Insider Shares Good News For Pokemon Fans Who Criticized Scarlet and Violet

gamerant.com:

The public criticism aimed at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet will influence future games in the franchise, an industry insider has said. This claim is likely to be welcome news for the vocal section of the fans who repeatedly expressed skepticism about whether their criticism of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet has been heard.

The past several generations of Pokemon games widened the gap between their sales success and long-time fan perception. Namely, while the games themselves continue to enjoy strong commercial momentum, with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet selling around 23 million copies alone as of summer 2023, the most vocal subset of the fandom driving the online buzz surrounding the series is no longer unilaterally infatuated with Game Freak's RPGs.

Although that demographic isn't lacking in pessimists who believe their efforts to point out flaws with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are an exercise in futility, that isn't necessarily the case, according to VGC's Andy Robinson. Taking to Twitter, the industry insider recently said that the response to the 2022 games is going to inform the development of the future series entries because The Pokemon Company has taken it «seriously.»

What that actually means remains to be seen, as not even Robinson himself appears to be privy to that information. One obvious area of improvement for the (mainline) series concerns its performance on Nintendo hardware, which has gotten progressively worse ever since Game Freak started developing for the Switch. But while a lot has been said about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's bugs and performance problems, that is far from the only issue that portions of the fandom had with these games.

E.g., many other long-time players have repeatedly criticized the barebones nature of the game's environments, arguing that the shift to open-world gameplay wasn't worth it if it meant sticking them into largely empty areas with nothing to do but catch pocket monsters, something that they were already able to accomplish