Here’s What’s Happening With Remote Raid Passes In ‘Pokémon GO’

Pokemon GO

Credit: Niantic

There’s a Pokémon GO shaped hole in my life right now. The get outside and catch Pokémon gameplay has been part of my like since it first launched, but coronavirus has made that first part of the equation more or less impossible. Developer Niantic Labs has been scrambling to re-orient gameplay ever since lockdown orders first began to spread across the world, and now it’s unveiled more details on one of the more ambitious updates to the game yet.

Raids are one of the most social things you do in Pokémon GO: you go out and team up with other players in order to fight powerful creatures out in the world. Without the ability to do basically any of that, they’ve almost completely fallen by the wayside in my daily play, available largely only to the people that live inside the radius of a gym(recently expanded). Enter Remote Raid Passes.

Remote Raid Passes won’t allow you to fight at just any gym: you’ll be limited to whatever is inside of your “nearby” range. For some, that won’t help, but for city dwellers and anyone near a relatively dense center or university of some sort, it should bring a good number of gyms online. Once this passes you’ll have your attack power curtailed, but for now you’ll be at full strength.

Niantic is considering expanding the feature in the future:

“We’ll be making adjustments to this feature over time, including changes to the number of Trainers who can join remotely, the ability to invite friends to raids regardless of their location, and the mentioned adjustment to attack power for Trainers battling in a raid remotely. We’ll announce all changes and improvements via official channels, so please stay tuned for further announcements and updates to this feature.

We should be getting a 1 Pokécoin bundle of these in the store soon, after which they’ll be available for 100 Pokécoins. This info comes with some other tweaks that the developer outlines in a blog post.

It sounds like a decent stopgap, though I wonder what will happen when things return to normal, because they’ll be sticking around. It could cause some serious strangeness in places with tons of gyms, and it undermines the basic proposition. That’s wishful thinking for a different world, however. For now, it’s a good idea.