- Primary Subject: Pokemon Mainline Open-World Design Shift (Post-Generation 8 Landscape)
- Key Update: The transition to unconstrained open-world maps has severely compromised performance, hollowed out town interiors, and disrupted structural level scaling across the franchise.
- Status: Confirmed / Opinion
- Last Verified: June 22, 2026
- Quick Answer: The open-world approach in Pokemon causes technical lag, strips towns of interactive details, and removes natural difficulty barriers, allowing players to easily bypass standard progression.
Pokemon has come a long way over the years, especially when it comes to exploration. In the past, reaching the endgame was more linear, as there were pre-determined paths that you needed to take to make it there. That's no longer the case with the more modern titles.
The series' recent games have taken on a more open-world approach, allowing players to travel nearly anywhere they wish, with only a few restrictions. People see it as Pokemon's next evolution, and a way for it to create a better experience for players. While it does have potential, I believe that the focus on more open-world design has ruined the series instead of helping it.
Yes, being able to traverse wherever you please can be enjoyable, but not if it's at the cost of important qualities that reduce the game's overall polish. For example, due to Pokemon's decision to use a more open-world approach, many of the towns have lost their charm.
Back in the day of classic Pokemon games, every different NPC-inhabited area that you visited was something to look forward to. You followed a path that took you from one to the next, and all of them contained something that made them unique, like houses with humorous NPC dialogue, structures that had significant items or plot progression points, etc.
Each town that you visited was more different than the last, and you were compelled to explore them all because of what they could offer. However, that changed when the series entered the open-world era of map design. In Scarlet and Violet, many of the towns had buildings that you could not enter, and most of them felt like a copy and paste of one another.
This issue was just as bad or even worse in Pokemon Legends: Z-A. While it's not a true open world, it's still one that allows you to explore the entirety of Lumiose City. Given the setting, it was disappointing that there were only a handful of structures that were enterable, and most of them had little to no substance.
Essentially, what I am trying to get at is that, because the games decided to go open-world, the design focused more on the outward appearance of the different areas, rather than the meaningful things that should be in them. They can look pretty, but they're essentially the same in that they're all style with no substance.
Again, the past entries required more detail in their towns and cities due to the more linear world approach, as it was a means of incentivizing players to push through and finish their journey. This resulted in the games feeling more alive and really made every area visited more memorable, which can't exactly be said for the more modern Pokemon titles.
Another example of how the open-world direction has harmed the series' overall quality is that it allows for more game-breaking issues. By that, I mean in terms of performance and the player experience, increasing the likelihood of encountering problems such as texture pop-ins or frame rate drops due to the amount of in-game objects.
This was certainly the case with the more recent entries, especially in Scarlet and Violet. Likely, they weren't properly optimized to handle all the resources that needed to pop into gameplay, but if that's the case, it would have been much better to go with a more linear approach.
As for the player experience, since players can pretty much go anywhere they please, the lack of limitations provides them the opportunity to cheese the game. What that means is that it's much easier for them to look for methods to reduce the overall challenge they're expected to overcome through normal play.
For example, certain late-game areas can now be accessed much earlier via a few tricks that can only be done with an open-world design. Since players can reach them far sooner than they're supposed to, they could potentially acquire insanely strong Pokemon or use them to level up their team to insane degrees. By doing that, they become too overpowered, making most obstacles towards the end goal non-issues.
While there is a certain degree of fun in figuring out how to cheese the game, it takes away the satisfaction that's supposed to come with facing and overcoming the challenges normally. It's a good reason why most of the previous games felt more rewarding, as there was either very little or no way to become too strong due to the more linear world design.
Going open-world can make any game great when done right, but Pokemon should not have adapted to it. There are issues now that didn't exist before, and it has certainly affected how players, both new and old, perceive the series. Hopefully, a time will come when Nintendo and Game Freak allow the games to return to a more linear world design, but unfortunately, that's looking highly unlikely.
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