What’s This? Your Pokémon Go is Evolving!
The location based augmented reality game may not be the same as you remember
By Kinaan Taha
Pokémon has existed for longer than most of the undergraduates at the University of Minnesota. Since its creation in 1996, over 800 cuddly, cool, and neat pocket monsters have graced our generation’s screens, card sleeves, and graphic tees in various forms and fashions. But when Pokémon Go launched in July of 2016, the fever dream of Millenials and Zoomers alike was finally realized: Pokémon were here, in the real world. For the first two glorious weeks, everyone was outside catching them all. And it wasn’t only people who had a pre-existing connection to the franchise who found themselves hooked on the game. No matter the place, no matter the time, people were hunting Charmanders and hatching Chanseys, and sometimes wandering into traffic to do so.
It wasn’t a hobby, it was a fanaticism. And when 45 million people focus their attention on something, no matter how interesting it might be, parts of it will start to break down. Pokémon Go was no exception, and soon the combination of fresh eyes and enfranchised fans scrutinizing it against the hype with which it was released led to a swift polarization of the fanbase. The absence of player-versus-player battles, the lackluster leveling system, and the inability to trade Pokémon forced players into making their own collaborative systems of play, such as organizing to fight a gym at the same time. Without any meaningful ways to interact with other players, it felt increasingly like playing a single player game in tandem with millions of other players, instead of the community-focused experience that was touted prior to its release.
Eli Koopman, a student at the University, said he played Pokémon Go upon its release but stopped playing after about six months. The game hadn’t changed in any meaningful way, and while the things that were fun upon release were fun after half a year, they weren’t as fresh. The gaps in the game had only grown more noticeable as time passed. “I felt like before [I stopped playing], you couldn’t really play with your friends very much,” Eva Chen said. She first quit the game in December of 2016.
So why, if so many players quit only half a year into its lifespan, is Pokémon Go relevant more than two years later? It’s because two groups of people never gave up on the game: hardcore fans, and Niantic, the game’s developers. Eva and Eli both came back to the game after a one year break to find it deeply changed. The addition of raiding (an event in which groups of players come together to fight a powerful Pokémon), player versus player battles, and interplayer trading has made the game more connected and interesting than ever. The campus Pokémon Go club raided a Mewtwo on September 20th and had over 40 people show up to concurrently raid. “Raiding wasn’t around when I quit,” Eva said. “I think I got back into [playing] because one of my friends mentioned that she had never stopped.”
On top of new features like raiding and trading, Niantic has continued to add newer generations of Pokémon to Pokémon Go as the years have gone by. By continuing to focus on what drew players in in the first place, and adding new features that make the game more group oriented, Niantic gave the core group of players a product that could be easily evangelized. The gradual evolution of Pokémon Go from its rudimentary beginnings to its more complex form in the present day says good things about where the game in particular, and the franchise as a whole, are going in the future.