Niantic outlines plans for upcoming Pokemon GO content, desire for worldwide events, old tracker not returning

Coming from a Vice interview with Niantic's John Hanke...

"...the priority for Pokémon Go now is to build in those things that reward co-operative gameplay, and make experiences available that offer more depth than just the capturing mechanic. It's going to be done soon. It is what it is. I'll take the massive wave of hysteria we enjoyed, and just deal with the fact that it's caused us to take a bit longer to get the rest of the features up. We're really happy to make our users happy. My heart is really with events, and that's something I want us to solve in 2017. It's complicated, though, to do them at the scale that Pokémon Go demands. But, to me, that would be the best demonstration of the vision of this company, which is all about playing games together, outside, with other people.

The tracker sort of fills a certain need within the product. I think the more interesting thing for me is not extending the tracker, but basically making the world richer and adding more ways to interact with new kinds of things in the world."

Hanke went on to say that some new features will be launched soon in "an abbreviated form", with Niantic still working on more complete versions. There's also plans to make global events, though some details have to be ironed out. Finally, work towards Pokemon trading, upgraded gym battles and player-versus-player battles are all still coming.