>>46380216Anybody who thinks open world isn’t here to stay is an idiot. Sword and Shield sold like crazy despite being boring cookie cutter garbage. This is the game every normie and their dog has been wanting for decades. It’ll be like Pokémon Go, but since you don’t actually have to go outside it’ll even drag in all of the people scared of getting the coof.
That being said, where do you guys think gen 9 will take place? It WILL be open world, and if I know GameFreak, they’re going to want to do as little work as they can, so they won’t want to do a place that has a whole bunch of cities they need to fully map out in open world style. My suggestion is actually one that was pretty popular even before we saw L:A.
Australia.
For one, this globe was found in the player’s house in Sword and Shield, and they’ve often teased the general shape of the new region via maps like this in the past.
Two, Australia is often characterised as having lots of empty deserts and bushlands as well as being full of some of the most dangerous animals on the planet, the perfect environment for an open world Pokémon adventure.
Three, the last four regions were all based on locations that Japanese people tend to go to on vacation (New York, France, Hawaii, England) and Australia is a super popular destination for Asian tourists, even though it’s probably just because we’re the closest western country to them.
While it’s totally possible that they’ll switch back to doing regions based solely on Japan again thanks to Covid, if they don’t then Australia is a top contender for a region.
