In today’s news roundup we’ve got three strong stories and a number of smaller news. As you may have guessed, Niantic hasn’t yet shared anything about the other legendaries.
Verizon says that Niantic is the one to blame for Pokémon GO Fest issues
In a surprising turn of events, Verizon’s spokesperson stated that Verizon is not the one to blame for the Pokémon GO Fest. “This was not a Verizon issue”, the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that company engineers “reported that even when attendees were experiencing issues accessing the game itself, other applications like YouTube worked just fine — which indicated the issues were outside of Verizon’s control, like an issue with the game’s server itself.”
Niantic CTO, Phil Keslin, shares more details in regards to ARKit
In an interview with Mercury News, Phil Keslin shared his perspective on the past year of Pokémon GO, but more importantly, he shared additional info about the ARKit integration that was demoed earlier this year.
Q: Does Niantic use ARKit?
A: We use it. We already demonstrated how we might use ARKit. The biggest one we did was the playground mode where you can pull out six of your Pokemon and stick them in a playground in a real life setting and walk around them and see how big they are. You don’t get a good feeling for how big a Charizard gets to be.
We can’t wait to walk around a Steelix!
Worldwide bonus extended to July 27
Trainers, the global rewards unlocked during #PokemonGOFest have been extended 72 hours. They will now end at 5:00 P.M. PDT on July 27.
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) July 25, 2017
Despite the prior announcements, the GO Fest Bonuses have been extended for another 72 hours, now ending on July 27, 5:00 P.M. PDT. This move was widely interpreted as Niantic’s “We’re sorry” gesture and was received with a lot of excitement by the community.
GO Fest Bonuses:
- Double Stardust
- Double Candy
- Double XP
- Increased Pokémon encounters
- Reduced hatching distance
- Reduced buddy distance
