Speculation What do you think the Next games will be

[Morningstar]

Witht he first of the SV DLC posied to be released, I want to look a bit further into the future adn ask what do you think would the enxt set of games will be like. Legengs Johto? BW remakes? Gen 10? come on over and share your thoughts on what the near future could have for us.

 

[Bolt Strike]

Hmm, this is a tricky one to predict, they've done some pretty weird things towards the end of a generation. 5th gen had a sequel instead of a 3rd version. 6th gen had a gap year and skipped the expected third version/followup game. 7th gen transitioned towards new hardware mid-gen and gave us LGPE. 8th gen gave us an outsourced remake and a prequel to the remake. They're probably going to do something we're not expecting, and it's tough to predict what that something is.

The one thing I do think, though, is that it's going to take place in an older region. They're probably done with Paldea after the DLC, they probably don't want to debut a new region until 10th gen in 2025/2026, and I don't think they want to take a break year because they want constant profit and marketing. But as far as which region and what form it's taking, I'm not dead certain on anything. I am leaning towards them just doing Unova remakes. Probably a BDSP-esque remake by ILCA and then Game Freak does either Legends Unova or some new type of Unova game that serves as a spiritual successor to LA. But I'm not going to bet money on that, it could easily be Johto or something else. Heck, they could easily do what they've done with the DLC and give us NSO ports of RBY as our "game" for 2024 (unlikely because they like to have something that they can add new Pokemon to, but with enough people complaining about modern games like SV not having enough time and effort, they could consider using NSO ports to fill in the gaps).

I'm also not even sure if it'll be on Switch either. There's strong rumors that Nintendo is releasing the Switch's successor next year, so we could be looking at the end of the Switch era of Pokemon games. Again, I doubt this, the Switch is selling so well and the fanbase is probably going to take a few years to transition over to the next gen device, so Pokemon may just continue releasing games on Switch until it's time for 10th gen. But they unexpectedly transitioned from 3DS to Switch mid-7th gen with LGPE, so anything can happen.

So yeah, ultimately I'm thinking Unova remakes + Legends Unova, but this is a time in the generation cycle where anything can happen.

 

[Silktree]

BW remakes followed by Legends Johto. SV and the DLC allude to those two regions more than the rest. I'm ambivalent about the console, but I don't see them using ILCA remakes as the first incentive to buy a new console for Pokemon players.

There'a also zero reason why the remakes should be connected to the Legends game. How many people liked encountering mostly the same Pokemon in Sinnoh and Hisui? That's a problem for a catching-driven games like Legends. They didn't have a lot of choice with PLA, but now they do.

 

[guzmania]

ngl i will be surprised if we get gen 5 remakes before gen 10, traditionally there are remakes every other gen and we just got one in gen 8. there are exceptions i suppose, what with frlg and lgpe.
i think there will be something else before the end of the gen, i just don't think it'll be the remakes. i also predict it'll be made for the new console.
could be wrong, though

 

[Bolt Strike]

BW remakes followed by Legends Johto. SV and the DLC allude to those two regions more than the rest. I'm ambivalent about the console, but I don't see them using ILCA remakes as the first incentive to buy a new console for Pokemon players.

There'a also zero reason why the remakes should be connected to the Legends game. How many people liked encountering mostly the same Pokemon in Sinnoh and Hisui? That's a problem for a catching-driven games like Legends. They didn't have a lot of choice with PLA, but now they do.

No, there's a good marketing reason why the remakes and Legends should take place in the same region. It's because there's a philosophical conflict with the remakes that can't really be solved and so they needed to split the remakes into two separate games. That conflict is over how similar or different the remake should be from the original game. There's good reasons for both sides, you need to have a largely similar experience to appeal to older players' nostalgia and to allow younger players the opportunity to experience a game that released before their time, but if you stick too closely to the original experience it can feel tedious and repetitive to replay and can be limiting from a creative standpoint. And these desires pretty much contradict each other so the problem isn't fixable with one game, hence they decided to have 2 Sinnoh games, one that's practically a carbon copy of DP and one that's more of a reimagining of Sinnoh with all of the modern gameplay design and modern features. Aside from the Pokedex issue (more on that in a minute), these games are night and day different and you can hardly tell they're based on the same region just by looking at them. If they just split these ideas to different regions, some players might feel cheated depending on which region they pick for what. What if, using your example they wanted to see a modernized Unova with open world gameplay and regional variants and cross gen evo and all of the other things we've seen from XY on? What if someone wanted Johto, but they just wanted to experience GSCHGSS on the Switch but with modern graphics and a handful of QoL features? It doesn't make much sense to mix and match regions for this, they'll pick a region and offer both styles simultaneously to allow players to pick the style of remake they like best.

As for the issue of having largely the same regional dex, I think they just need more expansive, modern regional dexes for the Legends style. One of my biggest disappointments for LA was that they only added a handful of new Pokemon to the Hisui Dex, I was expecting a 300-400 size Hisui Dex like some of the modern regions (every regional dex since Kalos has been 300+) and for them to throw in random families from other regions and the 5th-7th gen Pokemon that didn't make the cut in 8th gen at all, but instead they only had a handful of Hisui variants and evolutions and it was barely more than the Platinum Dex. If the Legends games take advantage of the looser restrictions on what Pokemon can appear in the region the Pokemon variety feels completely different. Like if it was a BW1 vs. BW2 sort of difference between the two, BW2 is a great example of how a significant dex expansion can make the experience feel very different from the original game even though they both take place in the same region and both share 156 of the same Pokemon. Because the BW2 Unova Dex is twice as large, you're frequently encountering different Pokemon that weren't in BW1. I think future Legends games would be better served to provide a similar experience.

ngl i will be surprised if we get gen 5 remakes before gen 10, traditionally there are remakes every other gen and we just got one in gen 8. there are exceptions i suppose, what with frlg and lgpe.
i think there will be something else before the end of the gen, i just don't think it'll be the remakes. i also predict it'll be made for the new console.
could be wrong, though

Well the issue with that pattern is that it makes the gaps between remakes longer and longer because new generations (that eventually need to be remade down the road) would be coming out twice as fast as remakes, so you build up a larger and larger backlog of games that need to be remade. The amount of time between remakes has been growing longer and longer, RG -> FRLG was 8 years, GS -> HGSS was 10 years, RS -> ORAS was 12 years, and DP -> BDSP was 15 years. So what, kids who are growing up with SV now will need to wait until they're 30-40 to get a remake and some of us on the forums might be dead before it releases? That's excessive. So yeah, I can see good reason to start increasing the frequency of remakes. The current pattern is unsustainable. DP and BW both released on the DS, so it would make sense if BDSP and BW remakes both launched on the Switch to mirror that.

 

[Zexy]

I believe we are getting a Unova-based game after The Indigo Disk, because of something DLC related which I would rather not talk about here. I hope it is actually not a PLA style game again, and not exactly BW or B2W2 remakes either. My best bet would be a re-doing similar to what USUM did to SuMo, and perhaps, this time, finally introduce the final form of Kyurem/Original dragon. Power should no longer be an issue, no matter what they do it cannot be that much worse than Zacian Crowned

 

[Bolt Strike]

I believe we are getting a Unova-based game after The Indigo Disk, because of something DLC related which I would rather not talk about here. I hope it is actually not a PLA style game again, and not exactly BW or B2W2 remakes either. My best bet would be a re-doing similar to what USUM did to SuMo, and perhaps, this time, finally introduce the final form of Kyurem/Original dragon. Power should no longer be an issue, no matter what they do it cannot be that much worse than Zacian Crowned

Well first of all I don't really see a significant difference between USUM and other third versions or even USUM and remakes like HGSS and ORAS. They marketed USUM like it's a "reimagining" of SM that's a "different experience" but it was mainly the same game (remember that "This is not the Alola you know" trailer? What a joke, they really cherry picked the only handful of differences that existed to make it look far more different than it actually was).

As for them applying a similar strategy to remakes, unfortunately I think in the grand scheme of things (or at least in Game Freak's eyes) something like USUM, HGSS, and ORAS is the worst of both worlds. They make a few tweaks to the formula and add some extra content but they largely follow the same script so it doesn't really feel like a reimagining, but it's also different enough that Game Freak probably feels like it ruins the nostalgia and makes the experience too different for younger players to be able to feel what the original game felt like. I think BDSP is just intentionally the way it is because they literally just want to make it DP for people that were too young to play the original DP and throwing in things such as newer Pokemon or newer mechanics would make it feel not like DP.

Meanwhile, you could make the argument that games like HGSS and ORAS, as different as they are, aren't different enough because of flaws in the original experiences that stem from hardware limitations of the handhelds they originally launched on and smaller and less varied rosters than what we have now. It can be hard for a remake to hold up in some people's eyes when they conform to the original design and retain issues such as flat, blocky, tile based map designs, or having type specialists of rarer types like Ice, Ghost, and Dragon spam duplicate families to fill out a full team when new generation games on more modern hardware doesn't suffer from those limitations, and with some of the complaints you've seen lobbed at remakes like LGPE and BDSP, especially when comparing them to games like XY, SM, and SwSh, you can kind of see why the remakes aren't quite feeling up to par. And I think even Game Freak might feel this way to some degree and feel like the remakes might be holding them back from what they really want to do, it seems like they really want to do things such as making the maps more realistic and open and introducing new regional variants, convergent evos, and cross gen evos and they don't seem to feel like they can do those things in remakes without it feeling like a completely different game. So that's what Legends Arceus was for, they could make a more modern, console feeling Sinnoh experience on the Switch without it being a proper remake that has to stay faithful to what the original did.

So I think what they did with Sinnoh may be the new normal here. They seem to want the actual remakes to be BDSP-esque and be almost carbon-copies of the original so that younger gamers aren't missing out on the original games, while also having a Legends style game (I do think there's a possibility they might not do a Unova Legends game per se, but they might have a spiritual successor to LA of some sorts that similarly overhauls Unova) that's more willing to make bold changes that provide a more modern experience that better fits the current hardware.

 

[EmpoleonProd]

Given recent trends in video games highlighting the Johto and Unova regions particularly, and just rumors in general that fit in line pretty well with the existing patterns of the main series release cycle, both Johto and Unova are up for remakes, although these may not be remakes in the traditional sense as in pretty standard faithful recreations or semi-recreations with very little plot deviation and mainly just graphical and QoL enhancements or a new mechanic (like Megas/Primals in ORAS), these would include FRLG, HGSS, ORAS, and BDSP. I think we're in for something that pushes the boundaries a little bit more, like a Let's Go or Legends: Arceus kind of game.

I think we will get a Legends: Johto game of some sort (the mascot either being Ho-Oh or Celebi would be the logical picks), and then the opposite of a Legends game for Unova, a very futuristic game. This kind of piggybacks off the fact that there are past version Paradox forms of Suicune and Raikou, as well as future version Paradox forms of Virizion and Cobalion, which is kind of the main piece of evidence to support this theory/rumor. I think these specific Pokemon were chosen for those specific roles 100% by design and as a way to tie-in Scarlet/Violet with a Johto and Unova game.

Now I highly doubt they'll release at the same time, they won't be like a paired release, but they will be companion games that are both marketed but with their releases spaced out, think like BDSP and LA. Maybe we get the Johto game in winter of 2024 and the Unova game in the spring of 2025 which gives us enough to chew on for them to prepare Gen 10 for the 30th anniversary of Pokemon. I think the Johto game will be more focused on the past and maybe involve time travel with Celebi, and then the Unova game will be more in like a dystopian future sort of setting, and also serve as kind of a BW3, they could have old characters be all grown up, like have an adult Iris be a wandering trainer now who is trying to preserve the past and history of Unova, and maybe she's researching the Original Dragon and trying to bring it back to fight off a dangerous threat. Just my personal take on it though. Might not necessarily get something that dark or that deep but then again SV had some pretty dark undertones too so it wouldn't be too Farfetch'd.

This is all of course just a theory but it's worth mentioning I've been right about these kinds of things before, almost nobody thought we were getting Kanto remakes after USUM except for me and a handful of others. Everyone thought we were getting Sinnoh remakes back then.

 

[Bolt Strike]

@EmpoleonProd Game Freak doesn't have the capacity to work on both a Legends Johto and a futuristic Unova game at the same time. BDSP and LA only worked because you had ILCA working on BDSP and Game Freak working on LA, and I don't think they're going to give ILCA a Legends game, just outsource regular remakes to them. You'll have to choose one or the other.

Honestly I think they'll just opt for Unova and satisfy Johto by putting GSC on NSO. That's the easiest and most feasible way for them to get both Johto and Unova on the Switch.

 

[mastermind lissi]

For a new mainline game I like the sound of Pokémon: chaos and calm. Like, it just rolls of your tongue and sounds nice as far as Pokémon names go. Some people in the other thread suggested different things but this is mine and I’m leaving it here for consideration

 

[Bolt Strike]

For a new mainline game I like the sound of Pokémon: chaos and calm. Like, it just rolls of your tongue and sounds nice as far as Pokémon names go. Some people in the other thread suggested different things but this is mine and I’m leaving it here for consideration

But do you think Gen 10 is the next game though? That's what this topic is more intended to be, what kind of game is next (i.e. are we getting a new generation, remake, Legends, Let's Go, something else? And what region will it be?).

I don't think Gen 10 is next unless 2024 is a gap year. Even Game Freak wouldn't dare try to release a new generation in 2 years, so we're certainly not getting Gen 10 in 2024, it would have to be 2025 at the earliest. That's the biggest mystery at this point, what are they going to do in 2024?

 

[mastermind lissi]

I meant thus as next mainline game, not next game altogether. For the next game though, I think let’s go johto or a legends game is a pretty solid guess.

 

[akrasia]

I think the next Legends style game is gonna be unova for sure, with stuff like meloetta from indigo disk being found because of a line in the original gen 5 games mentioning sepia tone when the guy first saw her and ingo being in legends arceus, i'm becoming increasingly convinced that they're intentionally bringing Unova back into the fold. I can't imagine another "proper mainline" game (in quotes because i know legends arceus is mainline but it feels like more context for the mainline games if that makes sense?) being in Unova again, but legends is ripe for the picking.

For the next A/B mainline game i'm honestly hoping that we get something kinda eastern european? This could just be me seeing the fact they weren't afraid to get genuinely kind of dark with Area Zero's story which was I think one of the best sections in the franchises history and wanting to see if they can have that with some of the folklore of slavic regions. Imagine the woods section from sword/shield but expanded, that tenseness being a blanket on the story instead of just a moment. I'm also saying this because I want to see how they would do an old growth forest in the scarlet/violet style, since theres the forests in game that are really cool but in my mind i'm seeing pine trees large enough to get lost in type of deal. But even then i'm just hoping that they refine the scarlet/violet gameplay loop since exploration and battles felt REALLY good as well as the three storylines if they make fixes like level scaling rather than static levels per area, performance optimization, bug fixes, and a liiiitle better on the graphics I think gen 10 could be hands down the best game in the series as long as they maintain the things that were good from s/v

 

[Unovia]

Ok, so as a Player from Gen 1, if I had to put money on it, I would bet on either:
-A Johto revisit (Johto as a Region has increasingly felt imo as the forgotten sister to Kanto). It's been 15 Years. I was disappointed that Pikachu & Eevee didn't have anything about Johto in it. With all of the new Pokemon that started as Pokemon from Johto in Legends & Paldea, I think they are giving a lot of them more love, hinting at a Johto revisit.

-A Unova revisit

-Both of these.

If they are skipping the opportunity to do either or both of these for Gen 10, they will really be missing something.

 

[BeautifulSylveon]

About Next Games (it doesn’t have to be for Gen 10), I have a Region idea: What about the Alps? Several countries would be represented, but obviously not most of them as a whole either, as it would be only the Alpine parts of said countries.

 

[Juliyet]

I'm gonna make a bold prediction and say this year we're getting a "remake" of BW that follows the general template of the original, but things progressively change as the game goes on, including cramming in a couple elements from B2W2. it'll be the only Unova related release before they prioritize the next console and will be a middle ground between BDSP and LA.

As for gen x, I'm split whether the next region will be somewhere in Mexico or Canada, but I'm feeling it will be one of those two.

 

[Palamon]

Hard to say. Maybe BW remakes, but with a twist? These days, I honestly think it's harder to predict what Game Freak is planning...who knows? We could get a new spinoff.

 

[RileyXY1]

I think that they might do something completely different that has never been done before.