>>52575179Level design doesn’t need to be super dense or restrictive, especially not in an OPEN world game, what matters is that the world design forces you to consciously navigate and interact with it in ways that impact the experience. As you can see from picrel, the map is actually deceptively linear for an open world game, forcing you to zigzag through the geographical obstacles like mountains, rivers, lakes etc, in order to get around. This naturally funnels the player through each area, and prevents people from just running straight across the map in a few min, which helps make the region feel bigger.
Yes, the pokeride abilities collectively let you straight up bypass all these level design elements, but you need to unlock those by beating the Titans, many of which are on the other side of the map, so you’ll inevitably need to explore at least a chunk of the map without them. I just think your idea of level design is too narrow, my biggest fears when I heard SV was open world was that the whole map would be completely explorable right away and nothing about my navigation abilities would change as I progressed. Not only was this not true, but the world was also just denser designed than I was expecting, so I’m very relieved personally, they went open world without sacrificing what I actually liked about the linear world design, which was unlocking new areas like a Metroidvania and needing to take specified naturally formed paths to get to certain isolated areas (I especially like how all the final 3 gyms are located in the most difficult to reach parts of the map
