Late last night US time Pokemon Go started their Japanese “field test", inviting select Android users to try out the game early. Immediately following, Twitter was blowing up with all sorts of people selected for the test… …aaaaand no one seemed to be able to get the game working. Thankfully, a game doesn’t even need to be functional for data miners to go hog wild, and much like what we see with new Hearthstone (Free) patches, the internet collectively opened their hex editors and went to town. Findings have been reported everywhere between various Pokemon forums and a ton of other places including but not limited to 4chan. The Pokemon Go subreddit has been aggressively cataloging everything that’s been revealed, ultimately producing this video that goes over what seems like every single thing in the game right now:
The big thing for me is the discovery that battles will likely not be realtime, data miners are thinking based on the text strings they found that players will leave Pokemon behind at various locations with two different moves selected. I guess it’s not much of a surprise, considering that’s how most of these GPS games typically work. Either way, it’ll be really interesting to see how this game does when it’s finally launched in the US. Commenters have been pretty loud and clear on the other Pokemon Go stories we’ve posted that they have no intention on leaving their house to play a game.
…Since GPS games sort of rely on that kind of thing, we’ll have to just wait and see if it’s the vocal minority of people being a stick in the mud about Pokemon Go, or if as we suspect on our latest podcast, if the power of the Pokemon brand will really energize mainstream players to get involved in this sort of gameplay.
