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Comment by Vexs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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'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?

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

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

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