I realized that I feel about the departure of Wizards Unite like I did when a dear friend’s girlfriend broke up with him. He was devastated and, while I empathized with his devastation, I was kind of expecting their relationship not to work out.
One of the reasons that I saw the end of Wizards Unite coming is that they clearly weren’t making a lot of money from players — the daily goal list had an optional “get a reward for watching a commercial.” And that, by itself, wasn’t what made me think that Wizards Unite wasn’t long for the world. It was the fact that the button didn’t work.
I mean, it would work eventually. Occasionally. I’d click on it and nothing would happen. I’d click again. Still nothing. I’d tap it repeatedly. Nothing. Sometimes closing the game and opening it again would work, but even that was no guarantee. I mean, I’m trying to get your sponsor to pay you and I can’t? Why?
There have been a lot of things that WB Games dropped the ball on. Wizards Unite has an event that rotates through where the player is interacting with things from the Fantastic Beasts movies and it requires the player to open portkeys by walking. Only one cannot open portkeys without the game open. Notice that in other games that use the same engine as Pokemon Go the game counts steps even with the game closed. Wizards Unite, not so much.
And the folks at WB Games kept dinking around with things. They had a nice set of tasks for their “brilliant events,” and they started messing with them. My personal favorite was when you had to interact with other players. Only, there are no other players, as far as I can tell. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole. I mean, there’s a fairly active community on Reddit, for example. However, both of the communities that I participated in before discovering the Reddit community have died. I finally had to strongarm Evelyn into starting to play so that I could get her to be my friend for those events.
I had a lot of fun playing Wizards Unite. It’s just that if I were to list the things I enjoyed about the game, a lot of it would sound like the same things I find fun about Pokemon Go, and whoever is running the servers for Pokemon Go (Niantic, I think) cares more about keeping stuff running and relevant than the people at WB Games did.
I’m giving Pikmin Bloom a shot. That’s the game that the people on the subReddit seem to be migrating to. So far I’m not sure I get it, but at least it counts your steps when you’re not playing the game.