Pokémon GO
is sleeping. No, it is not dead, despite what its continually falling fortunes
on the app store might suggest. It's still out there, still touting some of the
most interesting features in gaming today, and still playing the with the fact
that it became, in the course of weeks, some of the most consumed entertainment
in history. And so we wonder what will wake it up. As with any hibernation,
spring helps, but there's more here as well. The company appears to be getting
ready to roll out a full second generation of monsters, giving a big burst of
new activity to a playerbase that has seen little to no content for months. But
I'm worried that won't be enough: more boring gameplay doesn't make a fun game.
More content with fresh gameplay, however, can work. We need a full "year
two" to bring this game back.
I find
myself comparing Pokémon GO to Destiny a lot, though those games might seem
more different than they are similar. For those that don't know, Destiny is a
shared world shooter, where people go on missions with their friends, shoot at
aliens and collect loot to improve their characters. Not exactly a
monster-collecting ARG. But Destiny is similar in that it was a bold, odd idea
aimed at a larger audience than games like it usually seek, and also that it
launched with some bizarre features, a general paucity of content, and,
crucially, an irritated fanbase.
Destiny,
like Pokémon GO, set out to improve its game. First came The Dark Below, a
pretty strange update that must have been at least mostly done when the
original game launched. This didn't win any new fans. But then, the
rehabilitation began to come. First we got a warmup expansion, House of Wolves,
which featured improvements to storytelling and a slew of quality of life
improvements that served to staunch the player bleed and maybe attract some
newcomers. The big moment came with the next expansion, The Taken King. That
one added a large drop of new content and overhauled a good portion of the
games systems for the better, papering over the obstructionist design of the
original game while keeping the essential fun intact. People paid attention and
the game got a second wind that seems ready to propel it forward to a numbered
sequel.
The biggest
takeaway is that developer Bungie was unafraid to make pretty large changes to
some of the core systems in Destiny because it recognized they needed changing.
And the developers didn't do it piecemeal, in the way that the Silicon Valley
that birthed Pokémon GO prefers. They did with a big, dramatic "Year
2," and that's why it succeeded. It sent a very clear message to anyone
who had left the game in its early days: this thing is very different now, and
maybe you should try it again. When they came back, they found many of their
initial problems smoothed over. This is what Pokémon GO needs.
Here's a
short list of what Pokémon GO needs to be a real game: a new battle system, a single-player
progression and PvP battles. Monster customization would be nice, and aesthetic
items for monetization never hurts. Some sort guild system would dovetail with
PvP battles. I'll stop there: we won't get all of these, but a few could go a
long way. Niantic needs to make the sort of big, broad changes coupled with new
content that will bring back its massive playerbase and show them a better game
once they get there. Without that, all the same problems still exist.
But the
seasons are on Niantic's side here. This is a game that you play in the real
world, and so releasing big new features just as people are going through a
seasonal transition could be magic: we've got sense memory of playing this game
in the summer, and we could be persuaded to do that again. But like I said
before, piecemeal updates will simply not cut it. We need some drama to care
again. Like with Destiny, we need to feel like this is an entirely new version
of the same game.
Source:
Forbes
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