Author: Game Infliction

Nintendo has shared what changes are coming in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s long awaited February update but still hasn’t revealed an exact release date.

The patch, which includes several bug fixes alongside a handful of quality of life improvements, has been long anticipated by fans after Pokémon Scarlet and Violet launched in a state Nintendo itself was forced to apologise for.

Most of the new quality of life changes, as outlined on Nintendo’s website, revolve around Pokémon Boxes, with Nintendo making aiming to make it a little bit easier to manage the status of Pokémon all in one place.

From the Pokémon summary screen, players will now be able to change the nickname, markings, held item, and mark or Ribbon-related titles, reorder moves, have the Pokémon remember or forget moves, and use TMs.

The patch also makes it easier to swap out held items and move Pokémon around in large quantities, and it will now be easier to tell which Pokémon are in Battle Teams.

As for bug fixes, which are perhaps of a bigger concern to the near 20 million people who’ve bought Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, Nintendo is addressing several issues across different categories including Tera Raids and Battles.

A Tera Pokémon’s health not being accurately reflected in the HP bar, connectivity issues, National Dex Pokémon showing up in the Paldea Pokédex, random items appearing unintentionally in the world, and more (viewable in the full notes below) will all be addressed.

Nintendo also confirmed it would continue to update Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and address further issues in the future, but gave no information regarding when the next update would arrive.

This February update will be just the second released for the games despite several issues being reported following their launch. These included a broken PvE experience in the endgame, a rigged Battle Stadium, duplication glitches, a bizarre method of running at double speed, and more.

The poor performance was also a major factor in our 6/10 review, as IGN said: “The open-world gameplay of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a brilliant direction for the future of the franchise, but this promising shift is sabotaged by the numerous ways in which Scarlet and Violet feel deeply unfinished.”

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Ver. 1.2.0 Patch Notes

Feature Adjustments

• Additional functionality will be added for Pokémon Boxes:
  • From a Pokémon’s summary, players will be able to change the Pokémon’s nickname, markings, held item, and mark- or Ribbon-related titles, as well as being able to reorder moves, have the Pokémon remember moves, have the Pokémon forget moves and use TMs.
  • Players will be able to swap out held items by pressing the Y Button when in the Held Items view.
  • Players will be able to select All Boxes while moving Pokémon or items in the Party and Boxes view and Held Items view.
  • When in the Battle Team view, Pokémon in your Boxes that are assigned to a Battle Team will now have their icons displayed in a darker hue if those Pokémon are members of the Battle Team that is currently being displayed.
• The News screen will be displayed when you connect to the internet from the main menu, just as it is when connecting to the internet from the Poké Portal.

Bug Fixes

Tera Raid Battles

• A bug that can prevent an opposing Tera Pokémon’s HP gauge from properly reflecting damage done by certain moves (such as Play Rough) or certain status conditions may occur in Tera Raid Battles, resulting in the Tera Pokémon’s HP gauge fluctuating in an unusual manner. This will be fixed.
• A bug that causes all Pokémon on your side to faint at once despite their HP gauges indicating that they still have HP may occur in black crystal Tera Raid Battles against Pokémon with the Mightiest Mark. This will be fixed.
• A bug that can temporarily prevent a player from entering any input into the game may occur if a Tera Pokémon takes certain actions while the player is choosing the target of their move. This will be fixed.
• A bug that causes a communication error may occur when someone connecting to a Tera Raid Battle sees a different Pokémon displayed on their screen than what the host sees. This will be fixed.
• A bug may occur that causes players joining a Tera Raid Battle from the Tera Raid Battles search screen to be brought to a Tera Raid Battle against a Pokémon different from the one they saw displayed. This will be fixed.
• A bug that causes Tera Raid Battle crystals to not appear for a set amount of time may occur under certain circumstances. This will be fixed.

Battles

• Type matchups against Pokémon that have fainted will no longer appear when selecting a move or target during Double Battles.
• A Zoroark that has Terastallized and is disguised as another Pokémon via its Illusion Ability can be identified as a Zoroark by using the Check Target option. This is a bug and will be fixed.
• When a Zoroark has Terastallized and is disguised as another Pokémon via its Illusion Ability, the type matchups of moves are displayed based on the type of the Pokémon that Zoroark is disguised as, rather than Zoroark’s Tera Type. This is a bug and will be fixed.
• The stats of a Dondozo with a Tatsugiri in its mouth will increase when Dondozo uses Order Up, even when the move should have been negated (for example, by an opponent using Protect). This is a bug and will be fixed.
• If a Pokémon Terastallizes after using Destiny Bond and then faints, the effects of Destiny Bond will fail to activate. This is a bug and will be fixed.

Other

• We will address an issue that can cause the game to forcibly close at certain locations. As a result of this fix, there may be a reduction of Pokémon and people displayed in certain towns or in the wild.
• When a Pokémon that is not a part of the Paldea Pokédex is obtained through a Link Trade, it is displayed as being registered to the Paldea Pokédex. This is a bug and will be fixed.
• Certain actions can cause the main character’s expressions to not change until the game is closed and reopened. This will be fixed.
• A bug occurred for some players after Ranked Battles Season 1, wherein visiting the Ranked Battles screen immediately after the season’s results had been calculated caused a communication error after the players received their rewards. Following this error, players were unable to participate in any further Ranked Battles. This will be fixed.
• If a player has created several Battle Teams but does not use the Battle Team in the first slot for their Ranked Battles, they may not receive the Master Rank Ribbon after winning Ranked Battles in the Master Ball Tier. This will be fixed.
• When a Pokémon you caught comes back to you from another player through Link Trade, it may not listen to your commands in accordance with what is written in the profile app (“Pokémon caught at Lv. XX or below will listen to your commands”). This will be fixed.
• A bug is preventing the Pokédex from displaying additional entries (such as entries for Shiny Pokémon or Pokémon that were received through Surprise Trade from players that play in a different language) for Pokémon species that were already registered in the Pokédex. This will be fixed.
• Objects such as Poké Balls may be displayed in certain locations of the field unintentionally. This will be fixed.
• Passersby will no longer be displayed during certain battles that take place in towns during the main story.
• Other select bug fixes will be implemented.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Cardy’s been lost in other worlds with the PlayStation VR2. He’ll tell you all about his time with Horizon Call of the Mountain before Matt and Alex join in to talk about HBO’s The Last of Us now we’ve passed the halfway point. They then share some of their favourite post-apocalyptic games, movies, TV shows, and books.

Got a game for us to play, or just want to tell us the weirdest thing you’ve eaten for breakfast? Drop us an email: ign_ukfeedback@ign.com.

IGN UK Podcast 684: Horizon Call of the Weetabix

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• IGN UK Podcast 681: Shadow Drop It Like It’s Hot
• IGN UK Podcast #680: Dead Space and Other Games We Want Remade
• IGN UK Podcast 679: The Last of Us is Very Good

After spending about 10 hours in the comprehensive Enhanced Edition of Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge on a shiny new PlayStation VR2, going back to the old Meta Quest 2 version felt a lot like falling up a flight of stairs backward in slow motion. With the delightful and inarguably essential Last Call DLC in addition to a bevy of improvements that make use of every last one of the new headset’s haptic bells and whistles, plus the movie-like color depth, I’ve found the droids I was looking for. Be warned, though, that you’ll have to stick around beyond the first three hours of the middling original campaign and its genuinely bad writing, but after that it picks up the pace and puts on a real Star Wars show.

Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge begins on a subdued note. Upon waking up in the quarters of a cargo ship, you step into the role of a nameless, voiceless droid mechanic who also happens to smuggle illicit goods as a side hustle. Its early moments have you stumbling aboard the ship while characters talk at you through your transmitter. But at least you get a nice scenic shot of interstellar travel from your ship’s observatory before things go to the dark side.

A crash-landing puts you on the planetary surface of Batuu, a backwater world marked by a podunk settlement you might recognize as the setting of the Star Wars-themed section of Disney’s real-life theme parks. Here you meet Seezelslak, the cantina’s sole proprietor, and Mubo – a droid repair shop owner who’s your main smuggling client. They come across as exasperatingly cheesy at first, with overtly obnoxious dialogue lines that seem like they were pulled directly out of The Phantom Menace – and you can’t skip any of it. The droid shop and the cantina are treated as Galaxy’s Edge’s two central hub areas, though it’s disappointing you can’t explore any more of the settlement itself.

From the opening, there are plenty of chances to live out your Star Wars fantasies with fully modeled blasters, satisfying shotguns, throwable lightsabers, rocket launchers, and obscure weapons that can be comfortably dual-wielded or two-handed if you wish. They all look lifelike up close, almost as if you’re holding authentic Star Wars props. The fleshed-out arsenal feels especially punchy due to the haptic feedback and trigger resistance of the Sense controllers, and each blast can repel your trigger finger with an impressive level of force. The All-kit multi-tool makes otherwise trivial interactions like solving basic puzzles to open a door or a treasure chest feel more like you’re a kid playing with a toy that makes a whirring noise or shoots fire or sparks.

If you’re wondering if you ever get to play as a Jedi: you do! But that chapter is more of a side adventure than the main course. Most of your time is spent blasting your way through Batuu’s visually impressive but linear and straightforward levels, the first few of which are true offenders in the category of tutorial-ing you to death. They are all almost entirely made up of a series of hallways with the occasional nook containing a randomly generated treasure chest or audio log – almost like Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s world. It helps make Galaxy’s Edge’s content feel more substantial that you can return to these levels any time you’d like to farm the same respawning enemies for loot, and there’s a quest journal with enough space for a few materially rewarding albeit monotonous side quests.

It’s only when you get to the Last Call DLC content, which seamlessly expands the original three-hour story into a 10-hour arc, that the characters do eventually become enjoyable to spend time with. Seezelslak becomes the star of the show, with a head full of stories told so intricately you’d think you were living them for yourself. In fact, you actually do get to: you play through three short but much more satisfying chapters wherein you step into the shoes of a Jedi and the assassin droid IG-88 from Empire Strikes Back. These new chapters arrive exactly when they need to, clearing the palette and widening the story stakes between quests as you move toward Galaxy’s Edge’s legitimately grand finale mission.

You move around the world by tilting your left thumbstick and teleporting by pushing your right thumbstick inward and pointing at your destination. This is pretty standard fare for anyone who’s used a Quest 2 or other roomscale-style VR headset, but is still a big step up for anyone whose primary VR experience is with the original PSVR’s directionless Move controllers. It’s disappointing that you can’t move around while holding the crouch button, but of course this is VR so you can still just crouch in real life and move. Also, pressing the O button activates your jetpack. It didn’t feel great at first, and needs a mid-game upgrade before you can move around up there instead of just hovering, but after that smoothly gliding around the field of battle is pretty cool when I wasn’t awkwardly running into invisible boundaries.

Regardless, it’s great fun to face off against roving bands of pirates, mercenaries, battle droids, vicious local fauna, and the First Order itself. Their AI isn’t all that smart, but unlike when I originally played on the Quest 2, the PS VR2 is able to render enemies at a distance without obscuring too much detail, making it a lot more fun to pick bad guys off at range. Standoffs are tense because it only takes a few well-placed shots to kill you or anyone else, but combat is balanced enough to remain sufficiently entertaining in the face of danger. It helps that you can summon up to three droid allies to follow you around and fight on your side, making battles feel winnable even when you’re outnumbered and outgunned on all sides – but repairing them with your multitool can be a pain.

Speaking of tools at your disposal, there’s also a neat scanner activated by a button on your left wrist that lets you catalog points of interest into a codex, and the convenient drag-and-drop inventory system lets you place loot directly into a pouch for easy management. Healing yourself is as simple as positioning a bacta canister in front of your face and pressing the trigger to spray it, and it feels natural to pull out your pouch, reach into your inventory, and throw floating droids or grenades into the fray of battle.

And it all sounds terrific. Especially if you’re using 3D audio, it’s a treat to hear the iconic Star Wars blaster noises ricochet through the environment in all directions. Mixed with a riveting original soundtrack and bursts of headset vibration simulating blaster bolts whizzing past my face and explosions erupting in my vicinity, I found myself fully transported into the Star Wars universe. The only major cracks in the illusion were during the occasional glitch, like when a weapon fell through the geometry, not to mention: most of the objects you interact with aren’t fully physics-simulated so they don’t respond to all your movements.

I don’t think anyone would argue the idea that a Jedi makes for a pretty badass playable video game protagonist. They’ve got a lightsaber, force powers, they’re quick, and can jump really high. All great innate attributes for an action game set in the Star Wars universe. But one challenge about having a Jedi main character is that they’re only really known to use lightsabers. That presents a bit of an issue, as most good action game heroes have multiple weapons to help keep combat fresh over the course of the game. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order found a solution to this problem by giving Cal two different lightsaber stances, each with their own combat focus and moveset, and with the sequel, Jedi: Survivor, Respawn is looking to up the ante with a total of five different stances that Cal can use over the course of his journey.

To find out more about each of these stances, I talked with Senior Design Director Jason de Heras and Director Stig Asmussen, who walked me through the design philosophy behind each stance and their unique approaches to combat.

Evolving Cal

One of the big focuses throughout the development of Jedi: Survivor has been this concept of “Jedi 2.0,” and how to take Cal from where he was in Jedi: Fallen Order, a young and relatively inexperienced padawan trying to find his place and identity, to where he is now in Jedi: Survivor: a much more confident and capable Jedi Knight who’s also five years wiser. Asmussen said that the team wanted this change reflected in Cal not just in the story, but through his combat as well. As a result, Cal is a much more capable fighter right from the start of Jedi: Survivor, with three saber stances available right from the beginning of the game: Single blade, double-bladed, and dual blade.

“We felt like it was important to give the player a greater arsenal right off the bat. So we had two fully realized stances in the first game, and we had a stance where you had a twin blade, which was something that we wanted to fully realize in the first game, but we basically ran out of time and it ended up becoming a special move,” Asmussen said.

He continued by saying that the moment where you got the dual sabers in Fallen Order was a really cool moment, but it never really got the focus that they had wanted it to have. And so, day one, they made a determination that they were going to finish the Dual Blade stance.

Dual, Single, and Double Bladed Stances

De Heras said that the team really used the Dual Blade stance as the jumping off point, because they already knew the roles single- and double-bladed stances would play in combat, and so they wanted to start by trying to make the Dual Blades feel unique.

“And that’s where we started thinking: Let’s make twin a little more technical. Still approachable – anybody can pick up and play – but there’s a lot more, I guess, combat nuance to it,” he said.

That combat nuance comes in several forms. For one, you’re a bit of a glass cannon. You take more damage, but you attack faster and have a wider array of unique combos, some of which require you to pause a beat before continuing the combo. In addition to that, Dual Blade stance is the only one where you’re able to dodge or guard cancel the startup animations of an attack. Other stances have you commit to your attacks very much like you would have to in a game like Dark Souls, where once you press the attack button, you have to wait until your attack animation finishes before you can get out of the way. But in Twin Blade stance, you can rely more on your reflexes and freely get out of the way when danger is incoming.

“With Twin, we kind of let you ride the line between recklessness and aggression, but you pay for it if you’re making mistakes,” said de Heras.

The single blade stance is the all-rounder stance of Jedi: Survivor. It’s got medium range and medium power and a jack-of-all-trades approach to the skills that utilize it. It’s relatively fast, so there’s not the same amount of commitment to each attack compared to slower stances; you can throw your lightsaber out for a mid ranged attack, and it’s special ability is a strong thrusting attack that can be charged to deal heavy stamina damage to single enemies.

Like in Fallen Order, the double bladed stance is the go-to stance for crowd control. If there’s a large group of weak B1 Droids crowding an area, it’s never a bad idea to bring out that double blade and start dancing your way through the crowd. It’s largely focused on close ranged damage, spread out all around Cal. Its downside is that there’s a lot of start-up time to its attacks, making it a weapon that you really need to be careful with when putting it to use against faster enemies.

The Cross Guard and Blaster Stance

There will also be two brand-new stances that you’ll be able to wield in Jedi: Survivor, and while Respawn wanted to keep a lot of the cards relating to these two stances close to their chest, we do know that one of them is called the Cross Guard stance, and utilizes a hilted lightsaber much like the one that Kylo Ren uses; and the other is called the Blaster stance, which is a fighting style that incorporates both a lightsaber and a blaster.

De Heras described the Cross Guard stance as a high-risk stance that deals the most damage, but is also the slowest and has the least amount of range.

“We wanted the player to feel really powerful, but that there’s also a big risk, probably even more so than Twin, I would say. You need to understand spacing, because with that stance, we don’t artificially push you towards an enemy. It’s kind of like a fighting game stance a little bit.”

With regards to the Blaster stance, the team wanted something with more range, but also thought that a Jedi using a blaster would be a cool opportunity from a story standpoint as well.

“We thought it would be something that reflects the journey that Cal’s going through, to do something that’s unconventional, something that’s usually frowned upon for a Jedi and kind of putting it in this circumstance where he’s doing whatever it takes in the situation. That’s something that I think through conversations, we were able to really make that work in regards to combat,” said Asmussen. “We wanted something that kind of had push and pull to it where like the way the Blaster is designed, it encourages you to use your saber in order to replenish your ammunition and your gun. It’s almost this rubber band that we’re encouraging the player to engage up close so that they can kind of make decisions when they’re far away as well.”

To be clear, this is still a melee combat game. You won’t be sniping Stormtrooper from a distance with the Blaster stance. As de Heras puts it: “It’s not a shooter, obviously. It’s like a melee gun, even though you’re shooting from long range, there’s a limit to it. We always feed back into that thoughtful combat, and we still want you to hit with the saber.”

Stance Skill Trees

One of the most exciting aspects of these five stances is that they each come with their own skill tree, so each stance will have its own set of upgradeable skills to help you further develop it.

“We throw out ideas and we throw stuff away if it doesn’t fit the personality of the stance,” de Heras said. “Jack of all trades for single, aggressive and technical for twin, crowd control and commitment for staff. We would come up with ideas for skills, and some skills that were initially for single blade stance, we threw into twin eventually because it kind of lined up where we wanted it to fit in the role of each stance.”

Stances aren’t the only thing that have their own skill tree either. There is a tree for Force powers and one for survival skills that offer flat increases to your health, Force meter, and more. It all amounts to a combat system that offers a ton of flexibility in how you want to build your own version of Cal Kestis. You can only equip two stances at a time, but you can change them at every meditation point and adjust your loadout for whatever the situation calls for. It’s exciting stuff, and I’ll go into more detail about it when my full preview for Star Wars Jedi Survivor comes out later this month.