Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have been, well, kind of a mess since their launch last year. The games were plagued with bugs and visual glitches on release, and while a major patch in February tidied up some of the worst of them, the problems have not abated. Just this weekend, for instance, a new special raid event was released and then abruptly pulled when users experienced game crashes and other issues trying to complete it.
The raid event was intended to spotlight Great Tusk and Iron Treads, and would have awarded players with the Pokemon in question as well as a number of item rewards. However, when the event went live on May 19th, players began reporting an additional, strange reward: an item just called “None.”
What’s more, getting this item crashed players’ games entirely, and reloading seems to have reverted players to their last save, meaning they didn’t even get to keep the legitimate rewards for finishing the raid. The whole thing was such a mess that Pokemon had to shut down the raid event entirely, an announcement that was (oddly) only made on the official Japanese Twitter account, and not disseminated officially via English-language channels at all. So if you logged in on Saturday or Sunday in the States and had no idea why this event wasn’t running, you probably weren’t alone.
Pokemon fans’ reactions can be summed up in the current top-voted reply to this news circulating on the Pokemon Scarlet and Violet subredditYeah,:
People are pretty fed up! Another top post expresses frustration at the poor communication from The Pokemon Company as to what exactly is going on with Scarlet and Violet’s myriad problems. They reference not just the raids, but the issues with Pokemon Home’s announcement of integration last week, followed immediately by an unexplained retraction. It’s just another issue added to the growing pile of problems that have been present since launch, including visual bugs, poor performance, lag in raids making them difficult to complete, occasional hard crashes, and in rare circumstances total save data loss.
For all these problems, we still gave Pokemon Scarlet and Violet a 6 in our review because of the enormous open world, excellent story, and fun new take on exploring a Pokemon world and capturing the monsters within it. Despite their issues, the games have sold over 18 million units, and DLC is on the way starting this fall and is currently available for pre-purchase, despite us having not seen any of its gameplay content yet.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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