Trading and real-time player battles coming soon to Pokémon GO

Two key features missing from the initial Pokémon GO release—trading and real-time player battles—are coming soon to Pokémon GO by way of a future update, developer Niantic Labs told WayPoint in a recent interview. Niantic CEO John Hanke said that the team is working on bringing additional features and more depth to the augmented reality game, including the long-awaited Pokémon trading and player vs. player battles in real time.

They originally wanted to make those features part of the game from the onset, but various server issues at launch prevented them from doing that. The game appears to be doing so well that the team is pretty much funded “indefinitely,” according to Hanke.

“The priority for Pokémon Go now is to build in features that reward co-operative gameplay, offering more depth than just the capturing mechanic,” he added.

As a bonus, they’re working on ways to help bring new players into the game. Hanke said that early forms of those features will be a staggered release and then they will be fully fleshed out over time in multiple app updates.

“It’s going to be done soon,“ Hanke told Waypoint.

“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.”

In an update released on App Store earlier this month, Pokémon GO has gained integrated iOS wheelchair support for use with the game’s Apple Watch app.

Pokémon GO is a free download from App Store.

Are you excited about trading and real-time player battles coming to the game?

Source: WayPoint