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Niantic confirms that Pokémon GO is getting PvP battles ‘soon’

Greg Kumparak

Two and a half years after the launch of Pokémon GO, it’s still missing one major staple of the main series games: player versus player battling.

That’s about to change.

In a series of teaser tweets this morning, the company confirmed that the battle system is on the way, noting only that it’s “coming soon.”

Battling is the feature perhaps most demanded by the player base — particularly after the other oh-so-demanded feature, trading, was finally added around six months ago. While players have long been able to battle Pokémon stored in gyms, or work together to take down bigger/badder Pokémon that show up in raids, there’s never been the sort of real-time, head-to-head battling system for which the series is so well-known.

In August of this year, a rep for Niantic mentioned that their goal was to get it out by the end of the year. Given these tweets, it’s looking like that’ll happen.

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Greg Kumparak

Greg Kumparak was an editor at TechCrunch. Greg started at TechCrunch in May of 2008 as the editor of its sister site, MobileCrunch. Greg’s coverage primarily focused on consumer companies, particularly those involving gadgets, robotics, or augmented reality. Disclosures: Greg holds shares in ETFs/mutual funds and owns a small amount of cryptocurrency (ETH, ADA)

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