This month’s Pokémon Go Community Day is going to be an interesting one – and not least due to its choice of featured creature, the pseudo-Legendary Deino.
As well as the monthly event’s typical in-game bonuses and good chances at catching a Deino’s Shiny version, developer Niantic is also using the event to roll-out a couple of brand new features.
In a twist, players will be able to extend the event’s three-hour runtime in their local area by raiding at gyms after the 11am-2pm window concludes. The raids will feature Deino’s evolved form Zweilous, and hatch from a new type of raid egg that can only be tackled by players in person (so, no remote raid passes!).
Niantic is doing this in response to the game’s community pushing back on the recent decision to return Community Day to its original three hour duration, rather than the six hour-long days seen during the past couple of years.
Niantic’s reasoning for that was it wants Community Day to be about players interacting in-person, and the chances of doing so are greater within a more focused timeframe. Some players, however, preferred the six-hour window as it meant more time and more flexibility to harvest Pokémon and items.
So, this month’s new features are being offered as something of a compromise. Any completed in-person Zweilous raid will spawn 30 minutes of further Community Day spawns in a 300m radius of the gym, up until 7pm local time that evening.
These raids will be a new four-star in-person-only difficulty. On the one hand this makes sense – why make them possible to remote raid when their bonuses will be local? – but on the other, their announcement has left players wondering if other raids may become inaccessible with remote raid passes in the future, as Pokémon Go seeks to return as much as possible to outdoors play.