I posted about the new Pokemon Go “research” susbystem when it launched and I was cautiously optimistic. I've now completed the full Special Research questline and a full week's worth of Field Research, and I think I can go from cautiously optimistic to saying that I think this is a great new feature for the game. [Spoilers for both types of research below].

Field Research

When I made my first post about the research subsystem I hadn't fully understood the Field Research subsystem. Each task has a potential reward with it, some of which are the chance to catch a pokemon, but many of which are other game resources, such as items, stardust, etc. I also didn't realize that you can get rid of a task if you're not interested in pursuing it (there's a little “garbage can” icon over on the right, I didn't realize it was there until somebody replied to a social media post I made complaining about my frustrations with a task that pointed it out to me). Overall I've been happy with the way that the field research goals have encouraged me to change up my normal routine. For example, the other day I was over at some parks near the Willamette river, but I had a research task to spin 3 pokestops I hadn't spun before. I noticed there were some un-spun pokestops at the top of Skinner Butte so I decided to deviate from my normal pattern of just staying on the paths near the river and take the walking path up to the top to spin them.

Each day that you complete a Field Research task you get a stamp, and when you get seven stamps you get a special reward. This week it was an opportunity to catch the legendary bird Moltres:

Mine has really good IVs, not perfect but close. I've complained before that it's frustrating for solo players like me that some game content was locked behind the raid subsystem so I think it's really great that I've finally been able to capture a legendary pokemon of my own. From what I've seen on the internet, everybody who completes the field research system gets a Moltres, or at least did for the first week. I'm assuming that will change to give people opportunities at other rare pokemon, but I don't know if that will be based on the number of 7-day cycles you complete, a calendar-based cycle, or something else. Regardless, I think both the individual tasks and overall reward for Field Research have been a great addition to the game.

Special Research

The Special Research questline to capture Mew was also satisfying, but pretty frustrating in some parts. One task required fighting in 10 raids. I normally take my poke-walks early in the morning, often before any raids are active. And then I seemed to have really bad luck finding any that I could realistically fight as a solo player. I fought some legitimate raid fights, but to get all the way to ten I cheesily started some raids with teams that had no chance of winning and waited for the fight to be over, just so the game would count it as having been involved in the fight. I hate standing around doing nothing, so having the wait the two minutes for the raid to start and then for the entire fight countdown to conclude was really frustrating for me. Also, the task of getting an excellent curveball throw was somewhat diabolical for me. Virtually all of my throws are curveballs now, and I often get great throws and occasionally luck into an excellent throw, but when I was trying to get an excellent throw I couldn't seem to land any for the longest time – choking under pressure, I guess. Still, I think tasks like that are pretty good game design, it draws attention to that particular aspect of the game in a rewarding way.

With all the tasks completed you get rewarded with the opportunity to capture Mew. It automatically switches you into AR camera mode for this, which probably would have been really cool if I had managed to complete the quest while I was out walking somewhere interesting. In my case I actually managed to hit the last task in my home office (a Clefable spawned, and I managed to get the excellent curveball throw on it) so my view of Mew was amusingly anti-climactic. Still, it's cool that I've now captured one.

What does the future hold?

The Special Research tab now indicates that “More research requests will be coming soon!”, so I assume this will be a new vector for Niantic to occasionally introduce new content to the game to keep things fresh. I don't know enough pokemon lore to know if there are other pokemon that would serve as a basis for a questline like Mew did for this one, but it seems like this subsystem will give Niantic a lot more knobs and levers for creating special content than they've had in the past, since they've mostly only been able to work with spawn rates and reward multipliers when running special events. I'm also hoping that the Field Research reward will let me “catch up” with all the players who were able to get a lot of different legendaries via raids (or even better, if in the future some legendaries show up as research rewards first before ever appearing in gyms, so we solo players have first crack at them for a change). Even having completed the Special Research line, I'm still deriving enjoyment from the tasks in the Field Research system – it's fun to have little intermediate goals like “catch 3 Fire-type Pokemon” or “Make an Excellent throw” to help keep me engaged with the game.