“What are you playing now?” my wife asked as I pulled out my phone while walking around the mall. “Catching uh…Harry Potter…Pokémon,” I said, as I cast a spell at a large clock being protected by two imps. “What?” she asked confused. “It’s…hard to explain,” I said. The clock fled.
There’s no doubt that Niantic/WB’s Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is a polished game. Servers are stable, they’ve animated hundreds of unique creatures, people and objects for it. It has a full-on skill tree system and some neat uses of AR (Portkeys!).
And yet overall, the game is just not very good because of its central concept, one that is much harder to wrap your head around than the ease of seeing Pokémon, catching Pokémon in Pokémon GO.
The problem with Wizards Unite is that Niantic wanted to use the same mechanics that made GO a hit and forced players to traverse the world, even though that has…never really been what Harry Potter’s been about at all.
The obvious conclusion was to make this a “Fantastic Beasts” game, the new era of the movies which has Eddie Redmayne trying to capture magical creatures before they wreak havoc in Muggle-land, but someone decided that wasn’t going to be “Harry Potter” enough, and so Wizards Unite was born.
The problem is that the solution that was invented here is wildly weird and nonsensical. There is some spell that cast magical creatures, objects and people out into the world, and you have to go put them back where they came from.
This is decidedly strange in practice. The objects in quest are called “foundables” and range from objects you heard mentioned once across seven Harry Potter books (Remembralls! Howlers!) to creatures (Hippogriffs! Mandrakes!) to then…actual people, pretty much every major named character in the books. This timeline is supposed to be taking place post-Hogwarts where Harry Potter is an Auror and Hermione works for the Ministry of Magic, and yet you will find younger “fragmented” versions of them out in the wild to rescued for…reasons? I have never figured this out.
The problem is that players are just not going to have any kind of attachment to most of the weird crap you are being asked to find in Wizards Unite. Why do I care if I return the 11th copy of the Weasley magical clock back to their house? Why am I invested in making sure Professor Sprout isn’t being tormented by magic roots and can go back to hanging out on Platform 9 3/4s?
None of this works at a fundamental level, but I don’t even think a Fantastic Beasts game would have made much of a difference. Even if we weren’t catching Crystal Balls and shards of Luna Lovegood’s younger self, and instead catching magical creatures in a way that lined up with Newt’s movie quest, people still don’t care about Harry Potter’s made up slew of magical animals like they do Pokémon, and it just would have felt like a half-hearted version of GO regardless.
Sometimes concepts do not work with certain IPs, and Harry Potter, a series which is all about immersing you in a magical fantasy underworld, does not work with asking players to walk around the real world catching random magical pieces they’re supposed to remember from a line or two in a book or a scene or two in a movie. It just doesn’t work. It isn’t engaging the way building a full Pokedex is in GO, or training up your monsters to be powerful raid fighters or gym defenders. There’s nothing like that here. Yes, Wizards Unite also suffers from over-monetization which I’ve written about already. And yet that’s something that can be changed and balanced in time. The core concept of the game, these foundables, are here to stay, and that’s the main problem.
There’s a lot going on in Wizards Unite and most of it is polished well. And yet the entire concept does not work as a whole, and as such, I am not surprised to see the game struggle with a tiny fraction of the playerbase and engagement of GO. We’ll see what the future holds.
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