Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Niantic, pokemon, pokemon go

Pokémon GO Devs Would Like To Add In-Game Chat and Other Features

Published Thu, 29 Mar 2018 21:45:53 -0500

A fun piece of international translated news coming to us today revolving around potential updates to Pokémon GO that could be very awesome if they come to fruition. The next update with research missions and Mew is coming this week, but according to a Reddit post, Niantic could be adding in some new options down the road that may make the game more player to player interactions.

The post explains that a German user named thw31416 (whose info was translated by another user named SirPaulchen) attended the 5G conference in Berlin where Niantic's vice president Omar Tellez, as well as their strategic adviser Michael Jones, spoke about future plans for the game. This took them down a rabbit hole of awesome information as they revealed they'd like to add items such as in-game chat and item trading, making the game more interactive between players in person. We have a snippet of the post below with the full set of items, but if what they said is true, that would be a step in the right direction toward making the game more complete by adding the ability to interact with trainers one-on-one beyond grinding through gyms.

Oh, for the day when we can start fighting each other with our Pokémon of our choosing.

As before, they stressed the point that the development of new features for pokemon go has only recently begun, because the huge user base forced them to address a lot of other things for the first 1 1/2 years. They did mention a couple of concepts that are on the horizon:

in-game communication. They are considering direct chats or "boards" for specific locations.

‎ transferring items like potions in-game or via social media. Pokemon trading was NOT mentioned.

‎personalized pokemon encounters: missing dex-entries could randomly spawn somewhere close to the player with a notification that it has spawned. The pokemon would then only be available for that specific player. If one continues to ignore such notifications, they will become rarer.

‎spoofing: they will do everything in their power to ban spoofing and spoofers. They will be using algorithms and possibly include provider information (where legal).

5G-location: in the very long term they'd like to be able to rely on 5G locations instead of GPS. This would also save battery, as phones have to connect to the transmitters anyway.

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