Harry Potter MMO

[BLSTMASTER]

Now that I think about it, I'd like a single player HP game where I'm just a student at the school learning and participating in different events of the school without any big overarching story involved in it :P

[Chickat]

Beacause noone would want to come home from school to play his favorite online game ... where he spends his entire time in school.

One of my fav games is bully. Whats your point? I played bully while still in school btw.

[stuartj1992]

The world of Harry Potter could certainly work for an MMO, but it would be tricky. Here's some ideas I quickly thought of:

Hogwarts could essentially constitute the the main 'levelling' experience, with progressing through the years functioning in a similar way to levels, though it would be helpful to have individual levels or whatever inbetween the 'years' to provide continuous smaller goals. The fact that with each year the students learn stronger and more difficult spells in the books correlates quite well to the standard MMO progress system with learning more powerful abilities as you level up.

Within Hogwarts there's obviously a lot of lore to go on, and making it the main levelling area would mean that the developers could really go to town on making it a huge place, with lots of little places to discover, 'factions' to join (think the various clubs) and smaller mini-games. The different subjects could work as a kind of way of 'speccing' too, with people being able to specialise in certain subjects, such as transfiguration, Defence Against the Dark Arts, potions etc to gain access to special spells and abilities within these subjects.

I imagine the end-game would be leaving Hogwarts and getting some kind of job, moving out into the world. So, you could become an Auror and help fight in the current wizarding war (I think the First Wizarding War would be a good time setting for the game), even perhaps join the Order of the Phoenix (would be an opportunity to meet lore characters of the time such as Dumbledore, Sirius, the Weasley parents and even Harry's parents), or if you're the evil type, join Voldemort's forces as a Death Eater. This could be how the 'factions' are decided in a way - neutral at Hogwarts, and make a choice after leaving school.

I dunno, these are just a few ideas I came up with after a few minutes thought - I'm sure that if Harry Potter was to get its own MMO, then a decent developer could do it justice. I think there's enough potential with the material to make a half-way engaging MMO experience, though I have no idea how they'd do the combat and magic system. It'd be a tricky one certainly, but could really make it a very interesting game if done right.

[Haftepaff]

Not as an MMO, i think we have enough MMO's as it is. I think they should create a great offline sandbox game however, where you attend to the school. Similar to the older Harry Potter games.

The story could be set after Harry Potter storyline, at the time when the main characters children also attend the school. Visit the Diagon Alley and buy the wands before you arrive at the school and get sorted at one of the four houses. With different challenges such as sneaking past prefects in restricted areas, battle against pixies and other students in duels or why not ride on a broom outside Hogwarts or play Quidditch?

[Daexx]

Being a fan of the franchise, I can definitely see this as an interesting MMO, provided that we, players, play a role of regular hogwarts student and possibly doing something in a wizarding world later on (nothing too fancy like saving the world though). Would definitely need to be based on books (not movies) and probably expanded even further in terms of spells.

Now getting into wall-of-crazy but perhaps a wand working on a kinect/wii basis for wand movements and spell casting (voice recognition for incantations) or wait another 100 years and create the game for Holodeck

[crakerjack]

If it were based around 3-4 years within deathly hollows, sure... but if I were playing as little kids, I don't think i'd enjoy it so much. would be cool to fly around and blast people out of the air. Classes would vary considering everyone is a wizard/witch and you could only have healers/supports, dps and summoner tanks... or some crap about that. Would be fun, but there would be a lot of bumps to cover first.

[Vankrys]

never bite into the whole harry potter franchise, never like the actual movies. So obviously i would not be the target audience for such MMO. But that beg the question, how big really is the target audience for such MMO. Keep in mind i don't talk about how big is the harry potter fan base, but how big is the overlap between mmo player and harry potter franchise.

As an exemple, i mention SWTOR. The star wars fan base is enormous, but the actual MMO player part of it, not so big. Many original player of SWTOR were not actually MMO player and were turned off but the whole subscription, static world and repetitive gameplay (flashpoint, daily, operation)

[xskarma]

I always loved the idea of a Harry Potter MMO. In fact, this reminded me of the fact I actually worked on writing a mock up of my vision of a HP MMO, kinda like people make fake expansions for WoW.

The idea was that you'd start as a student in the time after Voldemort was gone. Not every supporter of him is caught though, and there's still a movement for bringing some of his idea back into effect. You'd have his supporters to fight, but also things like unexpected Trolls, and going into the Forbidden Forest for god knows what. There's plenty of back ground stuff in the books to fill in possible stuff to do.

So you'd start as a student and then after 7 years of schooling you'd go in to the world and have several areas in Great Britain where you could do like end game stuff. Expansions would bring you to different continents and places, like North and South America in the first expansion, and Eastern Europe in the second. I think I had the possibility of playing a Vampire or Werewolf character in the Eastern Europe expansion.

Anyway, you'd start with making a character and choosing your House (possibly after a short intro) where every House has benefits for certain school subjects. Then after your first year at school (kind of the intro to gameplay and basics) you'd get to choose your main subject, which was basically your class. I had like Defense against the Dark Arts and Charms as prime subjects, and Dark Arts as well, for those that want to play a more evil attuned character. Dark Arts was pretty cool, you couldn't learn this from a teacher, but you'd always have some shady figure somewhere that would give you a quest to meet up with someone that could teach you something new in the Dark Arts. All very clandistine and hidden. Your prime subject would then be augmented by a secondary school subject, like Potions or Care of Magical Creatures (which would of course give you an animal companion). These would basically just not give you much in terms of spells, but mostly just functioned as a power boost to your main subject, giving certain flat increases, or a more temporary cooldown type boost, like Transfiguration, which at higher levels would allow you to turn yourself into an animal form, like an Animagus.

You'd still have a third string of school subjects then, which functioned sort of like flavour subjects, but very handy, and helpful subjects none the less. Like you could learn Study of Ancient Runes and it would allow you opening of locked and possibly cursed boxes, and disarming of traps, and you could learn Flying and this would give you a place on your house's Quidditch team (which would give you a boost to reputation gains). Trivial stuff like that, that's still pretty helpful, kinda a crossover between professions and racials in WoW. I think I also had Dueling as an option here for people that wanted to PvP.

I had all kinds of cool stuff thought up for it, but I kinda lost steam and got marred in the whole combat system, mostly if I should go for a trinity or not. I prefer the trinity, but it kinda doesn't work when you have limited options within classes to fill the 3 roles. So I kinda gave up on the idea alltogether. I'd still love to see an MMO or single player game in the mold of what I just described though.

[Skulljin]

Frankly, when I think about how I would imagine an actual Harry Potter MMO, I notice that many things I would like to see are already in "The Secret World".

An MMO which is set in the real world (Check)
With all kinds of magic and mystical creatures and mystics (Check)
With no real classes because everyone is kind of an sorcerer (Check)
(Although one could make classes out of the school subjects, I.e. Potion Master, Metamorpher, Herbalist, etc with some basic spells avaiable to every class of course)

I cannot think of reasonable PVP besides Quiditch and cheesy Duels.

An Idea for an actual boss would be the story twist of Voldemort coming back again because he had an eight Horkrux no one knew about, just in case.

[Daexx]

Frankly, when I think about how I would imagine an actual Harry Potter MMO, I notice that many things I would like to see are already in "The Secret World".

An MMO which is set in the real world (Check)
With all kinds of magic and mystical creatures and mystics (Check)
With no real classes because everyone is kind of an sorcerer (Check)
(Although one could make classes out of the school subjects, I.e. Potion Master, Metamorpher, Herbalist, etc with some basic spells avaiable to every class of course)

I cannot think of reasonable PVP besides Quiditch and cheesy Duels.

An Idea for an actual boss would be the story twist of Voldemort coming back again because he had an eight Horkrux no one knew about, just in case.

Cannot think of reasonable PvP ? : ) You already mentioned Quidditch but you are forgetting that not everyone is good. Voldemort or not, some people are evil. In my ideal imagination of it, you could be a wizarding world criminal and also auror, obviously there would be clashes, but you could also be like working something else in the ministry or in st. mung .

I would very much appreciate if game would not feature 20 people killing voldemort again or giant cockroaches though : D

Also, rather like a game set in the universe , but not following any particular book-based storyline (except maybe Triwizard tournament, that would be kinda cool). I wouldn't mind having a chance to meet some characters as NPCs, but I would hate helping them accomplish the goals from the books aka wrecking the complete and finished storyline.

7 years at school are plenty of material , needless to mention for some years, only 2-3 spells for example from Charms are mentioned for the entire year, imagine the actual number of spells you could learn in expanded universe for 7 years.

And in the end having a job in the wizarding world ... playing quidditch on the side if you wish.. I would personally prefer if the game didn't feature any raids in a conventional sense aka go there kill the giant cockroach get fancy boots .. but seeing that game is featuring time manipulation, perhaps some kind of content that revisits the past such as goblin rebellions ... or medieval ..

[Skulljin]

Cannot think of reasonable PvP ? : ) You already mentioned Quidditch but you are forgetting that not everyone is good. Voldemort or not, some people are evil. In my ideal imagination of it, you could be a wizarding world criminal and also auror, obviously there would be clashes, but you could also be like working something else in the ministry or in st. mung .

I would very much appreciate if game would not feature 20 people killing voldemort again or giant cockroaches though : D

Also, rather like a game set in the universe , but not following any particular book-based storyline (except maybe Triwizard tournament, that would be kinda cool). I wouldn't mind having a chance to meet some characters as NPCs, but I would hate helping them accomplish the goals from the books aka wrecking the complete and finished storyline.

7 years at school are plenty of material , needless to mention for some years, only 2-3 spells for example from Charms are mentioned for the entire year, imagine the actual number of spells you could learn in expanded universe for 7 years.

And in the end having a job in the wizarding world ... playing quidditch on the side if you wish.. I would personally prefer if the game didn't feature any raids in a conventional sense aka go there kill the giant cockroach get fancy boots .. but seeing that game is featuring time manipulation, perhaps some kind of content that revisits the past such as goblin rebellions ... or medieval ..

What you mentioned for PVP sounds more like one or another PVE Event to me. The Problem with the HP World is that, at least in the actual Time in the books, there seems to be no actual thread besides Voldemort, so one would have to shake up the whole Universe, which could as well lead to the HP Universe not feeling like an actual HP Universe anymore, know what I mean?

A solely/mostly based on Hogwarts feels kinda awkward, too, because, well. You're just a kid most of the time, there will be nothing you can do which couldn't be done by some full fledged Spellcaster better. (Only if you aren't some very special branded kid, of course~)

The Thing with the Time Manipulation would have potencial if Time Travel would work in both directions in this universe, sadly, time travel only works in one direction, backwards, so once you went into the past slaying some medieval goblins, you're pretty much stuck there.