As Pokémon Go announces a seismic shakeup of its Mega Pokémon, IGN has chatted with the smash hit smartphone game's developer on the inspirations for the move, what's changing for the better, and what the future of Mega Pokémon looks like in the game.
Today, Niantic announced the addition of a new, tougher Super Mega Raid tier with tougher battle mechanics but better rewards, a fresh currency to engage with Mega and Super Mega raids, and a fourth Mega Evolution tier for your Pokémon to grind for an unlock more bonuses.
Niantic says Super Mega Raids will require upwards of seven players, who are strongly encouraged to bring Mega Pokémon into the fight in order to break shields thrown up by the boss during battle. New and existing Mega Pokémon will feature in Super Mega Raid battles over time, and will reward more Mega Energy once defeated. This will come in handy for levelling your own Mega Pokémon to the new Super Max tier, which provides further boosts and allows you to re-Mega your Pokémon every 24 hours.
Finally, and perhaps most controversially, is the introduction of the new Link Charge currency for Mega and Super Mega Raids. The idea here is that this, like Max Particles, provides a separate method to access in-game content that doesn't just rely on raid passes (though you can still use raid passes for Megas if you choose). How exactly this will be balanced, however, remains to be seen — though Niantic says it will provide better value. Read on for more detail on all of the above in our chat with Pokémon Go's senior producer John Funtanilla.
Hey John, great to chat with you again. Let's start with Super Mega Raids — is the pitch here that they're going to be the equivalent of Gigantamax in terms of difficulty and launch cadence? Will we really need seven or more players as has been indicated?
John Funtanilla: Yeah, the mission with Super Mega Raids is similar to Gigantamax and we want to lean into the community play aspect of the game that's gone very well. We want to make sure that we're gathering folks and we have seen a lot of success with that — communities of sometimes hundreds of players in San Francisco going up and down on the piers playing together. That really inspired us and we know that was happening all across the globe. Not to say that there wasn't also some Trainers that also did low count lobbies and were challenging themselves to beat these Gigantamax battles with four or five players. We're very careful with the tuning and we were kind of surprised by that, but we do feel like if you're a really talented player, you understand the systems, you are able to do different strategies that beat these raids. For Super Mega Raids, it's kind of the same thing. We are targeting around a seven to eight player headcount to win, and that's pretty sizable, but again, it's related to how big your communities are, and being able to find the communities. I can go into it a little bit later, but I would say yes, expect same kind of level of difficulty for Gigantamax and there's some mechanics in there that require group play.
Right, there's mention of shield breaking mechanics which sound interesting. I find Gigantamax battles fun because they do require extra strategy, but I know you always have to balance that with the fact your playerbase has a mix of hardcore players and more casual 'Korean grandmas'. You have to fit both those things, to some degree. So, were there any learnings from Gigantamax that you applied here to the new Mega changes?
John Funtanilla: Gigantamax was such an ambitious effort. We really wanted to introduce a whole new system. As you know, there's the three Max moves, there's Power Spots. It was a massive, massive effort to finally bring in and actually unlock Gen 8 into the game. For Super Mega Raids, it's kind of an incremental approach. It's a little bit more challenging than normal raids, but other than that it does play using a normal raid battle format. We explored different mechanics and we didn't want to veer away to something that was unfamiliar to players — so we added different iterations on top.
Walking through what this type of battle is, Trainers will need to bring in a Mega Pokémon — it's not required, but we definitely encourage you to bring one in to take down one of those shields. And when we're playtesting internally, people are bringing in Mega Pokémon, and when that last person comes in, there's this big climactic moment where the shields break. There's an amazing visual but not only that, though, there's a huge amount of damage that's done to that boss. And so you get to that powered up form, you're trying to chip away at it, you're yelling at other players to bring in their Mega Pokémon. If they were knocked out, tell them to relobby, heal that Pokémon, bring it back in. We really wanted to lean into that. And that's why I keep saying we wanted community play to be kind of streamlined for this one, it's less tactical than Max Battles but we wanted that excitement, that energy that comes from that moment.
Nice, and then just to clarify — could you get into a situation where maybe no one has any Mega Pokémon left, could you still break the shields at that point?
John Funtanilla: That can be a state that does happen, maybe one person doesn't have a Mega Pokémon. There are ways that we try to alleviate that. So we've recreated the first time user experience, so this time we put the tutorial right in front of you as soon as you log into the game and that triggers and you'll catch your first Mega Pokémon. You'll understand the utility of it, you'll catch another Pokémon of that species to understand that you get more Mega Energy. So there is an update to this, but we've tried to kind of lift the total tide for the entire feature and include UX improvements.
I think some of the big reasoning that we gave for actually diving in and improving the Mega system is that we felt that players — looking at the data — weren't engaging with Megas as met as much as we'd seen, especially for something as powerful and with as much utility as they have. That was the biggest thing — improving things all across the board so by the time you get into the Super Mega raid you feel prepared.
So unfortunately it is a scenario that can happen, but we're hoping that a player realizes that they don't have a Mega Pokémon involved, they back out to the lobby, they come back in and they're going to be that one person that breaks the shield. And I've seen that many times. So I think after players have gone through this a few times, hopefully they'll understand like, 'Oh, I should bring a Mega Pokémon in. I see everyone with their Mega Pokémon and there's toasts and texts that keep saying bring a Mega Pokémon in.' So yeah, we're making it easy for players to have a Mega Pokémon and reminding them to bring it in.
And a quick one: is the reason the Primals don't count as Megas here lore-related? As they're not technically Megas?
John Funtanilla: 100% lore. They're not Mega Pokémon. They have the same kind of power, but The Pokémon Company created the lore which is that technically they're not identified as Mega Pokémon.
Let's discuss Link Charges, which are the third sort-of currency for interacting with battles in Pokémon Go, on top of the existing raid passes and Max Particles. Obviously people love looking at datamined information and drawing their own conclusions, and there's been conversation already around Link Charges potentially offering more activities to do for free but also being another currency to keep track of, and separately work within the limits of.
John Funtanilla: I saw that reaction from players too. You know how it goes, players will see things with a limited amount of information, but obviously there's still a huge portion of the feature coming out and players are yet to experience it for themselves. I did want to set the perspective on that which is that we had a lot of learnings from Max Particles. So yes, there's the system where you can get a daily free raid pass, there's a system where you can engage with Power Spots and get Max Particles, and then we have Link Charges, which is the new currency. I think the biggest thing here is we want to give players access to premium content. We also want to make sure that we're encouraging and incentivizing engagement into our social features.
"When you use Link Charges in person, it's actually cheaper than using a battle pass..."“
We just put out the Weekly Challenges. We have community check-ins, we love the gifting feature. Those are things we want to encourage and we see players engaging with these a lot, but those lead directly towards the Niantic mission. And with Link Charges, for us, these are ways for players to have flexible access to premium content. When you use Link Charges in person, it's actually cheaper than using a battle pass, so there is some kind of discount there. We always want to encourage IRL play and as long as you're doing some of the social actions I mentioned, we reward that effort. And with community check-ins, we understand that's a high value effort action. We reward that, we give you a ton of link charges, you check in, you're good, you're set.
So you do get a lot of Link Charges and we learned from Max Particles to increase the cap higher. There are some other aspects where we understand that the content is very, very premium and it's difficult to challenge. So with Super Mega Raids, remoting into those does have an added cost of extra Link Charges, and again, it's like a balance that we have to form with the system. With economy, I think it all comes down to flexibility. If you're a player that doesn't want to pay too much, but you love engaging with the game, you love engaging with your community, gifting, things like that, we want to make sure that you have flexible ways to access that content.
Have you nailed down how many Link Charges you can hold at a time, how many you'll need for a Mega Raid (is it just one?), how many you'll need for a Super Mega Raid?
John Funtanilla: The tuning will definitely be in different denominations than raid passes. Raid passes is like one for [a specific battle]. Link Charges are again like a currency. We're still tuning it, and that's likely going to be something that we're looking at as we're playtesting it internally, reviewing it with the team. Again, the stance we want to take is that playing in person will be cheaper, and it's going to be cheaper than a battle pass, and it's not going to require a battle pass. That's a fundamental part of the system.
And I guess the same question on how much it might cost to buy Link Charges in the shop. Can you give an equivalent to buying a raid pass?
John Funtanilla: It'll be better value, 100%. The final tuning, we're still getting to that, but better value is the main thing that we keep driving here.
