It's official: Pokemon GO is introducing legendary Pokemon. Should players complete the Pokemon GO Fest challenges successfully, everybody will be able to take on legendary Pokemon Raids and hatch legendary eggs for a chance to catch one of the characters for themselves.

The arrival of legendaries is exciting enough on its own, but fans will be positively over the moon with the news that shiny legendary Pokemon may be available at some point too. After digging around in the Pokemon GO 0.69.0 update, ZeChrales of the game's development community have found that the game is downloading five new icons for legendary Pokemon in the background, including legendary variants. Icons for shiny Articuno, shiny Zapdos, shiny Moltres, normal and shiny Lugia have all been uncovered.

It should be noted that it's currently unclear when these shiny legendary Pokemon will be available. Despite the background download, the Pokemon GO app itself is not downloading these assets into the game yet. This may have been done by developer Niantic in an effort to keep the shiny variants a secret, or it may be preparing to reveal the shinies at a later date. After all, assets for legendary Pokemon have been in the game for some time but it wasn't until this week that the developer decided to officially lift the lid on the characters.

Other than the release date, Pokemon GO players will also want to know exactly how they will be able to get shiny legendary Pokemon. While making shiny legendary exclusive to the game's Raids would be a fantastic way to encourage people to get involved, but for those who do not have any Pokemon GO-playing friends to take on the Raids with, they could miss out. Once legendaries are unlocked, player will be able to get legendary Pokemon from eggs that they pick up at Gyms. Putting shinies in those eggs too could allow many more players to obtain them.

So there is a lot of information that Niantic needs to share about the shiny legendaries, but either way, the variants are sure to be popular. When the developer hosted a Water-type event, Pokemon GO players captured over half a billion Magikarp in the hopes of finding a shiny variant. There are currently only two shinies in the game - shiny Magikarp and its evolution, shiny Gyarados - and the release of the shiny legendary Pokemon will be even more popular as a result.

Pokemon GO is available on iOS and Android.

Source: PokemonGOHub