Author: Clifford Colby / Source: CNET
First announced in 2017, the Harry Potter: Wizards Unite augmented reality game will be familiar to anyone who’s played the wildly successful Pokemon Go. Relying on your phone’s GPS, you move around the physical world and interact with beasts, objects, points of interest and other witches and wizards you come across on your game’s map.
The game is a joint effort from WB Games San Francisco and Niantic under the Portkey Games label. It’ll be released before the end of the year, the game developers said last week at a briefing at Niantic’s San Francisco headquarters.The game is far enough along in development that Niantic invited a handful of journalists to its offices last Tuesday to get an update and then play a prerelease version. Prowling the waterfront of San Francisco on a rainy morning, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this Potter-meets-Pokemon-Go experience.
What is Harry Potter: Wizards Unite?
I’m walking to my bus after a day at the office keeping my wits about me. Instead of dodging traffic or the guy trying to get me to sign a petition, I’m watching for magical beasts from the world of Harry Potter. Dueling dark wizards and overpowering magical beasts is a tough job, but it’s all in day’s work when you’re keeping the Muggle world safe from unexpected calamity. And it’s all happening on my phone.
An unexplained calamity is scattering magical items across the Muggle world.
It’s unclear who’s responsible and how long the magical artifacts will stay hidden from Muggles.
As part of the Statute of Secrecy Task Force, your duty is to look for magical traces of the calamity and piece together clues to uncover the cause. When you come across evidence, you enter it in a registry of your discoveries about the anomalies.
The game builds on the Harry Potter books and movies and the two Fantastic Beasts films to create a compelling and familiar wizarding world on your phone.
As a fan of the Potter franchise, I couldn’t wait to step into the magical universe to cast spells, encounter beasts and confront dark wizards.
What are the game basics?
Wizard’s Unite uses much of the same underlying technology as Niantic’s other games — Ingress and Pokemon Go — to create the map, points of interest and AR environment. If you’ve used the map on those other games to navigate to a portal or a gym and if you’ve traced a glyph or tossed a Poke Ball, you’ve got a head start here. But as familiar as the game feels, it’s distinct enough that I didn’t feel like I was playing a reskinned Pokemon Go. Instead, I was in a new and strange world.
Part of the fresh experience comes from several tricks not found in Ingress or Pokemon Go that improve shared multiplayer AR environments. (You can catch a glimpse of that in this Niantic video.) And unlike in Pokemon Go, you’re armed with spells in Wizards Unite. To cast one, trace a spell hint with your finger on your phone’s screen. The onscreen motions are not unlike the glyphs you trace in Ingress.
How do I get started?
To get going, create your wizarding avatar. Use your phone’s camera to snap a photo of yourself. You can then outfit it with witch and wizard garb.
While cooperative play makes up a big part of the game, your avatar isn’t automatically shared with others and is saved just to your device. (The game also will come with parental controls to help adults manage children’s accounts.)
You also pick your Hogwarts house and choose your wand. But don’t agonize over your choices: You can switch houses and wands at any time. If you’d rather be sorted into a house than choose one, head over to the Harry Potter official website and have the Sorting Hat place you.
You also choose a profession — an Auror, Magizoologist or Professor — which each offer job-specific skills and abilities you upgrade to as you go. As with houses and wands, you’re not locked into your profession.
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