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Comment by Sephiroth87 | Hacker News Reader

Just image if the game was actually good... It's kind of a shame :(

Kind of cool idea but I feel like they didn't do enough with it. Really it's walk around and collect Pokemon. But what kills me is to do anything in the game you have to go places. Which means if you live in an unpopulated area (or area where nobody played Ingress) there are no Gyms or other points of interest. So you literally can do nothing except have the game up and hope Pokemon pop up. You have to physically be near a Gym to battle Pokemon. What the hell do you do when you are not near places and want to play? Nothing. It's basically a walking app with a Pokemon overlay.

Kind of bad for those in low population areas... but from Niantic's perspective they are going after a larger market.

I'm optimistic that the game will continue getting fleshed out; there's no way Niantic isn't going to capitalize on this.

I don't doubt it'll get better, but I also don't expect any major rewriting of the core loops / mechanics, which might invalidate user progress

The way I see it, they've got like two weeks tops to flesh it out more. Because after that, running around catching them and struggling against the weird gym system until you win is going to stop being enjoyable at all (and I do find it enjoyable for now!). Even just a bare bones friends system and a combat system that utilizes the 2 attack method gym battles have could go a long way to give the game a little more staying power.

I don't have a link to the article handy at the moment, but they've already said they'll be adding player trades.

Honestly I hope they add functionality so people who run into each other while playing can battle. It'd really be just like the game at that point, other than the battle system being very different.

Yeah...I have serious doubts about the longevity of the game. There's some cool tech behind it, and the sense of being part of a worldwide event is really impressive. But the core game itself just feels so...bland to me. The battle system is incredibly shallow even when compared to the first Pokemon game which came out 20 years ago. And this is coming from someone who grew up with the original series and loved it.

I agree. I really hope they will work on it and introduce more features. This would be a great post-mortem, if there will be one.

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