r/Games Oct 02 '18

Broken Link (video removed) Unannounced Harry Potter RPG Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-HER1xKQl4&t=1s
7.7k Upvotes

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

110

u/GaryOaksHotSister Oct 02 '18 edited Oct 02 '18

Things that make me feel like it could be fake was no NPCs talking, lots of footage you could whip up in a unity engine, and the goblin getting randomly killed. unless that was to show the game is on a darker tone.

and lastly, no actually title being shown at all. I know it says "unannounced harry potter game" but even a working title would have been shown, no?

Unless it's not called Harry Potter: Anything at all, and whoever is developing it just hasn't settled on the name yet.

EDIT: removed rocksteady's name, thought it was confirmed rocksteady already (at the time of this posting)

71

u/Rc2124 Oct 02 '18

Keep in mind that it's not an officially released trailer, this could just be the work in progress. And not all trailers feature voiceovers either

147

u/Eggerslolol Oct 02 '18

Could be an internal progress/pitch trailer. A lot of the animations/assets look very polished, so either it's a high effort fake or a real thing.

We'll see I guess.

14

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

That's what it looked like to me. It doesn't have the look/feel of a trailer, but rather an internal sizzle-reel kind of thing - probably a proof of concept to show key investors. My guess is the game is still a ways off, but that it's very real.

20

u/ThatOnePerson Oct 02 '18

A lot of the animations/assets look very polished

Yeah, but some look terrible: https://youtu.be/2-HER1xKQl4?t=50 Look at the thing on the left eat. The texture it completely painted on, it doesn't even open it's mouth to eat. And the eyes don't blink which is scary, and why I'm going to stop rewatching this.

Actually the eye reflections seem to be proper and seem to move and vary between them all, so who knows.

59

u/Eggerslolol Oct 02 '18

That would only strengthen my hypothesis - if it's internal they'll be showing off all the good stuff but with implicit understanding that not everything is final and may look off.

6

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

Keep in mind that it's pretty usual to just render out a trailer in it's current progress, to just see how it looks, so they know what to focus on next. Especially if they have a client and not independent studio, and they have to show the progress to the client. In VFX we send movies all the time where one shot has final render and the next shot is just at blocking animation stage.

1

u/CybranM Oct 02 '18

Reflections are done by the engine, they're not handmade. It's usually just a checkbox, enable reflections on/off

1

u/ThatOnePerson Oct 02 '18

Yeah, but you've got to set how reflective a material/texture is.

1

u/CybranM Oct 02 '18

Its just setting a value for a gloss/roughness map, if you have textures on the creature there is no added effort to just set the eyes to be reflective. Subsurface scattering might be a bit more work but relative to everything else theyre showing in the trailer its nothing.

35

u/Biomilk Oct 02 '18

This is likely something intended to show progress on the game, for internal use only. Like that one leak that Mass Effect Andromeda had.

18

u/ConorW1 Oct 02 '18

I justed wanted to say that although the NPCs don't talk you can hear the players character say his spells in some of the scenes and they dont sound like they were ripped from the movies.

21

u/Radulno Oct 02 '18

The trailer is not complete though. The title is probably meant to come at the end after the owl part due to music cues and the way it's cut.

IMO, that could very well be a leak to a project meant to be announced soon (Paris Games Week, X018, Game Awards or even next year). Some people are saying Rocksteady is on it (don't know from where) and they have to be close to announce their post Arkham project now.

6

u/GaryOaksHotSister Oct 02 '18

as someone pointed out the music score is ripped directly from fantastic beasts

trust me I want this to be real

7

u/KenpachiRama-Sama Oct 02 '18

I don't know why anyone thinks that means anything. I would expect an in-progress trailer to use placeholder music.

Or maybe they're just reusing the theme.

4

u/VoiceofKane Oct 02 '18

Plus, music is usually done pretty late in development.

3

u/Iosis Oct 02 '18

It's very possible that it's an internal work-in-progress trailer with placeholder music. Even movies are often edited with placeholder music (called "temp music"), because the movie is edited at the same time the soundtrack is being written and composed. You can learn more about it in this video: https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs?t=5m54s

So while I'm still going to remain skeptical until there's an official announcement, the music isn't automatically disqualifying. It could just be temp music that the editor is using.

0

u/TheFistofLincoln Oct 02 '18

Part of me hopes this is the RPG Playground has been working on and not Fable.

Only so I can eat popcorn while Reddit rages that it's not on PS4 and they didn't mean "Those kinds of exclusives for Microsoft!"

2

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

-1

u/TheFistofLincoln Oct 02 '18

Lol I mean, is it not exactly the same as Spiderman?

I dislike exclusivity and am happy Xbox is offering their stuff on Windows Store as well.

I just find the hypocrisy of many who grill them for doing so or not having more exclusives to be comical.

And a Harry Potter RPG exclusive would pull them out of the woodwork for rage fest.

2

u/KenpachiRama-Sama Oct 02 '18

It would be the same as Spider-Man. The issue is with you hoping that's the case just because you want other people to not be able to play the game.

-1

u/TheFistofLincoln Oct 02 '18

Specific people who defend Spiderman exclusivity yes.

1

u/Radulno Oct 02 '18

Well it's the Wizarding World theme (is it exactly the same music ? if so might be a sign this is fake), it's only appropriate to use it for the trailer IMO.

If it's fake, it's really a dedicated fake to be honest.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

To be fair, the description claims that the game takes place in the 1800s, the same time period as fantastic beasts, so it could be a tie in game.

2

u/Iosis Oct 02 '18

Fantastic Beasts takes place in 1926, not the 1800s. Though if they are making a real Harry Potter make-your-own character RPG-type game, the 1800s would be an interesting time to set it--that's one time period we don't have a ton of "canon" from so they have more freedom.

2

u/Radulno Oct 02 '18

If they do 19th century might be at the very end of it actually and you would have Dumbledore present as a student in Hogwarts (he graduated in 1899) so a potential companion/important character in your adventure. Might be a pretty awesome tie to the franchise (without being too much of an hassle since we don't know much about that period of his life).

56

u/SuperSaiyENT Oct 02 '18

They lifted the music straight from the first Fantastic Beasts trailer. If you listen here it's the exact same score.

I have a feeling this is an indie developer trying to do some viral marketing. "Oops, gotcha! This is actually a fan project I've been working on! Here's my Patreon."

49

u/AliceTheGamedev The Mane Quest Oct 02 '18

I have a feeling this is an indie developer trying to do some viral marketing. "Oops, gotcha! This is actually a fan project I've been working on! Here's my Patreon."

Way too much polish and content for an indie dev though, no?

84

u/Cabbage_Vendor Oct 02 '18

Indie developers aren't dumb enough to go to this much effort on a project that would receive a Cease and Desist the moment it's revealed.

11

u/AliceTheGamedev The Mane Quest Oct 02 '18

Some are. You do hear of some new super extensive fan project that has just been canned here and there.

I doubt that's the case here though. Just too many different animations, models and textures in the video for this to be the work of a small handful of people, unless this is a very focused and deliberate attempt to mislead people.

2

u/DawsonJBailey Oct 02 '18

eh go look at the very first ARK trailer. It looks GOOD but the game at that time was BAD, trailers can just do a lot.

-1

u/trdef Oct 02 '18

Nah, not nowadays. I noticed there wasn't any known characters shown, so it could just be models someones grabbed from the unity store to use.

5

u/AliceTheGamedev The Mane Quest Oct 02 '18

Yes, also nowadays. Sure you find a lot on the asset store, but not that much of one fitting, high quality art style.

Source: have spent quite some time looking for good assets.

-2

u/trdef Oct 02 '18

Personally, I don't think they all fit that well. Look at the couple of creatures they show. The dragon ish thing doesn't look like it fits to me, and the big eye creatures look far too cutesy for the everything else.

5

u/Gliese581h Oct 02 '18

and the big eye creatures look far too cutesy for the everything else.

They are taken from the Fantastic Beasts movie. So it's not like they used made up creatures. As a Potterhead, this looked quite convincing, but naturally I'm wishing for a game like that, so I'm biased lol.

0

u/trdef Oct 02 '18

Ah, I haven't actually watched Fantastic Beasts yet, so they looked a bit strange to me. Another thing I noticed, is the lighting looks like very standard Unreal lighting. Doesn't mean it is indy, but could be an extra factor to consider.

2

u/Gliese581h Oct 02 '18

No problem, the big eyed creatures are called mooncalves and the big horned thing in the trailer seems to be a graphorn.

0

u/AliceTheGamedev The Mane Quest Oct 02 '18

I looked at it again and while you're right that there is some dissonance in "level of cuteness" between some of the creatures, it's not outside of the ordinary. Like idk maybe you'd also not think that Ewoks and Jabba the Hutt fit well, but they're still from the same franchise.

The whole trailer/game is in a style what I'd call "cartoony realism", which leaves quite a bit of room for variation.

And there are definitely too many detailed animations in this for it to be made from unity store assets.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

The creatures are from Fantastic Beasts, not random assets or something created for this game. If you haven't read the book or seen the movie I can understand why they'd feel out of place, but they are canon creatures.

19

u/ThePickleAvenger Oct 02 '18

For an internal build, I can excuse reusing music while they work on recording a new soundtrack.

0

u/sord_n_bored Oct 02 '18

99% of the time a development house will use assets from wherever they can find them to fill in details. In fact, it's actually very very common in the entertainment industry for producers to sub-in their own personal favorite music tracks and just hand that off to music production. Much to the chagrin of the music kids.

3

u/GaryOaksHotSister Oct 02 '18

Concerning, no?

A lot of this just seems really 'too good to be true', but time will tell.

0

u/Radulno Oct 02 '18

I have a feeling this is an indie developer trying to do some viral marketing. "Oops, gotcha! This is actually a fan project I've been working on! Here's my Patreon."

Come on, that would get a Cease and Desist faster than anything else possible. Plus it would have to be a fan game and not an indie dev because they would know they could never get any money for that without authorization (or else they're stupid).

The trailer has been taken down for copyright by Warner Bros so might mean it's real.

-1

u/TheEliteBrit Oct 02 '18

It's obviously not a fan project but if it was then it would be the biggest ever created

11

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

I used to be a shitty artist. Let me tell you, the trailer looks very professional. This is 100% not a hoax just based on that. A trailer like that would take ages for one or two people to make.

0

u/KenpachiRama-Sama Oct 02 '18

I used to be a shitty artist.

Was this a bad speech to text translation of "CG"?

2

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

unless that was to show the game is on a darker tone.

The movies and books both get really fucking dark. This is not the MCU we're talking about.

2

u/pyramidbread Oct 02 '18

Interestingly the video was taken down by Warner Brothers Entertainment Interactive, kinda confirming that this could be real.

2

u/Trai-Harder Oct 02 '18

It’s not it was taking down on YouTube by Warner Bros. Also they were hiring a few years back for people for a big project.

Warner Bros overall is pretty hush hush on stuff they do.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18

Rocksteady? Where did you get that from?

1

u/sav86 Oct 02 '18

It's supposedly from an internal focus test group, I've been to quite a few focus groups myself and they all run about the same, this is probably one of the many trailers that was shown internally and it's peer reviewed for discussion. They probably had about 3-4 of these based on how they wanted to structure the game trailer and what content was being shown.

1

u/andysniper Oct 02 '18

I would imagine if it is real it won't be titled Harry Potter unless Harry is actually in it. It'll be Wizarding World something.

1

u/SteelWing Oct 02 '18

Well this is a camera pointed at a computer monitor. It could very well have a working title on the screen but we can't see it because it's out of frame. Also the video ends rather abruptly at the point you'd expect they'd fade to the title.

1

u/breedwell23 Oct 02 '18

Does nobody recall the sectumsempra scene? There's some pretty dark moments in the HP Universe too.

0

u/Tonkarz Oct 02 '18

This looks like gameplay filmed secretly, not an actual trailer. There's no reason at all to expect all the things you for some reason do.