Trainers, the Teal Mask is off to an enjoyable start. A huge chunk of the community has already finished the DLC story and the Kitakami Dex. However, if there’s one thing Gamefreak certainly has NOT finished; it’s milking consumer money with a spotty product. This piece will illuminate that even after a year and a DLC, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: Teal Mask is still plagued with performance issues.
No doubt, Generation 9 is one of the most interesting Pokémon journies that players have had the joy of completing. However, not every player is able to look past the visual and performance issues for the sake of good story writing and gameplay.
Youtuber, SwitchForce, put out a video the day Teal Mask was released and cited that despite having a year to fix things and the fact that Kitakami is a SEPARATE map, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet still run horribly. In fact, some players are citing that the performance with the DLC added has worsened.
Teal Mask Pokemon DLC Has BAD PERFORMANCE BUGS in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC
Switch Force cited that the opening area itself has issues with frame rate drops and NPC pop-in. Not only that but during the festival at night, SwitchForce experienced the light from the decorations and stalls flickering in and out. This was extremely disappointing for him and others who experienced it.
The graphical and textural fidelity did not improve either. This is very alarming and disappointing to players as it has been nearly a year since Scarlet and Violet launched. In that entire time, Gamefreak failed to make any improvements, opting to prioritize fixing minor bugs and pushing out the DLC content.
Places on the main map also suffer from the DLC being added. One player has seen that when in a Union Circle, the frame rate in Cascarrafa suffered immensely. It had dropped to the level of being nigh unplayable. In addition, menus took longer to load and unload. One player even feared that their game softlocked on them. It is that bad.
This is all to say that this might point to a grim reality that Gamefreak, try as they might and say, have no real intention of even recalling current unpurchased copies to remake from the ground up. While some say this might be extreme if the game engine is really this busted and outdated, the only way to fix it is to remake it from the ground up.
Even then, Scarlet and Violet are the biggest-selling Pokémon Switch titles right now. The Pokémon Company is most likely going to push out Indigo Disk and move on. While many fans still look past the issues for the fun underneath, most consumers will not keep buying past this generation if there are no improvements.
This is the current state of the performance issues for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Teal Mask. While Pokémon’s main demographic is kids, adults still enjoy this franchise. Not only do the adults deserve better, their kids deserve better quality games to play than this. The Switch may currently be outdated, but with games like Tears of the Kingdom and Pikmin 4 out, Gamefreak has no excuse.
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