Fans aren’t sure if Pokemon Scarlet & Violet patch improves anything

Rumors are circulating that Nintendo may have been underplaying of yesterday Pokemon scarlet and violet Patch Announcement, with some suggesting that the worst framerate issues have been significantly improved. In our own very unscientific testing, it looks like this may be at least a little bit true.

Yesterday’s announcement of version 1.1.0 (the first patch that was extremely broken Pokemon game has received a supplement since its 1.0.1 day) was incredibly vague about what it actually did. For some reason, it only highlighted that it addressed the most trivial music issues, while everything else was grouped together as “miscellaneous bug fixes”. Which, as some sort of apology for messing up the game, made everyone assume the more important fixes were yet to come.

Nevertheless, the players report a great improvement in the gameplay. For example, check out the footage from GameXplain:

Others report longer render distances, improved shadows, fading light changes, and fade in instead of fade in for NPCs.

However, Nintendúo World’s side-by-side framerate test seems to show that each version outperforms the other in various places. Although I would argue that there are definitely some improvements to entering cities in 1.1.0:

Another luck? This side-by-side comparison by Reyvanlatino (who unfortunately plays both of their music at the same time, but only at different times) makes them look absolutely identical to me:

So yeah, it’s quite difficult to know exactly what’s happening here and why different people are recording such different experiences.

Continue reading: Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: The Kotaku Review

In my own very unscientific comparison, I played the same surface on my son’s original Switch with the 1.1.0 patch and on my OLED without the patch, and I found the patched version to be noticeably smoother. But my eyes are notorious idiots, and either way it was far from an enlightening experience.

It is So It’s hard to tell what your imagination compares to a real improvement, but Pokémon still popped up and still froze for half a second in random spots. (Nevertheless, I caught at least a few of them violet paradoxical monsters to trade for me later.) If things are improved, they definitely aren’t improved enough.

We asked Nintendo yesterday if they could be more specific about what was patched and didn’t even get an answer. So we asked again today, not least because it seems that way to them could have something to boast about here. We will of course update if they find time to reply. Though they may rely on people’s hopeful imaginations to fill in where they haven’t?

Meanwhile, come on Digital Foundrypull out your fingers and give us the definitive answers.