‘Pokémon Unite’ hides points mid-match to prevent players quitting

Suppressing score stops surrender? Seriously.

A Pokémon Unite developer has announced that hiding the score during matches is intentional in order to prevent players from quitting early.

In email correspondence with Kotaku, Pokémon Unite’s producer, Masaaki Hoshino said “The matches last 10 minutes and players have the possibility of making a comeback, so we wanted people to play without giving up to the very end.”

The easiest way for a team to make a comeback in Nintendo’s popular MMO is by defeating Zapdos, who appears in the last minutes of each match. Landing the final hit on the legendary bird allows your team to score points in the opposing goals instantly.

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This creates a huge advantage for players as usually it takes several seconds to score. The scoring animation can be reset by attacking opponents and as such goals need to be completely free of the opposing team in order to score points.

Throughout the match players still have some indication as to which team is winning even without numbers. Scoring 100 points in one goal destroys it and players can easily see which goals have been taken out on the mini-map.

The announcer also tells players which team has scored more points with phrases such as “We’re in the lead” , “We’re struggling” and the emphatic “We’re REALLY struggling”.

However, points scored does not always denote which team is winning or losing. Saving points until the last minute, when they are worth double, is a viable strategy. If you can see on the mini-map that the other team are holding points then that can also be a cause for concern.

In other Nintendo news, despite being out only a matter of weeks, players of Metroid Dread have already been able to complete the game in under 90 minutes.

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