Pokemon fans plan to forgo Scarlet and Violet DLC over enduring performance issues

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Not everyone is heading back to Paldea

Pokemon
(Image credit: Nintendo)

Pokemon Day 2023 was marked by the announcement of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC - but given the state that the base game launched in, several fans say they don't know that they'll dive back in.

In our Pokemon Scarlet and Violet review, Joel said that the games were "rough, both in terms of its performance and visual fidelity." He reported crashes, frequent lag and slowdown, constant pop-in, lengthy load times, and plenty of glitches, all on top of an open world not impressive enough to account for those issues. Performance analysis backed up that assessment, and Nintendo has been attempting (albeit slowly) to fix them with two performance-focused patches since launch.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be enough to be encouraging players back to the game. In the wake of the announcement, several fans took to social media to suggest that without a concrete fix in place for many of the problems plaguing the game, they're unlikely to venture toward the DLC

IGN reporter Rebekah Valentine pointed out that Nintendo didn't show off any gameplay footage for the DLC, noting that we're yet to see the hardware that will support the new content, or how it will relate to the 230 new Pokemon being introduced alongside it. All that comes as issues with performance and online functionality continue.

There's several months for those issues to be fixed, but it's hard to get excited about the new content sight-unseen, especially when those performance issues were a big part of why I bounced off Scarlet and Violet at launch.

Of course, I can see no issues whatsoever with Pokemon Sleep.

Ali Jones
Ali Jones
Managing Editor, News

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.