I think people will look back on this game as important, as something special. I've been playing video games for over twenty years, and I can't remember the last time something felt quite as exciting as this. Each time I've gone out, I've seen other people walking around playing, and everyone gets the same goofy smile when you ask them if they're playing Pokemon too.
It shows the potential for AR games, and I think it will help a lot of people get in shape. I've walked around outside more in the past three days than I have in the past two months. Even hanging out with friends, rather than sitting inside watching tv or playing xbox, it's like "let's check out that lure", or, "I see a Bulbasaur, let's go get it".
When I was a kid, I remember wishing that Pokemon was real. This game really captures some of the magic and sense of adventure I felt when I first played it so many years ago.
I've never played Pokemon anything in my life and I thought it sounded interesting and possibly worth a look based on the geocaching-like functionality of it. So they have the get-out-and-go-find-something of geocaching, the branding of Pokemon, the nifty factor of augmented reality, and multiple social aspects ranging from whatever online trading, etc. exists to people meeting trying to hit the same location.
Ingress was as exciting as this. And it was a lot of fun running into other players (friendly and enemy) and spotting them from a few dozen yards away. I still regularly talk to people I met on the Ingress scene, including one enemy player who was, at the time, my "archnemesis" of sorts. I did meetups with other local players to takeover large areas as a group and stuff as well.
But yeah, version 2 is cool too, I guess. ;)
Like Ingress, it'll be pretty busy for a few months and then it'll probably recede back to a core community of people who really really get into it.
A lot of people's lives have Pokemon deeply ingrained in them, and I'm saying that seriously. I think the core community of people who really get into it is much larger than you seem to be expecting. Remember the Pokemon craze of the 90's, and 00's, and this decade? It's all been huge since it came out.
No doubt Ingress was exciting, but it was a new AR/VR concept and an original sci-fi plot, putting it in the same ballpark demographic as a AAA video game.
Pokemon GO has the advantage of being based on an multi-billion dollar, 20-year-old franchise. Its appeal goes beyond that of a typical videogame, so has a significant leg up over Ingress in people's hearts and minds. Its popularity will eventually segment into a hardcore group and a mainstream group, but its mindshare among the wider population is likely to remain strong.
One of the big problems with Ingress was it wasn't available on iOS until maybe a year ago.
Since Google made it I don't exactly blame them, but that was a huge chunk of the market. I wanted to give it a try and I'm sure there were tons of other people but we couldn't since we didn't have Android phones.
It definitely didn't have a "catch them all" mechanic, and that alone lets Pokémon Go have much more of a feeling of personal progress.
In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team. You get items with weird names that you use for taking over portals. The maximum strength of the items you get is determined by your experience level, up to 8. After level 8 all players are equal.
What Ingress has that Pokemon Go doesn't have is "linking", where you form straight lines between portals your team owns that you've visited, and if you form a triangle of links in your color, you form a "field" that claims the area within it for your team.
That was cool, but I have made enough links and fields for a lifetime. Eventually there isn't much more to do, unless you're teaming up and making elaborate plans to form crazy huge fields, for which the reward is that you get to screenshot it and gloat about it on Reddit for a few hours before someone undoes your field, possibly by cheating.
I hope that Pokemon battles become as compelling as linking, or more. (I have only had one Pokemon battle that didn't crash or glitch out so far.)
> that alone lets Pokémon Go have much more of a feeling of personal progress.
In addition to the levelling-up aspect (L1-L16) Ingress has about a dozen "Medals", each with 5-tiers. IMO, they go along way in terms of giving a feeling of personal progress.
> In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team.
There are also infrequent Niantic-organized global 'Anomaly' events, which require a surprising amount of planning and coordination. To me, the reward is not taking a screenshot, but taking part in an activity that scratches that deeply human/primal "my group vs. its enemies" itch in my lizard brain in a safe way. Its like being on any kind of team really. On a meta level, it scares be how easily members of the other team get dehumanized (being called stupid, or having more money than sense, etc for no real reason). It's petty stuff mostly, but the whole in-group/out-group thing freaks me out a little.
Aren't the medals the same thing in Pokemon Go (i.e. no differentiation between them)?
So, the game claims that I walked a bit more than 40km so far and I'm going for the next (100km..) level of that medal.
As soon as I reach 200 caught normal type Pokemon (at ~150 now?) I get the next 'Schoolkid' level.
Was/is Ingress different?
As I stated elsewhere, for me it's Ingress vs. Pokemon Go is currently Multiplayer vs. Singleplayer, Community vs. Progression
> So, the game claims that I walked a bit more than 40km so far and I'm going for the next (100km..) level of that medal. As soon as I reach 200 caught normal type Pokemon (at ~150 now?) I get the next 'Schoolkid' level. Was/is Ingress different?
Ingress is similar - those are the tiers I was referring to. The only difference is Ingress medals are purely decorative: they don't affect gameplay. I haven't played Pokemon, but it sounds like a refinement of ideas present in Ingress.
You know, if someone wanted to generate training sets for human social behavior under a given variety of conditions, I bet a game like Ingress would be a great way to go about it. But you'd need a much larger install base, over a broader range of people, to get really worthwhile data.
I have played Ingress and it's definitely fun. I could never bring myself to care about the story though. I'd even meet people who have played it daily for years, but had no interest in shapers, Jarvis and all that. Sure, a game with fun mechanics doesn’t really need an engaging story, but I think a solid Pokemon theme is more than just branding.
AR game has been on mobile for many years. This became viral only because of Pokemon. I remember playing "hockey" on my phone with my friends a couple years ago on my mobile and it was an AR game.
It shows the potential for AR games, and I think it will help a lot of people get in shape. I've walked around outside more in the past three days than I have in the past two months. Even hanging out with friends, rather than sitting inside watching tv or playing xbox, it's like "let's check out that lure", or, "I see a Bulbasaur, let's go get it".
When I was a kid, I remember wishing that Pokemon was real. This game really captures some of the magic and sense of adventure I felt when I first played it so many years ago.