>>58997755>The main problem is that oceans don't really facilitate thatAre you saying the underwater environments will have less of what I'm describing, or the oceans break up the world in ways that degrade the open world experience?
Because I honestly think they've struck a perfect balance here, where the islands represent extremely large pseudo-sandbox environments, but allow for thematic differentiation and concentrated experiences, rather than trying to uniformly distribute procedural events across one big map. The islands can have individual personality.
The underwater areas will only supplement this, but they may necessarily be less than a full complement to the land areas owing to their lack of towns, buildings, etc. They'll represent something more untamed and less naturally traversable, but counter that with a diverse selection of unique Pokemon.
So I really think the design suits the concept of Pokemon perfectly, and avoids a lot of the drudgery of completely open worlds. We'll see how GF executes of course.
