Niantic officially announced its update to Pokémon GO. Players can now encounter, catch, and hatch Pokémon from the Johto region.
The much-awaited update to the wildly successful mobile game app will start featuring the likes of Togepi and Pichu - just some of the Pokémon players can encounter from both "Pokémon Gold" and "Pokémon Silver" games. The Pokémon Company disclosed that players can start finding Eggs at PokéStops that may hatch any of the new "Generation 2" Pokémon.
Pokémon GO's official website earlier announced that the new Pokémon in the update will be "the first of more Pokémon coming to Pokémon GO over the next few months." That means Niantic will update the app incrementally with new Pokémon available in the wild.
Apart from the highly-anticipated update, IGN reported that Pokémon GO will feature a special "festive hat"-wearing Pikachu appearing "in large quantities" from December 12 up to December 29, to celebrate the holiday season.
The rollout of the latest update follows Niantic's move to add thousands of new PokéStops in conjunction with Sprint and Starbucks. Pokémon GO's last update - a surprise one, involved the addition of the amorphous pink Pokémon Ditto.
Nonetheless, the game has yet to feature legendary Pokémon such as the three legendary birds (Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres), and Mewtwo and Mew. Details on how those Niantic plans to introduce legendary Pokémon into the game remain scant.
All in all, Niantic's recent moves to update Pokémon GO all serve as efforts to revive it from its rapidly-flagging popularity. However, players remain frustrated over the lack of new features that would bring the game closer to its Game Boy and 3DS counterparts, including trainer battles, Pokémon trading, and the like. Watch Pokémon GO's official trailer for the update below:
