Okay, Lets Cut to the Chase: What are the Chances of GameFreak Making a Game the Six + Regions?

Superfox

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    So, this is something that's been a question on the minds of Pokémon fans ever since Silver and Gold came out back in the day. Silver and Gold (and their subsequent remakes) are the only games that seem to acknowledge that it is possible to travel between the regions (which back then was only two). However, no other game has touched on this possibility since. I mean, weren't you guys a bit surprised in HG and SS when you couldn't go to Hoenn or Sinnoh as well as Kanto and Johto? I kind of was.

    Opening up travel between the regions would be such a boon for future games. It would take some of the pressure off of creating a post-game gameplay. That's because, instead of having to create ephemeral side quests that only last so long, the players could simply move between the regions, defeat the gyms in each region, and maybe even defeat their respective Elite Fours. That would at least stall (for a good while) the need for such things as Looker's detective quests.

    It just seems like Nintendo and Gamefreak are not utilizing the Pokémon world to its fullest. Think how awesome it would be if, in the next generation of games, we got to go to all seven regions–Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, and whichever new one is created.
     
    There's a few issues with this:

    1) Balance issues. Pokémon regions are usually made for a whole game, so at the end of the game when you've done everything you've POSSIBLY could, if you have a set team for the whole game, they should be at least level 50-60. (Especially in X/Y where your team will be, with the Exp. Share, level 70+.) You don't want to finish Johto and then go to Hoenn where level 2 Zigzagoon are still roaming in the grass. Ideally, you'd want to keep trainer and wild Pokémon balanced with the player's Pokémon, but after one, two regions your Pokémon will be level 100 most likely. Would you really like to face a level 100 Sentret?

    A possible workaround is that an event could be forced to make the player put their main team in the PC/not be able to keep it, etc. But this will most likely irritate the player to have six perfectly great Pokémon, especially if they're trained to their liking. And that's just one "comeback" I can think off the top of my head.

    2) Memory + time issues. Six+ regions, all in 3D, plus events. Sure, Pokémon models are already made, but NPC models, trainer battle models/art, enviroment models (trees, buildings), etc. have to be made. Not only will this take up a bunch of space (X/Y is 1.7gb alone), it will take a bunch of time to make. A game like that could be in production for YEARS at a time. And if its rushed, fans will complain.

    Really, it's not practical to make a game like this. It would be a fans dream come true, but you have to look at stuff like this realistically.


    So based on all of this, the chances of GF making a game like that is slim to none.
     
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    Kyain said:
    There's a few issues with this:

    1) Balance issues. Pokémon regions are usually made for a whole game, so at the end of the game when you've done everything you've POSSIBLY could, if you have a set team for the whole game, they should be at least level 50-60. (Especially in X/Y where your team will be, with the Exp. Share, level 70+.) You don't want to finish Johto and then go to Hoenn where level 2 Zigzagoon are still roaming in the grass. Ideally, you'd want to keep trainer and wild Pokémon balanced with the player's Pokémon, but after one, two regions your Pokémon will be level 100 most likely. Would you really like to face a level 100 Sentret?

    A possible workaround is that an event could be forced to make the player put their main team in the PC/not be able to keep it, etc. But this will most likely irritate the player to have six perfectly great Pokémon, especially if they're trained to their liking. And that's just one "comeback" I can think off the top of my head.
    Click to expand...

    Well, we don't see level 100 wild Pokémon anyway, regardless of the level of the Pokémon we have in our party. I definitely wouldn't mind having level 60-70 Sentret. But, then again, I also wouldn't mind having to retire the party Pokémon I already had when coming to a new region, and then being given one of the region's starters and using it to build a new party. It would be cool if you're previous Pokémon were locked away from you until you went through all of the regions and then you were allowed to access all of them in order to go up against one final threat.
     
    If they ever decide to do it (which is highly unlikely) it would be on a console and not a handheld. And they would do it in collaboration with Bethesda. Pokerim. Each new region would be a different faction quest where you would need to basically start from scratch and then you could use whatever you want in the middle area that they make up for traveling.
     
    However, no other game has touched on this possibility since. I mean, weren't you guys a bit surprised in HG and SS when you couldn't go to Hoenn or Sinnoh as well as Kanto and Johto? I kind of was.
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    I wasn't, because I knew HGSS were remakes, not games that would have an extra region or two to the games they were based upon. GSC were the first and only real games to have more than one region ignoring remakes, and back then there was only the one other region to use. (And in GSC, a lot of routes were severely downsized or just missing; Viridian Forest, Seafoam Islands, Rock Tunnel, Cerulean Cave, Mt. Moon...)

    Anyways - having as many regions as you can in the one game is just not a very good business model.

    Putting 6 regions in one game would be a substantial amount of work for the people making the game, ignoring all the problems like levelling or forcing the player to abandon their Pokémon, even if only for a 'while' (and by while... a whole length of a regular game). It's not just mapping out all the locations in current gen graphics, and avoiding cutting out too much to save data and making it feel barebones as a result - you'd also want to put in new plots and events as well, trainer data for every route, etc etc. Otherwise these places would be boring to visit! But what they do now - at most two regions in one game, usually just the one - works just fine - millions of sales every generation and Pokémon being in the top three selling franchises does sound like a success after all.

    So why would they change their winning formula to something that would take so much work, may not even be feasible, and in the end may not net the same sort of sales, let alone say 6 times the amount given they're putting in 6 times the regions one normally gets? Or seven if you want a new region in there as well.

    Plus, if they do it once, they're arguably forcing themselves to do the same again and again. If you have the choice between the older game with all the regions, or the newer one with only one... you tend to want to go with the game with more content. So they'd be also hurting future sales, unless they just kept adding regions and regions.


    In short, I don't think it is at all a realistic idea that would happen, and really would just end up worse than it would first seem in practice anyway.
     
    Kyain said:
    2) Memory + time issues. Six+ regions, all in 3D, plus events. Sure, Pokémon models are already made, but NPC models, trainer battle models/art, enviroment models (trees, buildings), etc. have to be made. Not only will this take up a bunch of space (X/Y is 1.7gb alone), it will take a bunch of time to make. A game like that could be in production for YEARS at a time. And if its rushed, fans will complain.
    Click to expand...

    Not to mention that it would be one tough act to follow. As awesome as seeing Kanto again was in G/S/C/HG/SS, GF brought backlash on themselves for never doing this again. And I'm not saying they were wrong for never doing it after Gen 2, I'm saying they probably made a mistake by including Kanto in G/S/C in the first place or not by making it clear enough that visiting older regions would be an exception, not a new rule. No matter how big Hoenn in R/S/E was compared to previous regions, people still wanted to visit other regions in the same game, and we still see people clamoring for old regions to make appearance in other games than remakes.

    Now imagine if GF did release a monumental game with all regions, and then followed with a normal one-region game. People would tear the latter to shreds because it won't have all the previous regions in it.
     
    Kanto didn't even appear in Gen2. It was a Scale Model of Kanto. They scaled it down so you would notice the COMPLETE lack of content. All Kanto gave you was a long walk between 8 boss battles. The wild pokemon weren't even scaled up, so their were zero places to train.

    Having PWT is essentially the same as having all of Kanto, you get all the boss battles without the long walk. (plus, all of the regions bosses in ONE GAME)

    "But I want to revisit Sinnoh." - Just play Diamond again. The game still exists.

    Since the Kanto in G/S/HG/SS is just empty space between Boss Battles, and PWT is all of the Boss Battles in one place, PWT is all region in one game.
     
    I know this may seem like a great idea at first glance, but like I've said myself in previous incarnations of these topics it'll have a lot of flaws and complications that could make such a game really hard to make.

    As bobandbill said in his post, the usual formula of the main games focusing on one region (or two if you count Kanto in G/S/C and HG/SS) has been successful because, having a new region means so many new things such as Pokemon, moves, trainers and I'm sure you know what else by now. Having just the one region in a game is why Pokemon is so successful and while having all regions in a game may look awesome, it'll be quite boring because, take Kanto for example. It's been featured in more main games than any other region, if you count remakes. It wouldn't be fun playing through the same region over and over again wouldn't it? I want to see new things, and that's why the games are doing so great as they are now. Remember, with the current tradition the Pokemon games sell millions of copies and that's what racks the money in. If we were to abandon that, the games wouldn't be the cash cows they are today.

    And then there's what Kyain said, the games have now made the leap into 3D complete with animated models, 3D-rendered environments and such, which would take years to make and could take up a huge load of space, I remember that the digital copies of X and Y took up 1.7GB of space alone, if a huge "all 6 regions" game were to be made, it would be way more data than that, maybe even too much for a handheld, and therefore would have to be on the home console.

    Also there would even be issues in-universe, we could be finding our Pokemon at the maxed out Level 100 before we even set foot into the next region, that would not be fun and it would take out the challenge element many older players want. Remember how many were complaining about the new Exp. Share mechanics in X/Y which made their Pokemon too overleveled at certain points of the game? People would probably make much harsher complaints here than what they did with X/Y.

    So, while it may seem like a cool idea, it'll probably be just as many flaws as the games we're familiar with.
     
    Okay, so how about if each successive game from now on at least let's you visit one other region, most likely the region from the immediately preceding generation?
     
    Superfox said:
    Wow. That guy's kind of an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
    Click to expand...


    well not to be rude but that is just STUPID in game programmer's POV... It would be like saying "Hey I want ALL OF MARIO GAMES INTO ONE GAME!" or "Hey lets have ALL ZELDA GAMES INTO ONE!"
     
    Superfox said:
    Okay, so how about if each successive game from now on at least let's you visit one other region, most likely the region from the immediately preceding generation?
    Click to expand...

    nah... because each region is supposed to be unique... they only did that with Johto because it is supposed to be "Sequel" to original R/B/Y. Hoenn is meant to be far away isolated from Johto and Kanto... And also... I don't want to see a new region WITHOUT its own pokemon league... Plus if you really want a previous region, you could always go back to previous game.
     
    This is one of the suggestions for future Pokemon games I see way too often. This idea sounds good in theory, but in practice it crumbles. Why?


    1. Memory - As people have said already, the unified game will be simply too big for the 3DS. X&Y alone is 1.7GB big, which doesn't sound like a whole lot. But what if we incorporate six regions? Let's do the math: 1.7GB x 6 = 10.2GB (approximation for simplicity sake). Even at a minimum of 10GB, it sounds way too big for a portable game to handle. If they're ported over to a console (which doesn't sound like that good of a decision anyways), it'll be much, much bigger. This is not even accounting for the future regions that Game Freak will undoubtably come up with.

    2. Level Curve - Again, as people have said, how would the levels of Pokemon that trainers have be handled? Kanto in GSCHGSS was already a mess; involving more than two regions to any game would probably end in a disaster.

    3. Story - In this day and age of gaming, most games come with a story, and Pokemon has certainly delivered them in all generations. But how would this be handled if there are all six games? Is it just full of small, unrelated tasks that serve no big purpose in the grand scheme of things? Or is it one big convoluted story that will prove difficult to fit the narrative of 6+ generations? Where do we even start? Which starts a segue into our next point.

    4. Not Future-Proof - If this "ultimate" game comes out, what about the future Pokemon games? Will they just be ignored? Some section of the fans will probably want that new region to be in a newer version of the "ultimate" game, and over time probably more will request it. Or would this game with all the regions signify the end of the franchise with a big bang? Either way it's an extremely difficult decision to make once they decide to push their development of a potential game with all the regions.


    In conclusion, I don't see this idea coming to fruition, and frankly I don't want it to because at the moment there are too many questions that are difficult to answer regarding this case.
     
    Zero. They don't fit, and, frankly, a game featuring all regions would suck if it wasn't a MMORPG.
     
    The Pokemon games are supposed to be separate adventures, if they were all linked together I think it might actually get boring after a while. Also, normally there is some sort of villainous team running around which drives our journey in some way. What villainous team would run around to 6 regions for 6x the amount of time they've done so before? And yeah, maybe we'd defeat them before the final region, but then I kind of feel like the rest of the game wouldn't have a purpose. Think of how exploring Kanto in HGSS was so much less exciting than it was in FRLG/RBY - if the town didn't have a gym in it, how long did you stay there? And, like others have said, your levels would get to 100 at a point and it would be pretty boring because everyone else's would be, too.
     
    Extremely low. In retrospect, that would be an awesome game and I'm sure everyone would buy it, but the amount of time and effort that is needed to develop such a game wouldn't be worth it. They could probably make three new installments of Pokemon in the same amount of time that they create this gigantic six region-encompassing game. And honestly, it's simple to buy all of the games and play them with generally the same effect. If your Pokemon transferred from one region to the next, after the first region, all of the trainers in the game would basically need level 100 Pokemon to challenge your team, and that takes a lot of fun out of it.
     
    I would imagine the game cartridge to be as big as a GBA lol. Also wouldn't it become tedious challenging the league 6+ times?? It'll definitely turn a lot of kids off plus the fact that levels don't reset so Lv 100s versus firs gym would be very crazy.
     
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