Pokemon Go Is Broken Without Radar

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Over the weekend, after heavily hinting at their disapproval of such apps, Niantic sent cease and desist letters and effectively brought down all fan-made radar programs for the company's runaway success Pokemon Go. PokeVision, PokeRadar: just gone. At the same time, they pushed an update to the app that removed the footprints from beneath Pokemon in the Nearby tab, and instead replaced it with nothing. And other than the few interviews Niantic CEO John Hanke has done over the past two weeks, we've heard nothing from the company--no kind of community management, no message, no explanation of how we're supposed to track Pokemon now. It's frustrating, and for some has made Pokemon Go unplayable.

I initially wasn't a fan of Pokemon Go. The game launched while I was staying in a sparsely populated rural area, so with limited access to Pokestops and Pokemon I wasn't motivated to play. Returning home to San Francisco, however, I found myself with a wealth of options: gyms every few blocks, multiple Pokestops on every street, and clusters of creatures, both annoyingly common and tantalizingly rare, available to catch. I started collecting eggs and walking the long way to work, hoping that the deviation from my normal route would bring an extra Clefairy or maybe even a more uncommon creature into my path.

When my coworkers introduced me to PokeVision, however, is when I really took to Pokemon Go. I read stories about a Vaporean spawning in New York's Central Park that brought masses of people to the landmark as they found him on their maps. Friends told me about seeing an Aerodactyl spawn in our Mission district and a Blastoise in Burlingame, and how they called each other and jumped in their cars, racing to grab the monster before it despawned. I frequently checked the PokeVision map throughout the day, which is how I found out about the Porygon that repeatedly spawns on Alcatraz Island along with a horde of Voltorbs and Magnemites; my coworkers and I subsequently made plans to do an Alcatraz tour in hopes of catching these electrical monsters.

THERE'S A SCYTHER HERE HOW DO I EVEN

PokeVision is also the reason our office found out about a Dragonite spawning, which, of course, caused mass hysteria and flocks of SoMa workers to gather outside our building. PokeVision alerted my coworker to a Venusaur five minutes down the road--and we took an afternoon hiatus to run at breakneck speed through the streets to get him. These moments wouldn't exist without PokeVision, and because my coworkers, friends, and likely most of you reading this don't have the luxury to spend hours on ending wandering the streets, it was the best way for us to locate and capture the Pokemon we needed.

Part of the reason we loved PokeVision and apps like PokeRadar so much is because they filled a void left by the app itself. Pokemon Go's Nearby feature was impossible to decipher and a little broken on launch. Each Pokemon that showed up in the "Nearby" tab would have one, two or three little footprints beneath it, indicating how far away you were from its location. But players worldwide never quite figured out what those footprints meant; I heard from a friend each footprint represented one yard, while another told me it was three footprints per city block, and so on. Without a reliable tracking feature, there was no effective way to play Pokemon hot and cold other than walk in circles and hope you were going in the right direction.

But now Niantic has forced them to be taken down. These radar apps weren't "cheating," nor did they take away from the experience of Pokemon Go. They added to it. People who don't have the time to roam knew when and where to find the Pokemon they wanted--just like in the actual Pokemon games. The radar apps also bolstered the game's social component, just look at what happened above with my coworkers and friends. We planned outings based on where we knew we could find rare Pokemon. In one instance, a friend took my phone with him down the street to catch a Magmar while I waited in line to pick up our lunch. There was a teamwork aspect that grew from having these tracking resources. We were trainers helping each other, looking out for rarer monsters and planning trips to where we knew we could get a good sweep of critters.

But now that that social component is all but gone--largely because my friends aren't playing anymore. A few have dismissed the app entirely; usually the GameSpot office is punctuated by shouts about Pokemon appearing here or there, and then a mass exodus as we all grab our phones and go for a quick jog. It was an excuse to get out of the office in the middle of the day and get some exercise.

By far the worst thing about all this is Niantic's silence.

By far the worst thing about all this is Niantic's silence. The company should say something, anything, detailing how we're supposed to track Pokemon now that the app no longer displays distance. An explanation on why they shut down radar apps--made by fans who love and want to share their love of Pokemon Go--would be beneficial as well. Is Niantic making their own radar? Adding a better tracker to the game? There's no point in chasing a Scyther that pops up on your radar when you have no idea if it's a one, five, ten, or more minute walk away from your office, especially when you have the rest of your life to attend to.

With their silence and stinginess, Niantic has effectively killed the Pokemon Go hype, at least for my friends and I. How do we know we won't be met with endless Rattatas the next time we head to the park? If we could get an explanation, perhaps that would ease the pain of having our most meaningful tools unexpectedly taken away. Until then, we're all a little less "go" for Pokemon Go.

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POKEMON GO REVIEW

Pokemon Go, described in simple terms, is a clever concept: Walk to real-life locations called PokeStops marked on a map on your phone to get items and collect the Pokemon that pop up along the way to gain XP. Use those Pokemon to take over real-world objectives called Gyms from other players. It has all the basics covered to make it a functional mobile treasure-hunting app, though technically its performance (and that of its servers) is often very poor on iOS and Android. But the main appeal of the free-to-play Pokemon Go is how being out in the real world, finding tons of other people who see the same augmented reality you do, brings the sort of intangible dream of Pokemon to life.

It has to be experienced to really make sense; without that social aspect it's really just an extremely light RPG level-grinder. Pokemon Go’s success or failure hinges on that experience, and right now it’s stuck somewhere in between, simultaneously fun and unique but also inconsistent and incomplete. (It is, after all, listed as version 0.29 despite being released onto the App Store and Google Play without caveats.) It’s not mechanically interesting, but it is socially very interesting thanks to a few smart design decisions. You wouldn’t jump off a bridge because everybody’s doing it, but that is a great reason to play Pokemon Go.

Welcome to the World of Pokemon

At least in the short term, Pokemon Go is a proven phenomenon with millions of players. I was at a party in the San Francisco Bay Area over the weekend where at least two dozen adults were out on the front lawn, calling out the names of Pokemon as they appeared on our phones. We ran inside when someone claimed a Bulbasaur was in the fridge; we ran back outside for Ponyta. We walked a block or two to challenge a nearby Gym only to have it taken over right from under us by someone we didn't know and couldn't see, and we all had the app crash on us a few too many times during our hour out and about. It was silly and frustrating and fun all at once.

The San Francisco area is admittedly really well-suited to Pokemon Go’s setup — your mileage may vary if you’re out in a remote area with few points of public interest around. Here, it feels like there’s no shortage of PokeStops to visit, and on multiple occasions I arrived at a PokeStop or Gym only to find that a group of other people playing Pokemon Go was already there. I also learned a lot about my neighborhood and the landmarks I walk by every day just by taking meandering walks to PokeStops, which was one of the best things about the times I played Pokemon Go by myself. In this environment, at least, Pokemon Go’s design — the RPG-lite level system combined with the collection aspect and the nostalgia only a hugely popular, decades-long franchise can bring — all build to the kind of experience that developer Niantic wanted, the kind the trailer seems to evoke.

I was drawn to Pokemon Go for that real-life Pokemon Trainer dream, but even when that aspect of it underwhelmed me with its simplicity and bugginess, I keep playing because having to go outside puts me in front of new places surrounded by other people doing exactly what I’m doing. All of my friends are playing, random passers-by are playing; it feels like all of the world is playing.

When It’s Not Very Effective

But this is a precarious house of cards built on top of a wobbly foundation of nostalgia. For the most part, Pokemon Go’s design as a paper-thin RPG is super accessible, but it’s completely unremarkable. You as a trainer have a level, and your captured Pokemon have “combat points” tied to your level, but none of that relationship is explained very well and thus feels confusing. It turns out that your level impacts the combat point ceiling of Pokemon you acquire, which is essentially how catching Pokemon in the regular games works… but just not as polished or intuitive, even to long-time Pokemon players. Fortunately (in a way) combat lacks the depth of traditional Pokemon games, so it barely matters.

Battles for control of Gym locations are nothing more than simple, real-time tapping-based combat, and it’s virtually unaffected by anything other than combat point value. Even Pokemon’s rock-paper-scissors type matchups hardly matter, either — if you have the higher-powered monster, you’re all but guaranteed to win. It’s boring by itself and, like the combat points system, isn’t explained well. (There’s dodging, but it doesn’t seem to do much to turn the tide of a fight.) It’s not that the only acceptable form of combat is turn-based and tactical, but the system in its place here is simply a dull chore after just a few fights.

On top of that, the app itself is stuttery, crashy, and performs inconsistently. There are updates that help with this, and it’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s often frustrating. I’ve lost semi-rare Pokemon to random crashes that struck during crucial moments (though sometimes those seemingly escaped Pokemon show up as caught once I reload after the crash).

Pokemon Go’s biggest weaknesses are more a matter of the features it doesn’t yet have than the ones it does, though. There’s no trading, no player-versus-player battles (you only fight automated Pokemon left to defend Gyms), no friends list, no leaderboards, and no in-app social capability of any kind, other than how we’re all prompted to group into one of three competing teams. Some of these features are in the works, but right now, the most interesting thing about Pokemon Go is not its gameplay but how its design encourages personal connections with other real-world players by physically bringing us together as we all chase common goals. Collecting is fun for a while, but without more things to do with those Pokemon or my Trainer profile, it feels a little empty at times.

The Power That’s Inside

Battling against that emptiness are a few key things that keep Pokemon Go together. In order to power up or evolve a Pokemon you’ve captured, you have to catch duplicates of its species — sometimes many, many duplicates. Transferring the weaker ones out of your bank of available Pokemon earns you “candies” for that species to fuel power-ups. It seriously takes the sting out of finding yet another Zubat, something that the main Pokemon games never quite solve. In Pokemon Go, I want to catch that hundredth Zubat so I can farm it for power-up potential.

There’s also an area-of-effect item that all players can use for a limited time: lures. One person can place a lure at any PokeStop, which increases the number of Pokemon that will show up. The cool thing about them is that they lure people in addition to Pokemon — I pulled over while driving because my friend said there were lures nearby, and we ran into the people who had placed them. Wanting to catch Pokemon means more lures, which keeps the community alive. It’s one of the smartest design choices in Pokemon Go.

That drive and incentive to catch ‘em all keeps me walking and venturing out of my way (I walked all the way around a hospital yesterday) to catch even more Pokemon. I mostly want stronger Pokemon to take over Gyms for my team, even though combat is boring. There’s just something satisfying about holding an objective that every other person playing can see, and the draw of taking territory for my team kept me coming back when the battle had long since worn out its welcome. It also helps that taking over a Gym nets you in-game currency, and I’ve found that spending real money on microtransactions isn’t strictly necessary. I haven’t bought any of the in-game money since I can find items and earn coins from playing as normal, and I haven’t felt pressured to do so in order to keep playing at the aggressive pace I’ve been going at.