The official Lord of the Rings special effects studio is making a cozy hobbit game
The official Lord of the Rings special effects studio is making a cozy hobbit game
Time to live out your dreams of playing a hobbit in Tolkien's Shire.
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I would love to see the equivalent of the Harry Potter game but set in a small hobbit shire with the ability to travel to human cities and elven and dwarven cities.
I don't get why people liked the Hogwarts game (I'm assuming that's the one you're talking about). Exploring Hogwarts was cool, but after that they were just wasting your time with the same few activities spread across the open world to make it not be empty. It was so boring. Then the lockpicking game that didn't need to exist made things worse, and no one caring about you breaking into their homes or walking around Hogwarts after curfew... It all felt so lifeless after the first hour or so.
Hogwarts itself they made feel alive fairly well until night time, which you're not supposed to be allowed to walk around during. (The groundskeeper literally tells you to though which makes it all even worse.) Hogwarts and Hogsmead are where it stops being even slightly interesting to me though. The flight mechanics were really boring. They were so bad they couldn't make quiditch work and just gave a lame excuse about it being closed.
Idk, it just felt like the epitome of an over-managed game where some manager wanted all the bad parts of modern open world games from eight years ago (many of which have been ditched by modern open world game makers) without any thought of how it works in their game. This is all without the Rowling issues and the use of goblins.
What made the game work for you?
Eh, I just found it relaxing. I was a fan of the wizarding universe but not a die hard fan, so little details like being able to explore at night didn't bother me. I just really liked the detail of the world, running around and looking in all the building and finding the neat little magical creatures and flying objects.
I didn't mind the flying, I wasn't doing it to beat high scores in racing or become quidditch champion. I just used it as a means to explore the world.
Definitely wasn't a fan of the lock picking, probably would have been better if they should locked that behind three different spells you had to learn at different points.
I'm a decent fan, but I guess my issue was I've been playing games for a long time. I have spent many hours in open world games, and I've seen them evolve. I absolutely hate 99% of them now. The issue is they create so much space that the developers need to fill that they end up spending very little effort on any bit of it. They create a handful of systems that they can scatter about so there's something to do everywhere, even though it makes it so there's no particular place that's unique anymore.
When I was younger and time didn't matter as much to me, I looked at the hours-to-complete metric as a good thing. I now see how flawed that was. Now I look more towards entertainment-per-hour. The longer your game takes me to complete, the more enjoyable it needs to be throughout. I don't want to spend 300h doing the same five tasks over and over. I'd much rather a 3h experience that does something unique.
That said, I do agree Hogwarts Legacy had great art direction. If there's one thing they did well it's that. It's just that I felt I had seen it all in a few hours. When art direction is the only thing you've got going, what happens when I have looked at your piece of art enough to see all the detail? That's not to say art focused games shouldn't be made, but they shouldn't be made to fill hundreds of hours. I think the game would have been much better if they focused on just Hogwarts and Hogsmead and made those full experiences.
I haven't played many "open world" games, but I think this captures my general feelings for them.
Like, the new 343 Halo Infinite game's campaign... it just kinda feels like wandering around a big map doing nothing in particular. I couldn't get into it.
Compare that to what Bungie has been doing recently with Destiny ... much more interesting, much less filler/go do this to keep you busy stuff.
I never played the game but these sound like criticisms I would've made. Sounds like it would have been much more fun if they made night exploration more tom clancy style spy/sneaking missions using magic and environmental objects to cause distractions and sneak about. And if they got quidditch right, it would've added much-need replayability (and possibly multiplayer) similar to blitzball in ff10.
I also heard the combat was very simple and repetitive. I could understand if they were trying to focus efforts on other hand systems but it sounds like they just skimped on development efforts across the board.
There was an old Gameboy Harry Potter game I really enjoyed that was basically you performing the major Harry Potter plot points (sneaking around, buying stuff, talking to people). The combat was kind of the Pokemon style turn based thing where each side had a health bar and so many moves. Very neat game.