Pokémon GO Update Restores Lost Feature—Not Tracking—and Promises New Ones

Pokémon GO is fresh off finally receiving the Buddy Pokémon feature in the middle of last week, but with the Pokémon GO Plus now available and fall upon us, the developers at Niantic are hard at work adding new features. A new update brings back one of the game’s early, lost features as well as adding even more support for the Plus peripheral, with promises of even more on the way.

The hot/cold distance tracking on Pokémon is still missing, and it will probably never return, as beta testers of a new tracking mechanic have been using something much different (not to mention that the “sightings” tab is already a much better way of tracking Pokémon than the broken “nearby” one used to be). However, the game will once again mark a geolocation for where a particular Pokémon was caught on its status page, which can be helpful to remember where you might be likely to find that one in the future—although not nearly as helpful as living somewhere with an active online community keeping track of such things.

Otherwise, the new update will allow Pokémon GO Plus users to use the peripheral to capture Pokémon attracted by their incense items, which they’re currently unable to do. That’s it for this minor update, aside from “bug fixes,” but the developer notes and comments on the Pokémon GO Facebook page also say, “We appreciate your continued support and have some exciting features and changes coming soon.”

So more features are on the way, but that’s kind of always been the case, as Niantic CEO John Hanke said from the beginning that only about 10% of the developers’ ideas actually made it into the original version of the game, and everyone’s been expecting trading and other features for months at this point. Now that the game and its servers have seemed to stabilize, though, and the buddy feature already made its way to users, it seems like these promises are closer to coming to fruition.

With the app finally knocked out of its top grossing spot on the app store, it’ll be interesting to see how new in-game toys to play with affect its smaller, though still strong, player base.

(via Polygon, image via Niantic)

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