Ingress Prime builds upon Niantic’s foundational real world augmented reality game, Ingress, and uses cutting-edge location-based technology to reveal the global game board and uncover Portals located at public art places and landmarks.
The original Ingress will continue. But the new game features graphics upgrades and other enhancements designed to entice players to switch over. You start out as an agent and choose which side you want to support. The Enlightened (green team) want to take the Exotic Matter (XM) at the public locations such as statues and use it to enhance human kind. The Resistance (blue team) is distrustful of the technology and aims to protect humanity from the new matter.
Ingress Prime is built on Niantic’s Real World Platform, which converts landmarks into game locations. Ingress Prime has an all-new story aimed at making veterans of the first game happy, but it also does a better job onboarding new players with tutorials and dramatic story videos. Upon completing training, players must choose a side between and then battle for control of landmarks.
“Ingress was inspired by idea that world is full of interesting places we pass by every day but we don’t always notice them,” said Hanke. “We decided we could we build a game around these interesting places and lead people to them.”
The reboot has been in the works for a while. Niantic announced it was working on it more than a year ago. It built the game from the ground up on the Unity game engine. The user interface has been streamlined to give more info at a glance.
As with the original, the Ingress Prime storyline will evolve and change based on how Ingress agents interact with one another and the outcome of Ingress real world “anomaly” events. The original Ingress had more than 2,000 in-person, real-world events. The game started with hundreds of thousands of locations at the outset, and now it has millions of locations identified in the game.
“People have gone to all ends of the earth to capture portals,” Hanke said. “One Russian player went to a military base in Siberia.”
As agents collaborate and compete, the story will expand through a new interactive hub which serves as the entry point into the deep Ingress universe. A new Ingress web series, “The Dunraven Project,” serves as an entry point, fusing narrative and real-world Agent achievements.
The two factions come to life in a new way, as two functioning artificial intelligence entities, with which Ingress agents and prospective agents can interact. They are set to come online shortly after launch and will play a pivotal role.