[miksy91]

"No more gatehouses! Well, they're still there, but you don't have to actually see the inside. I always though it was useless and slowed down travelling from town to town."

Spoiler:

Actually, the reason there are so many gatehouses in FireRed is that it is the remake of Pokemon Red (which is for Game Boy). Game Boy's hardware is very limited and so, only 12 different sprites could be displayed at the same time (each map bank could only include that many sprites).

There are much more than 12 sprites in pokemon red though so programmers had to create a way for making the game switch the loaded spritesets (a set of 12 sprites). And, that's exactly what happens in RBY when you travel through a route gate.

GBA hardware can probably display all the sprites in each map so there is no purpose in having route gates. However, it wouldn't have made sense if there weren't route gates in FireRed while Red is filled with them.

lol, I happened to start writing about GB specifics and such :D

Anyways, I thought of trying the beta out and see how it is