Today, the Pokemon Company unveiled its latest Pocket Monster experience. It’s called Pokemon Go.
“The day has finally come when Pokemon appear in the real world,” says Pokemon designer Junichi Masuda.
Here’s the debut trailer.
The game is being developed by Niantic Labs, a former Google start up known for it’s augmented reality smartphone game Ingress.
Niantic says it is working closely with The Pokemon Company and Nintendo to make a brand new style of Pokemon game. The idea is that players go outside, get some fresh air, and capture Pokemon.
The Pokemon Company has been working on the game for the past few years with Nintendo. Pokemon Go’s debut trailer is dedicated to Satoru Iwata.
In the past, Pokemon games have been based loosely on real world maps, so as Pokemon Company boss Tsunekazu Ishihara pointed out in an announcement conference, it makes sense to bring Pokemon to the real world with AR.
Pokemon Go is for Android and iOS, and is slated for release in 2016.
Comments
28 responses to “New Pokemon Game Uses Real World Maps”
Awesome, I always wondered when they’d do this 🙂
Sounds great, until you realise pokéballs are $2 each.
… are you being serious? I aint buying into pay to play, I’ll pay once or not at all lol
Micro-transactions will be a thing in this, but no one has any idea what they’ll be yet. He’s just being cynical and pessimistic.
Thankyou 🙂 i’ll keep hope then lol
I don’t know what they will do to Micro transaction this game, I don’t know how anything works. But you could make a lot of money selling pokéballs. I was also attempting a bit of dry humour.
Most Mobile games have Paywalls, the only one I’ve seen that is free and has no Paywall was Fallout Shelter, and I enjoyed the game so much I purchased a 5 pack of Mr Handies as a way of paying.
Niantic, the company helping out with this made Ingress which is another ARG game that uses real world maps. It’s completely free and pretty amazing. It’s got millions of portals all around the world you can interact with. If you live in any sort of large city there are hundreds nearby.
They have heaps of huge community ‘battles’ between the two teams several times a year. It’s a completely amazing game and since you go out in the real world to play, you will meet others on your team. Got an awesome group of friends from guys and girls I met on my team.
As I said, it’s completely free. They make money by sponsorships. AXA, the big investment firm sponsored them and you can not get items called AXA shields. They are much more powerful than the common, rare and very rare shields you can get. Several companies have sponsored special items. Another things is companies sponsor portals at their locations. Jamba Juice in the US was the first to do this. A portal appeared at every store. The main point of the game is to interact with the portals so it generates foot traffic to the store.
Not really sure if this will apply to Pokemon but it’s one way of making money. I don’t think we’ll see AXA pokeballs or anything, but I think a nominal monthly charge would be perfectly fine for a game like this. I’d be totally cool with something like $2 a month. You could try it out for free but only capture 10 pokemon or something until you subscibe?
I dunno, but it will be cool and I’ll totally be playing!
I’d be OK with a monthly sub, but I’d prefer to buy it outright.
I will admit I am super cynical and jaded when it comes to Mobile games, they all want reviews before you get a chance to play it properly (so I tend to give them a 1 star review for forcing me to do it early) and have paywalls so the very small few that don’t get missed. I will look into Ingress.
Pro tip if you want to play ingress. Playing with a friend makes it so much better.
Also, hook up with local players, they will help you blast through the early levels quicker to where you can make a meaningful difference.
I imagine they will have master balls for sale and will have a fee to instantly revive injured pokemon.
The early parts of that trailer look familiar… Like I’ve seen them before. Was there a fan video a few years back that proposed this very concept?
It sounds cool, and it sort of sounds like they’re over-promising, but hearing Niantic is involved gives me hope. I couldn’t really get into Ingress, but the concept is cool, and they seem to know what they’re doing in the real-world AR space like this.
You’re thinking the Google Maps April-Fools joke from a few years back.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the positive response to that had something to do with this game being created.
That’s it exactly! And the article states this game’s been in development for a few years. Maybe they already knew? Niantic was part of Google until recently.
EDIT: link to the Google video from… April 1st last year! Surely they knew…
I think it was a trailer for something that had 3D Pokemon appearing in real world locations. It may have been for Pokken.
I sort of feel bad for the kids watching this who are too young to realise this trailer isn’t an accurate representation of how it’ll work.
Wow, this is like the next level of Ingress. The big battle at the end, looks like a kind of anomaly?
Wow, I never thought Nintendo branching out into mobile would be this good.
I’m a big Ingress fan and I think this will hook me hard.
So, its like Ingress but with Pokemon? I’m down with that.
What a weird trailer. Like, the touchy-feely-uplifty music and everything. Felt weird.
I’m watching this at work without earphones and no speakers and it was still weird. I guess things aimed at kids often have that strange surreal vibe going on though.
That’s the thing though. It feels like it’s *not* aimed a kids. Which I guess is maybe what makes it so weird.
Imagine this mixed with Microsoft holodeck tech.
i do feel though the video and app will be similar to the Megaman box art vs actual game issue. over promise under deilver…
This is probably as close as we are going to get to a Pokemon MMO, but man if it plays like this is advertising then sign me up.
Yeah, but if you’ve played pokemon shuffle, you’ll know pokemon still makes good spin off games. There can be paywalls, but its nothing a bit of luck, skill and passing the challenge rounds can’t get you past. I seriously doubt nintendo would give a paywall you can’t get around. Nintendo, one of the only people who make freemium games I actually want to invest money into.
I feel like this would be better with Digimon, particularly because there is no way the augmented reality will look as good as the trailer, I’d be amazed if it’s even functional, let alone actually looks good.
I doubt it will even be part of the product. It’s to give you an idea of what the game is about. You’ll get into a certain area (think a pokemonified Google maps on your screen) and it will flash when a wild pokemon attacks or whatever. It won’t be using the camera to add stuff into the real world.
I don’t know about that, the Pokemon token he was holding definitely suggests some kind of augmented reality. It’ll be something like “throw that pokeball and point your camera at it to see your Pokemon in action!”
Have a look at the trailers for Ingress and then compare that to actual gameplay.
I know that Mewtwo can kind of be a jerk, but a whole city teaming up to take him on seems a little mean.
This sounds awesome as a fairly new Ingress player (been lacking a bit lately though sorry smurfs) i love this concept. Ingress is free to play (except for travel expenses obviously) so i cannot see how microtransactions will work though.
I imagine will be an advantage due to low population in hunting pokemon and a massive disadvantage is overall play in countries like Australia & New Zealand 🙁
Seriously I get 1-2 street passes a month out here.