Two officials from Pokémon GO developer Niantic Labs, John Hanke and Mike Quigley, revealed details about the upcoming mobile MMO on Thursday.
In an extensive interview with VentureBeat’s GamesBeat writer Dean Takahashi, CEO Hanke and chief marketing officer Quigley laid out their plans for Pokémon GO’s leveling and team structures. They also answered questions about the game’s playability in more remote locations.
Pokémon for all — not just in big cities
Hanke went into great detail about the availability of actual Pokémon in GO, as well as the ethos behind their design.
“Our goal is to make it so you can walk out of the house and within five minutes, you can find Pokémon,” he said. “It may not be the most rare Pokémon in the world, but there’ll be a population of Pokémon living near all our players.”
This is similar to Niantic’s first game, Ingress; while many of the major game events take place in larger cities in the United States and around the world, nodes (capture-the-flag style virtual markers in the game) dot the landscape from metro area to suburb and beyond. This serves to allow nearly everyone with a smartphone to access the game and play along. Hanke and Quigley say the same structure will apply to GO, with Pokémon Gyms standing as some of the major battling-and-trading hubs in the game.
“This is the first time there will be a real Pokémon experience on a mobile phone,” Hanke said. “(T)here are markets where they don’t even sell Nintendo hardware, because the price point and distribution doesn’t work out — India, for example, or Brazil — but there’s surging smartphone usage.” Hanke sees Pokémon GO as a bridge for players who love Pokémon, but only have smartphones.
Virtual Reality Futures
Hanke said part of Niantic’s long-term goal is to infuse upcoming virtual reality technology into their existing augmented reality gameplay — with emphasis on the gameplay.
“The game is what’s important, though. We’ve seen this with platforms throughout the history of video games. It’s about what’s fun in the game and creating new and fun game experiences. The hardware enables that, but it’s not about the hardware,” he said. “Tens of millions of people will interact with Pokémon GO. You can have differentiated client experiences that interface into that same game world. If 100 people have Magic Leap devices, they can play in the game with 5 million people on smartphones. They’ll have a different experience, one that’s maybe better in ways, but you don’t have to wait until 5 million people have Magic Leap to let them have this fun, social, real world game experience.”
Training, Battling and Trading
The question on everyone’s mind is how Pokémon GO will play. Hanke said the game will emphasize the social exploration Ingress employs, but at its core, Pokémon GO is going to be a true-blue Pokémon game. This is due in large part to Nintendo and The Pokémon Company’s stake and involvement in the game’s development, which began with the late Satoru Iwata and his love of Ingress. From what we now know, the game’s core mechanics will be centered around battling, training and trading your captured Pokémon.
“We’ll have events for Pokémon as well. Those are competitive, but they can also be places to trade stuff with other players. Pokémon trading is going to be huge,” he said. “You can’t get all of them by yourself. If you want all of them you’ll have to trade with other players.”
There was also some talk about how the Pokémon GO Plus wearable would work — namely, the center button would flash in a pattern and the user will need to press the button in that sequence to catch whatever Pokémon they were near. Then, they could check their phone to see what they got. The device, currently in development by Nintendo, would add an extra sense of tangibility to the game.
Pokémon GO and Pokémon GO Plus are slated for release in 2016. Limited access to closed beta testing is still planned for this year.