Pokemon GO Gets Remote Raid Battles To Keep Players Inside

With quarantines and stay-at-home orders in effect around the world, that puts Pokemon GO in a rather unique position. Pokemon GO's core gameplay loop centers around players exploring the world around them, searching for Pokemon and visiting real-world landmarks to progress. Obviously, that isn't something that can be done at the moment, so Niantic has had to retool how the game works in order for people to keep playing.

Niantic wasted little time in making those changes too, first implementing them back on March 13th. With those changes, Niantic made it easier to play the game indoors by dropping the price of a 30-pack of incense down to a single PokeCoin.

Ever since then, Niantic has offered a variety of item bundles for a single PokeCoin, allowing players to get outfitted for Pokemon hunting on the cheap. Those inexpensive bundles were joined by other measures that saw the distance required to hatch eggs in an incubator halved and increased Pokemon habitats so wild Pokemon would appear more often.

Today, we're seeing the launch of another measure meant to keep people playing while they're indoors. According to a new post on the Pokemon GO blog, Niantic is introducing Remote Raid Passes that will let you participate in the raid battles that show up in your Nearby page (or those you can see on your map). When they launch later this month, Remote Raid Passes will be offered at a discounted price of 100 PokeCoins, though Niantic also says that they'll be featured in those aforementioned one-coin bundles.

That blog post also reveals that players will get one bonus Field Research task each day without having to spin a PokeStop, with those tasks centered around activities that can be carried out at home. Your buddy Pokemon will begin retrieving gifts from PokeStops when you're running low, and Niantic will even allow players to activate multiple Star Pieces, Lucky Eggs, and Incense at a time to extend their duration.

You can read more about this update in the blog post linked above. Niantic doesn't specifically say when this update will be rolling out, but we expect it to happen at some point this month. We'll let know when Niantic shares more, so stay tuned.