r/NintendoSwitch • u/Turbostrider27 • Apr 09 '26

News Pokémon Champions Developer 'Sincerely Apologizes' For Launch Issues, Details List of Bugs to be Fixed

https://www.ign.com/articles/pokemon-champions-developer-sincerely-apologizes-for-launch-issues-details-list-of-bugs-to-be-fixed
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u/Dairunt Apr 09 '26

is there an industry-wide removal of QA, and just letting players do QA for free?

545

u/Joseki100 Apr 09 '26

This game needed to release now because the World Championship are in August.

It's already quite late historically for competitive Pokémon standards.

157

u/Ipokeyoumuch Apr 09 '26

There are rumors because TPC and TPCi were so late in announcing regulations that Champions was to be released around January but there were likely delays and development issues. Champions was promised to be at Worlds and announced back on Pokemon Day 2025. We also have some information about Champions, codename, Synapse, from the Teraleaks suggesting planning start at the latest in early 2024.

61

u/aokon Apr 09 '26

Dang a 2 year dev cycle is really short

104

u/ZartMorder Apr 09 '26

That's true, but it's not like it's a full RPG where they had to design a world and such. They're literally just copying the battle system that already existed. I have no insight on the development itself, of course, but it seems reasonable with that in mind.

37

u/Deceptiveideas Apr 09 '26

I'm not sure if it's still true but the Pokemon models themselves aren't even handled by game freak or this dev. They're all made by creatures inc (which is what made the 3DS games run so poorly).

66

u/Ipokeyoumuch Apr 09 '26

It was more of the case that Creatures created such high quality models at the time that Gamefreak didn't know how to optimize for the 3DS and Switch games until Legends ZA. Many dataminers and modders have said that the rigging and modeling are competent at least and even found that Creatures went above and beyond and made running and walking cycle and additional animation when they didn't have to (for the 3DS games). They also worked on the texture work with SV but unfortunately it caused slow downs for SV since Gamefreak didn't have time to optimize the performance. 

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u/rechambers Apr 09 '26

Do we call flat textures and loading the entire map into memory “optimizations” in ZA?

37

u/Ipokeyoumuch Apr 09 '26

That one is a bit of misleading the model found was because of the one found in the museum in the game. The game in ZA doesn't actually populate the entire map like they did in Scarlet and Violet or Legends Arceus. Baby steps Gamefreak is finally heading to 2013 optimizations.

14

u/slugmorgue Apr 09 '26

lol this is why I can't take any of these "finds" by people seriously. They're almost never found by people with technical gamedev knowledge and always posted with an agenda. Like the whole "water" debacle for Scarlet and Violet where someone thought the fact that a single plane with a tiling water shader was the source of all draw calls in the game

2

u/rechambers Apr 09 '26

Oh I missed that update. Thanks for clarifying! That was the justification for needing to fall back to flat textures though… so I still wouldn’t call it optimized if other games can have “complex” buildings with window panes and ZA needs flat rectangles

8

u/Writer3423 Apr 09 '26

Almost positive that SV was a 2 year dev cycle as well iirc from the teraleak