When I was in London in September, I got a first hand look at Electronic Arts’ new game for Order of the Phoenix. I have to admit that I’ve never been much into arcade-style games, preferring to play Excite Truck and Elebits on my Wii, Time Splitters on my GameCube, or Animal Crossing on the DS. So I watched the demo they showed us without expecting to care a whole lot. Boy, was I in for a surprise.
This new game, from what I can tell from everything I’ve been seeing and from the conversations I’ve had with EA, is going to be almost an RPG. Not entirely, mind you, but enough so that it will feel like you’re a student at Hogwarts, doing wizardy things like attending classes, playing wizard chess in the common room, solving mysteries, and making potions (stirring with the Wii remote or the DS stylus! How cool is that?). This is going to be a lot more than an arcade game. And the graphics are gorgeous. Take a look at these two exclusive screen shots to see what I mean.
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More to come. We’re going to be creating a section here on the Lexicon with player support information and other resources to make your virtual time at Hogwarts even more rich and exciting. In the meantime, I’ll post any new graphics I can get and pass along any other new information as it comes in.