Trainers, attention, this is a big one! Niantic has just shared a massive update on staying safe during the COVID-19 health crisis. Among all the upcoming changes for stay at home game play, Niantic also teased that you will soon be able to do Raids from home!
Here’s the excerpt from the blog post:
While it’s impossible to predict when and how the situation with COVID-19 will evolve globally, we’re going to make the following changes to our games and live events:
- Exercise: you can track your steps indoor with Adventure Sync so activities like cleaning your house and running on a treadmill count toward game achievements. We’re going to make improvements to Adventure Sync so it works even better with indoor movement and activities.
- Social: we’re enhancing our in-game virtual social features to enable players to stay in touch when they can’t meet in real life. You’ll soon be able to team up with friends and take on Raid Battles together in Pokémon GO from the comfort of home.
- Explore: we’re also looking into how we can help players virtually visit and share memories about their favorite real-world places, until they can once again visit them in person.
- Live Events: we’re re-imagining what it means to participate in a Niantic live event this summer, and putting our creative energy towards bringing the excitement directly to your home. That means we’re working on an entirely new way to enjoy Pokémon GO Fest. More details coming soon!
Breaking it down and speculating
These are our thoughts and speculations on the matter!
Adventure Sync improvements will likely just be technical and mechanical improvements for indoor tracking, more focused on staying active in small places. We’re not sure which issue is Niantic trying to solve here, but we look forward to any changes to Adventure Sync.
Raiding from home is the big one here. If we had to guess, we’d say that Niantic can use a system similar to how you check your Gym defender’s status, but probably just for the Gyms you visited and have a badge for. This is a pure guess from our end, but it does make sense to utilize the Gym badges list a bit more. Either that or something to do with the nearby Raids tracker. Whatever solution they go for, we’re guessing that they will need some time to implement it – my guess is a month at least.
New way to enjoy Pokémon GO Fest? Well its going to be virtual for sure, the format is probably the only thing that needs figuring out. We enjoyed the “inside out” format over the past few years, with global Trainers participating in global challenges and attendees having their own set of challenges. We’ll see how this pans out, but purchasing a ticket will likely unlock additional bonuses for ticket holders.
Exploration changes? We have no idea what this could mean, but it ain’t personal PokéStops by the looks of it.
