“The Paldea Problem”: Pokemon Scarlet & Violet and the pitfalls of open-world design
I did not grow up in a world of open-world games. Video game worlds could be “open”, but only in the sense that you were meant to explore to your whims, but gradually be funneled back to the designer’s desired experience. The first two video games I ever played were like this: Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights for the GameCube was a Metroidvania-like game built around exploring to gain new abilities, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker offered players a vast ocean to sail and interesting islands to discover. However, those two games hardly compare to today’s proper “open-world” games, which offer vast lands full of content and things to do, typically in whatever order the player chooses. Most of these games will even adapt to the player’s progress to provide a steady difficulty curve; no matter where the player goes, the world will be ready for them at any level, with some exceptions. After all, if an open-world game didn’t adapt at least slightly to the player and simply had areas hard-coded to be vastly more - or even less - difficult for players of lower strength levels, then the open world would be nothing but a facade draped over interconnected-yet-unaligned areas, equivalent to levels in a more linear game.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are that kind of open-world game.
Back in 2022, when Scarlet and Violet released, they caught a lot of online flak from longtime fans for several reasons. The games were laggy, ugly, and terribly glitchy; I myself encountered several issues in my own playthrough of Pokémon Violet, ranging from graphical issues to witnessing props walking around unattached to their NPCs to simply clipping my character out of bounds on accident. But despite the issues, I did find myself enjoying the game. The tried-and-true turn-based gameplay of Pokémon is still fun after all these years, terastilization is a fun mechanic with greater potential in both single-player and competitive environments than either Mega Evolution and Gigantamax ever had, and the new Pokémon, abilities, and moves of the generation are pretty great across the board. However, if there is one part of the game that I absolutely did not enjoy, it is the game’s open-world design.
After the game’s rather lengthy intro, the player is cut loose from their academy for a “treasure hunt”, the game’s excuse for the player to go on a self-guided adventure across the region of Paldea, catching Pokémon, fighting fellow trainers, and tackling challenges to up their skills and abilities. In past games, this adventure was very linear - players would travel from town to town as the game guides them in search of Pokémon Gyms to challenge, earning badges that would eventually allow them to challenge the Elite Four and finish the game, all while encountering scripted plot diversions to fight your rival character or a team of bad guys with some cartoonish motivation for world domination or somesuch evil desire. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet offer the same challenges one would expect from these games - eight Gym Leaders and an Elite Four and champion to fight, an evil team with outposts to topple and a leader to defeat, and new to the series, a smattering of wild “Titan Pokémon” to do battle with and steal their magical foodstuffs to make sandwiches with.
The three of these individual plot threads are considered the game’s main three missions for players to do - titled “Victory Road”, “Starfall Street”, and “Path of Legends”, respectively - but unlike previous games, the player is not required to go about tackling them in any particular order. So long as players can reach each destination in the game world, they can attempt to accomplish each objective in true open-world fashion. To this end, I must commend the Pokémon Company for their intention; to be able to go wherever you want in Paldea at any time, taking on the game’s objectives in whatever order you want, is a dream come true for a Pokémon fan like myself. Unfortunately, that is not the experience that Scarlet and Violet offer, as the games make no effort to adapt to the player’s level of power whatsoever. Despite the fact that Paldea is openly explorable, the wild Pokémon native to the region’s various provinces follow the series’ old level curve philosophy, only spawning within a preprogrammed range of levels and making exploration of Paldea either extremely dangerous or entirely uninteresting if the player goes somewhere they aren’t intended to be yet. This applies to the games’ three main missions as well; the Gyms, the Team Star outposts, and the Titan Pokémon all have concrete levels that do not change no matter how strong the player gets, essentially creating an intended path through the game’s objectives if the player wants to follow the game’s level curve. Worst of all, if the player does want to maintain the game’s challenge this way, the game does nothing to foreshadow how difficult each objective is, leaving the player to simply guess based on the levels of the surrounding Pokémon.
During my own playthrough of Pokémon Violet, I ultimately resorted to looking up a map online that detailed the levels of each objective, seen above. Knowing the precise difficulty curve allowed me to maintain the challenge of the game, but I’ll admit it took some of the fun out of the game’s exploration; since I always knew exactly where to go next, the mystery of this unknown world had faded somewhat. In place of an improvised path however, I’d hope that Paldea would offer plenty of diversions for me to explore along the way. Things like side quests, secrets to discover, treasure to exploit, or simply interesting landmarks to witness. Unfortunately, I found little of the sort. In comparison to other open-world games, Paldea feels nearly barren of compelling side content. Sure, there are landmarks and views to find - the Ten Sights of Paldea, for instance, are in-universe landmarks with a small amount of history to read on their discovery - but due to the game’s subpar graphics, they are rarely impressive to behold. As for side content or secret treasures, it felt like ninety percent of the time the only thing the game bothered to reward me with was rare Pokémon. While it was engaging to stumble across Pokémon with rare tera types every once in a while, most other rare Pokémon felt underwhelming to discover because, at best, players could only manually locate the areas that rare Pokémon could spawn at; getting them to spawn at all would be up to luck. Finding Rotom around Levincia City, Frigibax on Glaseado Mountain, or certain Paradox Pokémon in Area Zero was more about patience and trial-and-error rather than discovery or effort. I never even found a Zorua or Ditto, who inhabit the overworld disguised as other Pokémon with no clear way to discern them from the surrounding Pokémon.
The other discoverables throughout the game I feel are almost entirely post-game oriented. The tera raids, for instance, were a feature I never engaged with. This was mainly due to them usually offering weak or uninteresting Pokémon that weren’t worth the effort to undergo an entire raid for, but also by the time that I had played Violet, the game’s remaining fanbase was mostly focused on the hardest, most rewarding raids available, and the level of preparation I’d need to undergo to join them I deemed not worth my time. The other discoverable remaining were the stakes tied to the sidequest to catch the “Treasures of Ruin”, four legendary Pokémon scattered to the four corners of Paldea. During my playthrough, I only discovered one of the twenty-four stakes littered across the region, and after beating the game, I learned that was because some require movement tools you only earn toward the end of the game to reach. With both these features in mind, it’s no wonder I hardly engaged with them - there was no way for me to learn to care for them during my playthrough, despite them being the most rewarding side content in the game.
So, all these issues combined are what I’ve grown to call “The Paldea Problem”: an open-world game in aesthetic, but without the features or adaptability to capitalize on the open-world setup. The game has a pre-set difficulty curve that cannot be sidestepped, the world has nothing worthwhile to discover and thus does not foster a desire to explore, and most of the rewarding side content only becomes truly achievable once the main story is complete. It’s for these reasons that Pokémon Violet disappointed me, even after its truly excellent finale in Area Zero; a finale that owes much of its successes to the fact that it forgoes the open-world gameplay and presentation for a linear, scripted journey into the depths of the Paldean crater. I don’t mean to cast blame or come off as aggressive, but as many other online voices have pointed out, Pokémon is one of the world’s most successful brands, backed by billions of dollars. One would hope that Game Freak and the Pokémon Company would be able to put more effort into their flagship products, but at the same time, I know that game development is not easy. Game Freak is only a company of 200 or so employees as (at least according to this report from 2023) and Pokémon as a series tries to have frequent releases, meaning tight deadlines and cut corners. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, which took two-and-a-half years to develop, are not the first to show these rough edges; Sword and Shield, the previous generation of games, were similarly torn apart by critics on release for their bad graphics and a limited Pokédex of available ‘mons. The cycle of Pokémon game development has finally caught up to the company, and they are unarguably feeling the burn.
Still, I can’t help but compare Scarlet and Violet to other games on the Nintendo Switch. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the games in the Xenoblade Chronicles franchise, for instance accomplish much of the challenges that come with open-world game design, and with flying colors too. While Breath of the Wild took twice as long to make as these Pokémon games, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was built in roughly the same amount of time with a team of only forty dedicated developers (cited here). All this to say that creating an interesting world with fun things to discover and one that offers an accurate level of challenge to the player is not impossible with a team of people of that size, much less with the Pokémon Company can throw around. so with that in mind, how could games like Scarlet and Violet have been improved, or even more so, how can open-world Pokémon games moving forward learn from their mistakes? I have a few suggestions.
A fanmade 3D open-world Pokémon game concept by George K., artstation link here.
Before anything can be done, we must first identify the components that make up “the Paldea Problem”, issues with the open-world design of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet that must be solved to create a satisfying world to explore. I’ll lay them out here, then address them one by one:
Pre-set difficulty curve enforced by enemy levels bound to specific areas or challenges
Poorly communicated difficulty levels of required challenges
Lack of worthwhile side content to discover through exploration before post-game
Discovery of rare Pokémon spawning areas sullied by luck-based spawns
The first issue, the pre-set difficulty curve, is by far the hardest issue to tackle of the bunch, yet it is also the most important. Plenty of open-world games before Scarlet and Violet have managed to walk this tightrope by gradually introducing greater threats and challenges to their environments as the player gets stronger. Breath of the Wild in particular uses a hidden counter that gradually increases as the player demonstrates their prowess and accomplishes tasks, such as defeating powerful enemies or completing the game’s many Shrines. As this counter increases, the enemies that spawn throughout the world are gradually made stronger; new variations spawn with more health and damage, and stronger weapons will spawn throughout the world to compensate. This creates a clean, satisfying, and entirely invisible difficulty curve that allows players to explore the world at their leisure without feeling boxed out of any one area by powerful enemies. However, there are exceptions to this method; certain areas of the map of Hyrule feature powerful enemies no matter what point the difficulty scale is at, but these are explicitly treated as dangerous bosses or mid-bosses. This includes monsters like Lynels and Hinoxes, who too grow into more dangerous variants as the invisible difficulty increases, as well as Taluses and Gleeoks from the sequel Tears of the Kingdom, which start off at their most dangerous. These special enemies are used to denote specific challenges for players to remember and return to when they feel confident enough in their skills, and are rarely-to-never used to bar a player from reaching an area they aren’t strong enough to explore yet. Fallout: New Vegas does something similar with its Quarry Junction area, a road that leads directly from Sloan (an early area of the game) to New Vegas, but is swarming with deadly Deathclaws. Bold players can try to cross the quarry if they want to reach New Vegas early, and while the path is dangerous, it is entirely doable with the proper skills and build. As their character grows stronger and the Mojave Wasteland around them gets more treacherous to compensate, even the Deathclaws adapt, going from throwing juveniles to alpha males and even Deathclaw mothers at you according to your level.
So how can Pokémon learn from these games? For starters, if Pokémon games wanted to have an adaptive difficulty curve, they luckily have the gates for one already established: badges. Scarlet and Violet award players with badges for every accomplishment along their three main quests, a step up from the usual eight you only obtain for defeating gyms. These badges typically only grant you the ability to command Pokémon of certain levels - another mechanic that further prevents players from stepping out of the games’ intended path, should they try to tackle a gym beyond their level with an obscenely powerful Pokémon they caught nearby - but they could also be used to secretly mark the game’s internal difficulty curve, since the player themselves does not have a level to reference instead. When curving the difficulty as such, the levels and evolutions of nearby Pokémon can be dictated by them - low levels and first-stage evolutions at no badges, higher levels and second-stage evolutions at a handful of badges, and so on. Certain areas can also be kept as danger zones with stronger Pokémon as well, but as the player nears the point where they could reasonably explore these areas, they will begin to adapt too, gaining yet-stronger Pokémon to inhabit them to make the return trip more exciting (for instance, a cave full of strong Gabites could soon start spawning fully-evolved Garchomps once the player had proved their strength enough).
It has also long been established in the canon of the Pokémon world that gym leaders have different teams they use for challengers of various strength levels; while the games don’t adhere to this information, Brock and Giovanni show as much in the Pokémon Origins anime from 2013. Gyms don’t need to be as in-depth and adaptive as wild encounters, though - designing eight teams for every gym according to the challenger’s badge count, or even more if the game features more than just gym badges, is obviously a needless amount of design work. Instead, each gym could have a few teams that “tier up” with the player’s progression, going from a beginner team to an intermediate difficulty team and then a late game team, whose levels adapt slightly to the player. For maximum efficiency, these teams can be initially designed at the highest level and then dialed back for the easier versions, lowering evolutionary stages of trimming superfluous team members along the way. This way, gym leaders can keep their flagship Pokémon (i.e. Iono’s Mismagius or Wallace’s Milotic), by simply reducing them down to prior evolutions. Some gym leaders can also be explicitly designed to be challenged at later stages in the game - a cocky or egotistical gym leader may elect not to limit their team based on their opponent, while more lax or carefree gym leaders are happy to do so and may not feature high-level teams at all. All this information would need to be easily conveyed to the player, allowing them to make informed decisions on which gyms they tackle in what order. Encounters with villainous teams can operate similarly, or they can function like proper quest lines that progress from stage to stage linearly, acting more like mysteries players must track down to progress, further encouraging players to explore and follow leads. The Yiga Clan questline in Tears of the Kingdom functions this way, and it felt satisfying to progress from encounter to encounter following Master Koga’s trail.
The next issues that need to be addressed are both based around rewarding players for free exploration. Scarlet and Violet did not reward players adequately for their exploration efforts during the main game outside of rare Pokémon, and even then actually getting them to spawn was all up to luck. Fixing the first issue of the two is obviously easier said than done; “just add interesting things to find”, for instance. First, we should identify all the things Paldea offers for players to discover and their issues:
Vistas and interesting locations
Due to the games poor graphical fidelity, many of these locations (such as the Gracia Stones, seen above), are visually unimpressive and not worth discovering. The Ten Sights of Paldea at least become fast-travel locations on their discovery, but Paldea already has those in spades.
Gimighoul coins
Gimighouls are scattered throughout Paldea and essentially function as the game’s version of Korok Seeds from Breath of the Wild. Since you need to collect all 999 of them for them to be of any use, finding them is practically worthless to all but the most dedicated players.
Pokémon with rare tera types
In my opinion, these are the most interesting and fun things to find in the overworld, as you can easily spot them from a distance and they provide and immediate challenge and fun reward. However, I eventually realized that they have predefined spawns, meaning this well can potentially run dry eventually. Regardless, I enjoyed finding rare pseudo-bosses in the environment that directly rewarded me with unique Pokémon.
Tera raids
The second method for obtaining unique Pokémon, but these raids require you to play with others, which if you’re too low level or haven’t bought a Nintendo Switch Online subscription rather neuters the experience. Not to mention, most of the raids I found had lower level or lesser-evolved Pokémon compared to the ones in the overworld, making them less interesting to me.
Rare Pokémon spawning grounds
Finding rare Pokémon is always a treat, but unlike previous games where you could run around in tall grass until the Pokémon appeared, Pokémon now spawn freely in the overworld. Without a more reliable way of making Pokémon spawn, the player is forced to idle around or leave areas and return in the hopes of their mark spawning. These methods have no feedback whatsoever, and the draw distance for Pokémon is so short that it’s easy for a wild Pokémon to despawn if you don’t beeline it for them immediately.
Items and TM Moves
These are easily found and used, and the TMs are easily discerned by their unique color in the overworld. TMs make for good items to discover by exploring, but they might end up uninteresting or useless depending on the team you are running - for instance, if your team is primarily physical attackers, finding a TM for Flamethrower would not be terribly exciting, but for a team of Special Attackers it would be a great find. That is entirely down to luck, however.
Treasures of Ruin Stakes
These are extremely easily missed and only become collectible in their entirety once players have completed the main stories, granting them access to all of their mount’s movement abilities. While the premise and reward is very cool - rare, otherwise unobtainable Pokémon - their inability to be collected during the time where players are most likely to be exploring Paldea is disappointing.
Other open-world games, just due to the nature of their gameplay being so different from Pokémon, typically reward players for exploration with resources or tools for them to use. The Fallout games offer things like food, crafting materials, healing items, new weapons, collectables like snowglobes or bobble heads, or even entire questlines based around hard-to-reach locations. The open-world Zelda games offer similar rewards with a large emphasis on collectible currencies - such as Korok Seeds or Bubbul Gems - but allows players to spend them on things incrementally rather than only rewarding players for collecting them all. These are things I think the Pokémon games have much to learn from.
If translated to an open-world Pokémon game, rewards like these for players would be things like Pokéballs with unique effects (of which there are plenty to draw from), crafting components for a more in-depth crafting system, exchangable currencies for interesting items akin to Zelda’s seeds or gems, or potentially even collectibles that grant passive buffs to specific attributes in battle (for example, you could encounter a mystical mossy rock in a glade that increases your team’s grass-type damage by 10% when activated). But most importantly to me still is rare Pokémon encounters, which is actually something past games did very well. Players would be able to either follow leads from NPCs or explore small dungeons that held rare encounters as rewards; NPCs in Diamond and Pearl would hint toward Drifloon appearing at the Valley Windworks on Fridays, or Volcarona lurking in the basement of Relic Castle, for instance. What makes these different from Scarlet and Violet, however, is that they were not just the suggestion that they could spawn in these areas, but rather they were guaranteed to spawn. These Pokémon would be visible in the overworld and required players to interact with them to begin their encounter. Imagine this as a more frequent occurrence, where players could track down rare Pokémon to their dwellings and have a scripted encounter with them akin to the first encounters with new monsters in the Monster Hunter. The only downside to these was that they were often a one-and-done experience; once the player fought these Pokémon, they never appeared again (except for Drifloon, who appeared once a week). My suggestion would be to make it so that, once these encounters are completed, then the Pokémon you encountered either begins to spawn in the vicinity naturally or becomes more common if they already did. This way, players could hunt down an alpha Arctibax in the chilly Glaseado Mountains, and once they defeat it, then Frigibaxes become more common in the surrounding area because their pack leader is no longer keeping an eye on them.
Tera raids, meanwhile, are a much more complicated beast. Since they are designed for online multiplayer, it’s natural that they become less populated over time as players become stronger. But if that is the case, then there needs to be a singleplayer alternative that isn’t just replacing teammates with NPCs, but something a player is expected to accomplish entirely on their own. To still encourage multiplayer, the rewards from these “singleplayer raids” shouldn’t be as good as the multiplayer ones, but to have the option at all would be optimal for players like me, or even children whose parents aren’t willing to spring for an online subscription. My suggestion for this should be something like a bounty system. An NPC may offer bounties on dangerous or rare Pokémon, and the player can take these bounties, hunt down the Pokémon, and either take them down or perhaps even be required to capture them in exchange for raid rewards. This can tie into the rare-tera-type Pokémon in the overworld, becoming a way for players to hunt down these unique Pokémon with a harder but more reliable method.
The last thing that Paldea still lacks is, well, interesting landmarks. This is a shame because even older games managed to do this successfully. I remember discovering the Old Chateau in Diamond and Pearl, or the various ruins around the Hoenn region in Ruby and Sapphire, and the wonder these places inspired. There should be more places like these in modern Pokémon games - microdungeons or small, detailed areas with specific aesthetics or vibes. In particular, the Pokémon games have gone two generations now without a decisively “haunted” location, with the abandoned supermarket from Sun and Moon being the last one that comes to mind, and I’d love to see something like it in a new game. But these landmarks don’t all need to be so detailed as that; some can simply be a carefully crafted clearing in a forest with some pretty lighting, or a cave where magnetic gems cover the walls, or a cliff face with a unique pattern drawn on it that looks like a Pokémon from a specific angle. No matter what, anything is better than three ugly rocks sticking out of the ocean like the screenshot above.
But not to end this on a negative note, I must give credit where it’s due - most of the Paldea Problem’s issues are actually addressed in Area Zero, the game’s final environment. It’s clearly the section of the game that got the most love, its linear design and established place in the game’s story makes it very fun to experience when you first arrive, and the inherent mystery of the place makes exploring it again afterwards so much more compelling. There are secret areas, admirable vistas, and interesting landmarks that go beyond those seen elsewhere in the game; I still recall discovering a hidden cave tucked away behind some rocks, then stopping in shock when I realized the floor of the cave was inscribed with a giant, inexplicable crop circle. It’s also home to the one of the only encounters of the same style as the Drifloon and Volcarona, this time being the stronger version of Koraidon or Miraidon, which the player must follow their own curiosity to find. Area Zero is probably the most significant factor between me and calling the games bad products, and I would hope that the Pokémon Company and Game Freak might use it as a microcosm of the best of their design efforts for future endeavors.
There will always be Pokémon games, but we are currently in the longest gap between releases. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet dropped in 2022, and only recently have fans finally gotten a look at it thanks to the Pokémon Day Presentation. For the first time, the Pokémon developers seem to be more interested in taking their time with what they’re making, potentially as a response to the positive reception of Palworld, a game that has suddenly become a major competitor. Pokémon may not be able to sit back and rest on its laurels anymore (or at least, not as much) now that another studio has shown the world what Pokémon could be like, and the opportunity honestly excites me. I’d hope that whatever a new Pokémon game could offer, it would be an improvement on what we’ve gotten, because I truly do think an actual, well-designed open-world Pokémon could set the world on fire, but we have yet to see one. Here’s to hoping that the Paldea Problem is just that - a problem with Paldea, and Scarlet and Violet, and no further.
