Nintendo/Niantic
Like Niantic promised, it has indeed been a “legendary” summer for Pokémon GO, with the release of five legendary birds and Mewtwo still to come at the end of the month.
But there’s more on the horizon besides endless raiding. It’s time to start laying the groundwork for the next generation of Pokémon to make their way into GO, Generation 3.
A recent patch added relatively little to the base game itself, but behind the scenes, Silph Road data minersfound some interesting information about exclusive raids, “super” incubators and most importantly, Gen 3.
According to metadata found in the patch, 135 new Pokémon spanning 73 new types of candy have been added to the game behind the scenes. For those who eventually stopped playing the handheld games (or never did), we are now entering the Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire era of the game, and frankly, the Pokémon added in this generation were way better than Gen 2’s for the most part, in my opinion.
I feel like Nintendo was kind of phoning it in with Gen 2 in many regards (so many Pokémon there are boring and evolve into nothing), but Gen 3? The creature design there was just fantastic, and the era created many fan-favorite Pokémon from Gardevoir to Wailord to Blazikken and many more. Just looking over the list, I think it’s pretty clear how much more involved and creative creature design was in this generation than Gen 2 (and honestly, Gen 1, in many respects, nostalgia aside).
Nintendo
This will be a fantastic update for the game once it does arrive, but when will it?
Well, just because new data is being added into the game, that does not mean Gen 3 is imminent. This kind of thing happens well before the actual release, and we saw it with Gen 2 as well. We saw Gen 2 released in February 2017 after this kind of data had been put into the game months beforehand, so that’s one possibility, that we might be waiting six more months for Gen 3. Personally, I feel like Pokémon GO may release Gen 3 a little sooner, maybe November or December, now that they have a process in place for adding tons more Pokémon to the game, having done this once already with Gen 2. They’ve also scaled up their team since then, meaning they should be able to release more content more quickly.
There’s still a lot of Gen 3 info that is not in the game, including the art, moves and sounds of the Pokémon. Over time, we will start seeing this fill in with new patches, and I’m sure the data miners won’t miss a bit of it.
I’m excited for the release of Gen 3 because I’m hoping it will let the game get back to its roots before it was taken over by raiding as the only worthwhile activity. Catching wild Pokémon, hatching eggs, these are things that have fallen by the wayside since the release of raids, but with Gen 3 dumping over 100 new Pokémon into the game again, they’ll have new relevance. I do wonder if the game will continue to have all 380+ Pokémon spawning in the game altogether, or if there will finally start to be some pruning, but we’ll discuss that another day. For now, just know that Gen 3 is coming, and that’s something to definitely be excited about.
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