With an eye-watering 500 million downloads around the world, Pokemon Go has to be the biggest gaming phenomenon of the year. Sure, it’s died off plenty in the months since its release, thanks to bugs, glitches, and a sense of a lack of variety, but changes are coming.
We were most recently given the option to have a Pokemon “buddy”: one that can walk around with you and passively gain experience, though it does take quite a while. However, that probably isn’t enough to bring plenty of players back aboard.
We want battles, and we might just get them.
Speaking in an interview with WSJ, The Pokemon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara confirmed that battles are on their radar:
“Battling is a category that we do best at Pokemon, after all. It’s important to really carefully consider any feature that may increase the difficulty and raise the barrier to entry for more casual users.”
Talking further about multiplayer in general, Archit Bhargava of Niantic said:
“The multiplayer aspect is still something we’re exploring, we’re still trying to figure out what’s the best way to do that. So far we’ve learned that multiplayer battles are a lot of fun. When two people from different teams show up at a rival gym, if they collaborate and both have their Pokemon deployed to battle at the same time, they can take down a stronger gym faster.”
“But we’re trying our best to rethink what the experience should be; what that real-world Pokemon experience should be like. Obviously we’re learning from Ingress, but it’s going to be a pretty different game. We have a vision for Pokemon, we’re gonna execute on it, but we’re gonna learn based on what the community reaction is.”
Quite how they would integrate battles into Pokemon Go remains to be seen – they’ve only just stabilised the experience, so adding on a weighty new mechanic might just unsteady the ship once again. The game as a whole is in a precarious position, no longer able to boast the same numbers that it did at launch, though that is to be expected with any title.
In my review, I said Pokemon Go was good, but largely an unfinished product. It certainly seems that will be the case for a while, but if something as simple as an app can inspire people to come together, fall in love, and go on bar crawls, it can’t be all that bad.
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