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General: My Moneys On Potter
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com columnist Justin Webb dedicates his column inches this week to the idea of a Harry Potter MMO.
In this article I’m going to recap some news from a few weeks ago. I’ll then point out some potential misdirection in the press release and hint at what Warner Bros may really be up to. Hint: it’s Harry Potter. Then I’m going to talk about how Hogwarts would make a really good MMO, and give some examples. I’ll be channeling UO throughout. The fact that “it pretty much designs itself” will be mentioned, along with some of the pitfalls that go along with the license. I may then twitter on about “transmedia” a bit, probably as a lead in to next week’s article.
The big news from two weeks ago was that Warner Bros bought Turbine. The accompanying news articles concentrated on the fact that Warner Bros now owns all the Lord of the Rings video-game licenses … finally! There was also some talk about how this would enable WB to seamlessly integrate microtransactions into their other games. While this is all fine and dandy (and ultimately hogwash), I think the press release has some details that are conspicuous by their absence, namely no mention of Harry Potter, which is the studio’s most bankable license. With the final Potter film releasing in 2011, Warner has been scrambling to try and prolong the life of its aging cash cow by turning it into an evergreen brand.
Read My Money’s On Potter.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
I am sure that my kid will love going to school and attending classes for fun.
Wait, what?
You know, as much as I hate the Harry Potter franchise, this really sounds like a damn good idea.
Totally agree with xaldraxius, i prefer many many many books to harry potter but a mmorpg like the one you described would rock.
Of course this sounds like a good idea. And Justin Webb has shown he can do a fine job sketching out the outline of a good game.
But no one here really thinks any commercial outfit is going to make a good game out of the Harry Potter franchise? There's going to be far too much money involved. Money, and disputes about how it is used, is something that totally screws up the development process: Publishers risking money prevent developers from trying novel, ("risky", also "interesting") things. Take Trion. Heroes of Telara was going to do some really novel things.
Then they got a lot of investors. Who don't want their investment risked. What they're making now (Rifts or whatever) is a lot less ambitious and novel and dynamic than what they were talking about two years ago. Big shame. Lots of us were looking forward to someone changing in the industry for the better. Guess the industry, such as it is, changed their plan.
Also, developers who have lots of money thrown at them tend to screw up and mis-spend it. Take the Cheyenne Mountain mess. Oh, sure they had plenty of money. I understand they started with about $36M. Sounds like enough to make a game, and buy a few cheeseburgers, no? What happened? They bought a big juicy license (can't lose, we have a licensed IP with a big audience!), they hired several big, expensive names (can't lose, these guys know how to make games.. though they demand big salaries), and they staffed up a big team (we'll need this manpower to make the game fast, because.. well.. we only have enough cash to pay them all for a couple years).
What happened? Well, they ... ran out of money. How did they run out of $36M, you ask? Well, they found a way.
Because making a AAA MMO title takes time, and you have to do some things over, and you run into unanticipated problems, and you make compromises. And all these things screw up your beautiful original vision, and you seldom release the awesome game you set out to make.
Especially after seeing STO crap out, I'm personally not looking forward to any franchises releasing well. The next awesome game I play will probably be a surprise out of left field.
I think they might surprise us some more by announcing a Harry Potter MMO aimed at tweens.. Which mother could/would deny their offspring the option to shell out 20-30 bucks a month on a game which is based on an IP they know themselves?
Counter point:
I think a Harry Potter MMO will have the same problem as the Star Trek MMO. Everyone will want to be Potter/Picard, but as an MMO it just isn't possible. Hogwarts School apart from Potter is only somewhat interesting - do I really want to go through a school curriculum as entertainment? If you look at the books and movies, actual Hogwarts class time is a very small part of what makes the stories compelling and would have the same drudgery as learning algebra does for muggle kids. Quidditch looks mildly interesting as a 3d soccer game, but it's not going to keep subscribers long term. Magic combat is somewhat limited in the books and movies, so the developers would have to go off the rails make something players could level up and limit with mana or stamina or some other limitation not based on the existing IP.
and not forgeting half of MMO's peeps is physical oriented(myself? I don't stand to play a mage it just don't work for me), and don't forget too, how would be the combat? or if any at all? maybe a browser game will work better? and the main motive anyone here would really play it? I know I wouldn't, also the author from what I know is a hell of a pick person, I remember a history before saying she wanted to fire all the cast because they are too old to act like the chars of this IP.
really I don't think harrypotter would be a good MMO, I don't see how
I would give up everything I play now to play a Harry Potter MMO. I hope this happens.
The author of the article never delved into the most important question which is; what would the typical day to day gameplay consist of?
You sit down at your computer and log into the game, ok, then what is it you actually do? I can't imagine for a second that people would find it entertaining to attend classes for more than a few minutes at a time. So what else is there? Exploring Hogwarts could be fun but unless they made the school the size of an entire game world in itself you'd run out of things to explore before very long.
The devs would have to add other areas for people to explore/adventure in and pretty quickly I think they would have to depart from the existing material in the IP.
And there would have to be lots of combat. I'm afraid there's just no getting around that. What fun would it be to learn new spells if you never had occassion to use those spells?
And then that leads into the sticky question that Battleaxe touched on regarding just exactly how the magic system would work. If you learned the spell Petrificus Totalis to pararlyse people/mobs would you be able to use it repeatedly as quickly and as much as you like? No, that would trivilize any content. There would have to be some limitations which were never worked out by Rowling because she didn't have to. She could just ignore inconvenient questions like that because she was writing for children who tend to overlook that sort of thing.
In fact, other than the names and effects of some spells, the entire magic system would have to be invented by the game developers and inevitably it would end up feeling considerably different than what exists in the IP because in the IP the magic system is not clearly explained in any detail it's just whatever happened to work for that particular part of the story.
I want a Harry Potter MMO more then anything.
I think some of you are looking at the worst possible realization of Justin's ideas and seeing them as the only possible ones. Classes don't have to be 30 minute long lectures, they could simply be tutorial excersizes. Your time at Hogwarts would basicly equate to the time spent in Tortage in AoC, or you could draw it out longer if you wanted. Harry is just one character and his stories tend to be focused on him, but his world could be much larger and encompass a lot more than what is shown in the books and movies. Helping Harry through his story would be a large part of progressing and your character would age based on Harry's age, but inbetween those story missions there could be a lot of side missions, exploring, and maybe even some new concepts in spell crafting.
It's not a bad idea. Although I strongly feel that it should be in the past, around the late 1800's - early 1900's. Would make a nice art style and still have a lot the elements that made the world.
The 'lessons' sound like they could be a good way to progress. End game would be a little tricky. I could see younger players not really caring but you want something for them to do. It's a flexible IP, there could always be an evil wizard or society looking to cause conflict.
My thought is the IP owners desire to keep the MMO to the places mentioned in the books will kill such a deal.
Turbine had a very hard time with Lord of the Rings IP initially until they recieved the freedom to change things a bit. Not so sure that is possible with a Harry Potter version.
Only time will tell.
A nude patch for this game would be so wrong.
One of the major problems that this idea has is that some huge markets, notably Germany and the UK, will not allow children to be portrayed as inflicting violence or having violence inflicted upon them.
Hmm..There is already a Harry Potter MMO and It's called Wizard101..
And It's actually the BEST MMO aimed at kids at the moment..
/junker
A Harry Potter IMO might work if it was an After Hogwarts... timeline. In other words, the playable characters are adults and the action takes place primarily outside the school.
No kidding, this has been my dream ever since i knew about mmo existence and HP existence
Omg going to magic lessons for real in an online worl, thats perfect. I just fear the end game content, but non the less, there could be so many places to go and stuff to do at school
.. And don't forget theres a lots of places to go besides school, including the muggles world 
I would almost expect a browser based game. The first 3 book ARE fully aimed at kids. But after that, Harry starts to grow up, and the last book is much more mature.
That sould sort of make me sad. I'd love to see a fully fledged MMO, it could even be set at different times. Maybe during the first war? This way it's not pushing into the book in any way, making large conflicting stories like LotRO did.
I thought, Wizard 101 is already a kind of Harry Potter online.
Man i keep thinking of it xD Theres also something awesome about this MMO.
Theres 4 Teams, so don't forget we would allways be competing against the oposing 'factions'.
Man i can't wait for this *.*
Turbine is working on something. Just today the (former) lead artist for LoTRO, "Floon", admitted he is now working on a new project, and has been for several months. It's no secret that LoTRO updates have been slowing down over the past year or two, and the obvious guess is that more and more of the Turbine team have been reassigned to the un-named project.
Many in the Lotro forums, including myself, wrote that a Potter mmo from turbine was very likely after the WB buy.
But for a reason the OP is too 'polite' to mention. Lotro development has seen a huge a drop after moria and its hard for us to believe that it would take the team that did SoA and MoM a whole year to make mirkwood: 1 zone and the skirmish system that uses old game assets. And from last xmass till now we only had 1 book that took us back to the old zones. I don't see how 5 developers could not make that update in 2 weeks. And its all turbine did for lotro in 5 months! (unless you call a spring festival maze content. That couldnt take more than a couple weeks to do either)
So only thing that can explain this is they have been working on something else since after moria came out xmass 2008. The WB buy makes Potter to be the most likely thing.
Sad for lotro really, and the comunity. The chances of seeing mordor with, what feels like a 5 man dev team working on the game, are getting slimmer.
As for Potter mmo, who cares? Im not 12yo and neither is anyone in my active 50+ ppl kin in lotro
if an mmo does get made i hope it has a job requirement thing where if you get a certain amount of grade in your OWLs and you want to become something like a death eater than maybe you cant because you didnt do well enough thats very original can work it also makes ypu spend more time training and forces you to make more characters if you want to expereience all jobs. thatmakes you waste more time and time on subscribtion based mmos = more money for company
Sure, there's a way it can be done. And, it might even be fun.
But, it's not happening and there are three major reasons why:
1) JK Rowling. She is very picky on how the license is used and she is extremely involved in each step. LEGO Harry Potter was terribly delayed due to her 'input', and it is doubtful anyone at Turbine or WB wants to deal with her in the development of such a huge project.
2) Cost. Not even the Star Wars IP cost what Harry Potter costs. WB does not have unlimited rights to the IP. They have to pay Rowling big bucks to make an MMO. An expensive proposition at best.
3) Timeliness. Let's face it, the license has missed it's window. The last two movies will be released in the next 20 months. There are no more books. No more buzz. Sure...the original books continue to sell well but Potter fever has left the building. If they are just now getting to developing the IP for an MMO it would take, what? 3-5 years from now for a game release? If WB were going to make a Potter MMO, they would have started developing it 2+ years ago.
Of course, who's to say they didn't? But, I doubt they could have or would have kept that a secret this long...