Warning, spiders in trailer…
Simon Pegg revealed in the role of the headmaster of Hogwarts in the game.
This is looking promising, though I definitely want reviews before I plunk down my wizard bucks or whatever.
Yeah, it hasn’t been a very good recent era for AAA games, has it?
The days when you could assume a big name game was going to be, well, good have passed. If they ever were there, I guess. Rose-colored glasses and all. In the old days, too, there were so many fewer games in general that we tended to be a lot more forgiving I think…
Reminds me of Forspoken. A little empty.
Over the past year I’ve enjoyed Elden Ring, Horizon: Forbidden West, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and God of War: Ragnarok. The only AAA games I was disappointed in last year were Saint’s Row (ugh) and A Plague Tale: Requiem (actually pretty good, but I just couldn’t get into it.)
But also: Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, Gotham Knights, the latest Mario+Rabbids, Dying Light 2, Tiny Tina’s Wonderland, Callisto Protocol, Ghostwire Tokyo…and yeah, even Midnight Suns…all either did poorly in either sales or reviews or both in 2022.
For me it seems as if I spent most of the year chalking off big titles I’d had mild to major interest in from about late February onward. 2022 will go down in my gaming memory as the year of indies. I’m hoping for a little better mix this year, and Hogwart’s would be a nice February surprise if it is even moderately decent.
I wonder if this will live up to the hype. Though the hype is coming from my brain.
I’m so curious as to how they will handle the physical architecture of Hogwarts. In the book and the movies, it’s all very abstract and hand-wavey. Yes, the stair cases move, you can just say that in a book, or show a brief scene in the movie to show that it’s easy to get lost. But in a game, you need to actually build the place. You need to be the architect who can’t just hand-wave away things or describe them abstractly. I’m dying to see it. That’s one reason why I love games. You get to physically inhabit places in universes that were much more abstract before-hand.
Most of my own hype train has also been in my own little brain. And I’ve tried to temper it pretty strongly, because I’m not sure this particular studio is up to this particular task. There’s not a strong backlog of particularly brilliant game design on their resume. In fact, there’s just not much there at all.
So I guess I’ve tamped down any expectations I have to: will it let me run around Hogwarts and the immediate environs around it and let me explore and see some cool stuff? If it does – even if the gameplay systems and narrative don’t come together well – I’ll count it as a kind of win.
Yes, the architecture is key I think. So much of the alure of Hogwarts is, well, Hogwarts the place. It’s the fantasy boarding school we dreamed of going to as a kid (well, we would have, if we had dreamed of boarding schools at least). And yeah, the books allow for our own mental world-building, and the movies were largely well-done and certainly lavishly funded; combined with the magic of cinema it meant we largely got really cool images.
What we will get in a game where you can ostensibly roam around all over the place remains to be seen. I fear lots of locked doors.
Gosh, this is less than a month off, isn’t it? I’m stoked for this as well. I’m with you guys in hoping it doesn’t disappoint, but what I’ve seen of it sure looks promising.
Headline is a bit misleading with regards to PS5 and Xbox, as it’s referring to the Amazon listing for games. I’m not sure if that’s a big way to sell games anymore. Still, number 1 on Steam is a pretty good indicator.
I don’ t get these people who pre-order games in a digital age w/o significant goodies included.
Just browse the Steam discussions for it if you want to know why preorders are so high.
Yeah, lots of people very enthusiastic to fund an anti trans bigot, sadly.
Just started following the game in November, but so far it seems like it’s doing for Harry Potter what KOTOR did for Star Wars and I’m pretty onboard for that.
I hope you have taken a look at where the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is invested if you don’t want to fund bigots (and journalists murders as MBS directly controls it). Blizzard/Activision, EA, Uber, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, etc. Not funding people you disagree with isn’t going to leave a whole left to spend your money on.
Oh goody