@celebi , Yep, I played pokemon go for about a year - I was thinking that it could be integrated even more into the poke-ecosystem by tying it to the switch or the other games, to give people more of an incentive to play both (i.e, more money for the pokemon company. And @lavendergengar , I hear you. The skyrim bugs were mostly fixed by the first and second official patches, though, and as someone who’s put more than 1300 hours into that game, after the patches things were pretty smooth.
I would call almost all the main pokemon games, from Red/Blue onwards, open world games. The scale between the pokemon games and other open world games varies, but overall, think about it: They allow you to wander and choose which quests to do, often allowing you to choose multiple ones at the same time. Item spawns, with the exception of a few story-centric ones, randomly spawn all over the map. There is an enormous amount of flexibility in terms of specialties you focus on: berry picking, breeding, battling, collecting, contests, exploring, etc. Pokemon is open world to me, it’s just a matter of scale.
I choose skyrim as an example because the world is vast, yet it doesn’t require internet access, like WoW or EVE or many of the other MMORPGs. I’d love to see a much larger pokemon map/territory - hell, even a world, with a shitton of complex sidequests and missions, a greater depth of crafting, training, and story telling - imagine a team rocket main quest that takes 50-60 hours to complete and really shows team rocket in shades of gray instead of black and white bad guys. Imagine being able to select between more than 2 main characters (male/female), with say 8 characters to choose form, all of whom have different strengths. Imagine a skill tree for your character. Imagine ocean and water areas like Ruby/Sapphire, except 100x bigger, with hundreds if not thousands of islands with different climate zones, items, berries, and mons (like Firered/Leafgreen writ large). Same goes for land. This is all what I was trying to get at.
@c0ll3ct0r is right: nintendo/TPC is a money printing machine right now and they have little incentive to change things up. Which is totally understandable, we would all behave the same way if we were in their C-suite. I think they’ll be relevant/making money for decades, because I know 5 and 6 year olds now who are obsessed with pokemon - pokemon is now a multi-generational phenomenon. I’d just love to see TPC mix things up and try to make something a little more in depth instead of sitting on tens of billions in cash reserves like smaug.