>>20693332I think it'd work just fine. A lot of MMOs have a lovely thing called level scaling. City of Heroes was great for this. If you joined a mission that was higher level than yourself, you were boosted up to that level temporarily with all the base stat boosts inherent to that level, but with no new powers/moves and the same "gear" as you currently had, which made you not as effective so it didn't break things and make the game too easy. If you joined a lower level mission, you were scaled down to that level and moves that you earned after that level were greyed out, but you still had your higher level "gear" so you had a slight edge for scaling down.
A Pokemon MMO could feature all the current regions and perhaps a new one for the game, allow you to run the gym circuit on each one, with gym leaders scaling to your relative level with modified teams for balance. Then you could face the Elite 4/Champions of each region that would have a similar setup, but could scale to your average level +2-4 to make sure they're properly challenging.
Make the combat similar to most MMOs with clickable skills and the ability to move freely in combat and the battles become much more rousing and absorbing. Toss in some world events like each region's Team pulling a heist or something that could be taken on as a team effort from players, powerful legends awakening and causing havoc, etc. etc. and it could have the makings of an awesome game. For those into PVP you could have a ranking ladder for a PVP League to determine who is server champ based on their rating, and most people would be happy.
It's really not a difficult IP to adapt to an MMO, and it's rife with potential while still maintaining the social aspect of the game that's so important to GameFreak. They just have to realize that a ton of people would play if they DID make it and there'd be no problem.
