3 ms·

The game consists of 2 mechanics: 1) Collect everything 2) Battle gyms for arbitrary cred at the moment, both oppose each other because the maps people make to

by NamTaf 10y ago

The game consists of 2 mechanics: 1) Collect everything 2) Battle gyms for arbitrary cred at the moment, both oppose each other because the maps people make to make #1 easier, make it easier for a subset of people to dominate #2 easier. By removing the maps that make #2 so unbalanced, #1 becomes a repetitive chore. There's literally nothing more to the game than those two mechanics. There's no end goal like the other pokemon games. There's no higher goal to work towards from capturing gyms and holding areas. It's no surprise that the game is dying. Either you collect the 80% that are easy to find and then it just becomes a huge chore without the necessary tools to find the last 20%, or you powerlevel up to fight in gyms for a bit and then... what exactly? Niantic should've taken another 3-6 months of heavy dev time to really polish it and add more depth to it. Create a higher purpose for holding gyms. Create a more compelling search mechanism that doesn't allow maps but then doesn't make the last 20% of the search such a huge, completely random-chance chore. There needs to be more to the game than those two mechanics and every moment it's released but there's not, it just withers. No amount of patching in an IV% calculator by visiting your 'trainer' will help that, because it still just relies on those two very broken pillars.

vacri 10y ago
This was the problem with Niantic's earlier game Ingress. It was fun to play while levelling up, which masked some of the repetitive nature of the game, but once you reached the highest level, there was nothing else to do except keep doing what you were already doing. The problem with all of these kinds of games (MMOs in particular) is that people consume content far faster than it can be created. It's quite difficult to create self-sustaining content.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  This is why they need a way for players to create this content somehow. Look at the success that Quake and Doom saw with people making maps, mods, full-blown total conversions, etc. I don't think going that extreme applies to Pokemon Go, but it's an example of how players can create the content that prolongs the life of the game. What I'd like to see is ways for players to do things that have lasting effects on the map. Whether it's moving Pokestops, or making Gyms have some higher purpose, or something I can't think of, I'm not sure. Right now it's a fairly shallow single-player game that has some extremely minor (Gyms and Lures) multiplayer mechanics.
- NamTaf 10y ago
  MMOs, and to an extent all multiplayer games, gain their complexity and replayability through PvP interaction (when I say 'v' I don't mean necessarily through conflict interaction, I mean also through cooperative interaction). Ultima Online is still paraded as one of the best of the genre because it had such high freedom in how players interacted with each other. WoW gained a huge level of depth from how it was set up for big, complex groups of players working togther with the whole raid boss thing. Even Dota and LoL gain their complexity not through the game (I mean they both have 1 map) but through the interaction that happens with 5v5 gameplay. Quake and CS are the same. The problem with Pokemon Go is that there's no player interaction beyond gym battles, which are just about as minimial as player interaction can get and could almost be replaced by NPC trainers that you periodically have to beat to kick them out before they reset again. Had they had more emphasis on player encounters, Pokemon Go would not be burning out. Trading of pokemon, player vs player battles outside of gyms, a more meaningful gym possession metagame (think Planetside). An item meta-economy where you can find and trade items that you can pick up around the place randomly and which give you bonuses (to catch rates, to pokemon power, etc. etc. - there's heaps of scope here). This is all roughly mapped out in MMOs, so it's a case of implementation not invention. Patching this in now is far less effective since they've burnt much of the goodwill that players give them when they first start playing. For every player that'll return, 10 won't bother no matter what you do to the game.

by NamTaf 10y ago

vacri 10y ago

This was the problem with Niantic's earlier game Ingress. It was fun to play while levelling up, which masked some of the repetitive nature of the game, but once you reached the highest level, there was nothing else to do except keep doing what you were already doing. The problem with all of these kinds of games (MMOs in particular) is that people consume content far faster than it can be created. It's quite difficult to create self-sustaining content.

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
This is why they need a way for players to create this content somehow. Look at the success that Quake and Doom saw with people making maps, mods, full-blown total conversions, etc. I don't think going that extreme applies to Pokemon Go, but it's an example of how players can create the content that prolongs the life of the game. What I'd like to see is ways for players to do things that have lasting effects on the map. Whether it's moving Pokestops, or making Gyms have some higher purpose, or something I can't think of, I'm not sure. Right now it's a fairly shallow single-player game that has some extremely minor (Gyms and Lures) multiplayer mechanics.
NamTaf 10y ago
MMOs, and to an extent all multiplayer games, gain their complexity and replayability through PvP interaction (when I say 'v' I don't mean necessarily through conflict interaction, I mean also through cooperative interaction). Ultima Online is still paraded as one of the best of the genre because it had such high freedom in how players interacted with each other. WoW gained a huge level of depth from how it was set up for big, complex groups of players working togther with the whole raid boss thing. Even Dota and LoL gain their complexity not through the game (I mean they both have 1 map) but through the interaction that happens with 5v5 gameplay. Quake and CS are the same. The problem with Pokemon Go is that there's no player interaction beyond gym battles, which are just about as minimial as player interaction can get and could almost be replaced by NPC trainers that you periodically have to beat to kick them out before they reset again. Had they had more emphasis on player encounters, Pokemon Go would not be burning out. Trading of pokemon, player vs player battles outside of gyms, a more meaningful gym possession metagame (think Planetside). An item meta-economy where you can find and trade items that you can pick up around the place randomly and which give you bonuses (to catch rates, to pokemon power, etc. etc. - there's heaps of scope here). This is all roughly mapped out in MMOs, so it's a case of implementation not invention. Patching this in now is far less effective since they've burnt much of the goodwill that players give them when they first start playing. For every player that'll return, 10 won't bother no matter what you do to the game.