Pokemon Go Developer Announces New Game Peridot

The makers of Pokemon Go have announced a new augmented reality game that’s all about raising unique one-of-a-kind creatures. Earlier today, Niantic announced Peridot, a brand new real-world AR game that focuses on raising magical creatures called Peridots. The initial teaser trailer, which showcases several different kinds of big-eyed Peridots, can be found below: 

The Peridot experience seems to build off of Pokemon Go’s Buddy mechanic, in which a player cares for a single Pokemon via on-screen interactions and by taking it on walks. Players in Peridot will be tasked to play and feed their Peridot, while taking it on walks and allowing it to explore their surroundings. Interestingly, the community component of Peridot will involve breeding your Peridot with those owned by other players, which allows them to discover additional archetypes of Peridots and further diversify the Peridot species. While each Peridot is considered to be one-of-a-kind, it seems that these archetypes will resemble different mythical and real-world creatures. Several screenshots shown on Peridot’s webpage seems to hint that players will be focusing on one creature at a time as opposed to collecting a large group of creatures like in Pokemon Go. 

Peridot seems to be the next evolution in Niantic’s AR experience. While Niantic’s early games Ingress focused mostly on controlling crowdsourced maps with interesting locations, more recent games have better leveraged the camera features of mobile devices. While Pokemon Go has some AR functionality using camera phones, this new game seems to push that even further. Niantic also develops a Pikmin mobile game called Pikmin Bloom, which focuses primarily on raising Pikmin and sending them out to explore their surroundings. Niantic is also developing a Transformers mobile game as well as several other projects with Nintendo. 

Peridot will have a “soft launch test” in select markets soon. You can sign up for a newsletter on Niantic’s website to stay abreast on details about their new game or visit Peridot’s website for more details.