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Harry Potter: Wizards Unite: Difference between revisions
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''[[Harry Potter: Wizards Unite]]'' was an [[Augmented Reality Game]] for [[iOS]] and [[Android Games|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 had 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?
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* [[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.
* [[Hidden Object Game|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.▼
* [[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.
▲* [[Hidden Object Game|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".
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* [[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 pandemic|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 [[Too Dumb to Live|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.
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* [[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.
* [[Organ Drops]]: Among other potions ingredients the player could find scattered about the game world, there were frog brains, dragon livers, and newt spleens, as well as bodily fluids like armadillo bile and re'em blood.
* [[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.
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** 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20190927223559/https://jibsentertainment.com/2019/07/26/how-sponsored-fortresses-compare-to-regular-fortresses-in-wizards-unite/ 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.
* [[Scattered Across Time and Space]]: Recovering people, creatures and objects from the past and present of the Wizarding World that have been fragmented and scattered through the Muggle world was the primary goal and gameplay loop.
* [[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.
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{{Harry Potter Franchise}}
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[[Category:IOS Games]][[Category:Video Games of the 2010s]]
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[[Category:Defunct Augmented Reality Games]]
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