Pokemon Go! is a game that has already taken the world by storm. It is impossible to go anywhere without seeing dozens of people playing the game. They are everywhere from parks, to shopping centers, to their neighborhoods. Its popularity, however, is not indicative of the finished product. The reality is that Pokemon Go! has been released as a “minimally viable product. ” That means that is includes the smallest number of working features possible in order to sell it.
Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go!, has a lot of work ahead of themselves. The game has attracted a large audience. In order to maintain that audience it is important that they continue to add new features. This will help keep people excited and engaged.
We polled our audience and reflected on what features we wanted to see included to the game as it continues to develop. Take a look below and check out our list of some of the requested features.
Trading
We already know this feature is coming. We just hope that it comes soon. This will give a lot more opportunities for gathering Pokemon and would give players a chance to use teamwork help complete their collections.
There are reports out there that this feature is going to include NFC (near field communication). But, we really don’t know all of the details outside of the fact that it is on the way.
Battling
One of the key components of the Pokemon franchise is the idea of two trainers battling it out with their Pokemon collections. This combat happens at gyms in Pokemon Go!, but we don’t think there are enough opportunities to battle friends or to even battle in the wild.
Our hope is that Niantic will provide opportunities to have the battle experience outside of the gym environment either with NPC controlled Pokemon trainers that wander the map, or with friends locally. This can use some of the same technology as the trading mentioned above if they don’t want to deal with the logistics of friends lists. But, honestly, we know they are smart people, they can figure it out.
Leveling
One problem that a lot of younger gamers have is that they don’t have the ability to level their Pokemon easily. We hope that Niantic adds some alternative routes to increase each player’s Pokemon. Some suggestions from our audience included things like earning XP for a given Pokemon by tracking walking distance or being able to ship Pokemon to Professor Willow for dust in lieu of candy.
Social
A healthy portion of our audience requested the ability to have more interaction with people that they deem as “friends.” They wanted to be able to challenge their friends to combat or to other competitions. There’s already some light social elements because everyone can join one of the three teams. Some people feel that the game is still an isolating experience (at least within their own phone) and are hoping that they can make a more social experience.
Accessibility
One member of our audience is actually color blind and mentioned that some of the coloring in the game specifically regarding the rings that represent difficulty for capturing Pokemon or difficult for them to see our hope is that they make the game slightly more accessible over time by implementing different colors to accommodate the color blind.
What Pokemon Go features are you looking for? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
Linda Wrobel
It would probably take too much computing power but I wish the pokemon would spawn and wander in a random direction slowly for 15 minutes before despawning rather than spawning and sitting in the exact same spots like clockwork during every hour.
I would like to be able to turn myself on to be able to fight pokemon one on one with those of opposing teams. I would show up on their radar and they on mine. I pick a pokemon for a challenge and when someone engages me, the pokemon they fight me with is the closest in CP power of mine to make every fight virtually even. When I engage someone else first, it takes the pokemon of mine closest to their CP pokemon. To keep it fair, pokemon must be within 100CP of each other or you can’t engage. Have the winner get 100 exp and the looser get 10 exp for trying to make it worth playing. Make it so you can only engage a person once a day or once an hour.
I would like the professor randomly pop up like a rare and ask you to fetch him a rare pokemon and send you on a walk to a random poke stop within a kilometer to get the pokemon for him. When you get there, you capture it in a ball and return to the stop you got the professor who will show up when your within range and reward you with coins.
I would like a challenge to show up in the form of papers to find a treasure at a random stop within a kilometer and you have to go stop and spin every poke stop in a kilometer area to find the treasure which could be coins or a random rare pokemon.
I can think of other things to get people out and about, walking and hunting. They could add so much to this such as visiting every pokestop within X kilometers to get a coin reward or something.
Oh man! I love the idea of randomly spawning quests targets or “interesting features.”
They even highlight a specific Pokestop in each town of what have you to encourage people to explore their hometowns and learn about things.