Round up your inventory Ingress players, because today Google and Niantic Labs just released a pretty big update for the augmented reality game. The still in a closed-beta game has a huge following, even though it drains your battery thanks to the ongoing GPS needs, but it’s quite fun. Today the game received tons of improvements, fancy animations, and much more.
If you’re one of the thousands that still love this game (I know a few die hards) you’ll be happy to see the update delivers quite a list of things users have been asking for. For one they’ve finally added inventory sorting controls. So you won’t have to fumble through the entire list. I know my brief stint with the game this aspect bothered me.
Ingress also added some fancy portal hacking animations, a new fire mode for weapons, a better health indicator, and more. The changelog even lists better support for high-res displays. Whatever that means. Hopefully our 1080p devices will look a little better, but that’s doubtful.
Get ready to attack portals in both the real world, and the virtual world inside Ingress with all these new tools and fire modes. The game is quite odd, but can be loads of fun once you put enough time and effort into it. It’s still in a closed beta, but you can grab the latest update right now from the link below.
Who plays Ingress? Did you try it and give up, or are you still waiting for an invite?
VIA: Play Store
I just started playing again after about a 7 month hiatus and was really getting into it (again). Until I realized (again) why I quit the first time. There are die-hard players that seem to have all the time in the world to play (which means the dominate the entire scene) and that’s really no fun for us part-timers. It takes a lot of time, work and energy to play Ingress so when a working dad can squirrel away a lunch hour to create a control field or two, only to have it all wiped out an hour after… well, just not much fun at all.
Oddly, this is pretty much exactly my experience as well. I hadn’t played since last December and only managed to grind to level 4-and-a-half due to the severe lack of portals in my area back then. Now, I look at the map and see no portals with resonators below level 5 in them, and a few level 8 players roaming all over the place.
I hope they can change the game mechanics and dynamics somehow because it really isn’t much fun if you’re in a weak, under-leveled position. There is nothing to do, no way to contribute.
I wonder if they’ll reset everyone when (and if) it ever gets released outside of beta. We’ll see
That wouldn’t really solve the balancing issues though, in my opinion. It would probably piss the veterans off (unless they handled the transition very carefully) and cause a new land rush to happen. The most active players would outpace the casuals very fast and the situation would be the same as before.
All that aside, I wonder if there will be a “proper release” at all or if it will just be as usual with Google products and at some point the invite-only restriction will vanish along with the beta tag. We’ll see, indeed.