Event: "What's Next" Megathread - What are your hopes for Gen 8?

What would you like to see in future games?

I searched throughout the forum, and apparently there isn't a topic like this anywhere. What would you like to see in future games? Would you fix, add, or delete anything? Is there a feature that disappeared that you'd like to see in future generations?

As for me, I'd love it if Pokémon could walk behind your back again. It was such a nice little detail that made the game so enjoyable that I wonder why subsequent games didn't repeat it.

Follow Pokémon for sure, like you said. I want to feel like my team are actual companions traveling with me, it's hard to make a big connection when they're hidden outside battle 99% of the time. That feature in HGSS was awesome and should've been kept as a regular feature.

Also....please for goodness' sake let me target and catch a specific Pokémon in horde battles. It frustrates me how I had to knock out the other mons before I could catch what I want. And if I happen to run into two shinies in one horde battle at once, I should be able to catch both of them. Nothing wrong with that!

Those small party/PC box sprites need to get shiny versions. My shiny Poipole is white, not purple. Not sure why they haven't added shiny versions of those yet.

a non-lifeless protagonist with actual expressions

What are my hopes, or what are my expectations?

Well, if we are talking about hopes...

• Large world; not necessarily "lol open world" but large enough and not fenced so that it feels open rather than a Lightning Saga Corridor.
• The world should feel more to scale (if a town or city covers two screens, have the roads between towns cover 15-20x times that) and have the population scale up too.
• Various means of transportation: on foot, riding your Pokémon, on bikes, trains, zeppelins, boats, depending on the environment and how far do you want to go from one place to the next.
• Death to HMs, life to adaptively using any Pokémon's techniques and attributes to traverse the environment: Growth or Vine Whip to stretch vines or branches to cross small chasms, Ember to light up torches in caves, Icy Wind or Snow Warning to freeze ponds and cross them, Mist or Sandstream to block opponent trainers' lines of sight, Telekinesis to levitate objects for puzzles, etc.
• Return to a more senseful 2.5D-esque world.
• Actual character customization. It's 2018 and the games still limit you to stereotypes such as "chocolate black people", "there are no fats" or "only girls have clothes variety".
• Something like the GB music player of G4, but even better, where you can listen to any of the music themes remade or demade in any of the soundfonts of the games released so far.
• A reason to get our first Pokémon and embark on an adventure that actually makes sense.
• Allow us to choose between any of the Starters, not just the ones of $CURRENT_GENERATION.
• Far less, or ideally no, handholding. And please no 45 minutes of cutscenes before even gaining any agency into the plot.
• Skippable cutscenes, including the ones for cinematic attacks.
• More than 8 Gyms, even if you still need to get only 8 badges to enter the League.
• Wild Pokémon and opponent Trainers level up according to your team, at least up to within a per-route range.
• More, or complete, focus on Double and Triple battles.
• Redo the battle engine to be in the style of FF Tactics excpet with a smaller and simpler grid, with things like positioning, distance and the presence of obstacles all factoring into the fight.
• Enemy bosses (rival, Gym leaders, evil team bosses) should have stacks of items just like you do. 10s of Full Restores, X-Attacks, Revives, stuff like that.
• Sidequest-driven gameplay: besides the main plot of beating the local evil team or championing the League, everything should be optional sidequests to be taken in general in any order.
• Added to the above: a game journal where you can track what have you been doing as of late and what sidequests have you completed, and take notes of where to go next or what items do you need to get.
• Your Pokémon following you and interacting with the environment. D'uh, that one's a given.
• Your Pokémon could complete small minigames in the wild, interacting with the local population, to eg.: learn tutor moves or unlock access to more areas. Also to find potential mates~
• Legendary battles, in particular the higher-tier ones, need to have more grandiose to them, something like how Final Fantasy does superbosses. Let's face them three versus one, or even a full six versus one, in spectacular scenarios, with them using awesome finisher moves or insta-switchouts, enjoying the ability to attack two or three times a turn plus incredible stats with several life bars and phases with varying mechanics to match a player team, and of course have the prize at the end be kind of worth it, if for the bragging rights only.
• Get rid of the artificial step-by-step slowness of the battle engine. I don't need to see a Pokémon become poisoned, then wait two seconds before the poison animation takes place, then another two seconds before the PSN icon appears, then another two seconds before the game notice that $POKÉMON has been poisoned appears. Give us notification logs or notification icons like the PMD games have.