Pokemon Gowill celebrate its seventh anniversary this year. Although it may have felt like all your friends stopped playing after that one glorious summer in 2016, the game remains aPokemonjuggernaut. However, speaking of those very early Pokemon Go days, one player recently noticed a featureNianticshowed someone using in its very first trailer still hasn’t been implemented.
The feature in question is honey. A player is shown with what they’re scrolling through on their screen projected as an image alongside them, AR-style. Among their choices are Pokeballs, Super Potions, and honey. As was the case for the player who posted the seven-year-old image on the Pokemon Go subreddit, many of you are likely reading this asking what the hell honey is and why hasn’t it been added to Pokemon Go?
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There were clearly plans for honey to be an item in Pokemon Go at some point, and one reply to the thread below claims it remains in the game’s files to this day. There are theories as to what it could have been used for, as well as ideas on why exactly it was scrapped. There seems to be a split between players who think lures were used in place of honey by the time Pokemon Go launched, with others suggesting Incense is the item that took its place.
Both theories have merit as lures and incense share commonalities with the honey trainers could use inDiamond & Pearl. Honey could be smeared on trees and when you returned a few hours later, Pokemon attracted to it would be waiting to be battled and caught. That’s a nice idea in theory for Pokemon Go, but it would have meant either including virtual trees for players to smear honey on, or figuring out a way for the game’s AR technology to recognize real trees.
It seems somewhere between its announcement trailer and Pokemon Go’s launch, Niantic decided honey was too tricky an item to implement and it wasn’t worth the hassle. Between incense and lures, it seems more likely the latter was the one that eventually took the place of honey. It’s effectively the same thing with Pokestops taking the place of the trees and lure modules being the honey. The argument that incense was honey’s Pokemon Go replacement was met with a valid follow-up question asking if the trainer smears themselves in honey before going out to catch Pokemon.
Wondering what happened to honey will be a distraction Niantic is all for right now as it will take some of the attention away fromthe outrage over its remote raid pass nerfs. The controversy surrounding the decision refuses to go away, partly due to Niantic making the ill-thought-out decision totweet a joke about it. A joke it quickly deleted as it naturally generated quite a bit more backlash.
