‘Malicious’ Ogerpon glitch can lock Pokémon Scarlet and Violet players in online battles

While Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s The Teal Mask expansion is still suffering from issues in performance, it’s a relatively clean gameplay experience. Unfortunately, one element of everyone’s favorite new Pokémon Ogerpon has led to a game-breaking online exploit. 

With how Ogerpon is set up in the game, from a lore and mechanic perspective, you can’t change its base Tera Type like you can with every other Pokémon currently available in SV. That is because the Mask Pokémon changes its base typing and Tera Type depending on which of its four masks it is holding at the time—leading to a different form and ability for each. 

Despite that limitation, multiple players have now shown how hackers can manually go into the game’s files and change Ogerpon’s Tera Type, leading to an exploitable online mechanic. 

If you bring or encounter an Ogerpon online that has an artificially altered Tera Type and it tries to Terasatallize, the battle will pause, soft-locking both players indefinitely. 

This is because Ogerpon is supposed to change its typing to Grass, Fire, Water, or Rock depending on the mask it holds—and thus, its Tera Type. If the Tera Type it tried to pull from is incompatible, the game doesn’t know how to continue with the interaction and essentially stops working. 

As avid Pokémon tester Anubis pointed out, the intent here is likely to grief players in online matchmaking and gain rank artificially by forcing them to disconnect first since that is the only way to absolve the game state once it soft locks. They also point out that this likely will cause a similar result in Tera Raids and the testing did not include waiting until the battle time would have run out to see if the soft lock can end naturally. 

When asked why this error somehow made it past SV’s online checks, Anubis claimed that Game Freak is likely not focused on save editing and other tool-assisted exploits when doing initial testing since it is “disallowed” in Japan and not a major concern initially until something like this sparks a response. 

Now, players have to keep this exploit in mind when loading up into online matches until the developers release a patch to properly check for it—something that could take a few weeks to months depending on how heavily used or publicized the problem becomes.