You all know that you'd play them

A few highlights:

I'm hoping that video game developers will notice this article, and get cracking on some of these awesome sounding games.

 

I'd totally play the Warcraft one and Hippogriff Racing. I could only play the Sorting Hat game if it had Hat from TLIL in it though. That was the first (and only, to my knowledge) story to make the Sorting Hat awesome, and no game would be complete without running around stuck to the head of a golem, insulting people and smashing shit.

 

The Grand Theft Auto one sounds awesome. Especially if it features all the characters from the HP verse.

 

D'ya know, a real Quidditch League game would be pretty good if some thought went into it...

Grinning Lizard is plotting...

 

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a few people in the iRC channel about a Brutal Legend/Harry Potter crossover/complete fusion game idea.

To be honest, I'd happily start a modification to do this rough idea (after a design document was fully fleshed out - it's a hobby of mine to do game design) on the Unreal 3.0 Engine, if it wasn't for the fact that it would likely get a C&D letter, or me and the team would get sued by either the folks at Warner, or the folks at EA/Double-Fine Productions.

Ideas thrown about included the movie series' wizarding robes re-imagined and spliced with metalhead subculture fashion (eg, band t-shirts, etc), veela 'Razor Girls' who use either their allure to incapacitate or weaken low level enemy male opponents, or transform and use fireballs as a ranged attack. (http://brutallegend.wikia.com/wiki/Razor_Girls).

There would be two factions, the Light and the Dark, with each faction being obvious. The 'Light' faction's base would be Hogwarts, whilst the 'Dark' faction's base would be either the Malfoy or the Riddle Mansions. Or, a corrupted representation of the Ministry of Magic's design.

Spells from Guitar/Wand Solos would be things like 'The Dark Mark' (like from the books/movies), which adds a temperory map wide aura to terrify most opponents, 'Phoenix Song' which buffs your units for a time, 'Inferi Rising', which turns both your own and enemy dead units in an area into Inferi under your control, and an attack which summons a dementor swarm from off map to your location.

There are plenty of potential units for each faction from the books/movies themselves, such as dementors, veela, giants, werewolves, vampires, thestrals, phoenixes, dragons, death-eaters, aurors, hit-wizards, etc.

 

Ichor, you're making me salivate at the thought of that game. I just bought Brutal Legend a few days ago, too, so I can easily see how the setup of the game makes perfect sense for HP. Instead of summoning the Deuce, you cast an Accio, calling your broom to you. There is such a wellspring of video game ideas within HP, yet EA hasn't utilized really any of them.

I say we write en mass until they get off their asses and make MOAR HARRY POTTER....with dinosaurs, of course.

 

Double-Fine were working on Brutal Legend 2 this year, but 'E-Douchebag-A Games forced them to can it, so they went back to one of their game prototypes that they had whipped up during the first game's development.

As mentioned before, I'm quite willing to start putting a team together to kick this idea off, but the potential legal issues would be a severe crotch kick. Imagine if the mod' was around 20% and in Alpha stages, and a C&D letter gets sent your way? At the moment, that sort of action is the only thing holding me back.

 

Contact someone in EA/Warner/whatever and ask them if they would frown upon you making a Harry Potter game. The worst thing that'll happen is that they'll say no....or not write back at all. /common sense.

Goddamnit, I want a kickass HP game so bad.

 

Potions Mama....

I'm surprised there wasn't a Harry Potter MMO on that list

 

A HP game set up like Overlord 1 & 2 where you play as a budding Dark Lord or even Voldemort himself would be awesome. The minions would of course be the death eaters.

 

Copyright infringement is really hard to get around in games development (even indie non profit ones). Ichor, we could still make the game, just be ambiguous enough about the actual copyrighted stuff. Like nothing HP specific, just generally of the sort. We could then make a "fan-based" addon that would replace our original characters with ones from HP verse. Haven't played Brutal Legend but I'm thinking of a RTS while throwing this out there. I'm in if anyone wants to make the game or any kind of game.

@Redeye: if pulled off correctly that would be a hell of a fucking MMO. Considering the HP fanbase, it has the potential to be such a massive success. I honestly don't know why no one's ever thought of that. I mean, just imagine, you could start your life as a muggleborn or pureblood and then play throughout the life of a wizard while being able to interact with thousands of other real people doing the same is just mind blowing.

 

Oh I promise you, they've already thought of it and they think of it again every single time they see World of Warcraft mentioned. Remember that Warner Bros. decided to acquire Turbine earlier this year, the same Turbine who managed to flesh out and expand the world of Middle-earth for The Lord of the Rings Online without shitting all over the books. If they were picked up to make a Harry Potter MMO then it's a damn good choice, I honestly can't think of any developer I'd trust with the license more.

 

I could imagine that going down well.

"Hi there, I was wondering if you would give us (a small indie group of game developers) permission to create a free game based on an active and lucrative franchise that is currently being milked to death by your company and partners."

To be honest, I don't see that going down too well.

I do.

Bioware.

Nothing HP specific? I could not see that angle working, to be honest, since its design would be derived from the Harry Potter universe in general.

Ripping off Brutal Legend's sort of gameplay (by using it as a gameplay model, like using 'Worker' units seen in unrelated games such as Warcraft and Age of Empires) we would be able to get away with. It's the HP assets that there'd be a problem with.

I do not think that people be interested in using Herman Pothead and Baron Moldyarse instead of Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, and with spells? "Expellianus!" and "Abra-Kadabra!" :awesome

 

Quidditch World Cup was decent back in the day. I wouldn't mind playing a better version now.

 

I actually went hunting for that game last summer. Couldn't find it though. It was okay, but plagued by the fact that it was impossible to even score 200points before the Snitch appeared, making it so that was all that mattered.

I could easily see myself playing a few of these games, but what I'd really like to see is a Harry Potter MMO or one in the style of the Elder Scrolls series.

 

This this this. I would love to see an open ended HP MMO ala Oblivion, minus of course some of the obvious drawbacks of the Elder Scrolls series. I would love the freedom to explore Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, Diagon, etc. and to find new spells, magical artifacts, create new potions, etc. Learning magic could be fun depending on how they handled it...perhaps borrow a bit from Oblivion's system where you pick your skills (or in this case magic) from the character creation and you get better with that school of magic the more time you devote to it, or something. And I really liked Oblivion's potion and spell creation system, so I think it would be cool if they could incorporate something like that without totally ripping it off.

It would also be cool if there was a "disposition" system where you start off neutral and your actions or things that you do slowly change you, with the result of you eventually becoming a dark or "light" wizard; or perhaps even the possibility of staying as a "neutral wizard", with pros and cons for each (think the Red/White/Black orders in the Dragonlance series). I think they did this with one of the Star Wars games, but I never played them and I don't feel like looking it up.

It would probably be pushing it too much, but I would love some kind of relationship system reminiscent of Persona 3/4 where you can choose whoever you want as friends (with the entire cast of HP characters as possiblities, plus maybe a few OC's thrown in), and where you can eventually become bff or lovers with them, with some kind of benefits or rewards for getting to the final stage of the relationship, like in Persona where you get access to the most powerful demon of a particular type once you master a relationship. And if you could cultivate relationships with teachers or other authority figures, I think the payoffs would be rather obvious (access to higher levels of magic, special priveledges, etc.).

As for combat, I don't know how that would work out. I didn't particularly like Oblivion's combat system, and I've never played any of the HP games, so I'm clueless when it comes to this. I have heard however that the recent HP game that came out had spells effects sort of like guns, with some spells acting as machine guns or pistols, etc. Not sure how I feel about that. Anybody played that yet?

When it comes to the canon storyline, I think it would be cool if they allowed deviations from it, that is if they follow the canon plot at all. Like, say, you can decide not to retrieve the Philosopher's stone from the mirror in PS, or you can decide to kill Pettigrew in PoA (if they had a disposition system in place, I think that sort of thing would move you a bit closer to being a dark wizard), and then you would have to deal with the ramifications of your decision.

Ok, enough fangasming from me now. Most of what I said is probably impossible currently, but a man can dream right?

 

OotP had a nice idea, with you moving the analogue sticks to simulate wand movement, but it was fiddly even when the camera didn't screw you over - when the camera was being a bitch, it just didn't work full stop. I think they used the same system for HBP, although whether it improved or not, I don't know. GoF looked good, but you basically just hammered a button and the game chose the spell based on context. PoA actually worked quite well, as I recall; three spells assigned to the face buttons. Not the most complex system, but it's the best Potter game I've played (well, I kinda enjoyed Lego Harry Potter, I have to admit...)

OT: Definitely some sort of free-roaming game (although I picture it more along the lines of Fable than Oblivion), but I've always thought that the best way to appease both serious gamers and serious HP fans (who, let's face it, would likely go apeshit if a game tried to change canon, even as an option) would be to have the canon playable as a sort of 'Hero Mode'. Unlockable bonus missions where you can play through the set pieces as the relevant characters.

 

A Harry Potter MMORPG would be fucking brilliant. If the dueling system was set up correctly, you could even have tournaments on there, which might interest the 'pro-gamer' crowd.

 

Kinect/Wii/PS3 dildo support would be pretty awesome if such a game were made for consoles.

 

That combined in an MMORPG would be completely awesome. Then again...how many avatars would you see throwing a tantrum due to ragequitters...

Don't even mention 'tea-bagging'...

A Star Wars game with realistic lightsaber combat would be good like that, too.