Potterheads, Niantic has a surprise for you in 2018

Niantic, the minds behind Ingress and the smash hit Pokémon GO, have partnered with Warner Bros and WB Games. They bring to you a new location-based Harry Potter-themed AR game to mobile phones. Called Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. The game will let you battle fantastic beasts in the same sort of world-scale arena as Pokémon GO.

Harry Potter AR

According to a blog post announcing the game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite lets players learn spells, explore real-world places. They fight legendary beasts, and team up with others to take down the game’s powerful enemies.

Although details are still thin on the ground at this point. Even though the game turns out to be a 1:1 reskinning of Pokémon GO.

Pokémon GO’s battle sequences aren’t really what you can call ‘true’ augmented reality. As it only overlays images via pass-through camera with no positional tracking. You can’t, for example, run around a Pokémon while in the middle of the fight or run closer to it to get a better shot. Niantic says however they’ll be leveraging its entire Niantic Platform. While also “pioneer[ing]all new technology and gameplay mechanics,” and with the release of ARKit from Apple and ARCore from Google, this may mean we actually get a ‘real’ AR game.

Not much else is known about the game, although Niantic says aspiring wizards should expected it sometime in 2018.