or will the Pok?mon series be reduced to Call of Duty-esque yearly iterations without much changing between releases?
inb4 really edgy commentary about how Game Freak/TPC are doing precisely this
I feel like this is a rather broad question to ask that branches out into several possible answers. Now, what do I mean by that?
First and foremost, in my own personal view, I've always thought that the very reason why some people may not be enjoying Pokemon gaming as much is because... as much as we might not want to admit it to ourselves as the cause, we're growing up. Most of us aren't kids anymore where we used to have the free time and imagination to basically enjoy Pokemon games at face value. I don't know about anyone else, but that was what created maximum enjoyment for me. Playing with my irl friends, the challenge of always seeing, catching, and training new Pokemon and catching legendaries and all that other stuff was fun to me as a kid; I never really thought as much about the storyline, background of the characters, depth, personality, things like that.
I feel like, as some of us grew older and became more aware that Pokemon is really just the sum of its parts, we became more critical towards the games as a result. We became more aware of how the storyline was created, character design, types of NPCs, designs of NPCs, personality/depth of characters, how certain NPCs interact with the player... so on and so forth. I never really gave a shit about this as a kid and I bet most people didn't until they got older and feel like the games needed to "grow up" with them when the reality is that Pokemon was always a franchise designed for everyone (mostly kids, though), and not just what the older fans would want all the the time. As long as Pokemon games keep up with the current era of gaming technology, dedicated fans will gladly throw their cash at Game Freak because regardless of the criticisms, Pokemon will never change from its core philosophy of the very same qualities that we enjoyed as children: capturing, battling, trading, and interacting with cute and adorable pocket monsters and showing off to our friends, etc.
Yeah, that was quite a tangent. What does this have to do with whether or not Game Freak will run out of ideas?
Because whether or not you perceive Game Freak to really "run out of ideas" depends on how strongly you hold onto the memories of days gone by and your general attitude towards the current generation of Pokemon and what direction Pokemon is likely to take in the future. I personally feel that as long as Game Freak holds onto the very philosophy of interaction with players, battling, trading, and capturing Pocket Monsters, then the sky's the limit as far as how creative they can really be while incorporating these important aspects of what makes a Pokemon game a Pokemon game.
At the end of the day, we're all going to have varying opinions on
how Game Freak goes about with these things, and I think that's fine! It's perfectly okay to have standards for how a Pokemon game should be designed. I also think that sometimes, to better enjoy Pokemon games and not be overly critical about everything (which sucks the fun out of enjoying the games themselves), much like as we did as kids, it's important to just play these games as they are at face value.
