Pokemon GO launched last year, and in spite of everything (everything here meaning a developer simply not ready for the massive popularity of the game), it has largely managed to remain popular and relevant. With new, long awaited features for the game, such as Legendary Pokemon and trading, now being discussed, Niantic has gone back and decided to look at some of the game’s features that don’t work as well as they’d like.
“The gym portion [of Pokémon GO] needs a lot more work, and we are trying to improve it and make a bigger change to how the system works. Overall, I think we need a little bit more time to think through how we do it,” said Niantic senior product manager Tatsuo Nomura to Polygon. “We needed to define [gyms] in a way that works in a mobile game. For example, we didn’t have … there’s no non-playable characters. That’s not how the game works. We’re an MMO, and we expect people to play with other people. We expected more people to play that portion, and a lot of that is game balancing and just mechanics-wise, there’s some part of that that needs refinement.”
It’s good to see the developer being aware of the problems with the title, and pledging to fix them- we just hope that they don’t take too long in doing so. I imagine people will begin to lose their patience with the game eventually if they do.
Pokemon GO is available on iOS and Android devices.