There’s A New Harry Potter Game That Looks A Whole Lot Like Pokemon Go
Remember a couple of years back when the whole world absolutely lost their minds over augmented reality pocket monsters? Developer Niantic is now hoping to replicate the Pokemon GO phenomenon with a Harry Potter mobile game, and we finally have the first details.
Called Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic and WB Games San Francisco have been teasing the augmented reality game for months, sprinkling the game’s Twitter with graphics and live-action videos. One of the videos even featured three riderless broomsticks zooming down a deserted Sydney highway.
The teases were pretty cool, but only offered hints at a plot and told us nothing about how gameplay would work.
Fortunately, a few of those gaps have now been filled by a post on the game’s official blog.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite casts you as a new recruit to the Statute of Secrecy Task Force, a global organisation established for the purpose of dealing with “The Calamity”. This is a mysterious event that has caused all manner of things from the wizarding world to make their way into the Muggle world, including but not limited to “artefacts, creatures, people, and even memories”.
Your job is to round up these aberrations, called “Foundables”, thus keeping the existence of magic hidden from Muggle eyes.
Using the same augmented reality style of gameplay as Pokemon GO, Foundables in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will appear in real-world locations around you, particularly around landmarks. You will then have to cast spells, secure the Foundable, and return it to whence it came, recording it in your Registry.
Just as Pokeballs are required to catch Pokemon in Pokemon GO, Spell Energy is required to cast spells in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Spell Energy is replenished by visiting Inns, which are tied to real-world locations akin to Pokemon GO‘s Pokestops. Also like Pokemon GO, players are split into teams, or “Professions” in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite: Aurors, Magizoologists and Professors.
But unlike Pokemon GO, different Professions have different abilities, encouraging players to team up for the real-time multiplayer battles at Fortresses around the map. VG24/7 also notes that players can switch between Professions at any time. And sadly, it looks as though battles will only be against computer-controlled characters, so you can’t Expelliarmus your friends. At least for now.
You can also collect ingredients to make potions, and as well as discover Portkeys to “iconic wizarding world locations”. All in all, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite sounds a lot like Pokemon GO: Wizard Edition, but just a bit richer and refined. Whether that’s enough to launch the next AR craze remains to be seen.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite everyone pic.twitter.com/6Lx7KqARw6
— Aleksa (@yenofrivia) March 11, 2019
I have a lot of questions, particularly concerning how Foundables “appear in the Muggle world”. As we’ve seen in nearly every Harry Potter movie ever, the Muggle world and wizarding world are intertwined, therefore I wouldn’t say a Niffler going ham in a jewellery shop “appeared” in the Muggle world. It’s more like it simply demonstrated a careless disregard for secrecy.
I guess we’ll find out more when the game comes out. No release date has been announced, but Androids users can pre-register now for a chance to be given early access to the game. Those with iPhones are advised to “stay tuned for more updates”.