As per today’s Pokémon Presents, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet will have a fully explorable open world.
The Pokémon Presents stream revealed a lot about the upcoming main series games, confirming the veracity of many of the leaks that have been in circulation online.
One of the most exciting features announced during the stream was that the new region, confirmed to be called Paldea, will feature an expansive fully-open world.
The protagonist will obtain a legendary rideable Pokémon early in the game’s plot, Koraidon for Pokémon Scarlet and Miraidon for Pokémon Violet. Both of these Pokémon can change forms to allow the player to ride atop them on land, water and through the air.
Koraidon (Scarlet)
Not only that, the world's map will be fully open from the beginning. According to the voiceover on the stream, the player won’t be restricted on where they can go on the map. This includes the order in which gym leaders can be tackled, which is atypical for the series.
Past Pokémon games have allowed some flexibility in the order of gym leaders, but never to this extent. It’s unknown if this implies some type of difficulty scaling, whereby gym Pokémon are always a similar level to your own Pokémon, or just that you’ll be allowed to access later gyms at any time even though they’ll be near impossible to complete.
The premise of Scarlet and Violet is that the player is a student of an academy (Naranja in Scarlet, Uva in Violet) whose new assignment is to go out into Paldea on a quest called “Treasure Hunt.”
According to the voiceover, this quest will feature three distinct parts. One is the classic gym leader gauntlet that’s present in most games, and the other two are currently unknown but “will be full of surprises.” There is an implication that these three distinct parts can be completed in any order the player wishes as well.
Various other features were announced during Pokémon Presents, such as the new Tera-type Pokémon and the game’s multiplayer components.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet will release on November 18 of this year exclusively on the Nintendo Switch.