Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Niantic, Pokémon GO | Tagged: Niantic, pokemon, pokemon go, Season of Heritage, Team GO Rocket

Here's Where Pokémon GO Went Wrong With The Season Of Heritage

The Season of Heritage has been one of Niantic's strongest Pokémon GO offerings in a long time. This Season has seen the game begin to create stronger themes, tying events, Shiny releases, Community Days, and even social media activity into the overarching storyline. However, there is one fatal flaw in this event that has seen Niantic bring Pokémon GO more toward becoming a narrative game than ever before. Let's see where the Season of Heritage went wrong so we can hopefully see Niantic fix this issue in the future.

I strongly believe that narrative gameplay is the future of Pokémon GO. Niantic and partner WB Games did a great job using in-game narrative to keep Harry Potter: Wizards Unite interesting at a time when the player base was dwindling. We have seen light use of narrative in Pokémon GO in the past with the Season of Mischief's Hoopa-themed, season-long Special Research. However, the Season of Heritage took it a step further, but also in a less impactful direction.

The Season of Heritage focuses on a mysterious door that Professor Willow and the team Leadcrs explore. Arlo then utilizes the power behind the door to create Apex Shadows, which will tie into the Season's culmination of Pokémon GO Tour: Johto. On paper, it all sounds great… until you realize that virtually none of the storyline happens in-game.

Every single bit of story happens on social media and Niantic's blog posts. This Season has seen the developers completely ignore their in-game narrative feature of Special Research to instead deliver the narrative to a place where the vast majority of players won't even read it.

I can't quite imagine why this was done. Narrative is a step in the right direction, and a major one, but the bare minimum should be that the narrative actually happens in-game. Hopefully, Niantic can look into the stats of their players versus the number of people seeing their online-only entries to see how small a fraction of their audience even knows where to follow this story. I do believe, in the end, Niantic will get it right… but this, as is, is a huge missed opportunity and ill-planned allocation of resources for Pokémon GO.

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