explores new frontiers for Pokémon in some really interesting ways. Closer to true open world progression, with multiple main quest paths, online play with friends, and a new, more animated character art style. The ideas and concepts are THERE. Both arceus and S/V show gamefreak is not lacking in creative new ideas for the series. Which makes it that much more painful to see them release this game in a practically pre alpha state. Multiple departments must’ve been under HEAVY crunch. From texture and environment design to actual code and so much more. Man, if only they had the freedom to delay these games until they were ready, like BOTW and now tears of the kingdom. They could create games that aren’t just cash cows in the short term, but memorable, nostalgic experiences in the long term. Honestly hoping for continued massive backlash and criticism for the games. Fingers crossed they pull a cyberpunk 2077 lmao

I wished they just pushed back Pokémon Arceus I didn't think even that looked the greatest, but it clear they pushed this game out Violet and Scarlet out door quickly for the holidays. They could have had a more polished Arceus out for the holidays, but you know money. I'm more impressed by the visuals of the gamecube pokemon games than this.

Even the boxes take a few seconds to load the pokemon sprites on each one, and another few seconds to load the pokemon 3D model of the pokemon you have selected

I know it probably wouldn't sell as well but I'd be perfectly fine with Game Freak going back to 2.5D/sprites because that's what they know how to do well, Heart Gold and Soul Silver look amazing IMO and I've noticed for 3D games by other devs look much better like Pokken Tournament, Battle Revolution, Let's Go Pikachu/Evee and New Pokemon Snap.

8:13-13:36 *EXACTLY!*

I hope people continue to bring this Game up 16 Years from now like they do with Sonic 06

Unbelievable to me that anyone would spend $60 on this let alone $120 for the double pack. It's shocking how low peoples' standards are if they're allowing this to happen.