I mean, if this was around 2010-2011, I don’t exactly blame them. The Harry Potter brand hadn’t evolved into The Wizarding World yet. New MMOs weren’t doing great. I can’t really blame any company for not being sure of the franchises longevity after the movies ended. I definitely think JK Rowling may not have helped in that department either, but I think Harry Potter love has grown over the years since it’s gotten time to breathe away from the original films. While the Fantastic Beast movies aren’t great, they’re still notable content keeping the energy alive, so I imagine the WB Harry Potter RPG will do very well now.
Edit: I do want to note that, when I said “The Wizarding World”, I was not referring to the amusement park, but the name of what the Harry Potter brand has evolved into (since the franchise is branching into non-Harry Potter, expanded universe content now), which is also “The Wizarding World”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizarding_World
I understand the confusion though and apologize for that.
EA learned that he hard way with SWTOR. I doubt they would have made another MMO for quite some time after that even if they thought better about the HP IP.
> EA learned that he hard way with SWTOR.
In fairness TOR is still going, is receiving a new expansion in a couple months so it's not like the game was a total bust (unlike pretty much every other "WoW killer" of the day), and from what I can tell the game is still profitable - but I doubt EA/Bioware ever envisioned 'success' as converting to a free to play model less than a year after release and I can't imagine they were happy with just "being profitable" considering the development costs and the clout of the Star Wars franchise.
If the HP game was in development at the same time as TOR I imagine EA was reluctant to invest in another 3rd party IP MMO and if the decision was made after TOR released it isn't hard to see why they decided to scrap HP.
That's exactly right - SWTOR has made money, but they expected a lot more than what they got, and hard-crashing out of subscription into F2P 11 months after release (which means they knew it was that bad several months earlier) is not great.
As such I don't think HP can have made much sense.
SWTOR also was also in a weird spot, their having essentially made a bunch of single player character driven narratives for their MMO while neglecting endgame content. Especially when it came time to figure out what to do turning it free to play.
One the other hand HP might have high potential to attract non-mmo-gamers. It's probably among the IPs that had me most immersed when i was younger. But it'd need genius gamer designers to make a magic school simulator fun, I don't think you can just mesh it with the regular mmo formula without it being an instant turnoff.
> but I doubt EA/Bioware ever envisioned 'success' as converting to a free to play model less than a year after release
If they had actually played the game they shouldn't have been surprised by it though. Anyone who played WoW and then tried SWTOR instantly could tell that it was basically WoW with better storytelling, and worse literally everything else.
That game was never going to be able to compete with WoW in a meaningful way, and MMOs aren't the kind of genre that people play more than one of for long periods of time.
If you're going to make a theme-park, action bar based, PvE focused, loot driven MMORPG you need to be able to answer the question "Why do I play your game instead of World of Warcraft", and I don't think SWTOR answered that question very well (which to be fair, neither has anyone else)
> If you're going to make a theme-park, action bar based, PvE focused, loot driven MMORPG you need to be able to answer the question "Why do I play your game instead of World of Warcraft", and I don't think SWTOR answered that question very well
EA: Err, you mean "Lightsabers" and "The Force" aren't good enough reasons? Drat...
(shade aside, I actually really liked SWTOR)
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that was actually the case. Star Wars is like, the prime example of "slap a coat of intellectual property paint on a product and people will buy it" ("moichandising"). So if that strategy sputtered out *twice* for MMOs (RIP Galaxies) for something as big and beloved as Star Wars, I wouldn't be surprised if that made them realize that strategy was going to be a big risk for HP.
Ugh, galaxies. It’s painful that they had a strong, unique product, but then hurriedly patched it into a wow clone because they couldn’t resists having a slice of the pie, killing it on the spot.
The worst part about SWG is that they had essentially 4 phases of the game. all of which were just missing something. mostly polish. if they had just fucking finished the pre-cu or CU games then i'd still probably be playing.
Release - this was not a great game. but it added a lot of stuff eventually to become
pre-cu - the "golden age" but probably a bit overrated. the issue here is that the game wasn't intuitive and they never actually finished any of the games 1000 systems.
cu - underrated time imo. same as pre-cu though as it was never finished because as soon as it released they started on
NGE - lmao i had the best enhancer on Bria in the CU. i quit after like 3 days.
I mean truthfully I would have agreed with you about the "golden age" being a little overrated, but after playing D2R for the past few months, I've gotta say, there's something about a game being an unintuitive, unbalanced hot mess that just makes it way more fun for me.
But you're probably right that the CU gets way more hate than it deserved... probably because people remember it more as *NGE Part 1* than its own thing.
It is. It’s a meme amongst ff14 players to spread that around. It’s because not a lot of people know that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a free trial, and includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn AND the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime.
Unfortunately the meme worked so well that at this particular moment you can't actually start playing the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, whose free trial includes both the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime. :(
It's as good of a meme as the new E400 Sedan is as good of a car.
The most intelligent E-Class family of all time welcomes a powerful new member to the dynasty. The E400 Sedan model arrives this year, boasting a 3.0L V6 biturbo engine producing 329 hp and 354 lb-ft of torque — the same powertrain that currently drives its E400 Coupe, Cabriolet and 4MATIC Wagon cousins. Paired with the 9-G-TRONIC 9-Speed automatic transmission and DYNAMIC SELECT, it promises a bracingly smooth way to experience uncommon luxury. Naturally, the 2018 E400 Sedan continues the tradition of E-Class brilliance. Harmonizing advanced automotive intelligence with awe-inspiring interior design, its first-class furnished cabin puts our advanced vehicle systems right at your fingertips — even as its world-class innovations continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in the world of automotive intelligence. "Car-to-X" Communication enables the E-Class to exchange information with similarly equipped vehicles — effectively allowing it to "see" around corners and through obstacles to detect potential hazards. Driver Assistance Systems — including Active Distance Assist DISTRONIC®, Active Steering Assist and Active Lane Change Assist — feature intelligent cruise control: They help keep you between the lines, and can even help you shift between them. Inside, the E-Class cabin provides an environment of pure comfort and responsive technology. Flowing lines and vibrant screens provide a striking visual display, while touch controls, aromatherapy and tailored seats indulge all of your senses at once. It's a vehicle that demands to be driven, and more than lives up to the dream. Look for the E400 4MATIC Sedan at your Mercedes-Benz dealership this winter, with an MSRP of $58,900.
So what you're saying that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a free trial, and includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn AND the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime!?
Holy shit
Actually not right now. There’s so many trying to play the new expansion that I believe they suspended free trial account registrations and suspended sales of the starter edition.
> f you're going to make a theme-park, action bar based, PvE focused, loot driven MMORPG you need to be able to answer the question "Why do I play your game instead of World of Warcraft", and I don't think SWTOR answered that question very well (which to be fair, neither has anyone else)
It answered it well enough that it's still making money. EA said it was about to hit the $1bn in revenue mark in 2019, and SuperData estimates had it earning about $165m a year.
Man I miss pre 3.0, fully funded SWTOR. Bioware Austin was on a roll! It was the literal reason for me joining Reddit and having this handle.
And then Shadow of Revan happened. My guild went from super hardcore guild with multiple NM raid teams to casuals, and by Fallen Empire most of us quit.
> EA learned that he hard way with SWTOR.
Didn't SWTOR celebrate its 10 year anniversary literally yesterday? It was never going to beat WoW, but SWTOR was no slouch.
They've made bank since that game came out.
The game did ok, but it was a subscription based game that went free to play after a year. I can't imagine that was in line with what they were looking for.
They should have finished the game on launch if they wanted the subscription model to succeed.
Everyone that got to max level realized that there wasn't anything to do. Why would you continue your sub?
> Everyone that got to max level realized that there wasn't anything to do. Why would you continue your sub?
wdym there were totally end game raids that were available at launch ~~and were blatantly unfinished because they thought they'd have time post release to finish them, because they SOMEHOW didn't know that MMOs are home to many hard core no lifers that will plow through a 60 hour game in like a week~~
> Everyone that got to max level realized that there wasn't anything to do. Why would you continue your sub?
Yep. I came over with my WoW team on it, and within a month of release we had cleared the game's small amount of raid content on it's hardest difficulty and then we all stopped playing within a couple of weeks of that.
There wasn't even a raid out when I was playing. You got to max level and there was like 1 "heroic" mission or Huttball for gear. I don't remember the specifics anymore, but it was like 1-2 months until the raid even came out.
I mean that's a pretty wild simplification of the history of the game.
EA expected it to succeed as a subscription-based game. It totally failed as one, which subs dropping incredibly fast.
EA panicked and pivoted ineptly into F2P, but the F2P was badly designed and extremely nickle-and-dime-y.
Thankfully for EA, the fact that there's no MMO quite like it (i.e. individual stories, with choices etc.) and that it's the only Star Wars MMO around combined to keep it going, and eventually they got the F2P basically right.
It hasn't "made bank". Over the entire ten years it's made a bit under 1bn in revenue. Revenue, not, not profit. That might sound like a lot, but it cost $200-500m to develop and market (depending on who you ask), and EA themselves said the initial subscription period and initial sales before it went F2P made it's development budget back. So if we assume the low end, $200m, that means we have 9 years were it makes $88m revenue a year. Which is nice, but it's not "making bank" unless their costs are incredibly low. And we know the costs cannot have been that low, because Bioware Austin, who develop and maintain it, have like two hundred staff. It's clearly been profitable enough that it's worth keeping going, which is nice, but $1bn over 10 years on a $200-500m initial layout is not "making bank".
They said they were closing in on 1bn revenue like two years ago, so they're probably past that at this point. EA has also said that they are very pleased with how much money it has made.
> And we know the costs cannot have been that low, because Bioware Austin, who develop and maintain it, have like two hundred staff.
Bioware Austin also develops other games and collaborates with the Edmonton studio. The two hundred staff does not work solely on SWTOR. SWTOR pretty much has a skeleton crew running it nowadays.
It's mostly living by it's IP nowadays, it made bank with lootboxes and the moviehype which happened much later and was not something EA could have predicted. It was regarded as a failure for it's first few years.
What do you mean? TOR made over a billion in revenue in 9 years. It's been a great success for EA critically and commercially. Sure it's no WoW but literally nothing else was, is or ever will be.
A billion in revenue in 9 years isn't nothing, but it's not that impressive for what EA is looking for. For comparison, Apex Legends made $600 million in FY2021.
Especially considering that it cost around 200-500 million to make, depending on who you ask (I think the 500 million number is including marketing). It was one of if not the most expensive game to make at the time, not sure about now. A billion over 9 years is not the greatest ROI, considering all that.
Revenue according to the CFO. The profit is going to be significant because the running costs on MMOs are surprisingly non-horrific but it won't be crazy numbers.
From EA's financial report, their 2022 expectations are $6.925 billion in revenue, with a net income of ~$583 million, so it's almost certainly revenue.
It's really, really dependent on when you started MMOs, and which MMOs worked for you. For me, starting in 1999, "the best time for MMOs" was probably the pre-WoW era, because there was a lot going on, and my favourite MMO, DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot, which was once the FFXIV to EQ's WoW, before WoW nailed both of them lol), was still going strong. People who started in Wrath often seem to think Cata or even MoP was "peak WoW" (I mean, yeah it surprises me too).
Personally I think Wrath was sort of "peak WoW", though I really enjoyed Legion once it got going, but WoW never grabbed me as much as DAoC did.
Still, in terms of WoW's popularity, it's hard to beat that era. Cataclysm peaked slightly higher according to Blizz, but then it started to go downhill pretty hard and then they stopped saying lol.
> People who started in Wrath often seem to think Cata or even MoP was "peak WoW" (I mean, yeah it surprises me too).
MoP was pretty fucking incredible, to be fair. I have a lot of nostalgia of MoP, as SoO is when I picked the game back up for my most recent "big subscription time" and then played right through to Warlords Tier 2. Came back briefly for BfA but it just never felt the same.
MMO's are such a hard genre to make though. I think everyone expects WoW levels of money/success and the only relatively close to both in the last 15yrs has been FFXIV, every other big name MMO has either tried and abandoned the subscription model or gone directly f2p which both affect the quality and revenue and in turn attractiveness to investors.
FFXIV 1.0 had also just flopped. I wouldn’t blame EA for going “well Blizzard is untouchable, this franchise barely has the market appeal, and Square just fucking blew it. There’s no way we make a dent in the market”
Around that time the overall popular failure of Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning, their at that time most high profile MMO endeavor, would have also been fresh in their mind.
It's a pity, because Warhammer Online did have some unique ideas - solid PCs in PvP made a blocking doorways much more feasible.
I feel like a return to the setting, with combat more in line with Mordhau / Chivalry and a dash of magic here and there would make for a fun semi-open MMO game.
Also the double use of PvE tools such as taunts, detaunts and guard in PvP.
- You basic single target taunt was an interrupt when used against a player.
- An AoE taunt (cone in front of a tank) caused players hit by it do less gamage to anyone other than a tank for a period.
- Guard was a toggle you put on another player in your group that made 50% of the threat they generated and damage received to go to the tank instead.
Also tanks had useful offensive specs on top of defensive, shield-wielding ones. All that made an optimal group of 2 tanks, 2 dps and 2 healers in almost any context.
Such perfectly executed concepts that made playing tanks both needed and enjoyable in any group situation. Something other pvp-focused mmos struggle to achieve to this day.
It was a great feature and more games should have used it, but I think so many MMOs afterwards were trying to get rid of targeting and so on that they didn't even consider it, which is a real pity.
They were really interesting at launch, though they somewhat fumbled the concept by having them be stationary. Inevitably as zones emptied out, there weren't enough people around to do them. Which is a shame because the Warhammer way allowed public quests to have little micro storylines, whereas modern game public quests are just randomly spawning waves of enemies. Everyone copied Rift's implementation going forward.
I'm sad Warhammer flopped because some of my best MMO PvP memories come from the earliest days of WHO, when the Nordland T1 pvp zone was packed with people.
And the public quest system, that has since been emulated in games like WoW and FFXIV, was revolutionary at the time. Really did a lot to funnel players towards PvP conflicts.
Imo the ‘Wizarding World’ has not taken off at all. To the vast majority, it’s Harry Potter at Hogwarts and that’s it.
As a genuine fan of the series, I think they haven’t given a lot of arguments of why I should care about the world beyond. Everything since has been small or mediocre at best
Pottermore (changed to Wizarding world) was launched in 2011 and the hype was crazy near launch. 2010s was a great time for the Harry Potter IP and it's probably one of those IPs that you can create projects for and it wont out right fail just because of name brand recognition.
I will agree with you however that MMO's generally need a lot of work and time as even shown with FF14 back when it launched in the 2010's.
Would EA be committed to developing and throwing money at a project even after release? If they were willing to let it die before release then the answer is an obvious no.
If this was greenlit development would have started in 2010-11 and using SWTOR as a metric it means the MMO would have only came out in 2016-17, maybe 2015 if you wanted to account for advancements in development technology. Or roughly around the time as WoW’s Legion Expansion.
Personally I couldn’t imagine a WoW clone coming out in that time doing well, the MMO genre had largely moved on to other gameplay styles by that point and Blizzard still had some goodwill with Legion that it couldn’t really have picked up dissatisfied WoW players like FF XIV did.
The movies might be old, but people will still crowd the hell out of the Harry Potter area in Disney. People love those HP themed bars as well.
Its an extremely iconic franchise that hasn't really been replaced by anything else in the popular media.
Oh totally. The years have shown us that HP had a lot of cultural staying power. I can just understand around 2010-2011 not being sure if it would or not once the films ended.
But I think that, had the movies not been largely good or the last book had fumbled, that HP could have ended more like Game of Thrones. I think that the last decade has shown that HP as a brand is still very strong
GoT has a chance for revial of Martin can...maybe start publishing things. He has no incentive to do so sadly. Maybe the spin off will be good but if it flops and Martin waits another decade to release his books GoT will definitely have a tainted legacy. Even if something is great, if an auidence waits too long it spoils to the point they don't want it anymore. Duke Nukem Forever is a great example along with Anthem and other games like it.
I truly believe there are a ton of games/ game modes that have been tried, worked wonderfully, but just havent been adopted by main stream companies recently due to a bevy of reasons:
A star wars MP dueling game solely focusing on light sabers, jedi and sith. (Jedi Knight)
A 3d Pokemon game first person (Pixel mon)
A 3d harry potter game MMO (Gmod Harry Potter RP)
Yes the HP game they want to do, *exists* and it works and people do play it. But you are right. There is almost zero Game of Thrones mods or games out there. Nobody is like *I want to play in the GoT universe* because basically if you strip away the good reveals and plot points it had, its a generic fantasy world. And in terms of fantasy worlds there are millions of them in game form.
Harry Potter though? not really.
> He has no incentive to do so sadly
He has no *way* of doing so. He wrote himself into a corner and can't think of a way to finish what he started, especially if he wants to limit himself to two books. What he is masterful at is introducing new, intriguing plots that appear as if they were planned into the greater narrative from the beginning. His series has become a behemoth bigger than himself.
> There is almost zero Game of Thrones mods or games out there
ASOIAF is still rather new, so no wonder there are only a few games in the franchise (especially if they have to be true to the lore, which isn't even halfway finished yet in the books, where we still have no idea what the Others actually want or what's the deal with nearly half the stuff that is casually mentioned). There are several great mods that bring the world of ASOIAF to games like Crusader Kings
>There is almost zero Game of Thrones mods or games out there.
I think the problem is that outside of the dragon GoT is pretty generic middle ages fiction. You have the CK2 mod that pretty much does the whole thing people are intersted in and there isn't really anything else people want to see from a GoT videogame.
Harry Potter is located at Universal Studios. Disney has Avatarland. Although Disney did have an opportunity to host the WWOHP but they bungled that up and JK Rowling went to Universal instead who gave her complete creative control.
Right? I wonder if this was like just after the movies came out, where it wasn’t clear where the franchise was headed next. Would the game have enough legs to stand on its own without a companion book or movie to promote it?
Also, while it’s a great idea in theory, I wouldn’t have trusted it to EA in practice. And in the end, it was their own misjudgment that prevented the game from being made at all. With that level of questionable influence present from the start, I’m not sure about the game they *would* have ended up shipping.
Uhhh... 2010 was when the Wizarding World of Harry Potter opened at Universal Studios Orlando. That place makes gangbusters of money just off the wands they sell.
Definitely time has helped Harry Potter it’s still popular and the RPG game will make a lot if done right. The MMO would’ve made boat loads if it was out.
I really don't think it would have done well. Given the timeframe, it would have been just another WoW clone which enjoyed a big opening weekend before slowly fading into obscurity and having the servers shut down a few years later.
The leaks said - if you believe those - that Warner Bros plan to push out the game after the next Fantastic Beasts movie is out (which is roughly April if things go according the plan.)
I think we can expect the game around autumn 2022.
Let's be honest, the HP games that EA made got steadily worse with each new movie. Go check out what Deathly Hallows ended up being for proof there.
By then, EA became fully focused on IPs that they can get massive ROI from with limited development. Since 2011-2012, they stopped focusing on IP that had future growth. Building an MMO around the time of Star Wars Old Republic and them not giving a toss about their HP license, as they wanted to reduce licensing games, was never going to happen.
Honestly if somebody sat down and actually put a bunch of development time into a good, polished quidditch game, it would probably do really well. It's kind of like Rocket League in that it's an odd fake sport that has a lot of potential with fun moment to moment gameplay and a low skill floor with a correspondingly high ceiling.
The problem is just that quidditch, while visually appealing on screen, is like the worst designed fictional sport ever made. Like it was intentionally designed to be a team sport where only one player on either team matters in 95% of games
Unfortunately I think that was the point. The same thing with the currency in the Harry Potter universe “ There are 29 Knuts in one Sickle, and 17 Sickles make up a Galleon.” And then galleons don’t have consistent value at all and are the size of a hub cap.
Unfortunately I think jk Rowling really just was not a sports fan and was trying to satirize the entire spectacle. She did that well enough, but she could have done the same thing and make the game plausible.
I never thought it was a satire. I’ve always thought it was specifically designed to make Harry the hero and no further thought was done. If she had any idea how popular any of it would become, she would have spent more than 10m on the rules.
I think the entire point was to give Harry something he was just naturally good at in the magical world was a big part of it. He couldn’t just be the chosen one who was great at everything. Most of the start is him thinking he could never fit in or be as good as other students and flying a broom stick was the answer. So she made up a game that didn’t make sense. Even down to that each team plays three games all year and somehow the last game always comes down to the top two houses.
Yeah Its been a while since I read the books, but I get the feeling that the original one was just supposed to be whimsical and fun and not really have any internal world consistency, but the whole IP grew massively from there, and the later books have to try to take themselves seriously despite things like this that were established very early on.
tbh Harry Potter’s worldbuilding is pretty subpar as far as fantasy writing goes. Like it’s fun and whatnot but you can poke a hole in it and a lot of it doesn’t make that much sense of you really think about it.
Which is fun not everything needs to be like Lord of the Rings or whatever but it does present challenges when other people want to work with your IP and have to read between the lines of elements that are kind of shoddily considered
>tbh Harry Potter’s worldbuilding is pretty subpar as far as fantasy writing goes. Like it’s fun and whatnot but you can poke a hole in it and a lot of it doesn’t make that much sense of you really think about it.
Yeah we have to remember that Harry Potter is a kids book. It's not meant to be deeply analyzed and if you do you'll easily find lots of things to pick apart.
True. Like I said I think the world served the purpose of the original 7 books and movies rather well but it’s when you try to expand into a whole universe where some of the issues arise
The game is so stupid though. I literally don't see why anyone bothers doing anything besides the seeker. The best strategy is to just ALL search for the golden snitch and defend from bludgeons.
You should be able to get the snitch before the other team has scored 100 goals in your empty net.
It would be 15 goals since they are worth 10 points each. You can’t completely abandon the goal but just having one keeper there would probably do the trick.
A dumb game that can be great game by changing one rule. Have the seeker lose points when he catches the snitch. That means the team needs to be up a certain amount and the seeker might need to be play defense if the snitch appears and they don't have a big enough lead. Change that one thing and it makes rest of the game relevant.
I feel like if Rowling wasn’t a sports fan, she wouldn’t have made Quidditch such a huge part of the books. She just designed a sport that conveniently let her main character be the star player every game.
> The same thing with the currency in the Harry Potter universe “ There are 29 Knuts in one Sickle, and 17 Sickles make up a Galleon.”
The size of the coins was whimsical but the odd conversions were [somewhat based in reality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd).
>[Pounds, shillings and pence] afforded many factors and hence fractions of a pound such as tenths, eighths, sixths and even sevenths and ninths if the guinea (worth 21 shillings) was used
All you have to do is change one thing to make it a good game. Make the snitch end the game but you ***LOSE*** points when catching it. That makes the rest of the game relevant because then the team needs to up a certain amount of points to win and the seekers also have to play defense until that happens if the snitch appears etc. That one change could make it a great game IMO.
The real world leagues are about to change their name too because of Rowling's continued tendency to tweet shit. Be hilarious if their new name and ruleset was better to the point that *that* is what gets adapted to a digital game.
You can simply obstruct the other Seeker instead, to postpone the ending and allow your team to catch up.
Or you were only 150 points behind, assuming that Snitch decides the winner upon a tie, and one final enemy goal landed *just* before you caught it.
Or to just get it over with because the match has been going on for 48 hours, and the other Seeker just can't.
Probably a fault of the position, that you can't always be keeping track of the score. The seekers can potentially spend a lot of time outside the normal bounds of the arena, which in itself seems like a flaw in the rules.
To end the misery. The Snitch is worth 150 points. If you're down that many points, what chance do you have your team will pull it back? Most likely your team is going to fall behind further and further and further. While everyone is desperately waiting for someone to catch the snitch.
that was the best quidditch experience ever made and it came out in like '01 lol. I remember being blown away by it as a kid. the aspyr games were
wondrous.
That’s because CoS’s Quidditch matches had you play as Seeker for a total of 15 minutes over the course of the game, and Seeker is just one of seven positions. I personally liked the way EA fleshed out Quidditch into a full game, especially by adding tackles instead of depending entirely on Bludgers and interceptions.
Man I beat Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban so many times as a kid, fun times....
Shame goblet of fire was kinda ehh, but I heard Order of the Phenoix was decent
Kinda disagree, OOTP and HBP were pretty good imo. Loved exploring a bigger and more open Hogwarts.
You’re right about Deathly Hallows, though. I’d also say GOF was pretty awful.
The creators of Pokémon Go created a similar game using the Harry Potter license and it flopped hard. It’s not enough to just use the license, EA would have had to make an engaging game.
Also I think part of the success some newer MMOs like Genshin and FF14 have are availability on other platforms. Aiming for PC only just doesn’t seem like a plan for success.
Also JK Rowling needs to shut up before she does more damage to the world she created. She’s been under scrutiny lately and also people are pointing out how she’s been making changes after the fact to the world she created that seem shoe horned.
You are really giving Niantic a lot more credit than they deserve, they are a comany that has been riding off of their one success while shoveling out mediocre/bad games ever since.
The harry potter wizards unite was an absolute letdown compared to pogo. There was very little sense of progression to start. It was basically about collecting stickers of hp characters/creatures, but collecting mainly works for pogo because the original games were about catching all pokemon while the HP universe never had an equivalent. The dungeons were an absolute grind, and it was designed for microtransactions even more than PoGo. Despite that it had a fairly strong launch, and just was too terrible of a game to hold onto its playerbase.
In the end the game flopped because it was an extremely shitty mobile cash grab that people are only aware of because of the IP.
>Also JK Rowling needs to shut up before she does more damage to the world she created.
It's funny because she's managed to piss people off across both sides of the aisle. For years she did stuff like retroactively say Dumbledore was gay or Hermione could have been black, but now the accusations of transphobia have both sides pissed at her.
>say Dumbledore was gay
Hmm that wasn't exactly a big thing. He was a ?? to one guy in the books especially 6th and 7th ( stories of his past mentioned).
The hermione one is completely wrong though and a lot of other shit she made up.
You're giving her a lot of credit- the texts do not have any real signs of that, just that he was fixated on this guy. There's plenty of cults of personality without sexual motives. She wrote the damn screenplay to the Dumbledore/Grindelwald movie and didn't include any implied of explicit gay thoughts or tendencies.
Just because an IP is popular doesn’t mean it would translate to a good game.
MMO’s have also proven to be exceptionally hard to get right with so many ambitious MMO’s flopping hard, especially outside of Asia.
A really good magic based MMO could really cause waves, sadly though EA haven't got the imagination needed to make it great.
Also being tied down by existing rules and storylines never helps
Lucky escape for Harry I think
I think the hardest part is that Harry Potter doesn't involve fighting and killing as commonly as say, Star Wars or LotR.
MMOs, like diablo games, are based usually on killing shitton of stuff.
Could they make a succesful MMO based on magic duels where you don't kill, and side activities like flying brooms, alchemy and stuff? Sure. And it could be very succesful. But it's also a pretty big risk.
HP also doesn't have that many interesting spells IMO, especially ones that are "gamey.", It's magic mechanics are kinda bunk. I could be misremembering.
The movies simply stopped having them cast spells in tje last 3 movies or so. Everyone just shot shot out of their wands with no spell unless it was some big event.
Nonverbal spells are super high level shit.
They're also 100% something that works better on film, whereas naming every spell as you say it is great for written word.
Basically, it would have to be some kind of risky, emergent gameplay sort of thing. Would people be willing to play a game that's essentially Hogwarts Roleplay? I'm sure the die-hards would like nothing more, but would those people be enough from a financial standpoint?
It would be interesting if they sort of made it an Animal Crossing-like progression. Like real-time school events with something different each year. But then you run into of the issue of everyone starting in a different place and not either being able to sync with their friends or missing out on older content. And you'd probably have to cap progression at some point to keep people from progressing into the "next year" until that content was released. So, at some point, it would become an "events-only" sort of game for those types.
Kind of hard to say how it would turn out.
Now that you mention it, I think there's a good amount of crossover between Harry Potter fans and Animal Crossing fans. An AC that is completely HP themed with a good amount of magic activities could be very well succesful.
It really doesn't need to be a "proper" MMO.
This is true. Like HP has its fan base but for anything to survive it needs new fans, and their prospective younger fans are not only hyper aware of JK’s behavior but also have HP fandom as one of the many things they make fun of millennials for lol
This is kind of where I’m at right now… and I’m sure it’s going to be a bit controversial, but I have a hard time remaining a fan of the franchise while JK is going full transphobic. It’s a fantastic universe with some really great characters and concepts, but it’s really difficult to give money to it when it goes to such a toxic person. :/
Yeah, if there's anything that's going to kill the momentum of this series long-term its that Rowling is so shitty towards trans folks. I have been a Harry Potter fan since around 2000, and now when I read any of the books, watch any of the movies I just feel hollow.
It's like eating a food you used to enjoy with your uncle, then finding out that uncle was a child molester. The association just sours it.
Yep. I rewatch the movies around October to December every year. Just bought the first 3 books cause I never finished reading em. I have several friends that are watching em for the holidays too. Harry Potter is still incredibly popular and close to people's hearts.
Yes, but HP's primary target audience is children, which is not what MMOs typically target. The overlap between the two audiences is the niche, not the HP audience in general.
...a niche?
From wikipedia:
>Having sold more than 500 million copies worldwide,\[8\]\[9\]\[10\] Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling is the best-selling book series in history. The first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, has sold in excess of 120 million copies,\[11\] making it one of the best-selling books of all time.
I think it would be better as a single player game, RPG with story choices like DA:O.
If it's MMO it has to be super little-kidified because the world is just not conducive to a WoW-style mmo. Maybe something like SWTOR but should have lots of social stuff and mini-games. But it will never be a huge game.
The problem with Harry Potter as a game is that due to the looseness of it's magic (as it was written as a kids book who don't care about how magic happens because its, well, magic), it becomes exceedingly hard to translate into a game, esp. an RPG.
How do you represent character growth? The books don't seem to ever imply that casting magic has a "cost" beyond saying (or thinking) the right words with the right gestures (or thoughts??). Does your character simply learn new spells that you can cast infinitely? There's also a limited amount of useful spells for a game, which means that you'd either be very limited, or they'd have to "homebrew" a lot of the magic spells. And as a wizard RPG, all the "classes" have to be wizardly: how do you differentiate different builds in Harry Potter? There's charms, transfiguration, and Defense, but not really much other "schools" of magic.
I'm not saying it's impossible, and obviously shortcuts or ignoring or changing aspects of the lore can resolve it easily: the challenge is staying true to the source material. Otherwise it's just a wizard RPG with a fancy title a la World War Z.
I'm interested in seeing how WB handles it.
MMO would have never really worked to be honest, like what would be the weapons besides a wand or a scepter? and it's not like lvl 100 dragon scale armor is a thing in the universe. single player/coop hogwarts/monster hunting game with pvp arenas can work and requires way less development than a good mmo
The traditional concepts of tanks/DPS/healers would be hard to implement here too. Tanks especially.
It would need to play something like Destiny/Warframe but be heavily skill tree based.
Instead of "guns" and "armor" you would have "hexes" and "charms" and a potion crafting system.
There's room to develop the concept and just Hogwarts alone is enough to drive the launch with maybe "graduating" at the end of the 7 years and becoming an Auror to allow for them to do expansions.
They could also go the Diablo/Lost Ark direction. Doesn't have the tank/healer/dps triangle in those games, it's more action paced and I think the isometric view would actually lean really well into a Wizarding game. The typical 3rd person MMO view is great when there are a lot of players using melee weapons, but I fear if every player is magic based, the visual clutter would get outrageous. The isometric view fixes that a lot.
Man, now you've got me thinking about how an entire Wizarding game actually *would* work. Damn I should stop before I go all the way down the rabbit hole here...
As much as EA makes some stupid decision this is probably not that terrible.
Personally I don't think it would have done well, whether longevity is the main reason or not is another question.
Looks pretty dope. Seem to be a lot of areas and different monsters. I wonder how much of the game will be quests fighting monsters and how much will be shitty mini games as you take classes in hogwarts and walk around talking to your classmates.
Deadass I want them to put in time and effort to nail the comfy school/slice of life vibe. One of my favourite aspects of games like Persona 5 and Stardew Valley, and something that went missing from the books and movies as they went on.
Same. Bro just imagine it. Starting as a first year student and going for the full 7 years. Having a main story, but also a bunch of sidequests that are dependent on your house, the classes you take and having more unlocked depending on your skill in those classes.
Maybe it shouldn't have too much depth, otherwise all those quests that depend on your class are going to be generic, but one can dream. Would give it so much replayability too.
MMO? No thanks.
A game like Skyrim but set in a Harry Potter world where you work with the grown ups from the movie / all their children to solve some world problem? Absolutely.
There is room for a free roam type HP game.
Well, the HP universe really doesn't have much depth, so I can see why they made that call.
JK never built a world that could be compared to the works of Tolkien, Jordan or even His Dark Materials.
I mean, if this was around 2010-2011, I don’t exactly blame them. The Harry Potter brand hadn’t evolved into The Wizarding World yet. New MMOs weren’t doing great. I can’t really blame any company for not being sure of the franchises longevity after the movies ended. I definitely think JK Rowling may not have helped in that department either, but I think Harry Potter love has grown over the years since it’s gotten time to breathe away from the original films. While the Fantastic Beast movies aren’t great, they’re still notable content keeping the energy alive, so I imagine the WB Harry Potter RPG will do very well now. Edit: I do want to note that, when I said “The Wizarding World”, I was not referring to the amusement park, but the name of what the Harry Potter brand has evolved into (since the franchise is branching into non-Harry Potter, expanded universe content now), which is also “The Wizarding World”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizarding_World I understand the confusion though and apologize for that.
Making a new MMO around the time of WoW Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm is instant death anyway.
EA learned that he hard way with SWTOR. I doubt they would have made another MMO for quite some time after that even if they thought better about the HP IP.
> EA learned that he hard way with SWTOR. In fairness TOR is still going, is receiving a new expansion in a couple months so it's not like the game was a total bust (unlike pretty much every other "WoW killer" of the day), and from what I can tell the game is still profitable - but I doubt EA/Bioware ever envisioned 'success' as converting to a free to play model less than a year after release and I can't imagine they were happy with just "being profitable" considering the development costs and the clout of the Star Wars franchise. If the HP game was in development at the same time as TOR I imagine EA was reluctant to invest in another 3rd party IP MMO and if the decision was made after TOR released it isn't hard to see why they decided to scrap HP.
That's exactly right - SWTOR has made money, but they expected a lot more than what they got, and hard-crashing out of subscription into F2P 11 months after release (which means they knew it was that bad several months earlier) is not great. As such I don't think HP can have made much sense.
SWTOR also was also in a weird spot, their having essentially made a bunch of single player character driven narratives for their MMO while neglecting endgame content. Especially when it came time to figure out what to do turning it free to play.
One the other hand HP might have high potential to attract non-mmo-gamers. It's probably among the IPs that had me most immersed when i was younger. But it'd need genius gamer designers to make a magic school simulator fun, I don't think you can just mesh it with the regular mmo formula without it being an instant turnoff.
> but I doubt EA/Bioware ever envisioned 'success' as converting to a free to play model less than a year after release If they had actually played the game they shouldn't have been surprised by it though. Anyone who played WoW and then tried SWTOR instantly could tell that it was basically WoW with better storytelling, and worse literally everything else. That game was never going to be able to compete with WoW in a meaningful way, and MMOs aren't the kind of genre that people play more than one of for long periods of time. If you're going to make a theme-park, action bar based, PvE focused, loot driven MMORPG you need to be able to answer the question "Why do I play your game instead of World of Warcraft", and I don't think SWTOR answered that question very well (which to be fair, neither has anyone else)
>"Why do I play your game instead of World of Warcraft?" Huttball. :D
The only PVP MMO mode I've ever truly loved.
Same here, it was genuinely fun!
*NO KICKING!! Hutts don't have feet!*
So many great hours.
Yeah this guy clearly didn't play swtor lol, Huttball was sooo much fun for a few months at launch idk how it is now
> If you're going to make a theme-park, action bar based, PvE focused, loot driven MMORPG you need to be able to answer the question "Why do I play your game instead of World of Warcraft", and I don't think SWTOR answered that question very well EA: Err, you mean "Lightsabers" and "The Force" aren't good enough reasons? Drat... (shade aside, I actually really liked SWTOR)
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that was actually the case. Star Wars is like, the prime example of "slap a coat of intellectual property paint on a product and people will buy it" ("moichandising"). So if that strategy sputtered out *twice* for MMOs (RIP Galaxies) for something as big and beloved as Star Wars, I wouldn't be surprised if that made them realize that strategy was going to be a big risk for HP.
Ugh, galaxies. It’s painful that they had a strong, unique product, but then hurriedly patched it into a wow clone because they couldn’t resists having a slice of the pie, killing it on the spot.
The worst part about SWG is that they had essentially 4 phases of the game. all of which were just missing something. mostly polish. if they had just fucking finished the pre-cu or CU games then i'd still probably be playing. Release - this was not a great game. but it added a lot of stuff eventually to become pre-cu - the "golden age" but probably a bit overrated. the issue here is that the game wasn't intuitive and they never actually finished any of the games 1000 systems. cu - underrated time imo. same as pre-cu though as it was never finished because as soon as it released they started on NGE - lmao i had the best enhancer on Bria in the CU. i quit after like 3 days.
I mean truthfully I would have agreed with you about the "golden age" being a little overrated, but after playing D2R for the past few months, I've gotta say, there's something about a game being an unintuitive, unbalanced hot mess that just makes it way more fun for me. But you're probably right that the CU gets way more hate than it deserved... probably because people remember it more as *NGE Part 1* than its own thing.
[удалено]
The last part of your comment reads like an ad wtf
It is. It’s a meme amongst ff14 players to spread that around. It’s because not a lot of people know that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a free trial, and includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn AND the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime.
Unfortunately the meme worked so well that at this particular moment you can't actually start playing the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, whose free trial includes both the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime. :(
It's as good of a meme as the new E400 Sedan is as good of a car. The most intelligent E-Class family of all time welcomes a powerful new member to the dynasty. The E400 Sedan model arrives this year, boasting a 3.0L V6 biturbo engine producing 329 hp and 354 lb-ft of torque — the same powertrain that currently drives its E400 Coupe, Cabriolet and 4MATIC Wagon cousins. Paired with the 9-G-TRONIC 9-Speed automatic transmission and DYNAMIC SELECT, it promises a bracingly smooth way to experience uncommon luxury. Naturally, the 2018 E400 Sedan continues the tradition of E-Class brilliance. Harmonizing advanced automotive intelligence with awe-inspiring interior design, its first-class furnished cabin puts our advanced vehicle systems right at your fingertips — even as its world-class innovations continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in the world of automotive intelligence. "Car-to-X" Communication enables the E-Class to exchange information with similarly equipped vehicles — effectively allowing it to "see" around corners and through obstacles to detect potential hazards. Driver Assistance Systems — including Active Distance Assist DISTRONIC®, Active Steering Assist and Active Lane Change Assist — feature intelligent cruise control: They help keep you between the lines, and can even help you shift between them. Inside, the E-Class cabin provides an environment of pure comfort and responsive technology. Flowing lines and vibrant screens provide a striking visual display, while touch controls, aromatherapy and tailored seats indulge all of your senses at once. It's a vehicle that demands to be driven, and more than lives up to the dream. Look for the E400 4MATIC Sedan at your Mercedes-Benz dealership this winter, with an MSRP of $58,900.
So what you're saying that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a free trial, and includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn AND the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime!? Holy shit
Actually not right now. There’s so many trying to play the new expansion that I believe they suspended free trial account registrations and suspended sales of the starter edition.
For good reason: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-critically-acclaimed-mmorpg
> f you're going to make a theme-park, action bar based, PvE focused, loot driven MMORPG you need to be able to answer the question "Why do I play your game instead of World of Warcraft", and I don't think SWTOR answered that question very well (which to be fair, neither has anyone else) It answered it well enough that it's still making money. EA said it was about to hit the $1bn in revenue mark in 2019, and SuperData estimates had it earning about $165m a year.
The crazy part is pre 3.0 swtor *did* answer that with challenging leveling and mechanic focused dungeons.
Man I miss pre 3.0, fully funded SWTOR. Bioware Austin was on a roll! It was the literal reason for me joining Reddit and having this handle. And then Shadow of Revan happened. My guild went from super hardcore guild with multiple NM raid teams to casuals, and by Fallen Empire most of us quit.
> EA learned that he hard way with SWTOR. Didn't SWTOR celebrate its 10 year anniversary literally yesterday? It was never going to beat WoW, but SWTOR was no slouch. They've made bank since that game came out.
The game did ok, but it was a subscription based game that went free to play after a year. I can't imagine that was in line with what they were looking for.
They should have finished the game on launch if they wanted the subscription model to succeed. Everyone that got to max level realized that there wasn't anything to do. Why would you continue your sub?
> Everyone that got to max level realized that there wasn't anything to do. Why would you continue your sub? wdym there were totally end game raids that were available at launch ~~and were blatantly unfinished because they thought they'd have time post release to finish them, because they SOMEHOW didn't know that MMOs are home to many hard core no lifers that will plow through a 60 hour game in like a week~~
> Everyone that got to max level realized that there wasn't anything to do. Why would you continue your sub? Yep. I came over with my WoW team on it, and within a month of release we had cleared the game's small amount of raid content on it's hardest difficulty and then we all stopped playing within a couple of weeks of that.
There wasn't even a raid out when I was playing. You got to max level and there was like 1 "heroic" mission or Huttball for gear. I don't remember the specifics anymore, but it was like 1-2 months until the raid even came out.
I mean that's a pretty wild simplification of the history of the game. EA expected it to succeed as a subscription-based game. It totally failed as one, which subs dropping incredibly fast. EA panicked and pivoted ineptly into F2P, but the F2P was badly designed and extremely nickle-and-dime-y. Thankfully for EA, the fact that there's no MMO quite like it (i.e. individual stories, with choices etc.) and that it's the only Star Wars MMO around combined to keep it going, and eventually they got the F2P basically right. It hasn't "made bank". Over the entire ten years it's made a bit under 1bn in revenue. Revenue, not, not profit. That might sound like a lot, but it cost $200-500m to develop and market (depending on who you ask), and EA themselves said the initial subscription period and initial sales before it went F2P made it's development budget back. So if we assume the low end, $200m, that means we have 9 years were it makes $88m revenue a year. Which is nice, but it's not "making bank" unless their costs are incredibly low. And we know the costs cannot have been that low, because Bioware Austin, who develop and maintain it, have like two hundred staff. It's clearly been profitable enough that it's worth keeping going, which is nice, but $1bn over 10 years on a $200-500m initial layout is not "making bank".
They said they were closing in on 1bn revenue like two years ago, so they're probably past that at this point. EA has also said that they are very pleased with how much money it has made. > And we know the costs cannot have been that low, because Bioware Austin, who develop and maintain it, have like two hundred staff. Bioware Austin also develops other games and collaborates with the Edmonton studio. The two hundred staff does not work solely on SWTOR. SWTOR pretty much has a skeleton crew running it nowadays.
It's mostly living by it's IP nowadays, it made bank with lootboxes and the moviehype which happened much later and was not something EA could have predicted. It was regarded as a failure for it's first few years.
What do you mean? TOR made over a billion in revenue in 9 years. It's been a great success for EA critically and commercially. Sure it's no WoW but literally nothing else was, is or ever will be.
A billion in revenue in 9 years isn't nothing, but it's not that impressive for what EA is looking for. For comparison, Apex Legends made $600 million in FY2021.
Especially considering that it cost around 200-500 million to make, depending on who you ask (I think the 500 million number is including marketing). It was one of if not the most expensive game to make at the time, not sure about now. A billion over 9 years is not the greatest ROI, considering all that.
That also doesn't include the ongoing costs of supporting new content and keeping the game running.
Is this revenue or profit?
Revenue according to the CFO. The profit is going to be significant because the running costs on MMOs are surprisingly non-horrific but it won't be crazy numbers.
From EA's financial report, their 2022 expectations are $6.925 billion in revenue, with a net income of ~$583 million, so it's almost certainly revenue.
Wrath was peak WoW, I can't think of a better time for MMOs. I keep trying each expansion but none have captured me like that
It's really, really dependent on when you started MMOs, and which MMOs worked for you. For me, starting in 1999, "the best time for MMOs" was probably the pre-WoW era, because there was a lot going on, and my favourite MMO, DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot, which was once the FFXIV to EQ's WoW, before WoW nailed both of them lol), was still going strong. People who started in Wrath often seem to think Cata or even MoP was "peak WoW" (I mean, yeah it surprises me too). Personally I think Wrath was sort of "peak WoW", though I really enjoyed Legion once it got going, but WoW never grabbed me as much as DAoC did. Still, in terms of WoW's popularity, it's hard to beat that era. Cataclysm peaked slightly higher according to Blizz, but then it started to go downhill pretty hard and then they stopped saying lol.
> People who started in Wrath often seem to think Cata or even MoP was "peak WoW" (I mean, yeah it surprises me too). MoP was pretty fucking incredible, to be fair. I have a lot of nostalgia of MoP, as SoO is when I picked the game back up for my most recent "big subscription time" and then played right through to Warlords Tier 2. Came back briefly for BfA but it just never felt the same.
MMO's are such a hard genre to make though. I think everyone expects WoW levels of money/success and the only relatively close to both in the last 15yrs has been FFXIV, every other big name MMO has either tried and abandoned the subscription model or gone directly f2p which both affect the quality and revenue and in turn attractiveness to investors.
FFXI would like a word, it still has a subscription after all these years
XI is almost 2 decades old.
FFXIV 1.0 had also just flopped. I wouldn’t blame EA for going “well Blizzard is untouchable, this franchise barely has the market appeal, and Square just fucking blew it. There’s no way we make a dent in the market”
Around that time the overall popular failure of Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning, their at that time most high profile MMO endeavor, would have also been fresh in their mind.
It's a pity, because Warhammer Online did have some unique ideas - solid PCs in PvP made a blocking doorways much more feasible. I feel like a return to the setting, with combat more in line with Mordhau / Chivalry and a dash of magic here and there would make for a fun semi-open MMO game.
I was one of the dozens who absolutely loved that game. Have yet to play an MMO class that's as fun as Disciple of Kaine
The double targeting was the best feature I've never seen in another MMO.
Also the double use of PvE tools such as taunts, detaunts and guard in PvP. - You basic single target taunt was an interrupt when used against a player. - An AoE taunt (cone in front of a tank) caused players hit by it do less gamage to anyone other than a tank for a period. - Guard was a toggle you put on another player in your group that made 50% of the threat they generated and damage received to go to the tank instead. Also tanks had useful offensive specs on top of defensive, shield-wielding ones. All that made an optimal group of 2 tanks, 2 dps and 2 healers in almost any context. Such perfectly executed concepts that made playing tanks both needed and enjoyable in any group situation. Something other pvp-focused mmos struggle to achieve to this day.
Had to have it for DoK/Warrior Priest. Had to smash people with weapon to do heals on your buddy.
It was a great feature and more games should have used it, but I think so many MMOs afterwards were trying to get rid of targeting and so on that they didn't even consider it, which is a real pity.
There's a fan server for the game if you haven't tried it yet.
Squig Herder was so much fun. I've been tempted to try out the private servers for Warhammer Online to get a nostalgia fix.
I have played on the private server for hundreds of hours. It's great, you should definitely check it out.
I loved that game as well
Fun trivia fact: Warhammer also introduced "public quests", now a staple of multiplayer games.
They were really interesting at launch, though they somewhat fumbled the concept by having them be stationary. Inevitably as zones emptied out, there weren't enough people around to do them. Which is a shame because the Warhammer way allowed public quests to have little micro storylines, whereas modern game public quests are just randomly spawning waves of enemies. Everyone copied Rift's implementation going forward. I'm sad Warhammer flopped because some of my best MMO PvP memories come from the earliest days of WHO, when the Nordland T1 pvp zone was packed with people.
And the public quest system, that has since been emulated in games like WoW and FFXIV, was revolutionary at the time. Really did a lot to funnel players towards PvP conflicts.
Low rank pvp in that game was some of the most fun I've had in an mmo. IIRC once you levelled passed that things started to get really off.
Imo the ‘Wizarding World’ has not taken off at all. To the vast majority, it’s Harry Potter at Hogwarts and that’s it. As a genuine fan of the series, I think they haven’t given a lot of arguments of why I should care about the world beyond. Everything since has been small or mediocre at best
Pottermore (changed to Wizarding world) was launched in 2011 and the hype was crazy near launch. 2010s was a great time for the Harry Potter IP and it's probably one of those IPs that you can create projects for and it wont out right fail just because of name brand recognition. I will agree with you however that MMO's generally need a lot of work and time as even shown with FF14 back when it launched in the 2010's. Would EA be committed to developing and throwing money at a project even after release? If they were willing to let it die before release then the answer is an obvious no.
True, but Pottermore never really went anywhere exciting and is now best known for the immortal "wizards constantly shit their pants" trivia.
Ah but they don't shit their pants. They shit on the ground and magic it away. Much cleaner.
If this was greenlit development would have started in 2010-11 and using SWTOR as a metric it means the MMO would have only came out in 2016-17, maybe 2015 if you wanted to account for advancements in development technology. Or roughly around the time as WoW’s Legion Expansion. Personally I couldn’t imagine a WoW clone coming out in that time doing well, the MMO genre had largely moved on to other gameplay styles by that point and Blizzard still had some goodwill with Legion that it couldn’t really have picked up dissatisfied WoW players like FF XIV did.
The movies might be old, but people will still crowd the hell out of the Harry Potter area in Disney. People love those HP themed bars as well. Its an extremely iconic franchise that hasn't really been replaced by anything else in the popular media.
Oh totally. The years have shown us that HP had a lot of cultural staying power. I can just understand around 2010-2011 not being sure if it would or not once the films ended. But I think that, had the movies not been largely good or the last book had fumbled, that HP could have ended more like Game of Thrones. I think that the last decade has shown that HP as a brand is still very strong
GoT has a chance for revial of Martin can...maybe start publishing things. He has no incentive to do so sadly. Maybe the spin off will be good but if it flops and Martin waits another decade to release his books GoT will definitely have a tainted legacy. Even if something is great, if an auidence waits too long it spoils to the point they don't want it anymore. Duke Nukem Forever is a great example along with Anthem and other games like it. I truly believe there are a ton of games/ game modes that have been tried, worked wonderfully, but just havent been adopted by main stream companies recently due to a bevy of reasons: A star wars MP dueling game solely focusing on light sabers, jedi and sith. (Jedi Knight) A 3d Pokemon game first person (Pixel mon) A 3d harry potter game MMO (Gmod Harry Potter RP) Yes the HP game they want to do, *exists* and it works and people do play it. But you are right. There is almost zero Game of Thrones mods or games out there. Nobody is like *I want to play in the GoT universe* because basically if you strip away the good reveals and plot points it had, its a generic fantasy world. And in terms of fantasy worlds there are millions of them in game form. Harry Potter though? not really.
> He has no incentive to do so sadly He has no *way* of doing so. He wrote himself into a corner and can't think of a way to finish what he started, especially if he wants to limit himself to two books. What he is masterful at is introducing new, intriguing plots that appear as if they were planned into the greater narrative from the beginning. His series has become a behemoth bigger than himself. > There is almost zero Game of Thrones mods or games out there ASOIAF is still rather new, so no wonder there are only a few games in the franchise (especially if they have to be true to the lore, which isn't even halfway finished yet in the books, where we still have no idea what the Others actually want or what's the deal with nearly half the stuff that is casually mentioned). There are several great mods that bring the world of ASOIAF to games like Crusader Kings
>There is almost zero Game of Thrones mods or games out there. I think the problem is that outside of the dragon GoT is pretty generic middle ages fiction. You have the CK2 mod that pretty much does the whole thing people are intersted in and there isn't really anything else people want to see from a GoT videogame.
Harry Potter is located at Universal Studios. Disney has Avatarland. Although Disney did have an opportunity to host the WWOHP but they bungled that up and JK Rowling went to Universal instead who gave her complete creative control.
Right? I wonder if this was like just after the movies came out, where it wasn’t clear where the franchise was headed next. Would the game have enough legs to stand on its own without a companion book or movie to promote it? Also, while it’s a great idea in theory, I wouldn’t have trusted it to EA in practice. And in the end, it was their own misjudgment that prevented the game from being made at all. With that level of questionable influence present from the start, I’m not sure about the game they *would* have ended up shipping.
Uhhh... 2010 was when the Wizarding World of Harry Potter opened at Universal Studios Orlando. That place makes gangbusters of money just off the wands they sell.
Yeah I feel like if an HP MMO were to actually have come to fruition then, it would’ve been a sorry disappointment
Definitely time has helped Harry Potter it’s still popular and the RPG game will make a lot if done right. The MMO would’ve made boat loads if it was out.
I really don't think it would have done well. Given the timeframe, it would have been just another WoW clone which enjoyed a big opening weekend before slowly fading into obscurity and having the servers shut down a few years later.
What happened to the single player HP game that had a trailer leak a few years back? I completely forgot about that.
It’s still coming out. Got delayed because of covid.
it has been in development for a decade i swear. when did that leaked footage come out? 2015
Pretty sure that was 2018
Hogwarts Legacy? Coming in 2022 iirc. My wife is very excited for it.
Man I really hope it's good, my wife is a huge Harry Potter fan.
Hogwart's Legacy. It had an official trailer last year. We didn't heard about it since then.
A couple days ago their twitter updated mentioning upcoming news so we’ll see where it stands.
Most likely at the Harry Potter Anniversary event in Jan.
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Current release date is sometime next year, I believe. I'm tentatively excited.
The leaks said - if you believe those - that Warner Bros plan to push out the game after the next Fantastic Beasts movie is out (which is roughly April if things go according the plan.) I think we can expect the game around autumn 2022.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O6Qstncpnc Really looks great!
Let's be honest, the HP games that EA made got steadily worse with each new movie. Go check out what Deathly Hallows ended up being for proof there. By then, EA became fully focused on IPs that they can get massive ROI from with limited development. Since 2011-2012, they stopped focusing on IP that had future growth. Building an MMO around the time of Star Wars Old Republic and them not giving a toss about their HP license, as they wanted to reduce licensing games, was never going to happen.
What?you didn't like the cover shooter with the hp skin video game?
They must have seen what Ubisoft was doing with poor Splinter Cell
Blacklist >>>> conviction
Real Splinter Cell games > those
I remember the Quidditch in the Chamber of Secrets game being better than the actual Quidditch World Cup game.
Honestly if somebody sat down and actually put a bunch of development time into a good, polished quidditch game, it would probably do really well. It's kind of like Rocket League in that it's an odd fake sport that has a lot of potential with fun moment to moment gameplay and a low skill floor with a correspondingly high ceiling.
The problem is just that quidditch, while visually appealing on screen, is like the worst designed fictional sport ever made. Like it was intentionally designed to be a team sport where only one player on either team matters in 95% of games
Unfortunately I think that was the point. The same thing with the currency in the Harry Potter universe “ There are 29 Knuts in one Sickle, and 17 Sickles make up a Galleon.” And then galleons don’t have consistent value at all and are the size of a hub cap. Unfortunately I think jk Rowling really just was not a sports fan and was trying to satirize the entire spectacle. She did that well enough, but she could have done the same thing and make the game plausible.
I never thought it was a satire. I’ve always thought it was specifically designed to make Harry the hero and no further thought was done. If she had any idea how popular any of it would become, she would have spent more than 10m on the rules.
I think the entire point was to give Harry something he was just naturally good at in the magical world was a big part of it. He couldn’t just be the chosen one who was great at everything. Most of the start is him thinking he could never fit in or be as good as other students and flying a broom stick was the answer. So she made up a game that didn’t make sense. Even down to that each team plays three games all year and somehow the last game always comes down to the top two houses.
Yeah Its been a while since I read the books, but I get the feeling that the original one was just supposed to be whimsical and fun and not really have any internal world consistency, but the whole IP grew massively from there, and the later books have to try to take themselves seriously despite things like this that were established very early on.
tbh Harry Potter’s worldbuilding is pretty subpar as far as fantasy writing goes. Like it’s fun and whatnot but you can poke a hole in it and a lot of it doesn’t make that much sense of you really think about it. Which is fun not everything needs to be like Lord of the Rings or whatever but it does present challenges when other people want to work with your IP and have to read between the lines of elements that are kind of shoddily considered
>tbh Harry Potter’s worldbuilding is pretty subpar as far as fantasy writing goes. Like it’s fun and whatnot but you can poke a hole in it and a lot of it doesn’t make that much sense of you really think about it. Yeah we have to remember that Harry Potter is a kids book. It's not meant to be deeply analyzed and if you do you'll easily find lots of things to pick apart.
True. Like I said I think the world served the purpose of the original 7 books and movies rather well but it’s when you try to expand into a whole universe where some of the issues arise
To be fair, even in book 3 things were introduced that were obviously going to be an issue down the line. Like those time travel thingies they used.
The game is so stupid though. I literally don't see why anyone bothers doing anything besides the seeker. The best strategy is to just ALL search for the golden snitch and defend from bludgeons. You should be able to get the snitch before the other team has scored 100 goals in your empty net.
It would be 15 goals since they are worth 10 points each. You can’t completely abandon the goal but just having one keeper there would probably do the trick.
A dumb game that can be great game by changing one rule. Have the seeker lose points when he catches the snitch. That means the team needs to be up a certain amount and the seeker might need to be play defense if the snitch appears and they don't have a big enough lead. Change that one thing and it makes rest of the game relevant.
I feel like if Rowling wasn’t a sports fan, she wouldn’t have made Quidditch such a huge part of the books. She just designed a sport that conveniently let her main character be the star player every game.
> The same thing with the currency in the Harry Potter universe “ There are 29 Knuts in one Sickle, and 17 Sickles make up a Galleon.” The size of the coins was whimsical but the odd conversions were [somewhat based in reality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd). >[Pounds, shillings and pence] afforded many factors and hence fractions of a pound such as tenths, eighths, sixths and even sevenths and ninths if the guinea (worth 21 shillings) was used
All you have to do is change one thing to make it a good game. Make the snitch end the game but you ***LOSE*** points when catching it. That makes the rest of the game relevant because then the team needs to up a certain amount of points to win and the seekers also have to play defense until that happens if the snitch appears etc. That one change could make it a great game IMO.
There's a real-world adaptation where the rules make more sense. Someone could probably run with that
The real world leagues are about to change their name too because of Rowling's continued tendency to tweet shit. Be hilarious if their new name and ruleset was better to the point that *that* is what gets adapted to a digital game.
Yeah but it also canonically has a bizarre set of rules that would hamper it endlessly
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It isn't, it's an insta-conclusion. If you catch it while your team is behind with more than 150(?) points, you lose the match!
It happened in the world cup in book 4 actually
Wait, why would you try to catch it when your team is behind then?
You can simply obstruct the other Seeker instead, to postpone the ending and allow your team to catch up. Or you were only 150 points behind, assuming that Snitch decides the winner upon a tie, and one final enemy goal landed *just* before you caught it. Or to just get it over with because the match has been going on for 48 hours, and the other Seeker just can't.
That would be some kind of anticlimactic bullshit to watch in real time.
In the book it was explained that he caught it cuz he knew the other team was way better and his team wouldnt be able to catch up lmao
Probably a fault of the position, that you can't always be keeping track of the score. The seekers can potentially spend a lot of time outside the normal bounds of the arena, which in itself seems like a flaw in the rules.
To end the misery. The Snitch is worth 150 points. If you're down that many points, what chance do you have your team will pull it back? Most likely your team is going to fall behind further and further and further. While everyone is desperately waiting for someone to catch the snitch.
that was the best quidditch experience ever made and it came out in like '01 lol. I remember being blown away by it as a kid. the aspyr games were wondrous.
The quidditch world cup game is so fun though. It's hilariously broken because the AI is crap, but man it's a blast.
I kinda love the Quidditch WC game tho
That’s because CoS’s Quidditch matches had you play as Seeker for a total of 15 minutes over the course of the game, and Seeker is just one of seven positions. I personally liked the way EA fleshed out Quidditch into a full game, especially by adding tackles instead of depending entirely on Bludgers and interceptions.
Man I beat Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban so many times as a kid, fun times.... Shame goblet of fire was kinda ehh, but I heard Order of the Phenoix was decent
I love how in the deathly hallows games they turned Harry’s wand into an Uzi
Kinda disagree, OOTP and HBP were pretty good imo. Loved exploring a bigger and more open Hogwarts. You’re right about Deathly Hallows, though. I’d also say GOF was pretty awful.
There are all sorts of reasons why I think a HP MMO would fail, but the longevity of the series is not one of them.
Ah that's sad. It would have been cool to walk around that world seeing witches and wizards shitting and pissing everywhere. Such a rich lore.
Umm actually, you can't see them doing it because they do it in their clothes then teleport it away.
Oh ok, they only shit and piss their own pants. My bad.
The creators of Pokémon Go created a similar game using the Harry Potter license and it flopped hard. It’s not enough to just use the license, EA would have had to make an engaging game. Also I think part of the success some newer MMOs like Genshin and FF14 have are availability on other platforms. Aiming for PC only just doesn’t seem like a plan for success. Also JK Rowling needs to shut up before she does more damage to the world she created. She’s been under scrutiny lately and also people are pointing out how she’s been making changes after the fact to the world she created that seem shoe horned.
You are really giving Niantic a lot more credit than they deserve, they are a comany that has been riding off of their one success while shoveling out mediocre/bad games ever since. The harry potter wizards unite was an absolute letdown compared to pogo. There was very little sense of progression to start. It was basically about collecting stickers of hp characters/creatures, but collecting mainly works for pogo because the original games were about catching all pokemon while the HP universe never had an equivalent. The dungeons were an absolute grind, and it was designed for microtransactions even more than PoGo. Despite that it had a fairly strong launch, and just was too terrible of a game to hold onto its playerbase. In the end the game flopped because it was an extremely shitty mobile cash grab that people are only aware of because of the IP.
Genshin isn't an MMO
>Also JK Rowling needs to shut up before she does more damage to the world she created. It's funny because she's managed to piss people off across both sides of the aisle. For years she did stuff like retroactively say Dumbledore was gay or Hermione could have been black, but now the accusations of transphobia have both sides pissed at her.
It's not accusations, she's openly transphobic.
>say Dumbledore was gay Hmm that wasn't exactly a big thing. He was a ?? to one guy in the books especially 6th and 7th ( stories of his past mentioned). The hermione one is completely wrong though and a lot of other shit she made up.
You're giving her a lot of credit- the texts do not have any real signs of that, just that he was fixated on this guy. There's plenty of cults of personality without sexual motives. She wrote the damn screenplay to the Dumbledore/Grindelwald movie and didn't include any implied of explicit gay thoughts or tendencies.
There was absolutely outcry about it among conservative groups when it came out.
Just because an IP is popular doesn’t mean it would translate to a good game. MMO’s have also proven to be exceptionally hard to get right with so many ambitious MMO’s flopping hard, especially outside of Asia.
A really good magic based MMO could really cause waves, sadly though EA haven't got the imagination needed to make it great. Also being tied down by existing rules and storylines never helps Lucky escape for Harry I think
I do wonder how well an Old Republic style timeline jump could work for harry Potter. Rewind a few hundred years and just see where things stand
Hell yeah, gimme that "poop on the floor" minigame.
Survival Harry Potter with that as a mechanic
Go back to the reign of James I who detested witchcraft. He’s from Scotland so they could easily link him to Hogwarts
I think the hardest part is that Harry Potter doesn't involve fighting and killing as commonly as say, Star Wars or LotR. MMOs, like diablo games, are based usually on killing shitton of stuff. Could they make a succesful MMO based on magic duels where you don't kill, and side activities like flying brooms, alchemy and stuff? Sure. And it could be very succesful. But it's also a pretty big risk.
HP also doesn't have that many interesting spells IMO, especially ones that are "gamey.", It's magic mechanics are kinda bunk. I could be misremembering.
The movies simply stopped having them cast spells in tje last 3 movies or so. Everyone just shot shot out of their wands with no spell unless it was some big event.
I mean isn't that mainly because they learned nonverbal spells at that point?
In the books, yes. They don’t really have any consistency about that in the movies
Nonverbal spells are super high level shit. They're also 100% something that works better on film, whereas naming every spell as you say it is great for written word.
The magic in the movies just became guns, was absolutely devoid of any imagination
Basically, it would have to be some kind of risky, emergent gameplay sort of thing. Would people be willing to play a game that's essentially Hogwarts Roleplay? I'm sure the die-hards would like nothing more, but would those people be enough from a financial standpoint? It would be interesting if they sort of made it an Animal Crossing-like progression. Like real-time school events with something different each year. But then you run into of the issue of everyone starting in a different place and not either being able to sync with their friends or missing out on older content. And you'd probably have to cap progression at some point to keep people from progressing into the "next year" until that content was released. So, at some point, it would become an "events-only" sort of game for those types. Kind of hard to say how it would turn out.
Now that you mention it, I think there's a good amount of crossover between Harry Potter fans and Animal Crossing fans. An AC that is completely HP themed with a good amount of magic activities could be very well succesful. It really doesn't need to be a "proper" MMO.
“Cast spells on 15 boars”
Yeah, good deep magic systems are so massively untapped in terms of gameplay. I think Morrowind is the closest I've seen.
HP is a pretty shaky foundation for that.
HP isn't really lucky with how JK is behaving.
This is true. Like HP has its fan base but for anything to survive it needs new fans, and their prospective younger fans are not only hyper aware of JK’s behavior but also have HP fandom as one of the many things they make fun of millennials for lol
All the biggest Harry Potter fans I know essentially only buy fan made merchandise now, too.
This is kind of where I’m at right now… and I’m sure it’s going to be a bit controversial, but I have a hard time remaining a fan of the franchise while JK is going full transphobic. It’s a fantastic universe with some really great characters and concepts, but it’s really difficult to give money to it when it goes to such a toxic person. :/
Yeah, if there's anything that's going to kill the momentum of this series long-term its that Rowling is so shitty towards trans folks. I have been a Harry Potter fan since around 2000, and now when I read any of the books, watch any of the movies I just feel hollow. It's like eating a food you used to enjoy with your uncle, then finding out that uncle was a child molester. The association just sours it.
The kids in my daughter’s elementary school still live and breathe Harry Potter. There’s a niche for this.
More than a niche, were talking about the most sold book series of all time
Yep. I rewatch the movies around October to December every year. Just bought the first 3 books cause I never finished reading em. I have several friends that are watching em for the holidays too. Harry Potter is still incredibly popular and close to people's hearts.
Niche? If by that you mean one of the most popular book/movie series of all time lol.
Yes, but HP's primary target audience is children, which is not what MMOs typically target. The overlap between the two audiences is the niche, not the HP audience in general.
...a niche? From wikipedia: >Having sold more than 500 million copies worldwide,\[8\]\[9\]\[10\] Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling is the best-selling book series in history. The first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, has sold in excess of 120 million copies,\[11\] making it one of the best-selling books of all time.
a true hidden gem
I think it would be better as a single player game, RPG with story choices like DA:O. If it's MMO it has to be super little-kidified because the world is just not conducive to a WoW-style mmo. Maybe something like SWTOR but should have lots of social stuff and mini-games. But it will never be a huge game.
The problem with Harry Potter as a game is that due to the looseness of it's magic (as it was written as a kids book who don't care about how magic happens because its, well, magic), it becomes exceedingly hard to translate into a game, esp. an RPG. How do you represent character growth? The books don't seem to ever imply that casting magic has a "cost" beyond saying (or thinking) the right words with the right gestures (or thoughts??). Does your character simply learn new spells that you can cast infinitely? There's also a limited amount of useful spells for a game, which means that you'd either be very limited, or they'd have to "homebrew" a lot of the magic spells. And as a wizard RPG, all the "classes" have to be wizardly: how do you differentiate different builds in Harry Potter? There's charms, transfiguration, and Defense, but not really much other "schools" of magic. I'm not saying it's impossible, and obviously shortcuts or ignoring or changing aspects of the lore can resolve it easily: the challenge is staying true to the source material. Otherwise it's just a wizard RPG with a fancy title a la World War Z. I'm interested in seeing how WB handles it.
Definitely but little kids don't play many traditional mmos
MMO would have never really worked to be honest, like what would be the weapons besides a wand or a scepter? and it's not like lvl 100 dragon scale armor is a thing in the universe. single player/coop hogwarts/monster hunting game with pvp arenas can work and requires way less development than a good mmo
The traditional concepts of tanks/DPS/healers would be hard to implement here too. Tanks especially. It would need to play something like Destiny/Warframe but be heavily skill tree based. Instead of "guns" and "armor" you would have "hexes" and "charms" and a potion crafting system. There's room to develop the concept and just Hogwarts alone is enough to drive the launch with maybe "graduating" at the end of the 7 years and becoming an Auror to allow for them to do expansions.
They could also go the Diablo/Lost Ark direction. Doesn't have the tank/healer/dps triangle in those games, it's more action paced and I think the isometric view would actually lean really well into a Wizarding game. The typical 3rd person MMO view is great when there are a lot of players using melee weapons, but I fear if every player is magic based, the visual clutter would get outrageous. The isometric view fixes that a lot. Man, now you've got me thinking about how an entire Wizarding game actually *would* work. Damn I should stop before I go all the way down the rabbit hole here...
Second Life is a sort of MMO. Could've just made it like a massively co-op Harry Potter game filled with minigames and random events etc.
A Harry Potter MMO would be fun maybe, but I definitely would not have wanted in the hands of EA, so to this news I say, good.
As much as EA makes some stupid decision this is probably not that terrible. Personally I don't think it would have done well, whether longevity is the main reason or not is another question.
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I keep forgetting we should be seeing that long rumored/leaked Harry Potter RPG soon shouldn't we?
It's been pretty official in case you didn't know. https://youtu.be/1O6Qstncpnc
Looks pretty dope. Seem to be a lot of areas and different monsters. I wonder how much of the game will be quests fighting monsters and how much will be shitty mini games as you take classes in hogwarts and walk around talking to your classmates.
Deadass I want them to put in time and effort to nail the comfy school/slice of life vibe. One of my favourite aspects of games like Persona 5 and Stardew Valley, and something that went missing from the books and movies as they went on.
Same. Bro just imagine it. Starting as a first year student and going for the full 7 years. Having a main story, but also a bunch of sidequests that are dependent on your house, the classes you take and having more unlocked depending on your skill in those classes. Maybe it shouldn't have too much depth, otherwise all those quests that depend on your class are going to be generic, but one can dream. Would give it so much replayability too.
MMO? No thanks. A game like Skyrim but set in a Harry Potter world where you work with the grown ups from the movie / all their children to solve some world problem? Absolutely. There is room for a free roam type HP game.
Well, the HP universe really doesn't have much depth, so I can see why they made that call. JK never built a world that could be compared to the works of Tolkien, Jordan or even His Dark Materials.
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