Paul Morris·

Pokemon Go Update With New Gym And Raid Battle Features Announced

Niantic Labs has just pushed out a new post which will be of huge interest to anyone who still immerses themselves in the augmented world of Pokemon Go. After what has felt like a period of calm, the developers behind Pokemon Go have revealed that “the biggest update to Pokemon Go is nearly here,” meaning that a significant overhaul is inbound across iOS and Android.

It seems that the time is now for Niantic to dramatically overhaul specific parts of the Pokemon Go experience, with the company looking to focus on how Trainers interact with Gyms and the underlying experience they get when interfacing with that aspect of the game.

To improve that experience Trainers will start to see Gyms undergoing a major facelift. This will immediately manifest itself with the ability to spin the Photo Disc at a Gym to instantly receive new goodies for free.

The whole Gym experience is also being updated with a new underlying concept based on a motivation system. The Pokemon assigned to protect a gym will organically lose motivation over time, and therefore become easier to defeat when motivation is visibly low. In order to keep motivation high, Trainers are encouraged to keep popping in and feeding Berries to the Pokemon assigned to that gym.

Trainers will also be able to earn individual Gym Badges when visiting and interacting with the many gyms dotted across the world. Those Badges will be able to be viewed at any time, and will essentially act as a nostalgic reference to the fact that a Trainer has been to a particular gym.

Niantic is also introducing a new Raid Battle feature which is a cooperative gameplay experience designed to let individuals work with other Trainers to defeat a particularly difficult or strong Gym Boss. Defeating that Raid Boss will also result in a ton of new rewards and items being given to the Trainers.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that until the new features are rolled out all Gyms will be disabled in the augmented world of Pokemon Go. When this new feature rolls out across the globe, the Gym functionality will be restored ready to serve up the new features.

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