Niantic has recenntly announced that Origin Forme Dialga and Origin Forme Palkia will introduce a brand new mechanic to the world of Pokémon GO. Adventure Effects, as Niantic calls them, are on-demand effects that modify your in-game experience, either by extending the duration of certain items, or by extending the distance required to catch Pokémon.
Sounds good, right? Well, the Adventure Effects are good, but the cost required to use them really is not. Niantic is really pushing the cost up, requiring 5000 Stardust and 5 Candy (Dialga or Palkia, depending on the effect activated) for a single activation. These numbers are not final, but they are scary high.
For many of us, this is simply not worth it. Would you really spend 5000 Stardust and 5 Dialga Candy to get 6 more minutes of Lucky Eggs? I won’t, it takes significantly longer to farm 5 Dialga candy, and spending them outside of power-ups seems incredibly wasteful.
In case you forgot, this is what you can do with Adventure Effects:
| Pokémon | Adventure Effect |
|---|---|
Dialga (Origin)
|
Roar of Time disrupts time, and pauses the timers of Incense, Daily Adventure Incense, Lucky Eggs and Star Pieces for 6 minutes. You can extend the timer up to 24 hours. |
Palkia (Origin)
|
Spacial Rend disrupts space, and for 10 minutes you will be able to encounter wild Pokémon at an increased distance. Your spawn radius will be increased to 90 metres and you’ll be able to catch any Pokémon within an 80m radius (which is the equivalent of the biggest circle that shows in-game around your avatar). |
- Want Spacial Rend active for 1 hour? You will need to spend 30 Palkia Candy and 30000 Stardust.
- Want Roar of Time active for 1 hour? You will need to spend 50 Dialga Candy and 50000 Stardust.
Is there even an use case for these bonuses? At these prices no. These numbers seem ludicrous to us, especially since the use case for activating these bonuses is incredibly niche, and even then it is questionable if its worth it. The only examples when having these bonuses would be useful is extending your Daily Adventure Incense duration, which is the only way to get Galarian Birds, seems a valid use case for using Roar of Time.
So… what’s going on here?
Smells like another “Mega Evolution” launch
When Mega Evolution first launched in Pokémon GO (August 2020), it was borderline unusable. Not due to bugs it had, but due to the sheer cost and effort required to Mega evolve, players simply bashed it and ignored. A highly upvoted reddit post reached 9000 upvotes in 2020, pointing out that the duration of Mega Evolution is not worth the Raid Passes spent on collecting Mega Energy.
At the time, Mega Evolution lasted only 4 hours, you could only get it from Raids, and it felt really extortive to use it – you were basically forced into Raids if you wanted to Mega evolve. There was no progression, no levels, no bonuses.
The situation was bad enough that Niantic added three major updates over the next three months, culminating in a complete revamp of the system in April 2022. It took almost two years for Niantic to fix what was widely considered a broken system, and for Mega evolutions to gain significant traction.
Moving forward
With that being said, it is fairly obvious that Adventure Effects will have a similar fate as the original Mega Evolution system. A niche, expensive, under-designed feature that almost everyone will avoid if it remains priced at these levels. There is no way I am spending my hard earned Dialga/Palkia Candy on this – especially given the fact that I have to Raid to get them.
I’ve seen a ton of analysis explaining in detail why this is not worth the cost in any scenario, especially for Stardust-lovers out there. It basically takes the ideal, double-or-triple Stardust event for you to be able to recoup the cost in the 6 minutes the Roar of Time gives you. A redditor put it perfectly:
Definitely not useful… take stardust and star piece for example. If using this during a non stardust event. It costs 5,000 to use and get six minutes of bonus time. When catching a regular Pokemon, the star piece earns 50% extra stardust which is 50 stardust. That means you need to catch 100 Pokemon in 6 minutes just to recover the cost of activation. Then you start getting a bonus. That bonus just sucks.
Niantic, please address this before it goes live – we are now 32 days away from Pokémon GO Tour Sinnoh: Los Angeles. There is still time to reduce these costs to 500 Stardust, and 1 Candy per activation.
Make it affordable, and we will be happy.
