Pokemon GO players may be battling amongst themselves in mobile PvP matchups by the end of the year, according to a new interview with a Niantic employee.
Pokemon GO players busy completing high value trades thanks to the special discounts currently available during the trading event, but apparently Niantic may not be finished with player to player interaction additions for the year. According to a new rumor, the mobile AR game may be adding PvP battles by the end of the year.
The intel comes from an interview with Anne Beuttenmuller, Niantic’s european Head of Marketing. The chat was focused on Ingress, but the topic did turn towards Harry Potter and Pokemon GO at a few points. When asked what might be next for Pokemon GO, Beuttenmuller may have given away more information that intended (assuming the translation is correct).
Here’s a look at a translation of her response…
“Now we are working on PvP mode, which will soon appear [in game]. We are still working on improving the feature which has just made its debut – I’m talking about friend system and its functions, such as ability to trade Pokemon. We’ve just introduced an improvement so you can add a note [nickname I guess?] to your friend. The point is that you can have many people on your friend list and don’t remember who is who. So you can add now a comment [nickname] to that person. You can also sort your friend list. We are constantly improving every aspect of this game and next thing that we want to add at the end of this year is the PvP mode.”
If true, this is very exciting news for the game. Obviously one of the major questions, aside from a release date, is what the combat will be like. This may allow Niantic to introduce a more traditional, turn-based combat system. Many players have been begging for a turn-based mechanic in the game since launch, due to the franchise’s history.
Niantic is usually pretty quiet about what is on the way until a few weeks before it arrives, so it wouldn’t be surprising to not hear anything else about these plans until the system is finished. Some fans are speculating that the update will arrive close to the release of Let’s Go, but there’s no evidence of that just yet.
We’ll keep an eye out for confirmation and post a new update when there is more information to work with. Until then, good luck out there, trainers!
Pokemon GO is currently available in select regions on Android and iOS devices.
