'Pokémon GO' News: Co-op, Trading and PvP Coming
Niantic Boss John Hanke revealed that "Pokémon GO" would be getting three more major updates this year. Hanke made this impromptu announcement during his time at the Mobile World Congress 2017 (MWC 2017).
Chief executive officer John Hanke hinted at big developments for the 2016 mega hit but did not provide further details at the Mobile World Congress venue, according to BGR. The Niantic founder, however, gave an interview with the Spanish El Periodico in which he gave more hints at what those updates could possibly include, and the time frame that these content drops will start coming out.
Hanke tackled the usual queries about "Pokémon GO's" spectacular debut last year in 2016, talking about how he thinks the game turned out to be such a success and how the ideas for the game were turned into reality. Hanke goes on to talk about Niantic's plans for the game in the future, in more detail than he was initially willing to give out. Answering questions about the new updates, the CEO said that the timing for the major updates will be for every quarter of this year.
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Given that the update in which Niantic added a lot of Pokémon to the game — dubbed the Generation 2 update — was released in the middle of February, a major update coming this July would be consistent with Hanke's earlier statement.
One of the gameplay updates that Niantic will be working to bring into the game is cooperative play, according to Hanke. In a recent interview with Waypoint, the CEO also recently revealed that Pokémon trading among players and player versus player (PvP) battling are already being developed.
As to the schedule of the release of these updates, Hanke simply said that "It's going to be done soon," adding that "It is what it is. I'll take the massive wave of hysteria we enjoyed, and just deal with the fact that it's caused us to take a bit longer to get the rest of the features up. We're really happy to make our users happy."
