Sadly, it appears Nintendo is now just utterly helpless to leaks. So many first-party games from the last couple of years has found its way online—either being streamed, or even ripped and playable on PC—a week or more ahead of its release. Joining them, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has already seen a huge number of leaks in the last few days, but right now as I write, the entire game is being livestreamed to an audience of over a thousand.
Nintendo has been dashing about trying to put out fires all week, as more and more information about Scarlet and Violet has appeared online, including spoilers for how the trio of new starters will evolve. Thanks to the need to ship physical copies to stores (both online and brick-n-mortar) ahead of release, ne’er-do-wells within are getting hold of the game in advance, then grabbing for a moment of internet fame with spoilers. But now things have gotten a whole lot worse, with an hours-long stream of someone playing the entire game.
Look, it’s up to you, and you can obviously go watch it on Trovo (Tencent’s eerily familiar version of Twitch), but I really wouldn’t. I’ve had it on to verify this story, and already seen a starter’s later evolution that I really didn’t want to know, and seen a whole swathe of new (but officially unrevealed) Pokémon. Those are all surprises I’ll no longer get when my copy arrives on the 18th.
Read More: Pokémon Scarlet And Violet Leak Shows New Monsters, Including A Starter Evolution
Honestly, seeing how Quaxly—or Sergeant Duck to give him his proper name—evolves, I’ve been put off the starter I’d planned to play with. That sucks. And yeah, I can confirm those previous leaks based on some tiny Pokédex pixel images are accurate.
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Almost 12 hours into this stream, whoever the deeply unpleasantly named “reeeetardkun” might be must surely be beginning to tire. But not before pretty much every secret from the game has found its way out there. I’m not reporting them here, although god knows it’s going to be hard for all of us to avoid all manner of secrets over the next seven days.
It’s worth noting I also saw the game completely bugging out on the stream, where every location became just a white screen but for pop-up information. Quitting and reloading fixed it, but yeah, that doesn’t bode enormously well. However, Nintendo has made it known the game is getting a 1GB day one patch, so maybe such issues will be removed by launch?
Presumably Trovo is being used for this, because Nintendo would have contacts at Twitch to get this shut down hours ago. With 11 hours of the game out there now, managing to stamp this one out will be pretty futile. And, you know, perspective, it’s a video game: It’s very bad for Nintendo, but we just need to look away. And as much as I’d love to get an idea of lots of new Pokémon, I’d rather have some surprises in a week’s time.
John Walker
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