"Is there a point to open exploration if the game doesn't level scale?"

While it hasn't been officially confirmed, rumor has it that gyms will be at a set level despite Scarlet and Violet's emphasis on "exploration", and that likely means that the Path of Legends bosses, Starfall Street bases, and wild Pokémon are also set levels as well depending on their location (or some other factor we are unaware of just yet). I don't get it; just what is Game Freak trying to accomplish here? Didn't anyone in Planning and Development sit down and decide that this sounds like a bad idea? Won't this be confusing and frustrating to Pokémon's large causal audience? Won't this actually discourage exploration as a useless novelty in the grand scheme of things? I'm curious to see what other players think about this; I mean, if all the levels of these things truly are set, then that means that we're basically still on a story rail in a large, explorable environment- how will this be fun?When I think of an "open world game" that's not an mmo my baseline is probably Skyrim: despite coming out way back in 2011, you can go anywhere in a relatively beautiful environment, the game mostly scales with your level in terms of challenge and equipment, there are hundreds of quests and almost a dozen major storylines that you can choose to tackle or not tackle in any order, and the game directs you to objectives in the large world assuming you don't disable the feature. In contrast, Scarlet and Violet will no doubt have a mostly empty world, three major storylines which you can tackle in any order despite being locked in pieces by level and the Pokémon that you can find and capture may also be essentially staggered by level and environment. Now while Skyrim has problems of its own and is a single character RPG, Scarlet and Violet is 11 years newer yet seems like a major step back if this speculated lack of level scaling turns out to be true.Being a Pokémon player for 24 years who has enjoyed all 8 generations to date, I'll no doubt enjoy this generation as well and I apologize if I sound overly negative about this situation before all of the facts come in- Game Freak may have planned on this and have a few tricks up their sleeve to still make the experience fully enjoyable without the need for level scaling... but I can't say I trust them that much. I've got plenty of other problems with Scarlet and Violet's game design as well such as the TM crating, which is a major step backwards, the potential for boring auto battles in Starfall Street, yet another needless gimmick, the lack of addressing difficulty and story improvement, etc... but hey- it's open world, which is (true to Game Freak's track record) seemingly be treating as a gimmick in and of itself if all it boils down to is wandering around a mostly barren landscape searching for opponents of an appropriate level. They may even ditch it next generation as a one off.What does everyone else think about this situation? I may be needlessly perplexed for no reason, but my gut feeling is this design choice is probably a mistake in an "open world game". via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/xKPtZN8