>>40343084Open world in its purest form is a meme, especially in Pokemon. Players cannot be trusted to pace the game themselves - we can see this in games like Crystal Clear, where players will rush to get their first 6 mons in a few badges, and then wonder why the rest of the game, with no new pokemon to anticipate or events to give moment-to-moment purpose, feels so stale. Therefore, we're going to need to make the act of progression itself engaging, even if you ultimately can't choose where you go.
The solution, on a location-to-location, is to give routes various branching paths and hidden locations, each containing different items, trainers, and Pokemon. However, choosing these various paths isn't something you can do by just holding left or right, but instead is a problem you have to solve. You can take the easiest route without any thought at all, but if you want to cross, say, a small pitfall to get to the more interesting route, you'll have to think about how you can use your Pokemon to cross that pitfall - maybe you can use your obligatory bird to carry you over it, or maybe your grass pokemon can build a vine bridge, or maybe your fighting pokemon can just toss you over it. The current lack of pokemon-overworld interaction is fucking pathetic, this is a game about going on your adventure with your own personally chosen pokemon for fucks sake, the "adventure" and "pokemon" halves shouldn't be split apart.
On a larger scale, a greater sense of adventure that pleases the fanbase can be achieved by introducing a pseudo-open world setup, where the world is split into different linear chunks that can be tackled in any order. Alola would be much more interesting, even without any other changes, if you could tackle the islands in any order (with the difficulty of each island changing based on the order they're faced in). By forcing a small amount of linearity, we can still force an acceptable pacing onto the player.
