Hogwarts Legacy - Harry Potter open world action RPG prequel set in the late 1800s

[Reinhardt]

Wizard army vs modern military in Harry Potter would end with the wizard army being shot to pieces. And by "modern military" I mean anything from 1900 onwards, your average WW1 army would make short work of them.

not just 20 century military. good luck trying to stop collumn who can walk into cannon fire with few single target spells

 

[Tyranicon]

The most unrealistic part of the potterverse is that the wizards haven't really developed all that much in the way of warfare. Perhaps a militaristic magocracy was a bit too dark for a children's series.

Also, it's a children's series, so of course it's pants on head retarded.

 

[Jaedar]

you have to speak the words, if you say the magic words wrong the spell won't work.

Not after wizards are old enough.

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry began teaching nonverbal magic to students in their sixth year in Defence Against the Dark Arts, Charms, and Transfiguration; the students were expected to use spells nonverbally from then on.

There's still the somatic component. Wizards do have some advantages over conventional soldiers (brooms, teleportation, mind controlling enemy generals...) but in a straight up fight they'd lose. But when you can magick yourself and all your stuff so regular humans can't notice them, and mind control all the leaders (or just bribe them with magical healing for a long life), they would never need to get into a straight up fight.

The most unrealistic part of the potterverse is that the wizards haven't really developed all that much in the way of warfare. Perhaps a militaristic magocracy was a bit too dark for a children's series.

Also, it's a children's series, so of course it's pants on head retarded.

Maybe, maybe not. The entire wizard community of great britain seems to be maybe a few 1000 people in total (they have a single school with each year having less than a hundred people in it), so they may not have much reason for war.

 

[thesecret1]

This whole discussion is silly – the wizards would lose even against a bunch of unarmed inbreds, as can be proved on the case of witch trials. If wizards were so powerful, why did they let themselves get burned at the stake, huh?

 

[Reinhardt]

opressed banker gobbos could just hire some mercs or even just bunch of albanian goons and bye-bye wizzords.

 

[Tyranicon]

Maybe, maybe not. The entire wizard community of great britain seems to be maybe a few 1000 people in total (they have a single school with each year having less than a hundred people in it), so they may not have much reason for war.

A group of people with unique powers that in many ways far outstrips even modern technology... will always have a lot of reasons for war. It is only due to being an idealistic children's series that wizards haven't had a long and very bloody history.

This whole discussion is silly – the wizards would lose even against a bunch of unarmed inbreds, as can be proved on the case of witch trials. If wizards were so powerful, why did they let themselves get burned at the stake, huh?

IIRC they were faking it. No seriously, that was what Rowling wrote. The wizards/witches were apparently fine and just pretended to die horrible deaths.

 

[thesecret1]

IIRC they were faking it. No seriously, that was what Rowling wrote. The wizards/witches were apparently fine and just pretended to die horrible deaths.

Ah yes, the old 'merely pretending' tactic.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

You can't block a high caliber sniper rifle round.

Says who? I doubt no wizards have developed a spell to shield against bullets. And I think JK Rowling would agree if she ever happens to write this scenario.

They might be able to cast something to stop a bullet, but they'd never get a chance to.
Even advanced wizards capable of nonverbal spells still require extensive movement. If we consider a scenario where a soldier and trained wizard encountered each other and had their respective weapons drawn, the chance of the wizard even getting halfway through the motions of a single spell before he's been shot multiple times is incredibly low.

 

[Jaedar]

A group of people with unique powers that in many ways far outstrips even modern technology... will always have a lot of reasons for war. It is only due to being an idealistic children's series that wizards haven't had a long and very bloody history.

I mean the wizards do seem to have a somewhat bloody history, with lots of voldemorts running around, not to mention the various 2nd class citizens (centaurs, elfs, bankers). And iirc there were some hints that the evil dude before voldemort was allied with nazi germany?

As for "reasons for war" I am really not so sure. I am no historian, but I think most historians agree that war happens or happened partly as a result of cycles of fear (I'm afraid my neighbour will attack me, so I must have an army. My neighbour is increasing his army, I must match it. Oh look an opportunity to cripple him and be safe!) and because military conquest had a better economic rate of return than improving land (arable farmland was the primary resource, and beyond irrigation and some roads, it's really hard to improve, whereas stealing some is theoretically easy and there's almost always an abundance of farmers). Wizards probably don't have much to fear, at least historically, and it's unclear what things of value they have to steal that they can't more easily conjure.

 

[Sarathiour]

What'd be the point of using guns instead of wands? Wands don't have to be reloaded.

You're sure about that ?

Spoiler

Anyway, I always look at it at some kind of masquerade-lite settings. Sure wizards won't win in an open battlefield, but they rely more on trickery and deception to avoid attention and mind their own business. Which then make the "total war" against Voldemort retarded, but the settings is extremely flawed regardless, it's just that it's easier to brush thing aside in a not-too modern settings.

But yeah, I guess we can always count of the codex to this into the ground, hogwart school of negromancy being just another nail in the coffin.

 

[baud]

You can't block a high caliber sniper rifle round.

Says who? I doubt no wizards have developed a spell to shield against bullets. And I think JK Rowling would agree if she ever happens to write this scenario.

They might be able to cast something to stop a bullet, but they'd never get a chance to.
Even advanced wizards capable of nonverbal spells still require extensive movement. If we consider a scenario where a soldier and trained wizard encountered each other and had their respective weapons drawn, the chance of the wizard even getting halfway through the motions of a single spell before he's been shot multiple times is incredibly low.

maybe wizards would just use a permanent effect on enchanted items (a bit like the cloak of invisibility), so they wouldn't have to cast a spell against bullets, just wear the appropriate ring of bullet defense.

 

[Reinhardt]

You can't block a high caliber sniper rifle round.

Says who? I doubt no wizards have developed a spell to shield against bullets. And I think JK Rowling would agree if she ever happens to write this scenario.

They might be able to cast something to stop a bullet, but they'd never get a chance to.
Even advanced wizards capable of nonverbal spells still require extensive movement. If we consider a scenario where a soldier and trained wizard encountered each other and had their respective weapons drawn, the chance of the wizard even getting halfway through the motions of a single spell before he's been shot multiple times is incredibly low.

maybe wizards would just use a permanent effect on enchanted items (a bit like the cloak of invisibility), so they wouldn't have to cast a spell against bullets, just wear the appropriate ring of bullet defense.

why they not using rings of abracadabra defense or something?

 

[Harthwain]

Which then make the "total war" against Voldemort retarded, but the settings is extremely flawed regardless, it's just that it's easier to brush thing aside in a not-too modern settings.

"Total war against Voldemort"? Not "Voldemort's total war"? Because I think it would be possible to wage a secret war between wizards. Although I do agree it'd be easier 30 years ago than nowadays, because with the rise of the internet and smartphones evidence became really hard to erase.

 

[Caim]

Which then make the "total war" against Voldemort retarded, but the settings is extremely flawed regardless, it's just that it's easier to brush thing aside in a not-too modern settings.

"Total war against Voldemort"? Not "Voldemort's total war"? Because I think it would be possible to wage a secret war between wizards. Although I do agree it'd be easier 30 years ago than nowadays, because with the rise of the internet and smartphones evidence became really hard to erase.

Eh, Voldemort: Total War wasn't the best of Creative Assembly's work.

 

[hello friend]

So if I understand this correctly, rappers make the strongest wizards in the Harry Potter setting.

 

[Häyhä]

 

[Cool name]

Discussing the military capabilities of a whimsical children's book magical society is pretty silly, but come on, guns? Really?

I haven't read any of the books since not long after the final one came out, but I do remember that many of these guys, including several who are still in high school, can:
- teleport
- turn invisible
- perform mind control
- perform emotional control
- read minds
- create pocket dimensions
- perform mass memory alteration
- render entire city districts or islands unobservable and physically inaccessible
- permanently render an object unbreakable to non-magical force
- engage in limited time travel
- duplicate any object
- bottle and sell good luck
- transfigure any non-magic resistant object or being into just about anything else

This is basically all stuff that regular people did in the books, not the big boys like the headmaster and Voldemort. To top it all off, as far as I can recall they don't even rely on mana pools or anything, they can keep this shit up all day. Perhaps they somehow have zero defense against bullets (I doubt it, give all the stuff they can do) but even if that's the case, it's irrelevant when bullets are never going to hit more than a handful of them unless they're stupendously stupid.

These people have zero reason to worry about muggles. Writing this all down, suddenly it doesn't bother me as much as when I was a kid that the wizards mostly don't give a toss about what's going on in the muggle world. If anything, they need to worry more about protecting muggles if they don't hate them, since—unless other magicals are keeping an eye out and prevent it—a single competent and ruthless wizard could pretty easily end non-magical civilization if he was cool with a new world consisting of magical city-state islands connected via teleportation on an otherwise ruined Earth. Which actually sounds like a sort of cool post-apoc magitech setting.

They're ludicrously overpowered, and I'm sure the worldbuilding doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but that's fine. It wasn't made as a RPG setting, it was made for a series of children's books which aimed to present a magical world of whimsy and wonder paired with the classic British boarding school story, bc kids will eat that kind of thing up. Incidentally this is also why I think it was a mistake that the later books got more 'serious'—I'm not sure I ever finished the final one.

Anyway, this game will be bad.

 

[Inf0mercial]

Your all missing the point like the people who wank muggle always do.

The wizards win by doing a simple one act , stopping chaining up and corralling the invisible immortal soul eating monsters that breed from despair.

War wouldn't even start it would end with wizards slowly corralling the dementors through major city's until they decide they have killed enough, or just let them go wild and destroy the world.

Also its canon they control the leaders of both America and the UK and an imperious curse on high command or even a single crew of submarine and the world ends again.

Not that i have any hope the game will actually address any of this but it might be a decent open world HP game that gets good mods.

 

[Taurist]

Gameplay looks mediocre. This game will work by how well the flavour and setting is implemented in game.
When I played the Bamham games it worked for me, I felt like batman. When I played the mordor games all I could feel was disgust and how much Tolkein must have been turning in his grave.

 

[Cool name]

Regarding ethnic diversity at Hogwarts: No doubt people could ramble back and forth saying "Teleportation and flight mean the magic world would be more diverse earlier than the non-magical!" or "Magic providing for most necessities kills many pressures that cause people to emigrate, so actually it should be less diverse!"

But the real reason that Hogwarts is more diverse in the 1800s or whenever this game is than it was in the books is that Ron "The White Hammer" Weasley has yet to stride the halls:

Gameplay looks mediocre. This game will work by how well the flavour and setting is implemented in game.
When I played the Bamham games it worked for me, I felt like batman. When I played the mordor games all I could feel was disgust and how much Tolkein must have been turning in his grave.

I got a certain perverse enjoyment out of Shadow of War (the only Mordor game I played), seeing it as some kind of deranged "What if Michael Bay had created LOTR?" experiment. Though honestly I just treated it as a Generic Fantasy Setting game and liked messing around with the Nemesis System, which is a genuinely neat mechanic (as was the way Orcs could develop countermeasures if you use the same trick against them too often). In the end, Tolkien was already likely spinning enough to power a city electrical grid, so a pair of questionably conceived games added to the pile of things he'd loathe couldn't get me too upset.

Largely agree with your point though, and I think the game will struggle a great deal to capture the appeal of the setting. Translating magic into game mechanics systematizes and limits it in a way that's fundamentally at odds with Harry Potter's approach. Simultaneously, due to its success and multimedia milking over decades, the setting is too familiar— I'm not sure if it's even possible for anything using it to recapture the sense of 'discovering a magical world' which drew kids in to begin with.

 

[deuxhero]

You can't block a high caliber sniper rifle round.

Says who? I doubt no wizards have developed a spell to shield against bullets. And I think JK Rowling would agree if she ever happens to write this scenario.

The time it takes to pull the trigger is way shorter than the time it takes to cast a spell in Harry Potter.

Spells require a wand, a vocal component, and a somatic component. You have to move the wand and you have to speak the words, if you say the magic words wrong the spell won't work.

A gun requires you to pull the trigger. One quick finger movement.

And considering the scenes we've seen in some of the books where Harry blocks an avada kedavra death spell with an old shield, a fully armored medieval knight could easily block a wizard's spell, and if he's fast enough at sprinting he can drive his sword through the wizard's chest before the wizard can cast a second time. Because rate of fire is limited by how fast you can say AVADA KEDAVRA!

Now compare that to a machine gun's rate of fire.

Or a grenade launcher. There are no spells in Harry Potter that have splash damage like a grenade.

Wizard army vs modern military in Harry Potter would end with the wizard army being shot to pieces. And by "modern military" I mean anything from 1900 onwards, your average WW1 army would make short work of them.
Which is why wizards are so reclusive and hide from the world at large.

The classic needs to be posted. Spoilered for length.

Spoiler

Ok, this has been driving me crazy for seven movies now, and I know you’re going to roll your eyes, but hear me out: Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.

Here’s why:

Think about how quickly the entire WWWIII (Wizarding-World War III) would have ended if all of the good guys had simply armed up with good ol’ American hot lead.

Basilisk? Let’s see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren’t looking at it–you’re looking at a picture of it.

Imagine how epic the first movie would be if Harry had put a breeching charge on the bathroom wall, flash-banged the hole, and then went in wearing NVGs and a Kevlar-weave stab-vest, carrying a SPAS-12.

And have you noticed that only Europe seems to a problem with Deatheaters? Maybe it’s because Americans have spent the last 200 years shooting deer, playing GTA: Vice City, and keeping an eye out for black helicopters over their compounds. Meanwhile, Brits have been cutting their steaks with spoons. Remember: gun-control means that Voldemort wins. God made wizards and God made muggles, but Samuel Colt made them equal.

Now I know what you’re going to say: “But a wizard could just disarm someone with a gun!” Yeah, well they can also disarm someone with a wand (as they do many times throughout the books/movies). But which is faster: saying a spell or pulling a trigger?

Avada Kedavra, meet Avtomat Kalashnikova.

Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don’t think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldemort’s wand may be 13.5 inches with a Phoenix-feather core, but Harry’s would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let’s see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound.

I can see it now…Voldemort roaring with evil laughter and boasting to Harry that he can’t be killed, since he is protected by seven Horcruxes, only to have Harry give a crooked grin, flick his cigarette butt away, and deliver what would easily be the best one-liner in the entire series:

“Well then I guess it’s a good thing my 1911 holds 7+1.”

And that is why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.

tl;dr
Voldemort has seven horcruxes, Harry's 1911 carries 7+1.

This concept has been thoroughly explored in a best selling book series that deserves to have a video game made of it.

It would be an X-Com clone but you start as a new hunting company in 1895. Your hunting company would primarily get money by collecting the PUFF bounty on every monster it kills, which would primarily be found by sending employees to chase monster sightings/rumors on the geoscape. You could also contract with local governments/large companies to protect their shit, which gives recurring money for nothing, but forces you into fights you might otherwise choose to avoid. The game would have a long timespan (over a century) and over that time your employees would need to gradually be replaced as they grow old (who can accelerate noobie's learning if paired as a mentor since as a big part of the series is learning from your predecessors), new weapon/calibers are invented (forcing you to invest in getting a fancy new caliber produced in silver), and geo-political events occur which can put a wrench in your plans (War draft removes healthy young men from recruiting pool for a few years) or help you (after it's over there will be combat veterans who saw "things" and surplus galore).

 

[Tyranicon]

For a cover that looked like it came straight out of 90s Baen Books, I was pretty surprised to find this was published in 2009.

 

[Tavernking]

The classic needs to be posted. Spoilered for length.

Spoiler

Ok, this has been driving me crazy for seven movies now, and I know you’re going to roll your eyes, but hear me out: Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.

Here’s why:

Think about how quickly the entire WWWIII (Wizarding-World War III) would have ended if all of the good guys had simply armed up with good ol’ American hot lead.

Basilisk? Let’s see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren’t looking at it–you’re looking at a picture of it.

Imagine how epic the first movie would be if Harry had put a breeching charge on the bathroom wall, flash-banged the hole, and then went in wearing NVGs and a Kevlar-weave stab-vest, carrying a SPAS-12.

And have you noticed that only Europe seems to a problem with Deatheaters? Maybe it’s because Americans have spent the last 200 years shooting deer, playing GTA: Vice City, and keeping an eye out for black helicopters over their compounds. Meanwhile, Brits have been cutting their steaks with spoons. Remember: gun-control means that Voldemort wins. God made wizards and God made muggles, but Samuel Colt made them equal.

Now I know what you’re going to say: “But a wizard could just disarm someone with a gun!” Yeah, well they can also disarm someone with a wand (as they do many times throughout the books/movies). But which is faster: saying a spell or pulling a trigger?

Avada Kedavra, meet Avtomat Kalashnikova.

Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don’t think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldemort’s wand may be 13.5 inches with a Phoenix-feather core, but Harry’s would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let’s see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound.

I can see it now…Voldemort roaring with evil laughter and boasting to Harry that he can’t be killed, since he is protected by seven Horcruxes, only to have Harry give a crooked grin, flick his cigarette butt away, and deliver what would easily be the best one-liner in the entire series:

“Well then I guess it’s a good thing my 1911 holds 7+1.”

And that is why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.

tl;dr
Voldemort has seven horcruxes, Harry's 1911 carries 7+1.

I think you underestimate the power of being able to break the laws of physics at the wave of a wand, they could just cast a bulletproof ward, especially if it's the 'cast and forget' kind of spell. If you're in a fight against magic, you've already lost.

 

[deuxhero]

Wasn't it official from Rowling that even a basic shotgun beats master wizard and by extension the kids are lucky the bad guys are too xenophobic to employ muggle tech? I go back to my comment about protective spells that are only effective against black powder speed projectiles being the only way you could really make late 1800s Harry Potter work.

 

[Harthwain]

Largely agree with your point though, and I think the game will struggle a great deal to capture the appeal of the setting. Translating magic into game mechanics systematizes and limits it in a way that's fundamentally at odds with Harry Potter's approach.

It depends on how you make it work. Noita, for example, is literally the game about the caster using a wand and physics plays fundamental role in how spells behave.