There’s no denying that the performance of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet was the main thing to let it down upon release. Even after a handful of updates, there’s no notable improvement to make the experience more enjoyable. Players are still facing the same performance issues as on launch day, which raises the question of what precisely has been targeted in an attempt to resolve the issues players have been facing.
However, in an update launching for the title toward the end of February, several features are being targeted to improve the performance once again, but this time there will be a more visible difference for players rather than the update slipping by relatively quietly without causing too much of a difference.
Instead, this time around, densely populated areas by both Pokemon and NPCs are having their populations reduced. So, wild spawns will be reduced mainly around cities and towns to combat some lag and stuttering players encounter when entering a new zone, which has come as a shock to a huge number of players.
However, one positive of the reduction of NPCs in towns and cities means you’ll no longer have a passer-by walk through your battle screen, which was amusing when the game initially launched but became jarring to the entire game experience. Instead, when entering a battle sequence, any surrounding NPCs will be removed from the screen, and those walking will be paused.
But one of the main concerns players have toward this upcoming cull of wild spawns is how it affects shiny hunting via mass outbreaks, especially those surrounding cities. Although there’s nothing within the patch notes to state that mass outbreaks will also have reduced numbers of Pokemon spawns are generally being reduced to help prevent on-screen action, it feels counterproductive to have mass outbreaks on the same scale as they have been. Although it won’t prevent being able to shiny hunt via this method should the crowd be reduced, it’ll make the process significantly longer.
Despite there being no way to guarantee this reduction will improve the performance of Scarlet and Violet, it’s the first visible change players will encounter to combat performance issues, so it’ll be interesting to see how severely wild spawns are reduced by, or whether another update can be expected to roll out in a few months to target once again the never-ending performance issues the game seems to face.
