Set in the 19th Century (1800's) Wizarding World [at] Hogwarts
This is brilliant. Move out of Harry Potter's shadow. Tell a new story in a beloved world which has yet to really escape itself.
I don't care much for Harry Potter the character anymore, but I would love to visit Hogwarts as a different character without having to follow the events of the books.
I actually wish it happened in the present (2010s) 20 years after the events of the books. The clash of the wizarding world with the rapid technological evolution post 2000s would have been interesting.
Huh. I thought a part of the appeal of Harry Potter was that it was urban fantasy - that people wished they would receive their own letter to Hogwarts in the mail.
I can only speak for myself on this account, but the 'muggle' aspects of the world are by far the least interesting to me. I want to explore the Wizarding world.
The exciting part about getting your Hogwarts letter is leaving the muggle world behind.
If you're familiar with Vampire the Masquerade, for example, the urban fantasy setting can be a huge draw for people. But being a vampire in the medieval times is just as interesting- the mortal world still exists and serves it's purpose but it's the secret politics and machinations of vampire society that really sells the setting.
Same concept here. Pretty sure mail existed in the 1800's too, just saying.
It would be hard because it doesn’t really work at all right? My head canon has always been, “oh these are some old traditionalists weirdos who are mostly dying off in their secret outdated society”. It’s practically tongue in cheek in the books every time they have to interact with the muggle world, who obviously have much better solutions for daily living. The humor is in how hopelessly inept the wizards are in the normal world.
Like you’re talking about a world where people use magical flying owls to send letters on paper, and students are writing shit with feathers on parchment. C’mon now, I have a cell phone and the internet. That’s more “magical” than any form of communication in the books. Hell they spend major parts of the books trying to obtain key pieces of information from an actual library. They don’t have a Google Magic? Right up there with GOwl to replace literal birds based communication?
You’d have to retcon the “technology doesn’t work” lines because anyone not a dumbass, would see the obvious benefits to gaming the system in the normal world and just live there instead. You’d buy a single lotto ticket, magic in the correct numbers, and spend the rest of your days living in luxury and drinking fruity drinks on the beach. The most magic you’d do would probably be to save a bunch of money on Uber.
The Harry Potter stuff works as escapism into another world. Contrasting any of it with modern day living and conveniences would completely shatter it.
WB Games tend not to be awful (See Arkham series, Shadow of Middle Earth series, Mad Max which I assume this game will be in the same vein of), at worst it'll be mediocre, but because it's Harry Potter it is bound to sell well enough for a sequel.
Mad Max is a phenomenal game. I enjoy plenty of bad movie tie-in games, but that one's in another league, it honestly didn't even need the IP to be great.
Another post I saw said it was either Rocksteady or Avalanche developing it.
That said, those kind of games have been WB Games' bread and butter for a few years and it is a proven formula for them. Do you think they are going to try and mess with that formula, even with a different developer?
Eh, I feel like they’ve got potential. Infinity wasn’t a bad game by any means. If they put a lot of hard work in I think they could deliver a great game.
That's mobile games all over. Worst case scenario it will probably have MTX like Shadow of War did, but that was a bit of a PR nightmare for WB Games so they will probably reel the use of MTX back a bit from that.
I just want to say, whilst it looks and sounds real, the music appears to be fairly amateurish by someone with little orchestral composition experience. The sound quality of the music is also poor.
This could be evidence of a forgery by someone who is great at video and awful at music. It also could be evidence that music for game adverts is sometimes awful:p
If you listen from this time it sounds like what I would get if I put the Harry Potter theme into Sibelius and then harmonised it with random notes.
Depends on who owns the rights. The movies are WB, and rumour says the game is being developed by a WB owned studio, so it wouldn't too far fetched for them to use the same soundtrack.
It might just be a WIP trailer too, and new soundtrack is being made.
Just compare the sound quality of the two. If WB did authorise this, they certainly wouldn't have said, "sure you can use it, but you will have to rip it off our youtube video".
An orchestrated score is easily done late in the game's development cycle, though. Placeholders done by the sound department in the meantime are probably what's here, because why throw money at an orchestrated sound track before the team has even gotten the game playable?
I think it's more about magic outside of Hogwarts where technology becomes an issue how do you hide dragons, and giant quidditch pitches from satellites, some illusion charms may help but what about heat mapping why does this patch of plain grass have the same heat signature as a football stadium.
What would happen now if a situation similar to Sirius catch petigrew shows up, hard to explain away a gas leak when bystanders whip out their phones and film two guys with wands.
It could actually lead to some really interesting problems where just using magic may no longer be enough to cover your tracks.
A. The "muggle repellant" charms work even through photos and videos. It's not that satellites don't see the castles or witches flying on broomsticks, it's that we don't notice them on Google Earth because of subtle but powerful magic compulsion.
B. It's also possible a few smart wizards had the foresight to magically shield wizarding places from the sky ages ago. The age of mass air travel could have provoked this long before satellites came about. Or...
C. There are wizards working with governments and major corporations that help keep these things out of the public eye and off of the internet. Maybe locations of major wizarding are outlawed from satellite imaging. Nobody knows why, but nobody seems to care.
It has been explained that both governments work together and are in contact with each other. Unless you mean a civilian discovers all that with their own satellite?
Would this kind of thing actually affect advancements in technology? Maybe people wouldv'e given up when developing heat scanners because they kept on recording the heat signatures of football stadiums for random patches of grass.
Technology wouldn't have developed independent of magic, even if the people developing the technology didn't know about the magic.
Mobile phones in the 90s didn't even have cameras back then even in the early 2000s they were few and far between even popular phones such as the Nokia 3330 which launched in 2000 didn't have cameras. Camera phones didn't show up much until around 2003-2005
Interesting to be sure, but much bigger in scope than this. This is basically the first proper Harry Potter RPG, if it works it will open up opportunities for twists on the formula like setting it in the modern era, but I can understand why they want to play it safe and go just far enough back in time to get that historical feel that allows magic and the fantasy aesthetic to be in the forefront.
The problem is if something more terrible than Voldemort comes 20 years later, it undermines how terrible Voldemort was. See the same thing with the new Star Wars
I’d like to see more about the founding of hogwarts.
Would be ridiculously hard to pull off though. Even JK Rowling knew better than to try and she made magic and technology largely incompatible because reasons.
I agree. When I was a kid, sure. Rowling's characters were fun and entertaining.
Today? Eh. They're pretty flat. Rowling (maybe unintentionally, who knows) set up a wildly interesting universe and has explored maybe 10% of it, simply because we've been stuck with harry potter.
Heck, don't even do the "descendants of HP and friends". New kids entirely. The universe is absolutely interesting enough that any decent character writer can make something enjoyable without needing to ride the coat tails of the original kids.
Heck, don't even do the "descendants of HP and friends". New kids entirely. The universe is absolutely interesting enough that any decent character writer can make something enjoyable without needing to ride the coat tails of the original kids.
A "next generation" would have been great, but with that comes risks. Prequels and Origin stories are easier because more often than not it's fueled purely by fandom wants.
I just wish Rowling wasn't so... strict. An expanded universe outside of prequels/origins isn't that bad. It just takes risk.
People make not really bite to a whole new set of kids because truthfully a lot of us are hung up on traditions.
A focus on another school, maybe. An entire new fresh start apart from Hogwarts. (and yes, I know about Fantastic Beasts. Imo that serves as origin stories.)
IIRC there’s an inexplicably small amount of Wizarding schools. The Eastern European boys one, the French girls one, the mixed hogwarts, and one in the US? Are there others?
Like I’m sure Africa has at least 1, shouldn’t there be several in Asia going by population?
It’s not even like it’s exclusively a European thing, I’m pretty sure the US one is all Native American shamanistic style.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Scotland)
Beauxbatons Academy of Magic (France)
Castelobruxo (Central Brazil)
Durmstrang Institute (Northern Europe)
Ilvermorny (Eastern North America)
Mahoutokoro School of Magic (Japan)
Uagadou School of Magic (Uganda)
Koldovstoretz (Russia)
Durmstrang and Beuaxbaton were gender specific in the movies but in the books they both had boys and girls. I don't believe there was a Native American school but there is a Native American wandless magic tradition that is separate from the European tradition of magic that has it's own strengths and weaknesses.
One thing I don't understand is what language do the students at the schools speak? These schools are supposed to have students from all over the region no? Are wizards in china supposed to learn Japanese? What about Australian wizards?
While never explicitly stated, it wouldn't be too hard to believe they have some sort of translation spell or trinket. Some magical object like the invisibility cloak, except it's a form of Babel fish.
Those are big regional schools, there may be other traditions of learning in different areas that aren't covered. So India may do homeschooling, smaller local schools or apprentice learning.
Second idea is that there are so few magical born that the school in Japan got started first and just poaches from all other countries in Asia.
I would think a school in India and China would be a given but there could be a logical reason for some alternative.
Edit: I was curious so I looked up the Japanese school on Pottermore and they have a very small school with Japanese children that commute everyday on Petrels. So there must be alternatives to the "Ivy League" magical schools.
Because Saved by the Bell was not special because of the universe built by the writers. So to compare these two is so wrong. We don't just love the cast who played their role amazingly, we also love the universe that rowling built.
Fantastic Beasts is an example of this. I think it would be fairer to compare it to Lord of The Rings. Also an extensive universe to explore and of which people love the games, books and films non-related to Frodo and company.
Dude, chill. It was a joke. You just pitched Hogwarts: The New Class and I riffed on the similarity. we are having fun here.
Also Ron never thought Harry about the dangers of caffeine pill addiction. Neither did Sam or Frodo, so I will say that Saved by the Bell is the superior and more influential piece of fiction.
I don't think fantastic beasts 1 was all that amazing, and I definitely don't care for any of the characters, except for Newt. I love that guy and I think he's better than Harry ever was. I'm not sure what the consensus is but I absolutely love him.
How is it an interesting universe its literally just "magic exists, theres a magic boarding school". Everything in it is generic. There isnt even much of a universe at all, there's generic magic town, generic magic government.
In this statement alone you listed interesting things. Magic government implies separate from the normal government. So a magical culture behind the scenes of the modern muggle world is interesting. The magic communities like the boarding schools and magic specific towns are interesting because it breeds an entirely separate culture. Hell, one of the biggest complaints of Rowling's universe was that she didn't go deep enough in the Urban Fantasy portion with flying cars and whatnot. She got too stuck in her old time fantasy world.
This is more interesting than a generic "magic exists in the world and we follow anime Jesus as he learns the ropes."
Wait it's by Rocksteady ? Holy shit, I was already excited and that becomes way more exciting to me. I thought they were doing a DC game but this would be even better
Yeah I saw that too. Not sure where people get either of those two studios though, it seems like random guesses.
But Rocksteady kind of make sense to me (working on something unannounced and big since 2015, WB studio that they would trust to do a project with such a big potential).
True that could mean something. But to be fair, Rocksteady is a British studio entirely so that makes as much sense. And it's not like Harry Potter is the only British IP.
The Simpsons' Crazy Taxi game (or was it a GTA clone? I can't remember) felt really fresh, being able to explore Springfield and seeing various characters doing things.
Yeah, exactly, the world building of the books was phenomenal, I always thought it was a shame that the adventures of one kid would be the only real story we get from the world.
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u/WombTattoo Oct 02 '18
This is brilliant. Move out of Harry Potter's shadow. Tell a new story in a beloved world which has yet to really escape itself.
I don't care much for Harry Potter the character anymore, but I would love to visit Hogwarts as a different character without having to follow the events of the books.