First visit to IOA for 5 years and my take on Wizarding World and FJ. Disappointed to be honest. Maybe that’s due to all the amazing things I had read and heard before travelling so my expectations were to high or the fact the films don’t really do it for me either. The whole area seemed really small and shoe horned into the space. The best part for me is entering from The Lost Continent as the theme and detailing is amazing from that view with Hogwarts towering in the back ground over Hogsmead but from then it’s down hill.
Hogwarts Express just magically appears from a hole that leads to Dragon Challenge which doesn’t look good or make sense. Again while nicely themed the whole are is just too small and the forced prospective of Hogwarts just doesn’t work when you get any where close to it.
FJ the ride = Good but no way is it the best the ride in Florida, its not even the best ride in IOA. First off what’s with the queuing system? When we were there 60 min posted wait and 40 mins of that were queuing for lockers that we didn’t need. Why am I in a queue that goes at a snail pace due to where the lockers are located? Bad design!!!! Also every where I read goes on about amazing immersive theme!!! Really? So queuing in the greenhouse for the best part of 30 minuets (waiting for lockers) I am looking at a white show build whilst hearing the sound track for Jurassic Park, hardly setting up the ride experience. Once inside Hogwarts things are much better and this part of the ride is fantastic but now the queue picks up pace so the place where there is incredible detail we miss a lot of it. Again a real shame and bad design.
The ride its self is good but the transition between screens and real life sets are very poor and the floo effect is lame. Also on all my rides the dementor face effect failed as did the whopping willow. There is a lot of stick on this forum about Disney operating signature attractions with effects missing or broken, Uni is also failing to deliver on its most important attraction.
But the biggest thing for me is how Wizarding World as effect the rest of IOA. JP is now dominated by it with a lot of sight lines having Hogwarts or worse a big white box in view. JP used to be my favourite part of IOA as it captured the feel of the film that’s now been destroyed. Lost Continent another beautiful part of the park as also been nearly obliterated by it and again was such a great area and for this we have one new ride which whilst use cutting edge technology is a patchy experience and two rebrands one of which as made a great attraction worse.
I expect to get flamed but these are my genuine thoughts and feel that this land could have been much better pulled off if Uni had the land space to do it fully. Disappointed :down:
Going to break this down. I don't know if its worth it since you have a lot of Disney bias, but I feel the need to defend the pride of Universal.
I don't know how you can argue its not the best ride in Orlando or even IoA. There is literally no ride like it, so much so that the staff has trouble describing it to new people.
- Why are you waiting in the line? Because everyone else is. This is a halfway credible complaint, the lockers were designed poorly and are having the issue worked out with them for sister WWoHPs. However, all of those people would have been in line anyway so you're not really losing any time. When you go through and don't have a bag normally you just end up cutting a lot of people during the lockers, if done right then you don't cut anyone and only one of their party goes into the lockers and the status quo is maintained. Basically you don't like waiting in line.They tried a bag/no bag line at one time; it made more people angry than happy, so that will not be happening again.
- The garden/forest queue is pretty, again you're complaining about small details that people don't notice for the most part. We can go into other rides that do the same. A majority of rides do not have a fully themed extended queue.
- There is ample time in the line to observe details and they are pretty helpful about pointing out the castle tour line if you ask about pictures. This is after all a line for a ride and
not a walkthrough.
- Interesting that you choose to bring up Disney here. The difference is that the willow was out for one day; the yeti has been out for several years. No ride is going to be 100% all the time, but the important part is Universal tries.
- We need to end this discussion about sightlines. It is impossible to build a perfect park with perfect sightlines. Most people do not notice the small overlapping details. Let's all complain about being able to see all the lands from PoE or Suess from Marvel. Or god forbid we talk about another park with interesting sightlines.
I'm not sure how practical this would be from an operations viewpoint, but around the point with the sorting hat, the queue could split into 4, for each house with Hufflepuff being the mildest and Slytherin being the wildest. I wonder how easy it would be to set up a system which could change which benches were on which profiles depending on the demand at the time?
- Not at all easy. It would be a technical nightmare. There's no space to split it up. Logistically you can't sort it well. Single Riders falls apart. It just becomes 4 different rides in one building.
Just to clarify point by point,
Size = I am not suggesting that Hogsmead isn’t the right scale and get it’s a village just saying I felt the whole expansion to be small and shoe horned into the space for the amount of praise it gets here.
Lockers = FJ isn’t the only attraction in Florida that gets long lines and requires lockers and they seem to pull it off a lot more effectively than FJ
Willow = I guess that must be the case which is a shame as I guess I missed FJ at its best.
Site Line = I am sorry but I have to totally disagree with you and can’t see how you can talk about what other regular visitors think or don’t. The WW gets eminence praise and rightly so for a lot of things but for a good percentage of the time you can clear see something quite ugly and spoils not just WW but also JP. If this is forgivable by you in such a highly theme area then fair enough
Re-Branding = I consider a ride as an experience from the moment I commit to going on it so to say there are the same isn’t true. Dulling Dragons had at the time the best queue in Florida and really set up the ride and this in my opinion has been destroyed and therefore detracted from the ride experience (again just my opinion)
Queue speed = I refer you to Felipe post 16943 is this is exactly what I meant.
But having said all that again there are many areas of WW which I think are amazing and I guess it’s question of opinon
Size: Verily we live in a world with tangible dimensions where objects and locations must be designed to fit with the space that exists in reality. There was not room to expand any further without sacrificing all of Lost Continent and at the time of construction, this was still an experiment. When we can start bending dimensions and build more in less, let me know. I don't mean to be harsh, but I don't consider this a valid claim.
Lockers: Addressed above. However, HPFJ is still the only attraction that has lockers and has lines that require not only extra queue to be built every day during peak (of which they still run out of queue space), but also a land management system to keep the ride from crippling the entire park and breaking fire code, so I'd say you're comparing two things with entirely different scale.
Sightline: Still irrelevant, but you are entitled to your opinion. After all, nowhere in Universal's ticket ToS does it promise you that you will be happy or love everything. Again this park is dictated by the reality of space. Spending money on a texture for a showbuilding is a lot of money with no return.
Rebranding: I'm pretty sure that the Dragons queue is only slightly different with less scary effects; I'm still more concerned about the absence of dueling.
Bingo, the entire system has been tinkered with since opening. Nearly all modifications made to the ride system are so small it would be darn near impossible to notice.
The profile is changed very, very rarely. The slightest change in profiling can cause massive glitches with the ride. This profile change was not minor. Anyone who has been on more than once would notice the change. It was an entirely different range of motion with a lack of urgency or speed. It was like when they dumbed down Poseidon's Fury except much much worse.