One of the key pillars of Niantic is the concept of encouraging exploration–motivating players to get outside, engage their communities, and experience the world around them. When players engage with the real world in this way, it has an amazing benefit: getting active. And this week, that mission can be extended to even more players with the launch of Adventure Sync in Pokémon GO.
When developing Adventure Sync, the main goal was to make a useful feature for the more casual player, and a quality-of-life improvement for the more dedicated player. Adventure Sync is optimized for everyday use, using minimal battery and providing useful notifications when in-game rewards are met.
Adventure Sync provides offline capabilities to all users–everyone will now have the ability to gain the benefits of walking with Pokémon GO whenever they are on the move. They can capitalize on the dead time that manifests when they forget to launch the app, earning credit for exploring the world and developing a solid motivation loop that requires nothing except a smartphone.
From a mechanics perspective, we wanted to set up different goals with unique rewards so Adventure Sync is always a positive influence, never annoying or guilting. Players will have the ability to earn rewards from different walking milestones, ranging from one that many casual players will find easy to achieve to a more challenging goal that will reward the most active players. Of course, the goals work in tandem with Field and Special Research tasks that prioritize incubating Eggs or collecting Candy, Trainers can feel like they’re making key progress every day.
In order to experience Adventure Sync, users will need to opt-in to the feature. Once you opt-in, you can review the permissions that link to Google Fit or Apple HealthKit, and select granularity of data to share.
Adventure Sync is an exciting part of the Niantic Real World Platform, and we look forward to incorporating more health and fitness activity into our current and future games.
We hope that Adventure Sync encourages Trainers to embrace exploration as a part of their daily routine, and keeps the magic of Pokémon GO top-of-mind, even when their phones are in their pockets.
—Paul Franceus, Senior Software Engineer