Pokemon Go is a terrible game, which has added basically no value to the idea of a Pokemon mobile game, which is a brilliant idea and deserves better. This bothers me a lot, because the failures of Pokemon Go seem very obvious and easy to avoid, and in some cases easy to fix. It betrays the fundamental premise of Pokemon, and does this in a way that required designing new mechanics rather than recycling the old mechanics already existing in Pokemon games.
Because I keep getting worked up about it, I figured maybe it would help if I just wrote down everything that's wrong with Pokemon Go and how I would fix it if I had the authority. Maybe it won't help anything, but we'll see.
So before I get into the specifics, I want to establish what I think the important basis of a Pokemon game is. I posit that the core Pokemon experience has three elements:
1) Meet a variety of adorable and strange creatures
2) Choose a handful of those creatures to befriend, based on a combination of aesthetic and mechanical reasons
3) Bond with those creatures in a way that turns you both into badasses
Phrasing this in the
MDA framework, the core aesthetics are discovery in the first stage, primarily expression with a hint of challenge in the second stage, and abnegation and fellowship in the final stage. So the dynamics of play in a Pokemon game should give you new experiences, the ability to react to them uniquely, consistent rewards, and positive interactions with others.
Hopefully it's clear how the core pokemon games deliver on these aesthetics, but let me also quickly review one of my favorite games of all time and how it fits in: Pokemon Snap.
Pokemon Snap is fundamentally a rail shooter. There aren't any new places to go, and you can't even control your movement! But it's still chock full of secrets. Three of the four items you get allow you to access dozens of new scenarios and interactions, and unlocking these tools feels great because of it.
You also have very little ability to choose what you see... however, you have a very large ability to choose what you look closely at. There's significant variety in terms of how hard or how easy it is to interact with different pokemon, and what the best possible pictures you can take of those pokemon are. Pikachu has a special appearance in every level, whereas there's only one place to get a fantastic picture of charmander. However, it is possible to get great pictures of any pokemon by following it closely. Every time you run the beach you make choices about how much time to spend looking for lapras, whether to use doduo to pause yourself or to take it's picture, whether to save pidgeys or save meowths, whether to get a good picture of chansey or eevee. Making those decisions on your own terms gives the game a powerful sense of self expression. And at the end of the day, you develop that relationship with the pokemon with the pictures you take--which make a great trophy not only for yourself but to show off to your friends.
So let's review the experience of Pokemon Go, starting with a few things Pokemon Go really gets right.
You walk around the real world, and encounter loads of different pokemon. The type of pokemon you encounter is based on the environment you are in, giving you an incentive to travel around and explore.
Ok, that's great! Now on to the rest of the game.
Pokestops:
What the fuck are these. How do they contribute to the aesthetics of play at all?
They result in the play pattern of... people taking the same walking routes, and visiting landmarks. This seems fine, though there are mixed results: remember the koffing at the Holocaust memorial?
One of the things that's weird to me about this is that it's such a departure from the mechanics of the original game. You get a time based supply of items, which must be used for healing. In the main games, I almost never use items other than pokeballs, especially not healing items, except when facing the elite four.
So how can we change it?
Make pokestops like pokemon centers--they heal up your pokemon, while also serving as convenient meeting places for players. This makes the lack of pokestops in rural areas less of a problem, especially if you change the item system to a store-based system. Maybe you could give players a small number of pokedollars for swiping pokestops. But better yet, you could give them pokedollars for checking in together--giving people another incentive to meet up and play together.
Wild Pokemon
In Pokemon Go you encounter wild pokemon by clicking on them in their location on the map. So far so good I guess--the random encounters from the main games don't work so well here. But it can be difficult to click on them if there's a cluster, or if they're right under a pokestop. This difficulty doesn't really contribute much. Showing up on the map helps the illusion that the pokemon are in the real world... but that's Fantasy, which is actually NOT a core aesthetic! Plus while the augmented reality is fairly cool, the technology just isn't there to get pokemon to be positioned nicely in the picture all the time. Combine that with the weird sizes of different pokemon, the lack of 3D images, and the fact that AR recenters the pokemon in front of you and doesn't let you move closer or further, and the fantasy sort of falls apart.
Once you've encountered a pokemon, it sits in front of you alone as you take pictures or throw pokeballs at it. This is, in fact, even more boring and even less under the player's control than the safari zone--the part of the pokemon games that was so bad that they removed it in later generations because everyone hated it. Not having your pokemon interact with wild pokemon at all is also one of the many places they've eliminated any way of bonding with your pokemon.
I'm not even going to get in to tracking, as it's been argued to death on the internet. But basically, playing marco polo is kind of fun. Knowing that something is within two blocks of you is kind of frustrating. The new tracking system which seems to exist exclusively in San Francisco is actually almost as bad--going exactly where the game tells you to isn't fun either.
So how can we change it?
Have your buddy pokemon encounter wild pokemon. They can even just look at each other and do their little existing animations. So adorable! Then get some catch chance modifiers based on your pokemon's attributes. You don't have to fight them, just a bonus if your buddy is the same type or has type advantage, and a bonus if they're in the same egg group, and a bonus if your buddy came from this area. If you add in novelty pokeballs (fear balls for pokemon you have type advantage against, net balls for water and bug types, dusk balls for catching at night, etc.) then you suddenly have a great interaction with wild pokemon that also gives you an avenue of expression through your buddy.
Also, for Arceus' sake, stop pokemon from running away and give them the same capture rates as the main series games. Why would you change those things? It's more work and no benefit. Having a pokemon run away from you NEVER contributes to the player experience! In the games it's not AS bad since you can stay in the same area and be very likely to see another of the same species (for example Abra) and it's different for legendary pokemon (the dogs in G/S and lati@s in ORAS) but in Pokemon Go it's either insulting (a pidgey ran away? Really?) or horrifying (I've seen two wild porygon ever. How do you think I'd feel if they ran away and I couldn't catch them and never saw one again?)
While we're at it, let's also stop pokemon from, let's say the middle third of the CP spectrum, ever spawning. The way the game is now, seeing low level pokemon is good because they're easier to catch, and seeing high level pokemon can be good (though not for rattata...) because you may be able to use them in combat. But that middle third just sucks. I'd cut more if it were me, and I'd remove the level-based component of catch rates and cut the low level pokes too.
Your Pokemon
Once you catch a pokemon, there's so much you can do with it!
Not.
In the main games, you could level pokemon up, evolve them in a variety of different ways that take time to explore and discover, teach them new moves, fight with them, and even pet them in pokemon-amie!
In Pokemon Go, you can theoretically level pokemon up. However this makes them harder to evolve (?!?!???!) and is almost always a waste of resources. All pokemon evolve in the same way, giving you no choice over branching path evolutions and ignoring some branching paths and evolutions from outside gen 1. It is impossible to teach your pokemon new moves. Pokemon-amie, which would deliver not only bonding experiences but also doubles down on the Fantasy element than Pokemon Go has pivoted toward, would be agreat addition.
Finally, it's theoretically possible to fight with your pokemon... but pokemon are listed in terms of power level, not in terms of stats. In fact, you don't know ANY of the stats of your pokemon except its power level. So which pokemon you fight with is pretty much a done deal. I'll talk a bit more about this when I get to gyms--but basically if you like a pokemon, that means nothing at all for your ability to use it.
So how can we change it?
First, just put the stats and level of a pokemon on it's page. Why would you not do that? It clearly HAS stats--the reviews we get from the team leaders tell us that now. This CP crap is an uneccesary new mechanic.
Second, give your pokemon experience instead of your player! Jeez. Okay this is hard with the way the game currently is, but seriously.
Third, take off the player-level based level cap. This at least gives players the ability to, if they want, power up a pokemon that they really like at the cost of this being worse for their experience gains. This also would allow new players to level up a favorite pokemon enough to help attack and defend gyms--which is currently not possible at all.
Fourth, when powering up a pokemon with candy, have that candy reduce the cost of evolving that pokemon. That would allow players to bond with SPECIFIC pokemon. You could even do this ONLY for pokemon that level up through evolving, which would be a cool way to distinguish between pokemon!
Okay I got bored
So a couple other notes and I'll leave this to continue later if I feel like it.
-Don't give super powerful pokemon like dragonite and snorlax moves that cover their weaknesses like bullet punch, zen headbutt, and earthquake
-Make battles WAY faster, for example by restoring base power of moves from the normal game. Fights are boring.
-Add status effects or like baton pass as a special move that switches to another pokemon and gives them a full special bar so that the battles are less boring.
-Make swarms public, add a notice of where a swarm might occur or where a frequent spawn point is in the pokedex for pokemon that have been seen. Or just announce them on your website; like every day have a load of spawns of a randomly selected pokemon and a "find a park near you" button on the site.
-Make different pokemon more common around members of different teams.
-Make it possible to toss eggs so that it's easier to get 10k eggs.