It’s been a few months since Niantic introduced the avatar update, which completely changed how trainers looked in Pokémon Go, and it’s safe to say no one is really happy with the outcome.
It was so bad that back in June, Pokémon Go‘s director Michael Steranka sat down with Eurogamer to say the handheld game’s development team was actively looking to take on fan feedback to update the new avatar system over time.
It’s been two months since, so while at the Pokémon World Championships in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 17, Dot Esports took the chance to chase up Steranka about the avatar update to see what has been done and what the plan was, moving forward. When Dot asked Steranka about what recent changes had been made, Steranka was keen to talk about everything that had gone into the game after looking at feedback.
“We’ve adjusted some of the body type options that players have. We’ve adjusted some of the skin tones based on feedback that we received from the player base,” the Pokémon Go director stated before going on to say it’s still an “ongoing project.”
“It’s probably something we will forever be updating and adding things to I saw a couple things the other day that I am personally really excited about that I and will be updating my own personal avatar with once it’s available. So yeah, just like anything else in Pokemon Go, we see it as a forever game with forever features, and you don’t want any of our features to ever feel stale. We want to continually improve and update things as we go along.”
We were keen to hear what these teased features could be, but when we pressed for more details we were given the usual “no comment.” We did have one final question in the chamber though, and asked Steranka if Niantic would ever consider giving trainers the option to revert their character back to the old style in a future update.
Steranka didn’t like the idea, and said the team were “definitely committed to the new avatar feature,” but did acknowledge he’d seen fan outcry for such a feature online.
“One of the feedbacks we saw was around wanting the original avatars for some players, and some of the things we did to adjust the various options, or to give players opportunities to manually get a little bit closer to what those original avatars look like,” Steranka told Dot. “It’s not a one to one, for sure, but I do think if that’s what you’re really interested in there, there are options available to you to get close to that equally.”
For now trainers, we need to learn to live with the new avatar features we have, while hoping the upcoming changes pay off whenever Niantic unveils them.
