The newly released entries into the beloved Pokémon franchise, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have been mired by numerous bugs and glitches since launch.
Both games launched globally on November 18, 2022 and have managed to sell around 10 million units in the first three days alone. This includes physical and digital copies.
This has set the record for the highest global sales level for any Nintendo software on any Nintendo platform.
This new sales record beats the previous game in the Pokémon franchise, Pokémon Sword and Shield. The former games sold around 6 million units in its first week, making it the fastest selling Switch title at the time.
However, as mentioned before, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have been mired with various large and small technical issues since launch.
At launch, some of these issues included frame rate issues, character models clipping into walls, camera clipping behind walls, significant amount of lag, and hard crashes of the game. Note that these issues were present in the game after the day one patch.
Since then, two major areas of concern have been pointed out by players and fans. The first area of concern is the performance of online Tera Raids. The second area of concern is the Battle Stadium.
In the case of Tera Raids, these are optional raids where you get to fight Pokémon that are significantly stronger than the norm.
If you are a solo player, you can bring in 3 other NPCs to help. But if you are a co-op player, you can fight this Pokémon with friends.
That being said… players have been reporting that these Tera Raids are “extremely broken.”
There have been reports of poor matchmaking, lag, long animations, unforgiving timers, and other bugs.
In the case of the Battle Stadium, the problem is related to coding. Specifically relating to random number generation (RNG).
The issue arises when fighting battles in the Battle Stadium. According to a tweet by Twitter user Anubis, the Battle Stadium is currently using the same RNG seed for every single battle.
This means that you could figure out which attacks would hit or miss based on which turn of the battle it is currently.
This prediction can be made to be perfectly accurate so you know exactly which moves will hit on which turns. As you can imagine, this throws a bit of a wrench in the entire Battle Stadium.
For instance, it has been discovered that moves with less than 91% accuracy will always miss on the first turn of a Battle Stadium battle.
A Reddit user named Lord-Trolldemort used Frost Breath (a move with 90% accuracy) in the first turn of a Battle Stadium battle and missed 14 times in a row. Without this quirk of the RNG, the chances of missing a 90% guaranteed hit is around 1 in 100 trillion.
This strange glitch has effectively kneecapped the entire mode. This problem is made that much worse due to the fact that the other modes of the game are not affected by this glitch. Pokémon battles with trainers, gym leaders, or against wild Pokémon manage to have RNG without issues.
Despite all this, Pokémon Scarlet currently has a Metacritic Metascore of 76 with a User Score of 2.9, while Pokémon Violet currently has a Metacritic Metascore of 76 with a User Score of 3.4.
What Nintendo, Game Freak, and the Pokémon Company plan to do about these glaring issues in their new game remains to be seen.
Emmen Gaming 