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It's honestly amazing how well this game sold considering how mid the gameplay actually is. Having a popular IP really helped.
Eh, people don't buy for the gameplay mechanics most of the time, they buy for what they see in the trailers and read in the descriptions. Being the only videogame available for this IP, having the WB marketing juggernaut behind it, releasing at a time of the year without much competition, coming out on every single platform - it would have been weird if this game wasn't the best selling one in 2023.
Exactly. You don't know what the gameplay is until after you buy the game, unless you are savvy and watch reviews or something, which hardly any consumers do.
My wife, whose entire history with video games is Sims 3, Animal Crossing: NH, and Pokémon Go, played through this game start to finish and loved it. It wasn't really made for "gamers", it was made for Harry Potter fans that wanted to play a Hogwarts game. It didn't succeed as a gaming revolution, it succeeded in bringing non-gamers to buy it.
Personally, I love that she got into it whether it's mid or not, because it introduced her to a lot of the mechanics necessary to play "real" games in the future. And she had a lot of fun.
I'm both a gamer and HP fan.
I thought the game was great, and I didn't really realize the depths of people's distaste for it, I guess.
Was it crazy revolutionary? No, but it was fun.
Fellow HP fan, I was kinda weirded out by the whole "free access to unforgivable curses" and "canonically killing people" and the honestly kinda disheartening stance on goblin personhood but man flying around the grounds is so fun
Oh yeah me too. There are a lot of moments in the writing that make me go "wait... what? are you sure about that?" and some of the game design was iffy here and there but the main attraction is just the fact that they've given us a "full-scale" Hogwarts and surroundings.
I'm playing this game right now and it's honestly a six out of 10. The only reason to launch the game at all is because of the world design which is top notch. So top notch it scores all of those six points, because the plot characters story and gameplay are all a let down otherwise. This is the type of game that will disable the controls for your magical flying broom and then tell you that you need to climb a wall. I wish it wasn't so successful so they didn't think this formula was so good, because if they made the game actually good AND a Harry Potter property, that would have really been something special. But as it is now, it's just an uninspired video game painted in a pretty coat of a popular franchise. I'm sure we'll get a sequel.
I would have loved to have this game as a kid. It may be a 6 out of 10 but most of the other harry potter shovelware they shit out when the movies were coming was at best a 0.2 out of 10. The only arguably not that bad one was the prisoner of azkaban movie based game.
IDK. Most of the early games were actually pretty entertaining. I fairly recently played sorcerer's stone on the gbc, and it was still pretty fantastic.
I pirated the game. The first part in the actual school was really fun. But once you get out into the world, you quickly realise that it's just another generic open world game with outposts, collectibles, and general busywork that you've seen in every other open world game. It got boring very quickly for me and I never finished it.
I also pirated it, and yeah, I definitely got my money's worth from it. I tried to have fun, but it's the poster child for "mile wide, inch deep."
Maybe they can reuse the environment for a better game in the future.
It's multi-platform, uses one of the biggest IPs of an entire generation and seems to do it quite well too. Everything else would have been more surprising to me.
I wonder it's because it attracted a bunch of people who weren't into games, but are huge Harry Potter fans.
It's also on every platform, including the Switch, while TotK is just on the Switch.
Yeah this feels like a Look What They Have to Do (release on every system) to Mimic a Fraction of Our Power (be Zelda) meme.
I think you just nailed it, this is exactly why.
Honestly it was just a good game. I saw it attracting both Potterheads and non-Potterheads. (I would not consider myself a Potterhead).
Does it have a bunch of replay value? Not really (neither do a lot of games). But man, that initial playthrough was just really good. It also looks like I clocked 113 hours on the game, so that's a pretty decent return to me.
Also, despite the source material and the author, it had a lot of very inclusive elements, which were a nice touch.
Zelda was more fun though
Zelda would have been even more fun if it was available on every platform instead of just Nintendo.
I guess all the twitter drama around the author matters less to the real world. It's impressive to see how a vocal minority can completely distort what is happening offline.
It happens every time. Pokémon Sword/Shield and Scarlett/Violet had the biggest launch in the franchise's history despite being (justifiably so) heavily criticized by pretty much everyone online.
People shit on microtransactions and always-online games but the top charts always show online multiplayer games are among the most played.
It doesn't make the criticisms any less valid; it just means that the general public is usually ignorant of them.
JKR is a very vocal TERF that basically wants trans people to dissappear. A lot of people dont want to financially support her because of that. That most people seemingly either dont care about trans erasure or even worse, bought the game specifically because theyre the type to do shit just because people with a conscience told them they shouldn't, says more about most people than it does that "vocal minority"
I think that the masses are mostly disengaged with terminally-online type discourse. The only reason I knew JK Rowling was TERF was because of reading it on here, so if you are only on social media to follow your old high school classmates on facebook, you'd probably never find out
The masses are largely disengaged with LGBT rights in general, but the declining rights of transgender people in the UK (and the US) shows this is not just a "terminally-online" kind of issue. She is not the only one responsible, of course, but her outspoken antagonism towards transgender people is influencing people.
It concerns me when people can't differentiate "this issue does not affect me" from "this issue does not exist". Even calling matters "terminally-online" in general is a bit questionable when whole ass presidents get elected by meme campaigns these days.
Never got into Harry Potter since I was too old. This game was really fun to just explore and I constantly felt a forward momentum. Some of the stories were good, and some were awful.
I would absolutely play a sequel just based on the well done sense of discovery alone. I just wish more of what you found was impactful instead of cosmetic.
If you have nothing else to play and want a simple open world game set in and around Hogwarts, it's perfectly servicable as long as you pirate it. Don't expect to be blown away by it though.
I assumed that after literally nobody or any media outlets have talked about it since release. Telltale sign of bang on average game. Probably great for potter fans and boring for those who don’t care or haven’t seen the films/read the books.
Has anyone played both? Im loving zelda at the moment and wouldn't mind moving onto this next
Hogwarts is fun for about 30 hours roleplaying as a wizard, as a casual potter fan. I got really bored of it after that and never finished the game. At its core it really is very generic, it's really propped up by the IP. That's not to say it's bad by any means but its not got the depth of Zelda.
I think the biggest issue for me was how large the map was. They did the castle and hogsmede very well, but then threw in a bunch of filler content in the other towns. If they had stuck to the more core areas only, the game wouldn't have gotten so stale later on.
I pirated it and played for maybe two hours. It was boring and the controls didn't feel good. Uninstalled shortly after.
Nooooooooo!
I mean both were good games, but Zelda is just legendary status and on another level. It holds a special place for me, and they somehow nailed it out of the park yet again with TOTK. I don't know how they keep doing it! They have some geniuses over there.
Completed both 100% and they're such great fun games.
Hogwarts was awesome to walk through the wizardry world. Battling wizards, poachers, spiders, etc. Finding all the secrets and going through the story. Finished the game in a week, I just couldn't put the controller down.
Very curious. I played for about 10-15 hours and was just bored, but I’ve never been a huge potter head. Glad people like it though
poped in to say transrights! that'll be all
fuck harry potter, read terry pratchett
Can I just read Pratchett without fucking anyone? I'm ace and it's just really smelly and uncomfortable.
Bit unfair, because when compared to Terry Pratchett, just about everything else gets tossed to read more Pratchett. 😅
(not that I disagree, Pratchett is best)
okay