Pokemon Go Fans Are Furious Over Player Avatar Changes

Earlier this week, Pokemon Go announced that it would be giving fans more options to customize their games, including “enhanced visuals” and various new avatar options to help you look as close to real as physically possible. That all sounded very promising, but it’s not unfair to say that developer Niantic has completely goofed up, igniting the ire of thousands of fans by somehow making everyone’s player avatar much, much worse.

You only have to take a look at one of the more recent tweets from the Pokemon Go Twitter account to see exactly how much damage this latest update has done, severely downgrading the avatar of pretty much every player in the game. A lot of the issues seem to be down to the player models, as Niantic appears to have removed the male and female models and replaced them with a more homogenized one, presumably either an attempt to make the game more diverse, or open up more customization options.

That model is a lot less detailed than the originals, completely altering the faces of players and causing all kinds of issues with the game’s current crop of clothing options. You only need to take a brief look at the game’s subreddit to see multiple examples of clothing gone wrong, such as skirts clipping through legs, headphones making a huge dip in a player’s head, and even hairstyles are clipping through heads, sometimes vanishing completely.

Pokemon Go Players Already Want Old Avatars Back

Even the most generous Pokemon Go player has to admit that Niantic has rolled out these changes in a less than satisfactory manner, and you won’t be surprised to hear that there are plenty of people already demanding that the developer brings back the old avatars immediately. In fact, you have people begging for Niantic to do it, claiming that “no one asked for this” and that the issue is just as bad as the remote raids controversy from last year.

Of course, none of these changes affect the game itself, which is still just as playable as it was before, but it’s ironic to see so many people are no longer able to express themselves properly now, despite Niantic’s ensuring us that the update was designed to let people do that more easily. We’ll have to wait and see whether the developer buckles under the fan backlash and reverts the changes it made, though it’s not exactly a developer that’s known to backtrack, no matter how hated the changes are.