Once I first noticed point out of A Wizard’s World on Reddit this morning, I instantly confused it with one other wizardy Kickstarter MMO, Wizard’s Wrath. Figuring different folks would possibly do the identical – in the event that they’d heard of them in any respect – I believed we’d take a minute to disambiguate these video games in our MMOs You’ve By no means Heard Of column.
Wizard’s Wrath, as we lined again in November, was meant to be a digital actuality spell-slinging MMO from Welsh studio DragonfiAR. It ran a Kickstarter on the tail finish of final yr however canceled it with solely 16 backers and $1433 raised; a memo from the group final December stated that the undertaking would proceed. The web site remains to be up, however there hasn’t been any seen motion on the sport’s social media or dev weblog since then.
A Wizard’s World, however, is characterised as a free-to-play MMORPG AR cellular recreation from Swiss outfit NOEZ TeCH. It’s not technically utilizing the Harry Potter IP, nevertheless it couldn’t be mirroring it more durable (and does namedrop the franchise in its pitch). Its Kickstarter apparently introduced in round $11K US – a low quantity, however excessive given it had solely 95 backers. A standalone preview recreation, AR Duel Grasp, is already out there for obtain; the sport itself is outwardly coming in spring 2025.
Price noting is that A Wizard’s World claims to be the “first MMORPG AR cellular recreation,” simply as Touchdown Celebration did again in October, however as MMO gamers know, we’ve got fairly a couple of such video games already, together with MMOARG Orna, which has already been round for six years (and that’s when you ignore the likes of Pokemon Go and Ingress). Actually, it isn’t even the world’s first Harry Potter cellular MMOARG, as Niantic’s Harry Potter Wizards Unite has lengthy since come and gone. That definitely doesn’t imply we gained’t take extra such video games, nevertheless it’d instill extra confidence in backers if the studio knew the promote it was getting into higher than we did.