Pokémon Go’s new Party Play feature will turn groups of friends into raid-crushing teams

theverge.com:

By Charles Pulliam-Moore, a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Pokémon Go’s latest set of features aren’t quite the fixes that players have been begging Niantic for, but they will give trainers new ways to compete and team up as they dig into a spooky season of shadowy raids.

After a little bit of teasing toward the end of last week, Niantic has officially announced the arrival of Pokémon Go’s Party Play, a new feature that allows groups of four players to link up and explore together somewhat similar to the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Union Circle. After connecting using either an alphanumeric or QR code, Pokémon Go players (who must be in close physical proximity to one another and at level 15 at minimum) can form teams that receive significant power boosts when taking on raid bosses together.

As Party Play teams begin raid battles, using regular fast attacks will gradually charge up their Party Power gauge, which, when full, doubles the damage dealt by your next charged attack. During a demo, Niantic explained that this aspect of Party Play is designed to make it easier for relatively small groups of players to take down powerful mega-evolved pokémon and Shadow Raid bosses like Lugia (whose shiny shadow variant will be making its debut).

Along with raiding, Party Play’s also meant to encourage players to go out exploring together while appearing on each other’s overworld maps and seeing which team member can top the rankings in different competitions measuring things like who has walked the farthest and who has caught the most pokémon. Unfortunately, Party Play teams only exist for limited