WB Games are in a state of rebuilding, so the mistakes being made on Wizards Unite are happening at the wrong time and are building up in a bad way.
As exciting as it will be to see dragons in the wild again, this week has unquestionably presented the biggest turning point for the Wizards Unite community so far. It genuinely feels like attitudes toward the game are reaching an all-time low.
With the quiet ‘fix’ for trace charms this week, never more has it been apparent that there is a huge disconnect between what people want from the game and what is being presented to them. The failure to reach any sort of mutual ground since launch has been a continuous source of frustration.
Who can ever forget that ‘glorious’ window of time between the well-received Knight Bus and the not so well received Repeat Image Collection? That was an interesting month, which feels like two years ago now, in this, the longest year in world history. Now it’s Trace Charms hogging the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
And yet, this week’s blog post may show the strongest hint yet that WB are finally striking an appropriate balance and understand the need for transparency. People, while angry they’ve lost a feature they loved, at least appreciate the honesty and openness in the communication.
Still, every day spent on the forums, reading Discord posts, Reddit threads, and Twitter replies, seems to bring up more negativity than not. The game is well into its second year now, and it feels like we’re no closer to the promise and potential offered at the game’s launch.
Wizards Unite is desperately in need of new content. What we’ve had instead are cool features that would have been better served coming earlier in the game’s life cycle. To be blunt, they just offer new ways to keep catching and doing the same things. Many people have actually hit max rank and are gold on most, if not all pages and they didn’t even need the ‘benefits’ of the Trace Charm to do it either.
The content of Wizarding Chambers have basically been untouched since launch, save for some balancing tweaks, UI changes, and the ability to skip the timer. And the story, as well as SOS Challenges are just … well, they’re there.
People are getting restless and it’s not helped by a spate of events that keep telling us ‘It’s different this time’ but aren’t actually different in the slightest and really aren’t very interesting at all.
WB Games have got themselves into this tedious rhythm of producing multiple Brilliant Events a month. As we talked about on a previous Departure Denied podcast, you’re spending over half a month, every month, seeing your screen covered in purple spawns.
Incidentally, you may have noticed our own Departure Denied Podcasts have dropped off and it’s largely because our community is really struggling with the game in its present form. Frankly, nobody has a lot to say. Our chats have dried up, people are dropping off the game, and we’re in this state of flux waiting for new content which we’re promised is ‘coming soon’.
At the moment, the game is at its most interesting when there are no events due to the varied spawns in the wild. I remember the early days of playing and the excitement we all had seeing a rare spawn appear from a Dark Detector. While DD sessions are a lot more difficult for us these days, I get the slightest reminder of what those were like when I see a random Draco appear or happen to stumble across the last Graves needed to Prestige.
And it’s odd because I get the impression the WU team is constantly stretched for time. I don’t know their full team size, of course, but it does seem quite small based on the communication we’ve had. The irony being, many members of the community would probably be happier with slightly fewer events so as to allow them to catch the cool spawns in the wild, potentially freeing up development time to work on new features and content which would mutually benefit all players.
It’s weird because I get the feeling that the only ones really pressuring WB to keep making these events is WB themselves. Trust me, we don’t need four events a month to keep the game interesting. And we definitely don’t need Brilliant Events beginning and ending on the same days, either. I’m actually finding it more of a chore these days than enjoyable.
The other problem, of course, is that when there are events they always seem to start with a problematic game-breaking bug. To the point where it’s now become something of a running joke.
The game seems stuck in this horrendous loop of launching one event, then the game breaks, the community gets angry, WB Games extends the event, then gives everyone a make-up gift to say sorry. Rinse, repeat. It’s actually quite astonishing how often this keeps happening and it certainly isn’t doing anybody’s reputation any good.
It’s clear some serious work needs to be done in the back-end and, as I’ve mentioned, we really are in need of new content. Even if they dropped some new enemies in the chambers, or gave us a page based on some of the Brilliant Spawns that aren’t in the game yet, it would satiate our appetites just a little bit. Dragons is a great start and is probably the most excited I’ve been for the game in months – the Charm addition was a tad underwhelming – but it’s time to really use those master notes and take more steps forward.
With the Harry Potter brand getting more tarnished by the day, Catan looming on the horizon, Pokemon making the most money ever, and CD Projekt RED announcing an excellent looking AR Monster Slayer game based on The Witcher universe, one has to wonder if WB Games have, unfortunately, left this one brewing for too long.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the site as a whole