When I first saw mention of A Wizard’s World on Reddit this morning, I immediately confused it with another wizardy Kickstarter MMO, Wizard’s Wrath. Figuring other people might do the same – if they’d heard of them at all – I thought we’d take a minute to disambiguate these games in our MMOs You’ve Never Heard Of column.
Wizard’s Wrath, as we covered back in November, was meant to be a virtual reality spell-slinging MMO from Welsh studio DragonfiAR. It ran a Kickstarter at the tail end of last year but canceled it with only 16 backers and $1433 raised; a memo from the team last December said that the project would continue. The website is still up, but there hasn’t been any visible movement on the game’s social media or dev blog since then.
A Wizard’s World, on the other hand, is characterized as a free-to-play MMORPG AR mobile game from Swiss outfit NOEZ TeCH. It’s not technically using the Harry Potter IP, but it couldn’t be mirroring it harder (and does namedrop the franchise in its pitch). Its Kickstarter apparently brought in around $11K US – a low number, but high given it had only 95 backers. A standalone preview game, AR Duel Master, is already available for download; the game itself is apparently coming in spring 2025.
Worth noting is that A Wizard’s World claims to be the “first MMORPG AR mobile game,” just as Landing Party did back in October, but as MMO players know, we have quite a few such games already, including MMOARG Orna, which has already been around for six years (and that’s if you ignore the likes of Pokemon Go and Ingress). In fact, it isn’t even the world’s first Harry Potter mobile MMOARG, as Niantic’s Harry Potter Wizards Unite has long since come and gone. That certainly doesn’t mean we won’t take more such games, but it’d instill more confidence in backers if the studio knew the market it was entering better than we did.
