Lake of Outrage/Meeting Spot glitch?
Posted by: pngarrett
Date: 2020-01-07 14:26:13
A little under a month ago, I was playing Pokemon Sword, grinding in the Lake of Outrage, up by where the Hatterene spawns. At the time, the weather was snowing. After about a half hour of constantly encountering mainly overworld battles, I came out of one and realized the weather was suddenly clear. The date had not changed, so I moved around to see if anything would happen, and the location header popped up saying "Meeting Spot". Maybe a few seconds after that header popped up, it then popped up again correctly saying "Lake of Outrage", and the weather changed back to snowing. I continued grinding, and about another half hour later, the exact same thing happened. I exited a battle, the weather was clear, the header popped up saying "Meeting Spot" as if I had just entered it, and then a few seconds later, it correctly popped up again saying "Lake of Outrage" and the weather changed back to snowing.
Since then, I haven't had this happen to me again. Granted, I haven't really grinded there since then. If it's any help, I had been playing in docked mode for a few hours by then, so I know that the fans on my Switch must have been blowing. I unfortunately don't have any recordings or screenshots of this happening.
My thought is that there must be, for some reason, a check that validates the player's location or coordinates in the Wild Area once they exit a battle.
The location might be checked to determine the location tag of a caught Pokemon or a hatched egg (such as, "caught in the Lake of Outrage", or "hatched in Motostoke Riverbank"), or it could be to determine what weather should take effect upon returning to the overworld. If so, then the check could either reference the player's coordinates against a lookup table corresponding to the locations within the Wild Area (coordinates (x,y) to (x',y') = Lake of Outrage), or the check could possibly sequentially run through each of the location's identifiers and determine if the player occupies some kind of variable within that identifier.
Either way, it appears on the surface that the check fails, and either defaults to the Meeting Spot, or incorrectly determines that the player is in the Meeting Spot. Seeing as the Meeting Spot's weather is always clear (I think), it changes the weather of that location to clear until something rechecks the location and changes it back to whatever weather was supposed to be there.
Regardless of my speculative theories and everything, for a brief moment, the game clearly thinks that the player is in the Meeting Spot when they aren't.
This is an incredibly small and somewhat insignificant glitch or oversight, but I haven't seen this posted anywhere online, and I was wondering if anyone has encountered anything similar. I found it really interesting and fun to think of.