- Joined
- Sep 26, 2019
You're either thinking of Rare Candy, or something that got added after I quit playing
edit: While I'm here, some random thoughts about the whole concept of the GPS game genre:
I love the idea of these kinds of things, and it's sort of an evolution of Foursquare. Yeah, remember that? The social app where you check in to wherever you're going, and if you check in the most you become the "mayor" of a place and you can have pissing contests over check-ins? Yeah, that's pretty fun, but ultimately fruitless. Pokemon Go does have something like that, to an extent, but it's half-baked as hell. You can collect gym badges just from spinning or dropping off at them, and you level them up by having your Pokemon at a gym over time - I think like, 21 days worth of time total to get your gym badge all the way up to gold. Problem is, those only apply to gyms, not Pokestops. Nowhere in your profile can you see a log of Pokestops you've been to over time, nor can you ever see how many times you've spun one. Gyms show up in your profile, but you can't just click one, look at the picture, and check on its status unless you actually have a pokemon dropped off.
I bring that up because Ingress, literally the game Pokemon Go is built on top of, does let you collect every single stop. Instead of badges, you get portal keys, and those portal keys are integral to the game - they work as both a sort of postcard, but also let you remotely link stops together, as Ingress boils down to a global game of connect the dots mixed with Qix. Ingress has been, for a long time, in that sort of purgatory status that some online games get into, where its playerbase is almost entirely obsessives who either play the game around the clock, or bot the fuck out of it, with almost no casuals on board. But, it still works as sort of a postcard-collecting game, as you can see more than one picture from every stop (if different pictures were submitted), and even jump to those stops and have a look around.
So, an Ingress portal key lets you not just see the name and photo of a place, but other photos, how far you are from that location right now, the in-game status of that portal, a little blurb about the place, and an overview of what's going on around that location at the moment. Pokemon Go gym badges only let you see the name, one photo, and a blurb. And worst of all, what gets selected to be a gym seems to be random. So you'll see a lot of retarded situations where, like, some major point of interest will only be a stop, and the gym will be some tree next to it with a memorial plaque. So, you'll get the gym badge for this tree next to this really cool place you're visiting, but there won't be one for the place itself. That's retarded.
I have no clue why they removed so many features in Pokemon. It's such a gimped game in so many ways.
There could be a hell of a lot more done with this style of game, if they gave any actual reason for players to go and visit new places. Like, one game I've imagined is a dungeon crawler where you level up by scanning stops around your town. The levels would be permanently kept, with stops turning into shops, mini-dungeons, and little villages where you can get quests on repeat visits, but you'd be heavily encouraged to go find new stops to boost your level. These would be background to a main campaign which you could play at home, where the actual dungeon crawling would earn you in-game GP you could use to buy better equipment. And of course, you could drop off some items as treasures for others to find, alongside Dark Souls-style shitposts for others to laugh at. It's a game that would encourage exploration and exercise, forcing its players to touch grass to make progress, and appreciate the world around them.
Problem is, Niantic is made up of former Google employees, and they've got a whole system that's probably got patents and Google Maps API usage that's not accessible to us plebs. Maybe you could do something like that with OpenStreetMap, but it seems like an immensely difficult game to build out for any kind of indie developer.
But hey, it'd be the first RPG where you get experience points from actually having real life experiences.
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