General Discussion

MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh spent some time recently in the world of Wizard 101 and writes this review for our reading pleasure.

Wizard 101 is a children’s MMO created by Kingsisle Entertainment but one of the most engaging MMOs I have yet to come across. Playing a young wizard, you are going to school and having adventures in Wizard City and its surrounds. Harry Potter anyone? If you’ve ever wished to be a young wizard wielding a wand, going to school for Conjuration or Transformation, learning from the different schools and engaging in spell duels, you might find this game intriguing.

Ravenwood School

You, young wizard, are discovered by the Headmaster of Ravenwood Academy, Merle Ambrose and drawn into the world of Wizard City. Character customization is simple with a voice-over of Merle Ambrose walking the new player through it. There are limited choices between faces and hairstyles, colors and the starting outfit; the hat, robe, shoes and the color of the trim. Then you are asked a series of questions Ultima style and sorted into the right school of Magic for your personality. There are seven schools of magic to choose from, and these are Fire, Ice, Storm, Life, Myth, Balance, and Death. You can also by-pass the question and answer session by simply choosing your school.

Read the Wizard 101 Review.

Nice and accurate review. I tried this out in beta as a slight diversion, and found myself playing more than I thought I would as well. In fact, I almost decided that I would subscribe when it came out and started finding and submitting all the bugs I could find to make it a subscribe-worthy game. In the end, I decided it wasn't quite the game for me, but as a kid-friendly game, it's surprisingly good.

It really is an amazing game. Though it may be geared towards children, I found it immersive and addictive. I love the combat system.

There are many lessions to be learned from this by "AAA" title MMO makers. I am looking at you SOE, mythic, funcom, and blizzard.

I have to offer my two cents,just because i tried the game as i try just about every game that comes out.

The review was pretty much 99% accurate so i guess i can't add too much more.

The game and it's design was done quite well especially for the age group it was dedicated to.I would say it maybe the best game out here for a parent to join there kids in a game.It is not difficult to learn but offers a little diversity in how you build your decks.

Personally i think that as good as the game is ,it could easily be better with a little bit of work.I realize these guys are busy trying to get the next city/world design up and running for the players but there is still a lot that could be done with the existing game.

I offered SEVERAL suggestions as to witch a few were liked but of course many people found some excuse to not like my idea.I looked at every angle and aspect before offering my ideas so,even after i heard the arguements ,i don't buy them.

Just one area and my fave of course is COMBAT.Although the age group is on the lower end,you would be surprised at how smart some young people are,i have often found some young kids to be a lot brighter than some older people.In realizing this ,i think they could make the game a little more challenging or even offer areas of difficulty as they sort of tried to do with there instances that really don't resemble instances.

The quests also need to be a lot more appealing ,i think even the young kids get bored of them and just spending hours running around for nothing ,looking for someone or something.

However on a whole and as the game stands it does show some decent effort and should be reconized as a very good kids game.

I played Beta and I might fire it up again. The ease and causal gameplay is attractive.  Sometimes I remember rolling my eyes when I get "caught" into a battlefield when i thought I was far away from anything, but other than that, it does what it should do.  Entertains

On some level we should compare this to Atlantica Online

I'm also one of the many who was trying this game out, to see if it'd be a good fit for my kids' first MMO, and got completely sucked in. In fact I've barely gotten around to showing it to them yet. Great game all around, and I agree with the above poster, definitely some lessons to be learned here.

I have to fully agreed with wizardy. At first, i thought wizard101 is for kids, educational typed of games.

After i tried, i found out that this game is cute with nice graphics and very addictive for players to play especially when the wizards are in combat. AWESOME

Should give it a try.

 I agree with the review.  Wizard101 is a great, fun game for kids.  It's a solid product and KingsIsle has done quite a bit since it launched, especially with their revenue model and holiday event, to assure people that it's a serious contender.  That being said, Wizard101's sucess and popularity with older/more mature gamers probably surprised even Wizard101, since they weren't the target audience.  Per KingsIsle CEO Elie Akilian, in a pre-beta press release:

"We more than doubled our anticipated beta audience for Wizard101"

"It turns out that the solid game mechanics and whimsical fantasy environment appeal even beyond the tween audience. We've had a great response from testers that included everyone from grandmas who play with a grandchild sitting in their lap to twenty-something traditional gamers."

The game has been out a while, is stable and the revenue model has likely been finalized.  This is a great time for KingsIsle to consider updating the game to not only attract and retain older, more experienced gamers (especially with FreeRealms looming on the horizon).  I think they could do this with a few changes:

• Chat - Older gamers can become frustrated with the enfornced constraints of the kid-friendly chat system.  As of now, gamers under 13 and free gamers are limited to emote-based chat.  Only paid players over 13 can use the "free text" chat (or paid players under 13 whose parents expclitly enable free text chat), although this still limits the chat based on an approved dictionary.   Players limited to emote-based chat, either due to age or subscription status, cannot even see free text chat by those who are allowed to use it.  All they see are ellipses (...).  Why not add in a third layer of chat for paid subscribers >= 18 years of age?  This third layer could be truly free, non-dictionary based (except for obvious words that should be censored, just like they are in adult MMOs).  The mechanics of the chat system would still be the same in that <13 and non-paid subscribers would still see ellipses instead of the chat, thereby mitigating  the possibility of children seeing chat that may not be appropriate.  Paid subscribers between 13 and 17 would only see the text they're allowed to see, based on their level of chat, unless the most open level of chat is explicitly enabled by their parental unit.  This approach still keeps kids safe, but will reduce frustrations more mature gamers have with the existing chat system.
• Trade - at this time, players can only trade treasure cards, not items.  Introduce item trading for paid players >= 18 years old (unless explicitly allowed by an adult, in which case it'd be 13+ - NEVER under 13, UNLESS IN THE SAME FAMILY ACCOUNT). This introduces a famiilar MMO mechanic, but still keeps kids safe from being scammed, bamboozled, tricked, etc....