Pokémon GO was recently announced for mobile devices, giving fans the ability to capture and battle Pokémon in the real world with augmented reality. The upcoming mobile game will allow players to simulate elements of the Pokémon games in real life, and one of the most important elements in Pokémon is Gym battles. Each game centers around collecting eight Gym badges, so many fans have been asking if Pokémon GO will include gyms.

John Hanke and Mike Quigley, respectively the chief executive and chief marketing officer of

Pokémon GO developer Niantic, recently sat down for an interview with Venture Beat. They shared lots of exciting details about the upcoming game, including the confirmation that you’ll be able to take on Gyms.

GamesBeat: How do you plan to handle the distribution of different items and things in the game? Hanke: Our goal is to make it so you can walk out of the house and within five minutes, you can find Pokémon. It may not be the most rare Pokémon in the world, but there’ll be a population of Pokémon living near all our players. Gyms will be a bit more rare. You want to find gyms so you can level up your Pokémon and battle there, so it will take a little more effort to get there. Pokémon will live in different parts of the world depending on what type of Pokémon they are. Water Pokémon will live near the water. It may be that certain Pokémon will only exist in certain parts of the world. Very rare Pokémon may exist in very few places. But you can trade. If you live in a place with lots of water Pokémon and you come to an event — we have these Ingress events that are getting bigger and bigger. We’ll have our biggest weekend ever on Saturday. We’ll have events for Pokémon as well. Those are competitive, but they can also be places to trade stuff with other players. Pokémon trading is going to be huge. You can’t get all of them by yourself. If you want all of them you’ll have to trade with other players. Or you have to be someone who takes time off work and travels the world for a year. There may be people who do that.

Pokémon GO is one step closer to that “Pokémon in real life” experience with the confirmation of Gyms. If you’re worried that finding Pokémon and Gyms will be challenging because you come from a small town, Niantic has addressed that concern, pointing to their success with Ingress.

Hanke: We’ve learned a lot on those fronts with Ingress. Even if you’re in a small town — I grew up in a town of 1,000 people in Texas. We had that as a design goal. If we’re going to build a game that works with location, it has to be fun for people anywhere to play, in small towns as well as San Francisco. If we designed something that only worked in San Francisco, it wouldn’t be a real success. We wanted it to work globally.

Source: Venture Beat

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