Nintendo apologises for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet performance and pledges improvements

Nintendo has apologised for performance issues in its hit-selling Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and pledged to make improvements to the games.

On Wednesday, the company detailed the next update coming to the games and said it was taking player feedback “seriously”.

The version 1.1.0 update will release later on Thursday and bring with it the first season of Ranked Battles, one of the game’s competitive modes.

It will also fix an issue where certain music tracks weren’t playing correctly during specific battles, according to Nintendo.

In a message from the platform holder, it apologised for performance issues that players have encountered, saying that it will “take the feedback from players seriously and [is] working on improvements to the games.”

It said: “We are aware that players may encounter issues that affect the games’ performance. Our goal is always to give players a positive experience with our games, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

“We take the feedback from players seriously and are working on improvements to the games.”

The full patch notes for the version 1.1.0 update are as follows:

Despite the much-criticised state of the games at launch, Scarlet and Violet have been huge hits for their creators.

Shortly after their release last month, Nintendo announced they’d reached “the highest global sales level for any software on any Nintendo platform within the first three days”, with 10 million units sold in its first 72 hours worldwide.

In VGC’s Pokémon Scarlet and Violet review, we said the games were the most feature-rich Pokémon titles in years but suffered from technical issues.

Further reading

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet walkthrough, tips, and Pokemon locations

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet tips, evolution methods and all class answers

“The huge expansion and changes to the single player campaign are great, the size of the world and the joy of exploration are the best in the series, and the new Pokemon and battle mechanics introduced all sing,” we wrote.

“However, it’s just impossible to shake the thought of how much better the game would feel if it was on more powerful hardware, or simply ran acceptably on Switch.”