Harry Potter: Wizards Unite



""This Calamity is, well, quite calamitous. Everything that anyone has ever feared, revered, or held dear in the wizarding world — people, things, even memories — have been stolen and displaced, tossed about across the world. We've got to return what is lost, and quickly. The Statute of Secrecy is in danger of being broken.""

- Constance Pickering

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite was an Augmented Reality Game for iOS and Android devices set in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, created by Niantic, in collaboration with WB Games and Portkey Games. Like its predecessor from the same company, Pokémon Go, it combined GPS location and a game world map along with the ability to set game events against a background image taken with the camera in the player's handheld device to provide an immersive experience overlaid on the real world.

The story was deceptively simple: a great Calamity struck the Wizarding World -- a spell was cast that scattered evidence for magic and wizards throughout the Muggle world, complete with guards and protections to make sure that evidence was not removed. Dramatically understaffed, the Ministry of Magic recruited a massive team of volunteers they called the "Statue of Secrecy Task Force", whose job was to track down all traces of the Wizarding world and break them free of their protections, then return them to their proper places. Your primary contact at the Ministry (and the leader of the Statute of Secrecy Task Force) was an official named Constance Pickering, but you frequently discussed your progress and discoveries with Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and a host of wizards and witches original to the game.

And as you progressed, what seemed like a simple if vast attempt to undermine the Statute of Secrecy turned out to be not as simple as it initially appeared, and the suspected culprit just might have been the victim of a frame job. But if that's so, who was really behind the Calamity, and why did they do it?

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite was free to play; it used a Freemium business model and supports Microtransactions for the purchase of in-game items. Unfortunately, Niantic announced its shutdown in November 2021, removed the game from the app stores on December 6, 2021, and on January 31, 2022 the game was terminated with no resolution of the overall plot (and new features still appearing in the final weeks).


 * Addressing the Player: The player is the player character, and can put as much real information as they want onto their Ministry ID, along with their own photo.  Conditionally subverted as none of this is mandatory, and it's possible to use generic images instead of a photo -- and none of it is visible to others unless you choose to share it.  And almost entirely averted in game, as it rarely uses any of this information other than your "character name" to directly address you.
 * After Combat Recovery: Your Endurance is completely restored when you finish a Wizarding Challenge in a Fortress. Not a perfect example, though, as a Wizarding Challenge usually involves a minimum of two combats per fortress level you enter.
 * Alliteration: Portkeys are found in locked containers called "portmanteaus", of which there are multiple varieties.  These varieties all start with the letter "P", such as the Precious Portkey Portmanteau, the Peculiar Portkey Portmanteau, the Paramount Portkey Portmanteau...
 * Augmented Reality Game: Well, yeah.
 * Big Bad: Grim Fawley... or so it initially appears.
 * Character Class System: An odd one.  Once you level up a couple of times you can choose one of three Professions:  Auror (strong against Dark forces, weak against Beasts), Magizoologist (strong against Beasts, weak against Curiosities) or Professor (strong against Curiosities, weak against Dark forces).  Each Profession also has a "lesson tree" in which to spend scrolls, spellbooks and restricted section books to improve statistics like Hit Points and various percentages like the chance to make a critical  hit.  Curiously, you are free to swap between them at will with little or nothing in the way of penalties.
 * Character Customization: To a limited degree at game start, including among other things you may choose the specifications of your wand and your house at Hogwarts.  You could also choose a Profession and later skill trees were added that allowed you to specialize or generalize as much as you liked during play.
 * Character Level: You have a primary Wizarding level, but you also have separate ranks in the various Families of Foundables you're pursuing, and for certain special events -- all of which are independent of your Profession.
 * Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The color of your spell effect can reveal the results of your spellcasting early on -- the spiraling clouds that appear often start with black and red elements amidst their colors, and if the black and red persist beyond the first second or so, your spell has failed.
 * Cosmetic Award: The Wizarding Achievements section of your Ministry ID, along with all the mods that can be applied to your ID photo.
 * Cut and Paste Environments: Appear when you turn off the AR features of the game.  All Confoundable fights occur against the same grass-and-forest background, and all Wizarding Challenges take place in the same few settings.
 * Drop-In Drop-Out Multiplayer: Wizarding challenges work along these lines.
 * Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Sortakinda in play in the strengths and weaknesses of the Professions.
 * Enemy-Detecting Radar: You can only detect Confoundable Traces in your immediate vicinity, although that's surprisingly large.  However, the only things visible to you more than about 100 feet away are Wizarding buildings.  Curiously, your character emits a visible "ping" in the form of circles expanding from where he stands on the map, but it seems only to define how close you need to get to a building to use its function.  If you can see any other game object on your screen -- traces, portmanteaus, ingredients and so on -- you can interact with it, even if they are well beyond the "ping"'s maximum radius.
 * Everything's Better with Spinning: Every spell you cast -- even ones with well-known canonical manifestations, like the Patronus -- appear as spinning spirals of colored "clouds" centered on your target, at the end of a "cord" of energy emitted by your wand.
 * Experience Meter: Appears as a ring, around your photo/image on various screens, and around your current level when gaining experience after encounters.  Rankings for the various Families of Foundables have horizontal progress bars that are only visible in the Registry, and rings when gaining rank experience.
 * Exposition Break: The pop-up passages (called "storyboards") that appear when you achieve certain goals or at the start and end of special events, which advance the plot in the form of conversations with various individuals.
 * Failure Is the Only Option: The third tier "Distinct Spells Cast" Achievement rewards the use of twenty different spells.  Until late Spring 2021 only thirteen different spells were implemented in the game; in 2021 one more was added.
 * Featureless Protagonist: Your avatar on the map screen is literally faceless, with a blank flat expanse on the front of his head.
 * First-Person Ghost: The only part of your character you see outside of the map is the tip of your wand.
 * Fixed Camera: All actions outside of the map and the management screens are presented in a first-person point of view, with the camera (that of the device you're playing on) serving as your "eyes".  For reasons fundamental to the nature of an AR game, this cannot be changed.
 * Harmless Freezing: Several Foundables feature one or more persons embedded in a mass of ice, which you must destroy to free them.  Other than the occasional burst of frosty breath, after they are released they are unharmed.
 * Hero of Another Story: You, if you miss too many of the story developments that are only revealed by completing the tasks assigned during special events.  Miss enough and you'll have no idea what your contacts are talking about.
 * Fragmented Hidden Object Game: Sortakinda.  Most of the Foundables scattered around the world, while appearing to be complete objects or beings, are actually magically-created fragments.  You have to find all their parts -- anywhere from three to 120 -- before you have officially "recovered" them.
 * Hide Your Children: Averted, interestingly enough.  Some of the Foundables are Hogwarts students; others are time-shifted versions of the Harry Potter characters (from the period of the books) -- even as you speak with their adult selves on a regular basis.  Lampshaded at least once when the late-thirties Harry confides in you how disconcerting seeing his teenaged self is.
 * Hit Points: Called "Endurance".
 * Homing Boulders: Almost everything with an extended animation -- trace identification and difficulty, spell results, getting energy at an inn, even tallying up your winnings -- makes all the relevant decisions or changes before the animation starts, and just about every animation can be interrupted with a finger tap if, for instance, you are trying to make the most of that Baruffio's Brain Elixir before it runs out, or you don't want to see Moaning Myrtle's face in extreme close-up.
 * Idle Animation: The little monochrome wizard on the map screen has about three moves he makes when you're not walking about and changing his position, including what looks like an accidental discharge of magic from his wand.  Tapping him will make him wave at you.
 * Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Whenever you rank up in one of the Families of Foundables, a "treasure trunk" appears just long enough to dump its contents into your metaphorical hands.
 * Infinite Stock for Sale: Other than special limited time offers, nothing you can buy on Diagon Alley appears to ever go out of stock.  Then again, you are more likely to fill up your inventories long long before you would realistically have bought out a merchant anyway.
 * Isometric Projection: The map screen is displayed in an adjustable isometric view.  Using the usual mobile "zoom in-zoom out" gestures will actually change the angle at which the "camera" looks down on the map, from fairly low to almost vertical.  (A quick double-tap will return you to the "default" angle.)
 * It's Up to You: Averted.  You are just one member of a huge task force reacting to a magical emergency, and may even occasionally team up with other members.
 * Lampshade Hanging/Leaning on the Fourth Wall: At least one set of storyboards is Hermione Granger explicitly pointing out the seemingly random nature of the traces caused by the Calamity and speculating on the mechanism behind them.
 * Loading Screen: Before any encounter or visit to a location, you will have to wait through a black screen with a faint grey "Statute of Secrecy Task Force" logo on it.
 * Mana: Spell Energy.  One of the more unpleasant surprises for new players is that Spell Energy does not regenerate; it can only be regained by eating at Inns, completing certain special assignments, harvesting potions ingredients at a greenhouse, or as the occasional daily bonus.  (Or by buying it outright at Diagon Alley.)  During the COVID-19 lockdown, spell energy also became available in greenhouses, as a drop from portkeys, and as a randomly-appearing resource on the map, like potions ingredients.
 * Microtransactions: In addition to buying them with in-game currencies, you can spend real money to get various supplies for your character, or just buy oodles of gold outright.  The in-game store frequently offers a discounted bundle of some sort to tempt you into spending cash.
 * After the game shut down in early 2022, some commentators pointed to the game's "excessive" dependency on microtransactions as key to its failure, repelling a substantial number of potential players while at the same time failing to generate sufficient revenue from the player base.
 * Morton's Fork: The "You're Going Too Fast" nag screen.  This appears when your speed increases too much, drops too much, if you've moved too far while in any other screen than the map (or while using a different app on your phone), or any time the game can't figure out you're actually standing still.  It presents two buttons, both of which amount to agreeing that you're in a car: press one to admit you're playing while driving and the game offers to shut down so you're not distracted; press the other to admit you're in a car, but you're a passenger.  There is no "your damned GPS trace is screwed up and I'm not moving at all, you stupid game" option.
 * Motion Capture: All of the human and most of the humanoid characters in the game move smoothly and naturally enough that it seems likely motion capture was used -- sometimes to the detriment of the "realism" of the game, as in the case of a wizard Confoundable who, when hit with a "Flipendo" spell, very obviously flips himself in a fairly clumsy manner.
 * Mystery Box: Once a week the daily reward is a virtual mystery box -- appearing as a box in Hollywood Giftwrap with a question mark on it on the reward calendar -- in which is a random pick from the other rewards given.
 * Mythology Gag: Many of the wand movements you have to trace with your fingertip to cast your spells are the same movements used for the interactive "magic" stations in the Harry Potter areas of the Universal theme parks.
 * Neologism: The terms used in and specific to the game -- Foundables, Confoundables, and so on -- are all Neologisms In-Universe.  This is discussed at one point by your contacts, and you learn that some Wizards think they're stupid, and others are more than a little enamored of their own cleverness in coming up with them.
 * Nice Hat: Your avatar on the game map is wearing a jaunty pointy hat with a couple feathers in it.
 * Now Where Was I Going Again?: Averted.  There are no quest markers, travel destinations or other map goals.  You just walk, and wherever you go, that's where the action is.  Even easier is drinking a Trace Tonic and/or deploying Dark Detectors at an Inn and simply waiting for the action to come to you.
 * Pay to Win: An accusation made of the game from shortly after its release. The game's design -- particularly the non-regenerating spell energy -- seemed to be deliberately engineered to funnel even the most casual player into making frequent purchases from the game store simply to have a basic enjoyable game experience for more than a few minutes at a time.
 * Pillar of Light: May appear over various traces on the map.  Yellow and red pillars indicate increasingly difficult Confoundables to fight; purple indicates traces specific to a special event.  Orange pillars appear only over Oddity traces, and indicate a Death Eater.
 * Play Every Day: The Ministry of Magic assigns seven tasks every day, which when accomplished yield extra XP, spell energy, and other benefits in addition to the regular rewards from the tasks you have to perform; if you complete all seven you get extra gold.
 * Additionally, there is a variable daily reward that you receive simply for opening the game that day. If you skip a day, you skip that day's reward.
 * Play the Game, Skip the Story: Cleverly averted.  Story and plot elements manifest organically as you accomplish various tasks or special events begin and end, presented as dialogues between you and various personages at the Ministry of Magic.  However, entirely too many of these dialogues are only revealed when you have collected all the fragments of various special event foundables, and if you cannot complete all the tasks a special event assigns you will never see these developments -- even though the overall plot will continue and you may see cryptic references to these developments later.
 * Point of Interest: The game has three varieties:
 * Inns, where players can dine and regain Spell Energy, as well as deploy Dark Detectors to attract high-risk Traces.
 * Greenhouses, where they can find random potions ingredients or grow their own. (And get a little Spell Energy, too.)
 * Fortresses, where they can face difficult challenges for high rewards.
 * In a borderline case, some areas may appear with a flag to indicate that Traces of a particular Family commonly appear there.
 * Product Placement: Some inns and fortresses are sponsored, meaning that the establishment in their real-world location has paid to become a Point of Interest.  Known sponsors include select AT&T stores, and Simon Malls, Mills, and Premium Outlets malls.  Sponsored inns grant more Spell Energy on the average, and sponsored fortresses offer more and tougher opponents and higher rewards for defeating them.  (Allegedly; at least one analysis indicates the benefits/rewards of sponsored fortresses are not nearly as great as promised.)  Sponsored locations have a QR code and a sponsor banner instead of the Google Maps photo of the location; special offers for game players appear in a floating storyboard panel.
 * Repeatable Quest: Even when you have recovered a Foundable, you won't stop re-encountering it.
 * When you complete a Frame for a Family in the Registry, you are given the option to "Prestige" it, which empties it of the Foundables in it, and starts you over on them from scratch with both higher difficulty and higher rewards.
 * Run, Don't Walk: Averted.  The game wants you to walk and complains if you move too fast (when you do so it renders your wizard icon as flying on a broom, and your travel distance doesn't register for things that tally it).  The "You're Going Too Fast" popup which then appears accuses you of being in a car, and you have to reassure it that you're a passenger and not the driver.  Oh, and if your GPS read is glitchy, your wizard can randomly sprint or teleport anywhere for hundreds of yards in any direction, resulting in more complaints from the game because it can't tell the difference between real movement and GPS issues.
 * Saving the World: Not in a literal sense; the goal is to protect the magical world from being revealed to the Muggles, and in the process track down and identify the cause -- and creator -- of the Calamity.
 * Score Milking: A Good Bad Bug in the coding for the Potter's Calamity Brilliant event in July 2019 allowed you to earn a minimum of 500 points of Wizarding experience for each Brilliant Foundable you recovered; given that the lower levels of Wizarding experience took only a few thousands of experience points, and that you can double your experience gain with a Baruffio's Brain Elixir potion, the first few days of the event made it possible to rack up levels very quickly.  (The XP was eventually scaled down to around a base 75 points per Foundable.)
 * Set Bonus: Some Foundables are mystically broken into "pieces" that have to all be collected before you have actually recovered the Foundable.  Doing so grants an additional reward.
 * Space-Filling Path: Averted.  The game map is your immediate environment in the real world -- the only obstacles in your way are the ones that exist for real.  There are no arbitrary blockages or Insurmountable Waist-Height Fences to force you to go where the game wants you to.
 * Stuffed Into the Fridge: As soon as just a couple weeks after the game's release, some players were accusing Niantic of having done this to Penelope Fawley in the Backstory.
 * Symbol-Drawing Interface: Spells are cast by drawing the "wand movement" on the screen with your fingertip.  How closely you match the glyph presented to follow, and how fast you do so, controls how effective your spell is.  Fortunately the game pre-selects the correct spell to use for each encounter or combat exchange.
 * Visual Pun: Some of the "wand movement" glyphs.  For example, "Finite" is simply "X-ing out" the opposing spell.  "Riddikulus" looks not unlike trying to draw a smiley face without lifting your pencil.  "Ebublio" gets a lowercase "e".  "Herbivicus" (cast in greenhouses) looks like a lowercase "h", while "Arresto Momentum" is a capital "M".
 * World Map: Mostly averted.  The main display of the game shows you in the center of an isometric map based on your real-world location.  Roads, parks, sports fields, and water features are visible, as are selected points of interest.  Using the usual mobile "zoom in-zoom out" gestures will actually change the angle at which the "camera" looks down on the map, from fairly low to almost vertical, but the area shown, while variable, is always local.