Earlier this year I met with Pokémon Go senior vice president Ed Wu to get a sense of where Niantic’s ground-breaking mobile hit was heading, as the developer begins planning the app’s path to success over a second decade. Fans had long expected the game to eventually implement Dynamax – the mechanic that powers up Pokémon to enormous size and strength introduced in Switch games Pokémon Sword and Shield. Niantic had previously been coy about the feature’s introduction, but it’s now clear Dynamax has been on the studio’s office whiteboards for some time, given the far-reaching nature of its implementation now in Pokémon Go – which could truly be game-changing.
That said, a couple of weeks after Pokémon Go’s Dynamax features first began to go live, the mechanic still feels pretty opaque and a work-in-progress, with arguably little yet to gain from engaging with it. There’s no new Dynamax Pokédex to fill out, and no way yet of using Dynamax Pokémon outside of their own walled garden. Call it a soft launch, perhaps, or a slow introduction of a major feature to a casual player base with years of ingrained play patterns. Either way, there’s been little explanation of why players should deviate from those play patterns to begin collecting Dynamax Pokémon or dabbling with its deeper features. I’ve found myself engaging with it more out of curiosity than anything else, with only a few clues where it’s all headed.
Here’s what we know so far. Dynamax Pokémon are a whole new version of the creatures players have been catching for years, and require you to start from scratch to once again find new, Dynamax-possible versions with perfect stats, or to obtain their rare Shiny form. In a nutshell, it’s a way for Pokémon Go to re-release every species in the game already – similar to the introduction of Shadow Pokémon – with a fresh set of mechanics and systems that feel surprisingly standalone to the rest of the game.
About Author
