An open world Pokemon game. This is something so many people want, and I have never been able to understand why...or rather, I can understand why, but I can't understand why they think it would be a good idea.
I'm often somewhat appalled that people are so...selectively critical, shall we say, when it comes to Game Freak and Pokemon. There seems to be this general lack of awareness of where the problems come from, with recent Pokemon titles especially. Game Freak are an extremely small, notoriously inept team of programmers, who are under the iron fist of a composer who has absolutely no clue what he is doing...or rather, who has proven that he can't keep up with the demands of making a good quality video game on current system hardware. You can directly attribute a lot of the problems with recent Pokemon titles to Masuda's way of working. I'm not saying that there aren't other problems - most of them coming from TCPI and the merchandise train that the games have to keep up with, I'm sure - but if Masuda would be more flexible and logical in his way of working, the games wouldn't be half as bad as they have been in all likelihood. There should have been significantly more people working on SnS, but Masuda doesn't like working in larger groups. Masuda insists on starting every project from the ground-up, rather than building on past titles to create a more robust and refined experience. There is just so much wrong with Game Freak and the way they are run that it's impossible for them to make a high quality title now. Especially when you factor into this that they don't have the time to properly refine their titles.
There's this (partially perceived) general desire for open world titles based on the success of a few titles without the understanding of what made those titles so good...and, in most cases, it wasn't because they were open world titles. The illusion of freedom is nothing more than that - an illusion. Linearity is an inherent trait in any game with an endgame goal; just because you can wander around in a bigger area doesn't enhance the quality of the experience. If anything, it makes it worse, because it is literally just padding. You're taking longer to run from one objective to the next, and that's all you're doing. There's this general assumption that if a game has an open world then it will be a good game; an appalling lack of recognition that it is the systems that support and require a game have an open world to make full use of them, not that the game has an open world, that make it a good game. Or basically, a focus on the style rather than the substance. Which I get, nobody really cares about why a game is good as long as it is good. But applying this to another franchise that works completely differently, assuming it'll be good just because of this, and begging for it to happen, is something I find almost painful to see.
I've seen people who have loathed recent Pokemon games wish for an open world Pokemon game in the same breath, and there is an appalling lack of awareness in this...I mean, do you seriously expect Game Freak to be able to deliver on this? Game Freak are the problem with recent Pokemon titles, and those problems aren't going to magically disappear if you take them completely out of their element and have them make an open world game. That is going to make matters WORSE, not better, because they're going to have to start from scratch. Without the resources you would expect a AAA franchise to have. I would have thought that would be obvious with SnS especially, where the Wild Area was effectively one giant, empty route with absolutely no thought put into it, that Game Freak don't know how to make an open world title. People want an entire game like this? An open world Pokemon game would not magically "save" the franchise. Not if Game Freak, with their complete lack of understanding on how to make anything other than Pokemon Red/Blue with a fresh coat of paint, are the ones developing it.
I get a headache just thinking about this. But then, I am someone who is not particularly impressed by open world games - I've played plenty of good ones (Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, etc.) but I've also played plenty of awful ones (Breath of the Wild, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, etc.) and it's very easy to mess these things up. Just having an open world is not enough to make a video game worth playing, and plenty of developers fail to recognise this. Given Game Freak's track record over the last decade or so, and their recent attempt at dipping their toes in the water with SnS' Wild Area, I think an open world game from them is the last thing we need, because it will be so threadbare, so lacking in content (or worse, it'll take cues from Breath of the Wild and add bullshit like crafting and stamina; things that are designed to waste time in the name of "immersion" when they're just padding the experience out rather than adding meaning to it) that if you condensed the actual content in it right down you'd have exactly the same thing as you would have if it was a "classic" Pokemon game, only without the hours spending running across empty scenery. It's just not going to work.
