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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Chances are, if Ingress was anything to go by, the lifetime of the game is too short for any of these strategies to make sense. After a month or two of killing your battery life whilst collecting GPS data for google, most seem to move on or lose interest.

(I've not installed Go, and don't intend to, so it may have some actual game in there beyond collecting and tagging locations. Everything I've read seems to indicate it's as shallow as Ingress with a graphics change).

By the time they have a strategy and have included locations the moment will have probably passed. I also wonder how non-playing folks at a sponsored gym (say) will feel about the foyer or cafe being full of kids playing phone games. At least some attempts will carry negative as well as positive consequences.

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The biggest issue is it doesn't really have any mechanics beyond "catch pokemon". There's not really gameplay, short of the laughable gym battles. You can realize this after about a half hour of playing. Nintendo is sitting on top of a big giant pile of money, but I get the feeling they want to gimp Go in favor of their mainstream games.

Seriously, all they need to do is add a basic pokemon PVP with the same battle mechanics from the mainstream, and maybe random events, and they could keep it going for a good while longer.

Also, the always-on-gps is a huge issue with it. They need to find some way to lessen it.

> add a basic pokemon PVP

I think this is very true, when I was in 5th grade It wasn't wandering around catching pokemon that made me love the game. It was battling my friends, and trading with them.

It's not like they have 6 generations of pokemon games to draw ideas from. Like you said, even basic battling with wild pokemon/virtual npcs would make this game much more interesting, at the moment it's just incredibly simplistic.

I suspect they might be (justifiably given things that have occurred in Ingress) worried about PvP spilling outside of the small screen.

They are for sure planning trading already, and probably battling as well.

Catching Pokemon is the core gameplay aspect of it. Walking around, discovering new places, new Pokemon is what the game is currently meant to be about. That is why the PvP is laughable compared to other games.

They should realize that the "core" hook is the ability to walk around as if the world of Pokemon was this world. This is orthogonal to the depth of the game's mechanics and the casual/hardcore dimension. There is tremendous fun in anything that aids in pretending the game you're fantasizing about is the real world you're walking around in.

I agree. I messed around with it for a bit, and realized it didn't even have the depth of the Gen 1 game, and gave up on it. Its a great idea, with tons of potential, but right now it doesn't have any real gameplay.

I'm not convinced it isn't a purposeful slow release of features to ease people not used to playing the prior games in the series into fully participating.

Then again, that only really makes sense if they really thought it was going to have a bunch of new players, and I'm not sure there were indications it was going to be this big?

Actually since they don't have Pokemon Levels and only "Power-Ups" this game can never be as good as the real ones.

I've worked on location based games before and the game design possibilities are constrained. It is a real challenge. Collecting gameplay is something that seems to fit really well however, so if anyone is going to be able to succeed in this space, it's Pokemon, the best and most popular collecting game.

Niantic will have to iterate quickly to build in depth. The need to walk around is a lot of friction to playing a location based game. They'll have to introduce features that are enticing enough to overcome that friction. Simply collecting pokemon and filling out the pokedex isn't going to be enough in the long term.

> The need to walk around is a lot of friction to playing a location based game.

The only reason I play Ingress is the social aspect of it, and the need for walking. I don't have any other game in my cellphone that I play regularly and I don't care about angry birds and so on. If I want a seated experience my computer has far better games.

So, it depends on the user, there are no absolutes in gaming.

Man, if Pokemon Go has half the depth of Ingress it'll do awesome. The problem with Ingress isn't lack of depth, it's that a new player can't see where the depth is due to bad game design. Pokemon Go has a much better newbie experience (still could be better).

On the other hand, the strategic games that are at the heart of Ingress depth don't exist in Pokemon Go, so we'll see.

My experience has been that the tutorial is exceedingly lacking.

* It's not even obvious that the first 'catch' is a choice between the three starting pokemon?

* What's the green circle which changes shape mean?

* What's 3 footprints? Look online for a bunch of myth already being set up.

* One prominent site is still suggesting you can "pick up" missed pokeballs so they're not wasted!

Ingress' tutorial & tooltips were far better designed.

The tutorial is not great, but you can actually engage in the core loop (capture/evolve) at level 1. Conversely, one of the most common newbie questions in Ingress is "wait, why don't my bursters do anything against these high level portals?"

I'm not sure that the Ingress comparisons are accurate. Pokemon is the secret sauce that is making this ingress clone 'stick' for millions of people. I, like you, have questions about it's longevity, but the simple addition of Pokemon is not so simple, and makes this an entirely different beast imo.

9 out of 10 of the "kids" playing phone games have been 20 or older in my experience with Ingress and Pokemon Go.

So far Go lets you search for pokemon, power them up, and "battle" with them. Trading is coming. Isn't that pretty much everything the previous umpteen Pokemon games let you do?

While I am hopeful of future updates fleshing out the mechanics in the game and adding features, so far it is lacking much of the detail, content and depth that have allowed Pokemon games to retain their audience's attention.

Unless they flesh out the gameplay (either with new elements or mechanics, or by "porting" over from the existing games in the Pokemon franchise), the success of the game could easily be short lived.

Same with Ingress then and careless wording on my part. Actually there were quite a few older folks trying Ingress too. But it had very little sticking power.

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