Pokémon GO’s Big Weekend Accidentally Reminded Us The Game Used To Be Fun

This weekend may have been deranged on previously unexplored levels, but it was also Go Fest in Pokémon GO, the annual event when the mobile game reminds its millions of players why they used to love playing. This year, as the app reaches new nadirs of money-grubbing banality, the event’s terrific execution had the unintended consequence of starkly highlighting where the game goes so wrong the rest of the time.

Go Fest has been hit or miss over the last few years, from the absolute disaster of 2021’s—an event built around the excitement of encountering Hoopa for the very first time, that then, incredibly, never actually featured Hoopa—to the wonderful closing third day of 2022’s that finally gave people a reason to gather safely in public with its celebration of Ultra Beasts and Shaymin.

Last year’s was somewhere in the middle, a bland, dreary event that felt like a reluctant addition to the local live events that had taken place in just three cities in the world, which ended in anticlimactic nothingness. So 2024’s far more straightforward affair, with no elaborate twists or surprise fake endings, somehow felt like a win. And when it then ended, it sent the game crashing back to its current, dire state.

Letting Sunlight (And Moonlight) In

The theme for 2024 rather smartly picked up on 2022’s better approach, with a wealth of Ultra Beasts for players to win from raids—many available in shiny forms for the first time—alongside a storyline that resolved with you able to merge Necrozma with Solgaleo or Lunala to create Dusk Mane and Dawn Wings respectively. This was a replication of events that took place in 2017’s Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, and tied in neatly to 2022’s Cosmog events that allowed longer-term players to create both variants, while still letting newbs create at least one. (Which made for a nice change, bothering to remember people who’ve played the game for more than a month.)

On top of this, for the first time in so, so long, the game felt mildly generous.

The starkest downturn in POGO in the last year, following many years of disastrous choices that saw the game shedding players during covid, has been just how much more unpleasantly grifty it has become. In a way that the game once stood out for not doing, Niantic changed feature after feature to start costing money, or cost more money, nickel-and-diming you at every turn, at the same time as firing swathes of their employees. What were once regular freebie tasks and quests that motivated you to keep playing now cost anywhere from (seemingly at random) $2 to $10 to take part in. Remote raiding, an essential part of the game during covid, became core to the experience, so Niantic hiked the prices while reducing the efficacy. And on and on, icky choices that have made it a sadder and sadder experience.

However, this weekend at least, the game didn’t feel quite so stingy. Sure, the $15 entry fee feels like a big spend for a mobile game, especially when it could be bolstered by a further $5 for more Ultra Beast shenanigans. But discovering that items the game usually hands out as stingily as if they were ruby-encrusted diamonds, like Golden Razz Berries, being thrown at players in fistfuls, created a different atmosphere. (Having rationed mine so carefully, I went into the event with about 30. I now have 242!) The same was true for local raid passes, Star Pieces, and even Rare Candy—the magical items that help you evolve any Pokémon type.

Come Raid Or Shiny

Raids in Poké Gyms (imaginary places in real-world locations) refreshed every 10 or 15 minutes, meaning my son and I, and our impromptu group of new friends, weren’t sat around with nothing to do waiting for a new Necrozma to battle. Oh, and they (very temporarily) fixed one of the nastiest aspects of the games, and made raid wins guaranteed catches!

And shinies! The rates, which are usually so astonishingly low, were perfectly paced over the weekend, letting them still feel special, but ensuring anyone playing was guaranteed a fair few. I scored myself Dratini, Tyrunt, Yungoos, Amaura, Crabrawler, Illumise, Morelull, Golett, Gible, Pidgey and a scarf-wearing Umbreon. (Tragically I failed to get a single shiny Ultra Beast, but the group I played with saw a good bunch show up.)

A brief glimpse of sunshine in the UK this weekend (worry not, it’s raining again today) really helped turnout in our small town’s large park—it’s a location that sees people travel in from the bigger, far more populated towns either side, because of a particular concentration of Gyms in one area that makes for perfect raiding. At one point there were 20 people in a single raid, most of them locally—something I’ve never experienced in five years of playing the game.

This all led to those so, so rare perfect POGO circumstances where the circles of poké-nerds all staring at phones outnumber the normies kicking balls at the park, and you just know they’re going to be friendly if you go up and say hi. The boy and I recognized some of a group from a previous event, and this gathering of mostly women in their 40s to 60s welcomed us into their gang for the whole weekend.

The Holidays Are Over

And then it ended. 6 p.m. on Sunday, after a weekend of frivolity, the game reverted back. It was the same feeling as walking into a room after all the Christmas decorations have been taken down.

Oh. Back to normal then.

My son, now 9, had such a good time playing. He’d recently started his own new account, despite the now level-44 one we’ve shared since 2020 being in his name (and, to my now eternal frustration, being a child’s account that lacks a bunch of newer features), and was insisting on playing on his cumbersome tablet, making him look like a Borrower holding a full-size human’s cellphone. And despite our family having recently faced an awful bereavement, he was upbeat and chatty for the first time in the week since. So he’s desperate to do it again, and has his sights set on next weekend’s Tynamo Community Day.

But I know that next weekend’s Tynamo Community Day is going to be shit. Because they all are, and have been for years now. Absolutely minimal effort is put into them, with a scant few lines of abysmally written drivel delivered by the widely loathed Professor Willow, that absolutely everyone on Earth has learned to click past, before the same boring-ass tasks of catching 15 Tynamo, transferring 10 Pokémon, and evolving three Eelektrik. It’s utterly routine, when it could be a chance for imaginative ideas, new surprises, and at the very least, a fun bit of storytelling. They can invariably be completed in under half an hour.

And that’s half an hour on Sunday. The rest of the time—god damn, there’s barely a reason to load the app. Masterwork Research quests have become so unmanageably massive that they just sort of tick off in the background when there’s something more interesting to do—I’m hardly going to set out for a play of the game in the hope that some Sinnoh monsters might show up to raise my 239/492 count. The Events screen is empty beyond the battles, and the store doesn’t even have a rip-off $2 option to have something to do. It has never felt more like Niantic has given up.

A brief moment of watching my kid have a lovely time, while also walking five miles over an afternoon without a single complaint, has reminded me what Pokémon Go can be. Which, in turn, just more grimly highlights what it isn’t. But it could be! If Niantic would only step up for its actually successful and profitable game, rather than distracting itself with an endless series of unwanted failures to replicate the Pokémon success (Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, NBA All-World, Catan, Transformers: Heavy Metal and Marvel World of Heroes all either failed or never released in the last five years, and I bet you’ve never even met anyone who’s played Pikmin Bloom or Peridot), it could be such a joyous thing to play. Heck, there are dozens of Pokémon from as far back as 2013’s Kalos that still haven’t been added to the game, let alone 61 of 2022’s Paldean beasts.

Pokémon Go COULD Be Better

Go Fest 2024 stood out partly for the basic fun of a steady questline that resulted in fusing a pair of cool Pokémon, alongside an unusual generosity of in-game items and shiny rates. But it also stood out because it was fun to play again, for a brief window, reminding us all of how fun it can be when it has the decorations up and presents to open. Now, with that all taken down again, it’s just the plain-old living room, except the TV’s broken and the chairs are all worn to the point of being uncomfortable.

But it could be better! I really believe it could. It just needs whatever evil curse has been put on Niantic that causes the company to only make the worst decisions possible at every opportunity to be broken. Just have fun again. Be generous, such that players feel welcome, and therefore more comfortable spending money here and there. Care about the writing. Think about the children who are playing. And more than anything else, give casual players enough to do!

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