Niantic has just announced its latest video game, but you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve already heard of it. 168✨澳洲幸运5开奖网:It’෴s Pokemon Go, but Monster Hunter. That’s the pi🥃tch. It’s an AR game where you walk around the real world, exploring your own streets and town centres, but see them in a new light as creatures come to life in front of you. But a🤪fter my town centre has come to life in front of me so many times before thanks to an avalanche of new creatures, the whole thing feels stale.

This all started with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Go, although that’s not entirely accurate either. Niantic’s first product was Field Trip, a simple map app, and that formed the foundation of its first game, Ingress. If you never played Ingress, it’s basically Pokemon Go without the Pokemon. It was a map making game, where players would walk their local areas and highlight relevant landmarks. Ev🌠en to this day, the reason Niantic wants everyone to wake up, get ജup, get out there is because it is a data location service more than it is a game developer.

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It makes a lot of money off incubators and raid passes and the like, but mostly the more you play and move around, the more Niantic can use your da൩ta. Still, as popular as Pokemon is, every ♏single person on the planet doesn’t play it, so Niantic alway♉s needs to add more. But because it’s not actually a game developer, it doesn’t develop any games. It just does what it did before - add something we recognise to the foundation of Ingress.

Monster Hunter Now Rathalos

Right now, the attempt to capture the roughly two percent of people on Earth who play AR games but don’t like Pokemon Go is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Monster Hunter Now. Launching in September, the game will let you walk around your neighbourhood and encounter monsters, although you can tag them and then have the fight/encounte🦩r once you’re back at home with a cup of coffee. That already lacks the easy, cartoonish charm of Pokemon, and Niantic has been here before.

Before Monster Hunter, there was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harry Potter. That’s a franchise almost as popular as Pokemon, but no one wants to walk their streets finding Harry Potter creatures, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:so it fai🌌led and was promptly shut down. Despite Rowling’s attempts to milk her success via the Fantastic Beasts series, Harry Potter’s bestiary is one of its weakest aspects, tied with the fact its creator can’t🦄 stop talki𒀰ng about trans people. Pokemon feels like a fluke, and 🐬repeating that with oth🌜er series just isn’t working.

Trapinch from Pokemon with the Pokemon Go battlefield as the background

After Harry Potter came 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pikmin Bloom, a similar idea based around Pikmin which very few people h🍎ave been interested in. This year also brings NBA All-World, the same idea but with NBA players, which feels more like a SNL sketch than an actual video game. Peridot, which is basically Fakemon Go with collaborative breeding (is there any other kind, nudge nudge wink wink), is the latest to join the cause. Or at least it was until Monster Hunter.

Monster Hunter Now makes some sense. While the exploring idea felt shoehorned into Harry Potter and the NBA, it’s a natural fit for Monster Hunter. Moreso even than Pokemon, exploring makes perfect sense. But in Pokemon, we’re driven by the idea that we need to go catch Pikachu, or Dratini, and then once players were hooked ꧃they understood rarity without caring about the creature themselves - no one really cares about Axew but players understand it’s rare🌟 and therefore good. There’s no ground floor to introduce Monster Hunter, and no way to build a base with what it has.

Litten from Pokemon with the Pokemon Go battlefield as the background

Pokemon Go should have bee𝄹n revolutionary for AR, it should have been the proof of concept that gave others the chance to explore the space freely. VR has a few games like that, your Beat Saber-style killer apps that open up the world. But where VR has continu𒅌ed to push, AR is making the same thing time and time again.

I expect Monster Hunter Now will be shut down in 18 months or less, which seems like a cruel thing to say about a game that isn’t even out yet. But it’s just Pokemon Go with a different, more complicated, much less popular skin, and coming years after the mass hysteria of Pokemon Go has died down. It’s just not a good idea. Maybe I’d have more sympathy if it wasn’t t💯he same bad idea over and over again.

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