It’s looking very likely that Pokémon Go players will finally see two long awaited features added to the game – Legendary Pokémon and PvP battling. Both are features that were originally promised when Pokémon Go was first announced, but it’s been a year since the game launched and we’re still waiting for them to drop.
According to several reports from developer Niantic itself, both Legendary Pokémon like Articuno, Moltres and Zapdos and the player vs player (PvP) interactions are coming this summer.
The latest news comes from an interview with Niantic’s VP of Strategic Partnerships at Niantic, Mathieu de Fayet in Brazilian newspaper O Globo (as reported by Go Nintendo).
“Due to the large success of the game, we had to delay some planned innovations,” explained de Fayet. “Right now we are working on some that are due to hit this summer (in the northern hemisphere), such as giving more value to the choice of the teams, releasing Legendary Pokémon and introducing PvP.
“One thing we learned with Ingress was that the game can sustain itself if we are able to create social interactions amongst players, and we are working on that.”
Legendary Pokémon were also teased by Niantic’s Global Marketing Product Lead, Archit Bhargava, who said in his speech at the 21st Annual Webby Awards that “this summer will be legendary”. You can’t get much bigger a tease than that.
Niantic has been talking about Pokémon Go PvP battling for months too, saying that it hasn’t forgotten about it and it would be on the way eventually.
While both of those features would be fantastic editions to the game, we’re still waiting for trading to come into play. We’ve been holding onto some specific duplicates for a long time now.
All of these features were included in the very first Pokémon Go trailer, so we may just be edging nearer to the game we were promised in the first place.