Wizards Unite

Regularly Playing: July 2019 Edition

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For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog.  This is the second month where I am trying to do this at the beginning of the month rather than remembering to do it towards the end of a month. June was a pretty stable month as far as game playing, and effectively there is really nothing much changing in the mix. However I am still going to go through the actions of this post to keep myself in the habit.

To Those Remaining

Bloodstained – PC and Switch

I am completely in love with this game. I’ve written so much about it recently, but effectively this is as thought you had sat down immediately after creating Symphony of the Night and just kept going on and adding in all of the features you ever wanted in the game. The experience is flawless, and while I am hearing there are issues with the Switch port, I am too busy making my way through the PC experience to care. They have all the time in the world to fix that. I have gotten the “bad” ending, and now am trying to work on better endings.

Destiny 2 – PC

I went on a brief binge of playing this game and then once again got distracted by something else. I want to return to playing on a more regular basis, but I am going to have to burn down some of the other games I am working on to free up the mental bandwidth. Bungie is doing a great job of stewarding the game into this new era and I am looking forward to some of the changes that are coming with the new expansion. The game is in a great place, so well worth checking out.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch

This is still very much in the rotation because I have more objectives to accomplish during this season. I’ve completed one conquest which can be seen in the above screenshot, involving collecting a 50 million gold streak. The next up is going to be doing a bunch of GR55s as multiple classes. I still have yet to master any set dungeons so I should probably knock that out soon as well. Essentially I got distracted but I still very much want the penultimate reward this season.

Dragalia Lost – Android

This game is effectively my night cap. I crawl into bed and spend 10-15 minutes playing this on my tablet before eventually closing the lid and going to sleep. Dragalia Lost lives in this weird place where it is just engaging enough to keep me playing on a regular basis… and not engaging enough to keep me playing it constantly to the point of burning out. In part the later part is in thanks to its mobile mechanics which favor short bursts of play rather than extended play cycles. Whatever the case going on two years I am still doing this thing.

Elder Scrolls Online – PC

I am playing nowhere near as much as this game deserves but I am still periodically logging in to move the needle forward. Right now I am deeply distracted by all of the other games that are on the market and calling my attention. I will return to you at some point when a lull happens to continue adventures in Morrowind proper.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I am completely back on my bullshit folks… and loving it. Just prior to the launch of Shadowbringers I found a way to get re-engaged and as a result I think the expansion thus far has been all the more meaningful. I am not sure what else I can really say about this that I have not already said in a bunch of recent blog posts. Final Fantasy XIV is a lovingly curated game experience, and I am enjoying the hell out of the ride.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

This month I have not spent an awful lot of time playing, but it is still on the list of things that I dive into when I want something more quiet and contemplative. I am not entirely certain this one is ever really going to leave the proper rotation, at least not for the time being. The pace of magic sets being released really reinforces the need to keep popping ones head back into the game every so often. Yesterday Core 20 was released, so I need to pop in and check it out.

To the New and Returning

For the very first time in the history of this column of sorts… I don’t have any new games being added to the mix. I reached a point of stasis this month and for the time being it is a pretty great mix of titles to be engaged in.

To Those Departing

Once again… nothing to see here. I didn’t out and out stop playing anything this month but continued largely playing the same things.

Honorable Mentions

Wizards Unite – Android

This one is sliding in as an honorable mention and not something new… because quite frankly I don’t think I will be spending any more time with the game. Wizards Unite released for mobile platforms and represents an attempt to capture the same magic as Pokemon Go… but with the Harry Potter IP. I feel like they have failed to do that, and as a result have created a fairly cumbersome and often times unfun experience. It is worth mentioning, but only just.

E3 As a Whole

A lot of my bandwidth was taken up by watching the E3 coverage unfurl, and as a result I am giving it an honorable mention as well. It was not a great show, but there were several gems. The new Commander Keen game is not really ones of them, but I am just in part happy see ANYTHING to do with that IP. It was probably a toss up between Microsoft and Square for who had the best showing, and then everything else falls down significantly after that.

Wizards Unite Impressions

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Hi, I am Belghast and I am susceptible to hype… and like pretty much all of geekdom I have been playing around with Wizards Unite over the last few days since it’s release. First off… the servers were absolutely on fire when it clandestinely launched the night before its official release announcement. However by the end of the day on the 20th things seemed to be moving along normally. Niantic seems to have learned its lessons from the Pokemon Go launch and the fact that the game works at all… they seem to have planned adequately for the initial crush of users.

The play experience is not unsurprising for anyone who has played either Pokemon Go or the prior Ingress. If you live in a city core you will have lots of things to do. If you live in the suburbs or god forbid rural areas… the game will be a solitary wasteland. In the above image the middle pane is what the Wizarding World looks like from my office in the heart of downtown. The last pane is what the world looks like from my front door… because apparently I live on Privet Drive where we excel at quiet and mediocrity.

The gameplay largely revolves around recovering “confoundables” or spells gone awry by some force that we have not quite figured out. The timeframe of the game appears to be set in that of the Cursed Child with Harry and Hermione taking key positions in the Ministry of Magic and our character occasionally has need of interacting with them as we are on the SOS task force. Basically we are Wizard Cops trying to protect muggles from seeing things that they should not be seeing, and also rescuing various members of the Wizarding World that have been attacked by these rogue spells.

Howe we do this is by casting spells with our wand by tracing a shape on the touchpad screen. I’ve not nabbed a screenshot of this interaction but basically something along the lines of a Z or and E shape will appear on the screen and you are graded for how closely you can trace the shape. This grading appears to denote how successfully the spell was cast and how easy it is for the confoundable to resist said spell. Each time you need to cast a spell you consume something called Spell Energy… which in this game would be the equivalent of your stock of Pokeballs.

You regain by visiting the Poke Stop equivalent in this world. So far I have encountered Inns and Greenhouses, but there might be other times scattered around the world. You play a soft of mini-game but effectively it is just a roll of the dice because you seem to be assigned a random amount of energy that you are gaining. The problem is… each spell cast costs 1 energy, and in most case you get 2 or 3 at most energy back from an Inn with a 5 minute recharge timer. As a result expect to be spending a lot of time hanging out and waiting down that timer to recharge yourself, which again becomes more difficult for those in rural areas.

You can of course pay the in game currency of gold to recharge your energy meter. If I remember correctly it was 100 gold for 50 energy. Like every single mobile game they purposefully make the gold system obtuse… given that the prices and the amounts you purchase never line up. Effectively recharging your energy is a little over a dollar. Inventory limits are the key challenge to most things in this game, and similar to Pokemon Go they cost around 150 gold to increase them by increments of 10.

One of the more annoying challenges that I have encountered so far is the ingredients racket. These are used to craft potions and can only be used in a specific combination. However as you wander around the world you seemingly pick them up randomly so you will almost always have stacks of one type and next to none of another type. This is only an issue because ingredients are now what the Item inventory in Pokemon Go was, and you are limited to only 200 at a given time without purchasing vault extensions. I’ve found myself in the situation of having too much of one type of ingredient and being unable to pick up the ones I actually need when I encounter them.

The other problem for me personally is the Portkey game, which represent what was hatching an egg in Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is fully integrated with Google Fit and keeps track of the distance that I walk without the app having to be open. With Wizards Unite I am back to the era of needing to keep the app open at all times and drain my battery while playing. It feels like a massive step back and as such I have yet to “hatch” a single loot box to be able to tell you what exactly is located within. I am so used to not having to care about the app being open and having my watch catch my steps and direct them towards egg hatching that I will have to shift up my methodology to make this work. I hope the integrations come quickly.

As far as general game impressions… so far it just isn’t near as infectious as Pokemon Go was. With that game there was a certain amount of exploration and a sense of excitement each time I encountered a brand new type of Pokemon. Sure that excitement is diluted as you catch your 3000th pidgey just to grind experience, but even now I occasionally come across something I have never seen that quickens my pulse a bit. Wizard Cop… seems to largely just have too many dials, is too fiddly… and has a been there done that feeling. You notice in the post how I kept equating things back to Pokemon Go terms…. because most everything you encounter is effectively a reworked version of a mechanic we have already seen.

The deal breaker however so far is the Energy problem. This game is only fun if you can cast spells and collect doodads in the wild. When you have no energy you have no great way of collecting it other than hanging out at a location for a very long time and spinning the same plates over and over. The act of interacting with an Inn takes way longer than that of a pokestop, making it somewhat cumbersome to hit a bunch of them in a row. The feeling of interacting with most of the things with the game just feel less optimized than that of Pokemon Go, and as a result way more time consuming.

I could in the past stop in at the local QuikTrip and within a few minutes have captured all of the Pokemon on the parking lot. The equivalent took me a good fifteen minutes the other morning and I still had not gathered everything up. So far… it is interesting but I doubt it will ever reach the national obsession level that Pokemon Go did. The worst part is the fact that this is an AR game… and playing with AR enabled makes the entire experience actively worse as you have to do a fiddly motion controlled line up the stars mini-game in order to interact with anything. With AR off everything is just a straight forward capture, then again I also play with AR off in Pokemon Go so that might not be entirely damning.

I am not entirely sold on the experience, but would love to hear your thoughts? Are you finding it more or at least as enjoyable as Pokemon Go? Are you also finding yourself frustrated by the little mechanics? Leave me a comment below.