Wizards Unite ARPG

I searched all over but none of my keywords would reveal an existing thread.

So here's one.

Add me as a friend!
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I am Groan in the game.

Looks interesting. Instead of throwing balls at a collapsing circle, you draw a spell pattern.

Poof!

I am Turrash in game.

1534 6084 4084

The game somewhat confuses me. My seed and water vault is full and I have no idea what to do with all that stuff other than make potions very slowly.

So far everything seems to be filling up quickly. I'm not real keen on spending a ton of money to start expanding everything so I hope I can figure this out. I spent a total of $5 on Pokemon Go and played for a really long time. Got the gold I needed from having my pokemon in gyms. I don't know what the equivalent is for this yet.

It's been out for a month or two months here, and as somebody who plays Pokemon Go virtually every weekday on my lunch break, I have switched over to this and put a bit of time in it. My wife and 2 kids also played quite a both of Go and have tried HP as well.

On the plus side:
- I really like the catching mechanic, varying this each time is a nice change from doing the same thing over and over again.
- The "gym" battles are much more fun now. Like catching battles are also more interactive, requiring you to actually watch the screen and interact directly rather than just tapping it.
- I appreciate that they got rid of "teams". No more arguing over who is going to take a gym just because you happened to choose a different colour 5 minutes into the game.
- Daily tasks are fun and give me something to aim for each day. This is particularly true for somebody like me who plays regularly but mostly by myself and only for a fairly short time each session.
- The use of a single, capped, spell power resource, rather than different balls, removes one of the more painful resource management elements from Go.
- UI and design on the app is fantastic, while the core is essentially the same as Go the look and feel is all wizarding world.

On the downside:
- Both my kids (6 and 9) found the casting mechanics, especially in battles to be a little tricky. I don't think the game does a great job explaining what needs to be done here and while I appreciate that it's more gamey and demanding of the player I can see some people finding this frustrating.
- While the spell resource is well done, the ingredient/potion section is a huge pain. As DeThroned mentioned there seem to be so many different ingredient's and it's never clear which are going to be useful and which will just add to the pile of 20 you already have taking up inventory space, so I find myself regularly cleaning up in here. Potions are a bit the same, based on the low limit you can carry and the ease in getting them it feels like they are actively trying to get players to use them more but there are so many different ones with different effects that I'm often not clear on what I should use when.
- Saving the biggest problem for last, catching random wizarding world related things just isn't as fun as catching cute little pokemon. I'm not sure there is any way to overcome this, Pokemon might have been the perfect IP for this style of game.

For my family, both the kids fell off Wizards Unite after 1-2 days, after playing Go long enough to get to around level 30 (although neither play that anymore either). My wife still plays WU a little bit but spends more time on Go still and I am mostly playing WU at the moment, more because there isn't really anything new in Go at the moment, when we get the next big update there I will be back across.

Nice summary, Cronox.
Now what's your friend code!

I do have a question, When you are battling in a fortress, when you choose a guy to battle there are 4 squares below it. It looks almost like you could have 2 people battling him at the same time. That would be great where 2 lower level people could take on a single higher level one.

Is there any benefit to being friends with people in this game who aren't local to you?

I'm not playing it myself but my wife is totally absorbed into it. The day it released she asked me to go for a walk and it was excruciating, she stopped every 30 feet to cast a spell at a floating slug or something and our trip around the block took 3x as long as it should. Some girl pulled up in her car and asked us if we were playing the Harry Potter game and they exchanged friend codes, and this girl said there was a Discord channel for people playing in our neighborhood, and then my wife asked me what Discord was and now maybe I have to get her on it.

I have no idea. I don't really even know what you can do as a friend.

I was surprised to hear that this game launched with little fanfare here in the US. I figured it would explode like Pokemon Go, but apparently it’s only done 4% of the downloads that Pokemon Go did in its comparable time frame.

I’m curious to try it, but I was reading an article in Forbes and they mentioned that Wizards Unite is more of a pay-to-play freemium model than Pokemon Go is. That’s made me reluctant to dig in. In other words, you run out of energy or whatever more quickly in Wizards Unite. For those playing, any thoughts?

I thought Pokemon Go hit a nice balance with pay items. I never felt like I was horribly handicapped or slowed down by not spending cash.

groan wrote:

Nice summary, Cronox.
Now what's your friend code!

Sorry, my code is 070472103265. I have added the others in this thread.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I’m curious to try it, but I was reading an article in Forbes and they mentioned that Wizards Unite is more of a pay-to-play freemium model than Pokemon Go is. That’s made me reluctant to dig in. In other words, you run out of energy or whatever more quickly in Wizards Unite. For those playing, any thoughts?

I thought Pokemon Go hit a nice balance with pay items. I never felt like I was horribly handicapped or slowed down by not spending cash.

They made some changes big changes about a week ago so you can now earn a lot more gold through both log-in rewards and daily tasks. For the daily tasks going them all now gets you 10 gold (it used to be 5), and there is about 3 times as much gold available through log-in rewards now (exactly how much of this you get depends on how many days you miss each month).

I havn't paid anything yet and outside of having to delete ingredients I have not run into any instances where I have felt like I am missing anything or blocked from accessing something I would like to do.

I have also played Go on and off for 3 years and never even looked at paying money their so my threshold for this might be different to others.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I was surprised to hear that this game launched with little fanfare here in the US. I figured it would explode like Pokemon Go, but apparently it’s only done 4% of the downloads that Pokemon Go did in its comparable time frame.

This has been very noticeable here too. There are still crowds of people out for Go events like community days, but I think I have seen about 2 other people playing WU in the wild.

Great, thanks Cronox. That's interesting to hear about the changes. I'm wondering if the US version is different in the amount of gold you get.

4% of Pokemon Go's launch has got to be a concern. I wonder if people people who are playing Pokemon Go hear about it and think, "Well, it's the same as Pokemon Go except Harry Potter. I'll just keep playing Pokemon Go." And maybe people who played Pokemon Go for a while then lost interest think, "Oh, it's like Pokemon Go except Harry Potter. I've done that before. I'll pass." And so they just aren't very interested?

Or maybe no one knows about it? I haven't seen any marketing at all, and they got lucky the first time with how quickly the game took off with just word of mouth.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

4% of Pokemon Go's launch has got to be a concern. I wonder if people people who are playing Pokemon Go hear about it and think, "Well, it's the same as Pokemon Go except Harry Potter. I'll just keep playing Pokemon Go." And maybe people who played Pokemon Go for a while then lost interest think, "Oh, it's like Pokemon Go except Harry Potter. I've done that before. I'll pass." And so they just aren't very interested?

Or maybe no one knows about it? I haven't seen any marketing at all, and they got lucky the first time with how quickly the game took off with just word of mouth.

I feel like it's a bit of all three, but probably mostly the last point.

That first month of Go really feels like one of those lightning in a bottle situations. It was the combination of a strong IP, gameplay that was fun yet simple with an addictive loop, a release right at the start of summer and a new experience to have on phones which were still transitioning from incredible future tech with fantastic new apps/features coming out each month to why am I getting a new phone every year when the last three have been nearly exactly the same.

Cronox wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

4% of Pokemon Go's launch has got to be a concern. I wonder if people people who are playing Pokemon Go hear about it and think, "Well, it's the same as Pokemon Go except Harry Potter. I'll just keep playing Pokemon Go." And maybe people who played Pokemon Go for a while then lost interest think, "Oh, it's like Pokemon Go except Harry Potter. I've done that before. I'll pass." And so they just aren't very interested?

Or maybe no one knows about it? I haven't seen any marketing at all, and they got lucky the first time with how quickly the game took off with just word of mouth.

I feel like it's a bit of all three, but probably mostly the last point.

That first month of Go really feels like one of those lightning in a bottle situations. It was the combination of a strong IP, gameplay that was fun yet simple with an addictive loop, a release right at the start of summer and a new experience to have on phones which were still transitioning from incredible future tech with fantastic new apps/features coming out each month to why am I getting a new phone every year when the last three have been nearly exactly the same.

Yes, I think the novelty of AR helped fuel a lot of the popularity surge of Go too, and it'll be hard to capture that with Wizards Unite. Niantic got so much free social media hype with people sharing photos of their Pokemon in all sorts of weird places. That was new, fresh, and anyone could relate to it. It went mainstream so quickly in part because of that.

Pokemon Go is pretty sticky around here. Maybe still 40% of launch activity? Judging by the players I see every day in public.

Sorry guys, I had to uninstall. After being asked for the 4th time to upgrade my ingredients vault, then being charged for a potion pot rental, I can see this is going to be a money pit where either I spend a lot on it, or I don't play at all. I'll go the "not at all" way.

I've installed.

Here's my friend code:
4935 3279 2175

Please feel free to add me!

Game name: Sharknose

greetings!

my friend code is:
2204 3522 2367

Feel free to add

I think i'm, Vyros82 in this one.

I'm curious, does anyone have any insight into what exactly determines if you dispel a confoundable or if it escapes?

thrawn82 wrote:

I'm curious, does anyone have any insight into what exactly determines if you dispel a confoundable or if it escapes?

The bar at the top of the screen shows your likelihood of dispel. Green for good chance, through to red for low chance. The initial colour of this bar it determined by the strength/rarity of the confoundable (rare ones are harder to dispel than common ones) and your character level. This can then be influenced by using potions.

How well you cast the spell (both in terms of how accurately and how quickly you trace the line), then determines your position on that bar for that particular cast. This is where you see things like good, great etc.

Now add in a some RNG, where sometimes you will still not dispel with a great cast on a green bar, and others you will dispel on an average cast on a red bar.

Confoundable's departing seems to be a random chance after each failed spell. There are also potions which can make this less likely.

Reinstalled. My brother and nephew started playing and demanded it!

LOL

So the region lock got lifted and I tried this out, and I can't get over what a bizarre game it is.

I mean, it's beautifully crafted and the animations and effects and everything are spiffy, but the mechanics make no sense! Like:

  • The game has 20+ distinct spells, but they all do the same thing and the game picks which one you cast

  • The core "skill" mechanic is tracing spells, but doing it well has no actual effect on gameplay (just an xp bonus)

  • The core "battle" mechanic is tower challenges, but the only way you can affect the outcome of a challenge is potions. Assuming you don't fall asleep or something, the damage you take and deal each round is fixed, so although you have to sit there for 3-6 minutes drawing shapes, apart from consumables the outcome is fixed.

  • The game's "resource/crafting" mechanic is ostensibly to grow potion reagents in greenhouses, but for me at least I find reagents lying around more often than I find seeds and water, so why bother? Even if I wanted to try the growing mechanic, my reagent inventory was full long before I had the chance to.

More than anything, there's no player agency. As near as I can tell, the only meaningful choices you make in this game are (1) when to use potions, and (2) which order to unlock your skills in. Everything else just boils down clicking shapes and the game saying "you clicked the shape".

But it feels like there's soooo much potential. Like, imagine if there were multiple spells you could "draw" in battles, and they each did different things. Imagine if e.g. casting quickly made the spell more potent, but accuracy decreased the energy costs, etc.

Gah. I really hope there are updates to come. This could to be an awesome game, it should be an awesome game.

DeThroned wrote:

The game somewhat confuses me. My seed and water vault is full and I have no idea what to do with all that stuff other than make potions very slowly.

You can make them somewhat less slowly if you stir them properly.

This seems not to have been part of a tutorial, or if it was, I didn't get to it yet. But if you click on the info button on the potions screen, it explains it. (Essentially, you need to guess/experiment until you find the proper sequence of gestures to speed up brew times by 15%. So it's still pretty slow.)

I live in the suburbs, and have a ten minute walk to get to two inns and a greenhouse. There's a fortress at my job, and another inn a ten minute walk away from there. The inns are just far enough away to be annoying -- I wish spell energy also refilled slowly over time.

fenomas wrote:

So the region lock got lifted and I tried this out, and I can't get over what a bizarre game it is. .........

I get where these complaints are coming from but I think Niantic are going for a much more mainstream audience and aren't that interested in more in depth "gamer" mechanics.

If anything WU is a more complex than Pokemon Go, where catching is a single action and battles are just tapping the screen. Just in personal experience both my kids bounced off WU fairly quickly at least in part because they couldn't get the hang of casting the different spells, and particularly in the time limited situations of the battles they got frustrated quite quickly.

I think the meaningful choice's you make in Niantic games are more along the lines of, lets head outside and walk around this park for an hour hitting these 3 hotspots rather than lets switch to this spell because it does double damage against vampires.

Cronox wrote:

If anything WU is a more complex than Pokemon Go, where catching is a single action and battles are just tapping the screen.

I get what you're saying, but I'm talking systems and I think you're talking UI. Catching in pokemon go isn't a single action at all - you have two different consumables (berries and great/ultra balls) and a skill system (hitting the reticle) with two different risk/reward tradeoffs (whether to throw a curveball and whether to throw when the reticle is large or small). And all of those things materially affect your chances of success. In WU, there's one choice to make (use a potion or don't), and something that looks like a skill system, but doesn't actually affect your chances of success (apparently*).

I mean, I'm not here to say that Pokemon Go has deep or compelling systems, but it does have systems. WU is clearly trying to do similar sorts of things, but none of them quite works - it's all currencies that can only be spent on one thing, battles that can only have one outcome, and so on.

* (according to reddit theorycrafters anyway. Apparently the success rate depends on the color of the bar at the top of the screen, and there are occasionally cases where different parts of the bar are different colors, so in those cases accuracy could matter, if the cutoff point is near the middle of the bar. I've not yet seen any cases where this happened though.)

PS: if your kids are like me, the trouble they had with tower battles may have been that the UI makes it very non-obvious how to "target" the monsters. It took me several battles to figure out you're supposed to drag the tip of your wand around the bottom of the screen, to move your targeting reticle (which starts offscreen for some insane reason) onto the monster. Once you work that out, the "draw a shape" part is much more forgiving in timed battles, compared to the version with confoundables.

fenomas wrote:

I get what you're saying, but I'm talking systems and I think you're talking UI. Catching in pokemon go isn't a single action at all - you have two different consumables (berries and great/ultra balls) and a skill system (hitting the reticle) with two different risk/reward tradeoffs (whether to throw a curveball and whether to throw when the reticle is large or small). And all of those things materially affect your chances of success. In WU, there's one choice to make (use a potion or don't), and something that looks like a skill system, but doesn't actually affect your chances of success (apparently*).

* (according to reddit theorycrafters anyway. Apparently the success rate depends on the color of the bar at the top of the screen, and there are occasionally cases where different parts of the bar are different colors, so in those cases accuracy could matter, if the cutoff point is near the middle of the bar. I've not yet seen any cases where this happened though.)

Alright, that makes more sense.

If the bar at the top of the screen does indeed do nothing then the "catch" mechanic is very pointless. I was working under the assumption that much like Go a great cast would have a higher percentage chance of succeeding that a good or fair one even if the bar was the same colour in all three.

fenomas wrote:

PS: if your kids are like me, the trouble they had with tower battles may have been that the UI makes it very non-obvious how to "target" the monsters. It took me several battles to figure out you're supposed to drag the tip of your wand around the bottom of the screen, to move your targeting reticle (which starts offscreen for some insane reason) onto the monster. Once you work that out, the "draw a shape" part is much more forgiving in timed battles, compared to the version with confoundables.

Yes, it was very much a case of it being difficult to show them what to do while they were losing the battle.

Cronox wrote:

If the bar at the top of the screen does indeed do nothing then the "catch" mechanic is very pointless. I was working under the assumption that much like Go a great cast would have a higher percentage chance of succeeding that a good or fair one even if the bar was the same colour in all three.

In traces, when the encounter starts it shows a circular scale running from green to red, and then it shows two sort of clock hands that mark off a section of the scale. The cast bar seems to correspond to that range, but whether success rates change gradually or not is anyone's guess. (But it's clearly not like pokemon go where color directly correlates to success rate.)

You do get an xp bonus for better casts though, so that's the main reason to do it. There's also an achievement counter for how many masterful casts you do (interestingly, casts count even if the target resists or runs away).

Timed challenge battles are different - there the cast just works or doesn't, accuracy has no effect on anything.

I'm playing and quite enjoying it.
Friend code is 6460 7273 8117
TonicBlue in game. I just added the people above in the thread if any of you are still playing.

I like the core gameplay quite a bit and didn't play pokemon go outside of trying it on a friend's phone once or twice. Pokemon never quite caught for me but Harry Potter is a big draw for me.

I'm enjoying it enough that I spent $15 on the limited time 3x deals and used that to upgrade storage capacity. It seems designed to have you bump against storage limits hard early on but with a few boosts it's not a noticeable issue anymore.

My code is 5002 2522 5497

I'm on this too!
2869 0976 2967

I also have a friend who's not on these forums who could use more friends in game.
4407 2944 1465

and here i am doing searches on Steam and EPIC store.. derp