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Comment by pph | Hacker News Reader

I also felt that it was very boring and not living up to the hype at all, as the "gameplay" was basically to walk around and tap your screen sometimes to collect something or make a gesture on your screen to catch random useless Pokémon xyz by making a gesture instead. Besides the lackluster gameplay I also didn't see any meaningful progression system, so it lost my interest very quickly. The AR features were very gimmicky.

It could have been so much more. However I may not be in the target audience and some people did seem to enjoy the casual style - or play a lot despite that.

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Ingress was much better about giving you a real reason to pick out specific places. You didn't HAVE to do it, but building large fields to cover big territory was (and may well still be) a huge part of what made the game fun for a lot of people, as was building blocking links in order to stop others from doing the same thing. And all of that actually made use of the map effectively.

Pokemon Go, on the other hand...never really did. Sure, you've got the gyms, and biomes...the raids turned into this whole weird activity of piling into cars to drive from raid to raid...but generally, a raid in one place was as good as a raid in another. And dear god, while I thought Ingress had you staring at your phone a bit too much, at least if you were out doing those fielding trips, you had it in your pocket in between portals (which, depending on your area, could have been miles). Not generally so with Pokemon Go (though I'm sure rural players will disagree with me here).

It was also obvious from the second you started playing that you were expected to shell out lots of money to get any semblance of the "designed experience".

Also for some reason there were no poke stops or anything of note within many miles of my home. I live in a city of 60k people. But niantic originally populated their map based on the important locations in ingress, so if that game wasn't popular where you lived you basically got locked out of gameplay.

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