Hacker News Reader

Comment by XaspR8d | Hacker News Reader

You can't imagine a worse execution? It was the fastest mobile game ever to reach $600 million and has made well over $1 billion at this point.

I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic. It obviously struck a chord with some segments as I do still see people playing in dense areas (and at the local game stores).

I also think looking into Niantic's past work or Pokemon Company's past partnerships would've revealed this game couldn't possibly have the mechanics of the core Pokemon line, but I do understand that the marketing and messaging was very vague.

View on HN

Niantic initially developed Pokemon Go as a lighter version of Ingress. Except that game wasn't much fun, either.

It's as if they only had a very vague concept of what it was actually like to play a single-player Pokemon game on a handheld.

  BUG CATCHER wants to BATTLE!

You catch wild pokemon by walking through the tall grass, and you make yours stronger by training them against wild pokemon and other trainers. Other trainers can test your mettle by challenging you to a battle that you cannot refuse.

At launch, the only way your kids could fight with their pokemon is if you all pile into the car and drive to a nigh-random location too far away to reach on foot and fail to displace the otaku-whale that managed to put a level 500 Vaporeon on the gym with the Rattattas, Pidgeys, and Weedles that are the only things to show up in your neighborhood.

The game still needed to be both fun and playable entirely within the bounds of a single neighborhood, and it just wasn't.

I think a lot of it is a mostly failed competitive aspect - they wanted to make it so players had to compete, which makes the game more exciting, but also motivates cheaters and prevents those with limited play time from really succeeding.

Not sure what the alternative would be though, a single player version would have been incredibly boring. Maybe some sort of co-op based multiplayer instead could be done, but I'm not sure what that would look like.

It was fun at launch to see thousands of people in public parks. I was living in Japan in city were there was an area who made it in the national news for having so many pokéstop. It was incredible. So many people were playing day and nights.

A large part of the fun came from doing silly things like all nighters with friends and drinks and... portable battery of course.

People tend to think "what could have been" based on expectations and trademarks behind a product.

If they pulled some real social-interacting game, pokemon-like, at the scale they currently have...

> I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic.

Not just gameplay, but bugs. This game was so horrendously buggy at launch, I'm amazed it survived at all. Stupid things like having every button click wait synchronously for a response from the server before doing anything, or always trusting the client, or not implementing retry on requests, so you had a 50% chance of being permanently stuck on the catch a pokemon screen until you restarted.

I honestly can't remember a game with worse execution that actually managed to survive. If people loved it for the gameplay, they would have moved onto one of the many clones that implement the features better (and have trading and pvp). But it's not gameplay people want, it's Pokemon.

Avatar was like the highest grossing movie of all time, and it was just Pocahontas with CGI.

Just because people use it doesn't mean it's artistically meritous.

My opinion isn't subject to YOUR conditions. I've played Pokemon games since a very early age, and I had certain expectations for the experience that weren't even close to met in the final product.

The marketing was vague, but it's not like a complex concept either. It's pokemon on the go, in the real world. It's not a scavenger hunt game, and that's what we ended up getting.

I could be a bit nicer about how I explain it, but I LOVE Pokemon and this game is a giant blemish on the legacy, as far as I see it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com