Key Takeaways
- In Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, catching the Golden Snitch won’t end the game.
- Matches will end when a time limit expires or when one team has amassed at least 100 points.
- Catching the Golden Snitch will only award a team 30 points instead of the usual 150.
Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is making some big changes to the fictional sport’s scoring system, especially when it comes to capturing the elusive Golden Snitch. While Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions will be the first official Quidditch game in more than 20 years, fans of the franchise will have to acclimate themselves to the new set of rules.
Quidditch is a fictional sport from the Harry Potter universe that involves players flying around on broomsticks. The game utilizes three different types of balls: a Quaffle, two Bludgers, and the iconic Golden Snitch. Each team’s Seeker is tasked with trying to catch this elusive golden ball, an act which traditionally nets the capturing team 150 points and ends the match immediately.
That won’t be the way it works in Quidditch Champions, however. A new pre-release launch trailer explains that the old rule stating that a game can only end in the event of the Golden Snitch’s capture has been removed, with matches now ending at the expiration of a time limit or when one team has amassed at least 100 points. Just like in the source material, a Chaser throwing the Quaffle through a hoop is worth 10 points, but the value of a Quidditch Champions character catching the Golden Snitch has been reduced drastically to only 30 points. Many wonder whether Seekers will continue to compete after the Golden Snitch has been caught. The trailer confirms that the game will let players take on all four roles on the team — Chaser, Seeker, Beater, and Keeper — and that each will have a unique play style.
Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions Makes Some Big Rule Changes to Quidditch
The rule change may be jarring to some fans of the book series, but it may also provide for quicker, more competitive matches. In Harry Potter lore, the longest Quidditch match on record took about three months to complete due to the length of time it took for a Seeker to catch the Golden Snitch, which clearly wouldn’t work in the real world. Additionally, in the Quidditch World Cup section of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Bulgaria’s Viktor Krum intentionally loses the finals match to Ireland’s much more skilled team by catching the Golden Snitch, saving face by making the score closer than it would have been if the match had been allowed to continue.
In addition to the scoring changes, the new trailer also provides information about how the game’s Career Mode and progression system will work. In Career Mode, players will start out by competing for the Garden Cup at the Weasley Burrow, moving on to three more official cups at Hogwarts and other schools from the series, before finally representing one of 16 nations in the Quidditch World Cup. The game will also allow players to gain skill levels and unlock special moves, and characters will be customizable.