July 6 in the US, there was a simple way to start a conversation, or at least catch an understanding look from a stranger on the street. In the evening, when the working day is already over, it’s enough to go out and get people out of the crowd walking in parks, near playgrounds and other interesting objects with smartphones in their hands. Roughly spy on the screen because of the shoulder is optional. It is enough to add two words in an interrogative intonation.

Another interesting fact is that Nintendo shares have jumped strongly. The launch of an interesting product, entry into a new market and other positive changes lead to the expected reaction of the securities market. Companies whose shares are freely traded often become more expensive or cheaper. But hardly on such a scale. Nintendo Co. stock price jumped more than one and a half times in just three days. The market value of the company increased by $ 7 billion.

How these two events are connected - we will talk under a cat.


Download Pokemon Go in Russia and the CIS countries is impossible, and in the near future, availability is not expected - the game servers are too overloaded . The game was released July 4 in Australia and New Zealand, July 6 in the United States. You can try to conjure with VPN and different methods of determining the location. Android users can get a ready-made APK file somewhere from the web. But you should beware of malware: there are versions with a built-in DroidJack trojan . It is possible to distinguish a real file from a package stuffed with viral functionality according to tolerances: a real Pokemon Go does not yet ask, for example, the ability to call and send SMS.
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But otherwise there are no regional restrictions for Russia. They could be geolocated: in some places in Asia, players complain that they have blocked the game.

Immediately after downloading and installing the game pleases Junyit Masuda's soundtrack and suggests either creating an account or using Google. A young man appears on the screen. Bisonen is represented by Professor Willow. We propose to create a character from the meager choice of two sexes, several hairstyles and clothing options. Professor introduces the course of the matter, talking about the essence of the game - catching creatures, Pokemon.

Where am I?

In Russia and other countries of the former USSR, the Pokemon universe is not as well known as in Japan and the USA. Pokémon creatures began to conquer the world twenty years ago. The original games Pokemon Red and Blue came out in 1996 on the Game Boy. It is difficult to attribute this gaming console to ours. Therefore, for many, acquaintance with the media franchise began with the anime series.

In memory of an American or Japanese fan, rich sprites of a tiny 8-bit gaming console, music melodies, attempts to get that rare animal and a large world available for research will come up. In Russia, "Pokémon" is a children's cartoon that was shown on the ORT channel in 2001.

A series of games went through a lot of colors to name their iterations, and even began to resort to letters (X and Y, Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, and so on). The years of difficult economic conditions have passed, and Nintendo has a small but noticeable circle of fans in Russia. Still, when talking about the application of augmented reality, you can come across some misunderstanding. No, this is not an adaptation of that cartoon. This is a smartphone version of the established canon of games.


In Pokemon Go now there are 133 pokemon.

In short, any of the games in the series is an RPG in which the main character can travel around the fictional world of Pokemon. The player collects a collection of creatures and arranges battles with other Pokemon coaches. The goal is to collect a complete collection and obtain a champion title. In each game, you also need to confuse the plans of the criminal gang, which is trying to take over the world with the help of Pokemon.

Battles in games are step-by-step battles between two (or four) Pokemon of two sides. The series is known for its well-established fighting mechanics. The outcome of the fight is influenced by the level of fighting Pokemon, their type, special attacks and abilities. There is an opportunity to exchange Pokémon with other trainers - both with gaming and real coaches via a special cable between consoles.

Nintendo is often blamed for ignoring the growing smartphone market. Pokemon Go is one of the first attempts and, as it turned out, successful. Everyone has more than enough computing power in their pockets to create an augmented reality portal. Satellite navigation systems and orientation over Wi-Fi networks allow you to set the location of the device with an accuracy of meters. A permanent Internet connection loads content.

Pokemon Go Player does not control the Pokemon Trainer Avatar. He catches them not on the screen, but in the real world.

And for this you need to walk. How? Raise your right leg. Lower. Raise the left. And so continue to the point of destination. Players move in the real world, constantly glancing at the screens of smartphones. Nothing like?

Reskin "Ingress"?

In general, there is no discovery. Just look at the list of companies that had a hand in the game: this is The Pokemon Company (one third owned by Nintendo), Nintendo and Niantic itself. You need to talk about the latter separately.

In November 2012, the closed Ingress beta test began. The game was released into the open beta a year later, and in December 2013 a release was made. Six months later came the version for iOS. The developer was a small unit in the bowels of the giant Google - Niantic.


Augmented reality mode quickly loses the wow effect due to sinking performance. Project Tango , where are you?

When registering in Ingress, the application user selects one of two fractions, which differ only in color. Agents are moving in the real world, and their devices register movements. Points of interest represent sights and any unusual objects. Monument, graffiti, a temple, an interesting sign - all this can become a “portal”. The players themselves have entangled the world with a map of such objects. They themselves uploaded photos and gave names. Portals can be captured, their protection can be enhanced, of which you can farm game items. Between portals, you can throw links, and linking in the form of a triangle will lead to the seizure of the territory covered by it.

The essence of Ingress is reduced to the constant struggle for control over the portals and the territory. Every day agents lose and seize portals, every day they destroy and create connections. Gameplay encourages the coordination of actions, which leads to the establishment of social connections in the real world. Someone gets acquainted, someone loses weight , someone just gets pleasure.

Niantic did not become a letter in Alphabet, a holding company which former Google became after the restructuring. The unit went into an independent company. In general, the founder and current head of the company, John Hanke, has long called Ingress just a demonstration of technology, hinting at another product.

Objects An experienced player in Ingress will immediately notice in Pokemon Go the usual grid of portals. The monstrously huge Ingress base of sights of the whole world was copied with minor changes. Portals have become a network of pokestop, and especially their large clusters - training halls. In particularly dense clusters, some portals have disappeared. That is, there are fewer objects than before. New objects did not appear at all.

The base Niantic about five million objects worldwide, which were received from 15 million applications. New portals in Ingress stopped taking about a year ago. Almost all players are aware of the sluggishness of the moderators, who spent months approving applications for the creation of a portal. For some time he approved the robot, but later the acceptance of applications was closed completely - even in the game interface it is no longer there. That is why it will be difficult to play Pokemon Go in sparsely populated areas. Ingress was not played in some places, therefore there are almost no marked objects in some small settlements. If less than ten thousand people live in your city, then you need to check the map, but you should prepare for the worst. And the situation will not change in the near future, since in Pokemon Go there is also no function to send an object to be added to the map.

Pharming resources. Similarity immediately begin to be located not only in the borrowed database, but also in the rules. Pokestopy can farm and get game items. Immediately suggests a comparison with the portal hack. In Ingress, a hack without glyphs brings few experience points and little loot. When hacking with glyphs, the agent is shown a set of characters (glyphs), which are then asked to draw in the same sequence. If you do not make mistakes, then the reward is much higher. Someone learns glyphs, someone hopes for memory, someone uses helper applications like Glyph Predictor.


To burst bubbles with objects is optional.

In Pokemon Go, the process of pharming is simplified to disgrace. You just need to spin the icon, and objects will fall out of it. There is a time limit of 5 minutes, but pokestopy, unlike portals, do not overheat from frequent use, that is, you can farm indefinitely, without a cooling period. The level of items depends only on the level of the player. In Ingress, weak portals gave only weak items.

Catching pokemon. Pokemon randomly from time to time appear on the map around the player. The detailed algorithm is unknown, someone is talking about a timer from the last meeting. It is worth considering that most often creatures appear in crowded places, where a large activity of other players is recorded. That is, it is less effective to go to the forest for pokemons than to hang around some popular monument in the center of the city. And in Zone 51 there is no Mute. Unless it is worth looking for Pokemon of water type near open water.


Such Pokemon are caught badly, and yes even flea.

Below on the right are pokemons that are somewhere nearby. The number of paws under the icons indicates distance. Each of the tracks is an additional one hundred meters of radius. On the map it is worth looking at the grass particle animation - this is the place where the chance to meet a pokemon is higher.



By tapu on the pokemon on the map, the fishing mode will open. Catching pokemon looks like throwing pokebolov on being in the mode of augmented reality or without it. It is with these screenshots that the Network is crammed: a flat street area, a pokemon and an interface.


Augmented reality mode is completely optional. In fact, it is more convenient to turn it off, so as not to frighten passers-by with a threatening posture of shooting, and yourself with a low device performance.

Some Pokemon jump, what makes it difficult to hit them. Sometimes an eye is needed to estimate the distance to the creature. Often they break out of the pokeball on the first attempt at capturing. But in general, the process cannot be called complex. Unless you can spin the pokeball in a special way to get a little more experience points. Beware, the game stores information about the location of the Pokémon capture. Wrong spouse can easily burn, one precedent has already been .

Pharming Pokemon walks. Pokemon can be obtained by incubating eggs. To do this, eggs that occasionally fall out of pokestop should be placed in an incubator. Initially, the inventory has exactly one for an infinite number of uses. For gold, you can buy another one that will break after three eggs grown. After hatching, the player receives not only a Pokemon, but also a good amount of resources for their upgrade.


Plant for growing eggs, model with 4 legs and tail. Someone rides bicycles around. But the maximum speed is limited.

The game will ask you to go the required number of kilometers - 2, 5 or 10. The hatching pokemon depends on the distance you will need to walk. In the current version there is a problem: the game does not consider the distance with the screen off. Well, let's hope the bug will be fixed. So far, the solution is the following: turn on the power saving mode, in which the screen turns off if the phone is turned upside down, and walk.

Transformations The function barely got into the final game, as Niantic was afraid that users would not understand. The game corresponds to the imaged universe, in which Pokemon can transform / evolve. Here we need the appropriate types of candy (candy) and a little star dust. Different Pokemon require different amounts of resources for transformation. Magikarp requires 400 candies, the rest - much less.

Fractions. Ingress has two factions that differ only in color and plot text. In Pokemon Go there are three of them, and it seems that the situation with the senselessness of choice is repeated. Therefore, upon reaching the fifth level, tap on any training room and choose your favorite color. (I remind you that your favorite color is red.) If you can change a fraction in Ingress (it takes about a month), then there is no such thing in Pokemon Go yet.

Capture the jims. Pokestop can only farm, it is impossible to keep them. But the training halls - is the subject of capture of the three opposing teams.

For comparison: in Ingress each of the portals (and not just a special subgroup) can belong to one of two groups. The strength and level of loot from the portal is determined by the level of the resonators inserted into it. Fashion items reinforce the defense of the portal. In Pokemon Go, the mechanics are similar: players leave their Pokemon in the jims, against which you can fight to increase or decrease the value of prestige.

If in Ingress attacks were carried out with the help of weapons (XMP Burster, Ultra Strike), and defense was enhanced by mods, here it is a single entity - Pokemon. In jims, players leave their pokemon. Others can fight them with their pokemon. This is the only fights between pokemon that are present in the game at the moment.

In each hall, the number of Pokemon can be placed according to its level: in the second level jim is 2, the third is 3, and the fourth is 4. The level is determined by prestige points, while the demand for points grows nonlinearly. Inhabitants can be seen scrolling left and right after tapping jim. The leader is a pokemon with the highest CP, Combat Power. Each player can settle only one pokemon from his collection. It is clear that you can leave a pokemon in the halls belonging only to your faction. Strangers need to attack.

Capturing an enemy training room is reducing the value of prestige to a level where all Pokemon in it leave. This is achieved by a fight with its inhabitants - a duel with each, one by one, in turn. With a decrease in the prestige level, the inhabitants of jim will be less and less, and so on to zero. After that, the first one to put his pokemon in the training room will capture him for his team. This is the same as in Ingress: after knocking out all the resonators, you had to install your own.


Someone cheats with the help of the substitution of coordinates at the program level, someone plays a drone.

By the way, fighting in enemy jim is possible in multiplayer mode. In this case, Pokemon players will also be displayed on the screen.

Improving the prestige level of the training hall of your faction is exactly the same process. Only for capture, you can use up to six Pokemon, and during training battles you have to rely on only one. That is, if you wish to add a pokemon to a jim with two pokemons, you need a pokemon with which you can defeat both. Winning only one will bring much less prestige points. Another difference training fights from real fights - this is what Pokemon lose health, but do not die. The dead must be revived with a special object. Any types of contractions do not affect the performance indicators of the Pokemon.


Central Park in New York, a surge in activity of players Pokemon Go.

The struggles are simple. They completely ignore the above-mentioned mechanics of turn-based battles of the Pokémon series and occur in real time. All you need to do - dodge swipe across the screen and attack. Special movements are caused by tap and clamping. Although someone recommends it is simply pointless to tap a lot, hoping for the lack of lags of communication with the server. There are no deep mechanics in battles.


By the way, the battle can also be carried out in augmented reality mode.

Pokemon placed in jim is not available for any form of use or improvement. If another player defeats him, he will return to inventory. And the most important thing: for every Pokemon in jim, once every 20 hours, the player can get 10 coins for spending in the store and 500 units of star dust. Usually these coins are bought separately for real money. But the first 10 Pokemon in jims are considered, so you can get a maximum of about 100 coins per day.

According to the description above, it is noticeable that the game contains a lot of mechanics, which first appeared in Ingress. Much has been saved, even the area around the player - the same 40 meters in radius. So, is Pokemon Go just an Ingress reskin? Of course not. This is not a reskin, if only because Ingress is built on the basis of libGDX , and Pokemon Go was done on the Unity engine.

Veteran Ingress can grumble around for a long time in such a way that the gameplay honed over six years has turned out to be less popular than its trimmed version with pokemon. Over the years, Ingress, the popularity of the game has never reached what Pokemon Go turned out to be. The latest product is already breaking records in downloads, hanging in the tops of app stores. It is more popular than Tinder, and the traffic to the third-party download site apkmirror.com has soared seven times.



In this case, the game itself, compared with Ingress, looks unfinished. There is no opportunity to exchange Pokemon or at least drop objects on the ground. Little difficulty, it is difficult to hold objects. Too much of what makes you say: “We have not done it yet, we promised in the future.”

On the other hand, the game is not determined by the gameplay alone. The end user is entitled to preferences. As it turned out, the Pokémon theme provided a better start than the global conspiracy and sci-fi capture of the “portals”.

Monetization

The love fruit of Niantic and Google turned out to be a sweet and honest child. There was no talk of monetization at all, and if it was, it was invisible. The child could sometimes casually mention that it was tasty fed by the telecom operator SoftBank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group or the French financial institution AXA. In several countries, some stores became portals automatically. On the contrary, the user himself often wondered where the money came from - the advertisement was too subtle.

The paths of Google and Niantic diverged. Today, Nintendo, Pokemon Company and other investors own part of the company. The young bastard of Nintendo and Niantic, without a twinge of conscience, from the very beginning, offers to acquire a gaming advantage over the other coaches.

Pokemon Go is monetized on the free-to-play model, when the game itself is free, and for the money you can purchase additional features or game items. Game developers of this genre deliberately focus on the "whales" - the players who like addicts impulsively pour huge amounts of money into the game.

But that is not the problem. In fact, there is no shame in the desire to earn in this way. After the divorce of Niantic and Google in Ingress also appeared shop items. All of them were cosmetic, except for key containers for portals. The keys in them are not taken into account in the limit on the size of the inventory, which allows you to carry more items with you. This alarm bell only foreshadowed the very hateful type of monetization that Pokemon Go promises.



The new game Niantic sells a real advantage over other players. For money, Pokemon Go offers pokeballs, pokemon bait devices, eggs, and additional incubators. Some of this can be farmed, something can not get in any way, except for the money. That is, a player who pours money into the game will have an advantage over those who do not like it.

Let someone the advantage seems soft, but any inequality in the gameplay is a bad practice.

Tips

• The current version of Pokemon Go often freezes, so the application should be regularly restarted. If the game has stopped on one of the screens, then the application must be restarted. Wait meaningless.
• The application consumes about the same amount of traffic as Ingress. In the most voracious scenarios, it can eat 10 megabytes per hour, which is not so much. Most often enough of the smallest packages of Internet traffic from the line of tariffs of your operator.
• Borrow tactics and etiquette Ingress. Plan your walk to bypass the places with the most objects. There are no cards for pokestops and jims, but you can try the Ingress map of portals .
• Also in the game there is no chat of the faction and in general at least some possibility of communication. Get in touch through Ingress, ask in local cells, where the Telegram-chats of Pokemon Go players in your region.
• Ingress and Pokemon Go constantly draw 3D graphics on the screen, the screen works with maximum brightness so that the player can distinguish details in daylight, coordinates of satellite navigation systems, compass, device position, map data are requested, communication with the game servers is in progress. Not surprisingly, power consumption is monstrously high. On older devices, the battery goes literally on the eyes. Go out for a walk only in a charged state.
• In the pouch for the store of the machine M16 or AK well includes a large external battery of 8 cells 18650 20 A · h and above. Resist the temptation to buy something like this: pouches usually close on top, and there will be nowhere to insert a cable for recharging. Try other types of pouches or backpacks.
• Stick a tattoo on your face with the symbols of your faction. Terrify your enemies.

Problems that are not

As soon as the game came out, a number of media outlets began to spin up dubious stories, trying to attract attention and clicks with a new theme. Hints indicated that new entertainment violates the usual order of life and in general is guilty of everything.

For example, the story that a 19-year-old girl was looking for a water-type Pokemon, but found a floating body in the river. Some news releases about this incident ended with the words that Niantic has not yet commented on what happened. Although what is to blame for the game developer?

Much more interesting that teenagers began to walk . Modern children usually sit at home, buried in the screens of phones or computers. A few days ago, parents were surprised to notice that children began to spend considerable amounts of time on the street. And they are not just sticking out in the open air, but also have good distances.And the found corpse is only a consequence of the fact that the child once went for a walk. There is nothing to blame Pokemon Go. On the contrary, the game can help to establish contacts or get rid of social isolation and depression, as users themselves write about it .

Not every property owner likes the fact that a portal has appeared on its territory without demand. These are the owners of private houses, and the staff of public institutions. For example, Boon Sheridan converted the old church into a house. And the places of worship in Ingress as portals were taken well. When converting the base house Buna became a training room. As a result, in recent days, Boone noticed a stream of passersby past his home.that annoyed. The owner of the house even met the “owner” Jim in his house. In fact, it would be worthwhile to enjoy the sofa accessibility of the object in Pokemon Go. "Pokemon only for paying customers" The game does not yet have an adequate opportunity to remove your house from the card. You can get into technical support, but the process is not automated. Should I blame the situation Pokemon Go? This is a problem with the Ingress portal map. Just the flow of agents is lower than the Pokemon trainers, so Boon noticed attention only now, in the first days of the surge in attention to the superpopular game. Doduo, Holocaust Memorial Museum.









Sometimes the subject of catching cute monsters does not fit the place where it happens. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, monuments to victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and other similar objects may have been suitable for the portal Ingress, but they are not suitable as a stop on the path of the Pokemon Go player . These problems are more real, but still stem from the imported Ingress portal database. In general, Pokemon are generated in any crowded places. Perhaps Niantic will have to blacklist some of the spots, but the developer’s policy on this issue is still unknown.

The game sells items that temporarily increase the pokemon spawn around pokestop. Clever robbers took advantage of the situation and attracted players to the desired point. Was there anything new about this? Hardly.Ingress, too, there are beacons, and players are well aware of the risk of parting with personal property. Ingressovtsev long warned about the importance of caution and attentiveness. Both the loss of property and the violation of traffic rules by Pokemon Go players is a lack of experience in augmented reality games. Over time, the situation will be corrected.

Finally, the last is complaints to the attention of others , including on the basis of race . Surprisingly, if you send to the playground - a frequent type of portals in Ingress - a smartphone camera, then people begin to suspect something is not right. To solve this problem, it is enough just to turn off augmented reality mode and hold the device with the camera down.

Problems that are

There are real reasonable shortcomings. For example, at this point, the iOS version of the application is requesting full access to a Google account, including the contents of an email inbox. Niantic claims that this was done in error and that the game only stores the user ID and email address. Google confirms the words Niantic. In future versions, the error with the access level will be fixed.

There are minor issues. You can not exchange Pokémon, not enough features. Even the interface is not worked out - for some reason, the renaming of a Pokémon takes place in a separate text field. However, Niantic promises to develop the functionality of the game in the near future. Probably, the navigation bugs and lags in general will be corrected - everybody complains about software crashes. Will addexchange of pokemon, something like an account for comparison with other players around the world, will improve the mode of augmented reality.

Questions for the game lie in the other. Pokemon Go borrows mechanics from Ingress. But all the main problems came from there, and not one of them was fixed.

In Ingress, the newly registered can hardly change the appearance of the map. His attack level is too weak to penetrate the protection of powerful portals set by high-level players. For a while, one has to accumulate experience with hack, connecting portals with connections and coloring the territory. It is difficult to fight high level players. In Pokemon Go, already at the start, about the same problem was revealed: Jims are captured by players who swing their Pokemon every day for hours. It is difficult to play, when already in the first days all objects are captured by somewhere appeared trainers of the fifteenth level. It’s impossible to beat someone who puts hours into the game every day.

Upon reaching the eighth level before the player Ingress opens all the possibilities. Now he is a full-fledged agent who can capture almost everything. But the meaning is lost: on the horizon, nothing new. As a maximum, the next level, which will give nothing, or the icon in the profile.

If in some aimless Minecraft you can build mud houses for a long time, then Ingress offers an endless struggle just for the sake of the fact that there is no creativity. Many give up precisely because they can not come up with a game goal. In Pokemon Go, too, something like that is felt. You can constantly capture training halls for your faction, replenish Pokedex, but sooner or later the process will exhaust itself. Fuse will leave, the game will remain a rare reason for walking.

But this is not the greatest trouble. The lack of depth will not spoil the pleasure, it just will not last so long.

Interesting Ingress and Pokemon Go depends entirely on the interaction with others. If there is no active player base in the city, then this endless struggle will fail. Perhaps some of the problems would be solved if the players would fight not against each other, but against some external force. But in Pokemon Go something new did not happen. It turned out the game about the control of training halls. And if there are no opponents, then the goal of the game is missing. Pokemon Go is a game for cities and large cities. In places with poor foot traffic, playing is not so interesting.

In fact, it’s too early to worry, so far few people have reached the limits of saturation. The game will have new content, events and gatherings will take place somewhere. In the coming months, some of the players will leave Pokemon Go, but many will remain, forming a powerful and loyal core of the audience.

Did reskin succeed? No matter how green-blue starperes say, Pokemon Go is not a cloned Ingress with Pokemon spawn. It turned out to be a completely independent game, albeit with ingressovskoy mechanics and a portal base. Probably, the development of the community will follow similar scenarios, perhaps more successfully. By estimation of Sensor Tower , the game already brings $ 1.6 million per day, which is several times higher than other free-to-play projects.