Serious Energy

Jun 23, 2019

Games News and opinion about video games, technology and the internet Share to facebook Niantic The past few days I’ve been playing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic’s follow-up to Pokémon GO, using another huge IP as the base for a location/AR-based game. Wizards Unite isn’t quite catching fire on the same level as GO, which is to be expected, but even though it’s technically bringing a lot more to the table at launch , it also has one pretty severe issue that has the potential to strangle the game before it even gets off the ground. Energy. Energy is the most important currency in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. You start with 75, and every spell you catch to recover “foundables” in the world costs one energy. You can refill your energy at inns, which can give you anywhere from two to ten at a time (it’s usually two), but something feels off about the entire system. First of all, energy does not recharge on its own over time. It’s weird to go to bed with four energy and wake up the next day…still having four energy. Yes, it’s true that energy is essentially the equivalent of Pokeballs in this game, and those were not magically generated for players through time alone, and yet in every other game I’ve ever played with an energy meter, it’s something that does fill up by itself if you wait long enough, so for that not to happen here feels very weird indeed. But that’s not the only problem. 75 energy is a very low cap, a much lower cap than Pokeballs ever had, and though you can increase it over time, I have no idea if we’ll ever get to the point where players can have hundreds of energy at their disposal like it was easy to eventually get hundreds of Pokeballs if you were playing enough. Wizards Unite Niantic The game also demands you try and catch every foundable you come across, because even if something is a low level duplicate, you will still get +1 credit toward the location that item or person or creature is from. So that means you might spend 4-5 energy on some random foundable you already have, because you feel like you need to make some small amount of progress. But in Pokémon GO, it was a lot easier to skip all the common Pokémon you didn’t need because there was no real benefit to catching them other than a tiny bit of XP and dust. Finally, perhaps the worst offense of the energy system is that you also need to use it for battling. Fighting enemies at fortresses requires spell energy just like freeing foundables in the wild. Each enemy encounter is probably you casting 5-10 spells, and all of that takes up energy. The Pokémon GO equivalent here is if gym battles or raids required you to spend Pokeballs for each charged attack your Pokémon made. All of these factors combine to make this energy system completely exhausting. You are not given enough energy to start with, you are not given enough ways to recharge it and you are required to use too much of it too often in literally every activity you can do in the game, even battling. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen the “buy 50 energy for $1?” prompt come up the past few days, and this is not even getting to a separate issue where I filled up my ingredient/seed/potion inventories in literally 36 hours, and the game is constantly demanding I expand my inventory by 10% per upgrade in order to keep collecting stuff. Yes, GO had some of these problems, rural players lacking Pokeballs, inventory space issues, but in Harry Potter they are dramatically magnified to the point where it often feels like the game is almost unplayable a good amount of the time. Unless you park yourself under an Inn and get yourself 2-10 energy every five minutes, there is pretty much no way to keep playing unless you pay. Something has to change or this game is going to die off quickly. I hope Niantic gets the message. Follow me  on Twitter ,  Facebook  and  Instagram . Read my new sci-fi thriller novel  Herokiller , available now in print and online. I also wrote  The Earthborn Trilogy .