'Pokémon GO' News, Update: Niantic to Expand Gym Gameplay
Niantic Labs is committed to improving the "Pokémon GO" experience to keep the interest alive and the developer's next agenda is to develop the gyms.
Niantic recognizes that the training gyms in "Pokémon GO" need some improvement. Senior product manager Tatsuo Nomura told Polygon during the Game Developers Conference 2017 that they intend to do something about that.
"The gym portion [of 'Pokémon GO'] needs a lot more work, and we are trying to improve it and make a bigger change to how the system works," he revealed.
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"Overall, I think we need a little bit more time to think through how we do it," Nomura went on to say about the feature.
Niantic is expected to do an overhaul of the gym battles in "Pokémon GO," and the addition of the trading feature that the studio plans will certainly help.
Nomura says that in their attempt to improve the feature, they will have to compare how the gyms work in the augmented reality game and in the main "Pokémon" games.
In "Pokémon GO," players get the chance to be team leaders. In the main line titles, trainers are allowed to visit eight gyms, each of them is home to a set of other trainers and a leader.
"We needed to define [gyms] in a way that works in a mobile game. For example, we didn't have ... there's no non-playable characters. That's not how the game works. We're an MMO, and we expect people to play with other people," Nomura said.
"We expected more people to play that portion, and a lot of that is game balancing and just mechanics-wise, there's some part of that that needs refinement," he acknowledged.
Niantic is currently doing what they can to expand the gameplay possibilities in the "Pokémon GO" gym. When an update with those tweaks will be included remains to be seen at the moment.
