By way of quick introduction for those who are not familiar with it: Ingress Prime is a GPS-based game made by Niantic - the same company that made Pokemon Go (PG). Ingress was their previous game, and is easily summed up as "a world wide game of capture the flag".
Ingress was their original "go out and find virtual stuff" game and it had players from across the world submit locations to be places of interest. Niantic was then able to use that map to create the map for PG and make it the "instant success" that it became.
I started playing Ingress as it uses basically the same map as PG and my wife is a PG player so we could go out and play at the same locations.
What I've found from Ingress after playing for a few weeks is that it's good for exercise, but not so good for playing as a game. Unless you want to dedicate your life to it, and have a large team of players. how it works is that you go out and capture places of interest for your team. You can join the places together and when you join three, the triangle in the middle gets filled in and becomes your teams' "territory".
The more territory you hold, the more points your team gets.
The downside is that the places that you control start "breaking down", and go back to neutral after about a week. You can go and revisit and recharge them to keep them in play, but you need to be visiting them at least every six days or better yet every day. So the more territory you control, the more time you're going to be spending running around doing maintenance. I haven't done the math, but I'm sure there's a limit you'd reach where you'd be spending all your time recharging and have no time to create new ones.
Here's where it is handy to have teams - you can charge each other's territory, and you can focus on controlling larger areas. But that requires coordination and, you know, friends.
At the moment I think I'll be mainly focusing on just doing it on occasion for fun rather than seriously trying to win points. It's a fun thing to do while out jogging around the suburbs, but not something I'm willing to jump into the car and race across town to go collect or protect territory. At the moment (as far as I can tell), there's only about a dozen active players in the Darwin area so there are plenty of neutral points of interest which can be captured and controlled.
1 comment:
After about two weeks or so, I'm feeling a bit ambivalent about the game. I can see why there are not as many players as Pokemon Go. The running around and taking over territory is pretty good, I like the "it's better if you work as a team" aspect but I'm not digging the "your stuff needs to be maintained or it falls apart" bit of the game.
It would be nice if stuff you set up stayed set up until an enemy player came along and knocked it over. I'm not going to be able to set up anything too fancy because as soon as I go away for work, it'll fall apart - even if nobody else does anything.
So it's a good excuse to go out for a jog, gives something to look forward to but it isn't particularly exciting long-term. At this stage I'll probably keep playing socially, but I don't see me committing to it in a serious capacity.
Post a Comment