Lol this took so long to type out and I lost a chunk of my response at one point. Oops.
I think the issue is that i find open world bad because they affect the development side... ...Even with good, competent dev teams given a longer time to work on their open worlds, it is so easy to create shallow gameplay, stories and art because you need to do so many things and fill so many quotas that you never really elaborate on anything ever.
I'll agree with this idea (that it becomes increasingly hard to flesh out a game the bigger and more open you make it) at its basic level, but I have to disagree with various points you bring up here.
botw lost so much of what made the loz franchise in interesting story, characters, plots, enemies etc because the bare minimum for open world takes too much time to do anything other than that.
You're not the only person I've seen complain about BotW/TotK for how they mess up the Zelda formula, but I think the main other person I've seen do it is more miffed by how it messes with item conventions (for puzzle solving, durability being annoying, dungeons, etc.)
totk suffered beyond open world pitfalls and more because they forgot it was a loz game and not nuts and bolts but even with already having so much of that bare minimum already done, the game couldnt even expand upon the lore or story in any interesting way lol
Yeah, TotK is, in a lot of ways, a massive tech-demo flex, and I don't entirely jive with the technology's abilities in it, either (I think BotW's runes were more interesting from a basic puzzle-solving perspective), but a lot of bigger challenges in the game are based on them.
Also, hot take, but Zelda lore is kind of unnecessary beyond the usual Link/Zelda/Ganon relation (and even that has been discarded in a few games) and trying to force a timeline beyond specific games that are clearly sequels is one of the fandom's greatest sins.
and maybe you'll go "ok sure the lore was bad but the gameplay was good" but idk. i think botw and totk gameplay is kinda mid and even bad. shrines, ultrabeasts, depths all lack the effort and fun of loz dungeons and puzzles because its an open world so you have to make 100000 of them because the player needs to be able to find at least some of them wherever they go.
I never understood the vitriol toward shrines/divine beasts/whatever as "weaker puzzles" because they encourage you to find your own solution with the tools you have been given. You're free to bring other things in that can help, but you don't need to and aren't forced to. Sometimes the puzzle is outside of the shrine, too, though I guess that isn't that different from older sidequests. Really, the only issue I see here is how the puzzles aren't built around a specific dungeon item and forcing you to learn how to use it, but those remaining interesting throughout a game depend on said items being versatile and not "this solves this problem and ONLY this problem." Also:
(I know you meant divine beasts lol)
combat lacks any spiceness because theres only 3 sets of enemies other than the bosses and a bunch of weapons that dont actually enhance or change how you play (once you see a meele weapon and arrows youve seen 90% of the nuance unless youre a speedrunner lol), but because there needs to be content they added a bunch of types to find and collect. and then what? walk around an empty world that loses the "well its a desolate area" wonder after an hour of playtime? do korok seeds even though you learn theres only a limited type of puzzles that repeat and once youve seen them youve seen all that koroks can offer, making them just be a chore or something to ignore once you got your slots (dont do 900 please. please. please.)?
Mostly fair points here; I watch a lot of a very good OoT player and, aside from the glitches, there are a lot of sword options in that 25 year-old game, and BotW/TotK really haven't added that many more (and even removed a few, I think). The whole "huge overworld with a bunch of mini-challenges" is something that Super Mario Odyssey dabbles in too with its Moons, and I watched a video essay about that game, critiquing how the huge number of Moons (and quick timing of getting one to another) diminishes the satisfaction from getting one; I think that's what you're feeling, and I think it's a reasonable thing to critique.
Oh, and since I almost forgot, TotK did rather notably increase the number of enemy types, something that was definitely missing from BotW.
and idk. i always single out botw and totk because theyre considered good open world games and they kickstarted the trend for many devs. i also find elden ring the worst of the franchise because its open world and thus has similar lessened impact in world, lore, and gameplay.
I haven't played any of the Dark Souls games (I've started Bloodborne but haven't gotten very far), so I'm not speaking from personal experience, but it's my understanding that none of these games are particularly... direct with their stories. I can't say how different Elden Ring's game progression is from Dark Souls or other FromSoft games, but I didn't think it did anything super different with how its narrative was presented.
pokémon has an advantage in that they had a 900 enemy creature backlog with finished models and data they can just pick from, give slight updates and slap on the game + a few new ones, so they can fill up their world with encounters easier than loz or whatever fromsoftware does. but the games ive talked about were made by competent developers under a decent timeframe and had very clear goals. why do we think pokemon will be able to do better than Bad when they dont have that level of competence or the time and resources. of course the towns and routes and most characters will be bland, they have to waste time doing stuff for the open world. and all that time sacrificed just leads to a very mediocre gameplay feel.
I think Game Freak should, and could, have the resources available to them if they wanted to use them, given how lucrative the franchise is. Time, though? Yeah, that's a problem, and one that I've seen brought up a lot since SV released. A lot of fans are desperate for Game Freak to get more time to develop a generation, myself included. I choose to believe that the complete lack of interiors would have been one of the first things fixed if they had more development time, but that might be copium.
what the hell is there to do in sv routes other than catch pokemon, battle a few trainers, look for a gimmighoul coin and leave? have we really improved over the formula because now you can pick the route to go next? did pokemons exploration really benefit from this bare minimum half baked open world enough that it was worth to sacrifice the already dwindling effort and time taken on the region itself?
That's... all Pokémon has ever really had when it comes to its routes, as far as return value is concerned. If you ask me, though, part of the problem is that it's much easier to hide secrets worth searching for in a smaller, 2D game world than it is in a full 3D world with a wide camera angle (SV's poor draw distance aside). They could have added more places worth climbing or surfing to that you could see early on, but they chose not to, and that's a loss.
the kitakami and indigo disc plotlines and exploration were more involved and had much more interesting characters because it was a non-open world narrative disguised as open world, with smaller focused areas that got more thought put into them!! imagine if the actual main series plot had the same benefit of being focused? its not like youre losing anything anyway since nothing scales LOOOL. you could literally make each new town or whatever be a gym/titan/star member and it would be the Same Shit. itd probably be better because knowing where your player is and not wasting time in the barebones open world game would make the areas and encounters actually yknow. stand out and be fun
I haven't played the DLC yet, but I can respect a good, streamlined story. I think you are downplaying the effort Game Freak does put in to the areas they choose to apply themselves to (mostly Gym Leaders/teachers in SV). It's bad that the rest of the world is essentially a ghost town, but they do try to make their named and "important" NPCs have definite personalities and goals. This was true in SwSh as well, where each pairing of possible trainers had a specific interaction in a postgame tournament.
Also wanted to bring this up but I think SV's probably too-vast map would be a little less frustrating if the actual map function in-game wasn't completely terrible with next to no automatic labeling (with no clear divisions between regions) and only one very flimsy labelling option.
Since Ironmage and I both brought it up, the way Metroidvanias do progression is probably better for something like Pokémon than a true open world. But you've got to build a world/region around that, and make decisions on how you want to wall certain areas off behind progression. Taking a couple of different examples, Hollow Knight tends to have multiple ways to get to almost any area in the game, leading to a fairly flexible number of ways one can obtain important items. On the other hand, Metroid Dread actually kind of railroads you in (with some opportunities for sequence breaks) but makes you
feel like you've got freedom to roam around the map. That's closer to what Pokémon has done in the past, and again, it's not strictly bad (Pokémon needs to work on its overly-conspicuous roadblocks, though).
I think this take is probably uncommon, but I actually don't like the idea of the whole game scaling to the player's progression in an open-world Pokémon game. It breaks immersion. Let Gym Leaders/other in-universe structured groups scale, maybe, but not the entire wild Pokémon population. This doesn't apply to all games (I think the way BotW/TotK does it is decent enough), but if, say, Gen 10 does have the entire world scale to progression (assuming it's open world again), I think I would find that a lot more annoying than having a rigid storyline.
What I like conceptually about open-world games/a lot of metroidvanias is that everyone's experience will be a little different. The in-game story may suffer (not saying it's a given, but more likely), but the
individual story of playing the game is different, and you'll have your own little anecdotes to share. Pokémon does have some of that baked into its formula (which creatures you choose to raise), so, you know what, I will concede that it's probably not the end-all for the "best" game possible.
yeah to me open world is a concept where on paper its kinda like peak gaming right? just go wherever, the ideal of exploration without the limitations of real life. But it needs SOOOOO much content to support it, and unless youre willing to do that for a decade or more, your game will have to sacrifice many things to reach the bare minimum, let alone a good or great game! Not all devs and certainly not all franchises or game ideas should be open world, its a very niche type of game thats not being treated like that.
and like, i agree with the idea that pokemon would be good for open world. but in practice? ignoring all the above issues, we havent even reach good plot and gamefreak has been struggling with linear exploration, which is MUCH more approachable. this franchise should not be jumping to something as demanding as open world when it cannot even get a single benefit from it! its not like paldea is particularly replayable over other pokemon games, and id argue its probably less as youre encouraged to work on your save file with new raids and events etc. the exploration isnt memorable, any atmosphere you have gets destroyed by the graphics (listen idc about graphics but we need to be real here. open worlds are as much about doing things as it is seeing things and if your world is ugly, youre not getting people to explore it lol), its all just the same formula of catching every mon in the area, battling the trainers and fighting the boss/gym/whatever.
my frustration is less about sv in specific and more that it feels like so many AAA AND indies have locked themselves into open world and made their stories, worlds and gameplay worse as a result. open would should be niche and rare because most will never be able to make good ones
And... you know what, I agree with basically all of this. I like this conclusion. It's far better for a game/series to refine what it wants to do and make it actually fun and functional instead of following the most recent trend and biting off more than they can chew. I'm not a big graphics guy but agree that, even ignoring performance, SV look really bad (well, the overworld does; the Pokémon themselves look really good IMO).
I gotta say, though, I've personally set my bar for stories from Game Freak internally low, so I don't really care what story they churn out. I'm just along for the ride.
help me