Upcoming Niantic titles and how they may affect Wayfarer & the Wayfarer forums
PkmnTrainerJ-ING
Posts: 4,811 Ambassador
Currently, we have Ingress Agents and Pokémon GO trainers above certain levels in their respective games able to nominate Waypoints/Wayspots/POI, and gain access to Wayfarer and these forums.
However, the points of interest that are added to Niantic's maps appear in their other games too. We currently have;
- Harry Potter: Wizards Unite
As a game that receives these, but whose players cannot nominate directly from this game. I would imagine there is some overlap, and some Ingress/Pokémon GO Wayfarers also play this game so can make nominations just fine. However I do see various players who solely play Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and thus can't improve the "game board".
We are now in August, and we have at least two new (outside of limited beta tests) Niantic titles to come out globally this year;
- Pikmin (Source of 2021 release)
and
- Transformers Heavy Metal (Source of 2021 release)
We also have CATAN: World Explorers on the way at some point (CATANDominik and team don't want to commit to a date) so I am not including that in 2021;
I really love reading how excited you folks are for us to finally launch globally. But until there is an official announcement, I won't be able to say anything that I've not already said: We will launch the game when it is ready. We want the world to experience the game in its best state, which includes a full feature set, balanced gameplay and great technical performance.
plus at least four Nintendo x Niantic AR titles from their deal outside of the Pikmin game.
There's also a quite recent post from Niantic that throws out a possible mix of potential AR games. It is not clear if these are in the works, or just something they'd like to do, but perhaps a glimpse into the Wayfarer future?
Mario, Transformers, Marvel’s superhero universe, the world of Wakanda, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Maltese Falcon
It seems we may have a lot to come over the upcoming months and years. I know this is a whole lot of verbiage and links but there is a Wayfarer related point in here somewhere along with all of this.
As the "metaverse" opens up more, how do you think this will affect Wayfarer? We have already seen that there has been abuse where people try and "fudge" locations to make Waypoints appear in certain games without thinking about what will happen in others.
Maybe that wasn't so bad (it was still bad) when it was just the three games, but when we are at ten or eleven titles by the end of 2022, a location edit could mess up several games.
A title/description could have several in-game references in that you're not aware of (Does Bumblebee Field mean the Transformer, or the actual bees? Argh!) and how should Niantic make sure their Wayfarers are aware of all of this, if you only play one game?
Then finally should all these titles be able to have Nominations? Could Wayfarer cope with one player having 100+ Nominations to use every 14 days?
I am sure Niantic has put some thought in to this into some kind of 5 year Wayfarer plan, but I wanted to share all of this, and see what you folks thought too.
Comments
If the language filter was advisory instead censored/blocking, Wayfarers could actually learn of special words from games they did not play.
Somebody could nominate the break room at the Bumblebee cannery to be a waypoint candidate. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes.’
Bumblebee’s Hideout (used car lot) ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Not unless I want a warning/strike/ban!’
Consider this off-topic to this discussion, I just hope there will be a dedicated forum for each games. And the staffs are able to handle them.
Especially Mario and other Nintendo x Niantic games, they might have a larger fanbase compared to Pokemon GO's.
Someone ping me when there's a Sailor Moon crossover, please.
So far there’s a forum for every Niantic game except Pokémon GO, so I would guess that there will be a forum for each but good point.