Pokemon Scarlet & Violet patch update 1.1.0 arrives as Nintendo apologizes for its performance issues

Pokemon Scarlet & Violet patch update 1.1.0 arrives today, aiming to address a handful of the game's issues - but the situation with much of the title's performance remains so dire that Nintendo has seen fit to make a public apology - something very uncommon from the typically more tight-lipped publisher.

"We are aware that players may encounter issues that affect the games' performance," Nintendo notes as part of a support page detailing the latest Pokemon Scarlet & Violet patch. "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."

Today's update, however, is likely not to fix many of the issues that have been going viral in an embarrassing way - indeed, the version 1.1.0 update is said to focus on the first season of ranked battles and fixing several other minor bugs:

• Season 1 of Ranked Battles will kick off, allowing you to enjoy Ranked Battles through the Battle Stadium.
• Please check the in-game notice for more details about Ranked Battles Season 1.
• An issue has been fixed that caused the music to not play correctly during the battles with the Elite Four and the Top Champion in the Victory Road path.
• Other select bug fixes have been made.

In the RPG Site review, we noted that Pokemon Scarlet & Violet was one of the best Pokemon games in recent years - on paper. Beyond the theory, however, it's dogged by constant performance problems as its new open-ended, open-world design struggles to run in an acceptable way - all while looking markedly worse than other Switch games, such as Xenoblade 3.

With the first patch and this apology, Nintendo has at least acknowledged the issues. Here's hoping they work to fix more of the problems over time.