One question for Niantic.
Brian, or whoever from your company can answer. I want to ask you something. You say you have a small team? Here's a trailer, this game was developed by a company that employs 12 people. This trailer is not posted for the purpose of promoting another game or third party company, but solely as an example.
Look at the level of graphics, detail and gameplay elaboration. Now answer me just one question.
---What prevents your company from making an equally interesting, enjoyable and advanced game ???---
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In case you're wondering about the disagreements hitting your post: Posts like these, comparing things developed for entirely different platforms, by different studios, targeting completely different hardware, with completely different restraints, comes off as rude.
People complain constantly about how much battery Ingress and other Niantic games eat up. But if they made the games look anything like The Ascent, our batteries would be drained within minutes.
The Ascent is designed to be played on systems that are plugged into a wall, and can max out their graphics accordingly.
Drawing loads of polygons and animations on our phones? Battery life is paramount. Do you want 30 minutes of awesome graphics, or 5 hours of being able to actually play the game?
Let me explain the essence of the question. There are two companies. With a minimum of staff. In one company, in a couple of years, they made a whole universe for which it was necessary to create a bunch of graphics, visualizations, write program code for the engine, voice characters, prepare videos, and so on. And what did they do in Nia? As a client, I should not be interested in the front-end, back-end, and other things, I should get a finished product in which I could invest my money. And this product should motivate me to make further investments. I look at the finished product of a third-party development team and see a new world that looks holistic, then I reopen the scanner and see hundreds of bugs that still have not been fixed. And I don't see anything new and attractive in terms of content in our game. As an end consumer of the product, I see that the scanner only works worse. I see glitches in the menu, the scanner does not work at low internet speeds, this is where the old scanner worked just fine. And I see a lack of plot and progress towards "new and interesting". But if you look at Pokemon Go, for example, then everything is perfect there, The other game from Niantiс, the one with cubes, is also superb, even the game maps are clearly visible both at night and during the day. And here it is.
One menu will overlap with another, the texts crawl out of the buttons and look crooked. If such a project were submitted by students as a thesis, they would be sent to rework their application.
But, for example, a translation into Russian, which a third of the civilized world knows. The translation is not complete, one faction was translated into Russian, the other is not.
But this made in force "I translated it with the help of a dude who knew a dude who once heard the Russian language" looks wild and strange, especially with the crossed out letter "O" which does not exist in Russian.
Again, the text will overlap the text ... It seems that after the translation was completed, no one even checked it ...
So I see two approaches. One product is made with high quality, a lot of interesting ideas, a wonderful plot, nice graphics, and the other product is so glitchy and boring. The ingress audience is decreasing, because more and more players leave the game that does not bring them new impressions (except for the impressions of new glitches that cannot be fixed for more than half a year).