Pokemon Legends: Arceus isn’t fully-open world confirms The Pokemon Company

(Image credit: The Pokemon Company)

Pokemon Legends: Arceus isn’t fully open-world, The Pokemon Company has confirmed following a fan discovery.

Following reports that Pokemon Legends: Arecus may not be fully open world and might instead just have open-world areas, The Pokemon Company has since confirmed that this is actually the case in a statement to Kotaku.

The statement reads "in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Jubilife Village will serve as the base for surveying missions. After receiving an assignment or a request and preparing for their next excursion, players will set out from the village to study one of the various open areas of the Hisui region. After they finish the survey work, players will need to return once more to prepare for their next task. We look forward to sharing more information about exploring the Hisui region soon."

The key terms in the statement seem to be "one of the various open-world areas of the Hisui region" and "Jubilife Village will serve as a base," which pretty much confirms one fan’s previous theory about Pokemon Legends: Arceus having "segmented open areas" like in Monster Hunter and Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Pokemon expert and creator of Pokemon website serebii.net, Joe Merrick, was the one who originally pointed out that this could be a possibility after seeing screenshots of Pokemon Legends: Arceus' map last week. They have since put out another tweet discussing what one of the "seemingly five open areas" contains, focussing exclusively on the Obsidian Fieldlands.

According to Merrick, "this area has got 34 different sub-areas within it. To compare, Wild Area had 18, Isle of Armor 17 and Crown Tundra 15." The eagle eyed-Pokemon fan continues, "granted they're of varying size, as are the Wild Area ones, but this one area is basically the equivalent of 2 Wild Areas, and if there's 5 of similar size, that'll be a lot of areas to explore."

We’ll have to wait until Pokemon Legends: Arceus officially releases on January 28, 2022 to find out exactly big the gmae's map is.

Until then, start thinking about which starter Pokemon you’re going to choose with our Pokemon Legends: Arceus starters guide.

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After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.