Pokemon Go news: Niantic event update plans REVEALED as talk turns to Gym battle revamp

Pokemon Go updates have been top of the news agenda lately at Niantic, with fresh tidbits of info popping up at the Mobile World Congress, as well as GDC 2017.

The latest Pokemon Go news was revealed at the SXSW Conference and Festivals in Austin, where CEO John Hanke revealed that Niantic were working on some new ideas.

While he didn’t reveal what they were, he crucially added that these new projects had not been touched on by his team yet.

That rules out all the major talking points from the past few months, including the gym battle revamp, as well as trading and additional PvP features.

This may have also been in reference to a new Pokemon Go event being worked on by his team, with fans still waiting for a followup to the Festive Pikachu run.

And it appears that the next Pokemon Go event could involve Pikachu and some nifty new hats… again.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the anime series and the release of the 20th Pokemon movie in July, Pokemon Sun and Moon players have a chance to download one of six different Pikachu models, each wearing one of Ash’s hats from the TV show.

Fans can get a code for the Pokemon Sun and Moon hats by pre-ordering tickets for the film.

Nothing has been announced for Pokemon Go, but an advert for the promotion suggests that the Niantic app could get something similar.

Japanese cinema chain TOHO already has an agreement in place with Niantic and the Pokemon GO game, with the TOHO promotional video showing Pikachu spinning a Pokestop, which then spits out a selection of Pokeballs with Ash’s cap.

While fans are busy trying to figure out what the next Pokemon Go event might be, internet data mining teams are also looking at how Niantic may eventual change gym battles.

Niantic have already revealed that this will likely be the next major update released for Pokemon Go and now the team at the Pokemon Go Hub have taken an in-depth look into what they could change,

“We recently learned that Niantic doesn’t yet have the technology to connect long distance points on the map like in Ingress,” a post on the POGO Hub site explains. 

“This was accidentally leaked by Niantic’s CTO (Chief Technical Officer) Phil Keslin on the recent O’Reilly cloud scaling conference.

“With that in mind, Niantic can’t create team based objectives as they do in Ingress – there is no “Gym links” or “Gym connections”. 

“Initially, we strongly believe that they will introduce something in line with “Team Territories” or “Team Objectives”.

“Team Territory is a rather simple concept of an area of map being influenced by one team, resulting in increased rewards from PokeStops for members of that team.

“Team Objectives on the other hand are an open ended daily / weekly quest concept for all members of a Team in an area.

“Both of these concepts encourage team play, player coordination and are not one time features that perish after a month. These concepts also tie in neatly with future PvP.

“Imagine trying to raid an enemy Territory and facing enemy players who challenge you to a Duel! This contest is not new in MMOs, as many other MMOs have servers/areas that are free-for-all in PvP and where players can be freely attacked by enemies while traveling.”

A move toward a system even remotely like this would help drive co-current user numbers back up high, as one of the main drains is that players get bored of the same Pokemon popping up.

Some kind of end-game system that allows for players to actually use their favourite Pocket Monsters in meaningful encounter with other trainers would likely prove very popular.