Hogwarts Legacy

I read the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling once back in the day when they were coming out hot off the press. Beyond that I have by happenstance watched maybe one of the film adaptations but otherwise that's where my following of the Wizarding World stopped. In 2023, Hogwarts Legacy by Avalanche Software (not to be confused with the Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios) provided an entirely new addition to the universe in the form of a third person action roleplaying game. It looked cool enough to play and was just recently added onto PC Game Pass.

I cast an illusion of choice

The game is set in the 1890s, a century before the Boy Who Lived (Harry) is born. Your character is starting at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as a fifth-year student (15 years of age), which is quite unusual -- spellcasting talent manifested only so late? I assume you are mudblood because surely a child of a wizard family is also a wizard/witch from the get-go? Your background is left rather vague by the game -- I guess they didn't want to add all the interactions the details could have implied.

The stress in Hogwarts Legacy's genre classification is definitely on the action part: the choices you make are superficial with some slight exceptions. I would almost say that the game is better fit under action-adventure instead.

With your unusual school career start, it is no surprise that you're special. Soon enough it is discovered that you can see traces of ancient magic -- dubbed Ancient Magic -- no one else can. That is tied to the current events of a goblin rebellion. In each chapter of the Ancient Magic narrative, you get to watch a Pensieve memory. I found it amusing that I guessed where the story was going the moment the second one started playing without any actual hints having yet been given. The narrative didn't in the end get to where I thought it might, though: a surprise villain behind the goblins. I guess expecting such a twist was too much.

The theme of the memories is echoed in one of the relationship side quest lines with a Slytherin student Sebastian. His sister is ill from having been cursed and he thinks Dark Arts will provide a solution despite their caretaker uncle and everyone else having told him there's no cure. I thought Sebastian's quest was interesting and liked most of it. Towards the end, it too starts to suffer from the ludonarrative dissonance Hogwarts Legacy as a whole suffers from.

Here I go killing again

If we assume that what your character does in the game happens canonically, they will end up having murdered hundreds of people as a fucking 15-year-old like it's no big deal. The bodies might belong to Dark Wizards but they were still human. The excuse of them possibly just being injured is also thrown out of the window when you start using the Killing Curse that you can learn in Sebastian's quest line. The game leaves the morality of using of the Unforgivable Curses entirely on you; no one will mind you shouting Avada Kedavra!. At least in Harry's times, murdering someone with the spell grants you a life-long trip to Azkaban.

The few occasions (adult) NPCs use the Killing Curse in Hogwarts Legacy did have the gravitas it's supposed to have, though -- always a dead serious moment. I guess the books did leave some level of lasting impression on me, triggered by the pair of words. Sebastian using the spell was so predictable that it took from the moment, however. Him trying to excuse it afterwards by saying he didn't actually mean it didn't quite convince when he'd been constantly telling me that the Curses work only if there's actual intention behind them.

The single time the game appeared to acknowledge me using the Curses was the boss fight at the end of the Minding Your Own Business quest: the Cruciatus Curse was disabled during it. You have a (useless) wizard cop there so maybe your character wants to avoid using a questionable spell in front of her. Or maybe it was just glitched.

The Killing Curse does actually kill when cast, even enemies with boss health bars -- to my surprise -- though they might stay alive for story reasons. The curse's power is balanced by a long cooldown and you do get it pretty late into the game, too. Unless for roleplaying reasons, you might as well choose to learn all three Unforgivable Curses. (The Imperius Curse I did find bothersome to use because keeping track of the enemy on my side took too much effort.) The Dark Arts perks are good and you can make multiple regular spells also afflict the cursed status like Crucio! does, and with the Killing Curse's perk, the spell will kill all cursed targets in addition to its own.

Action with depth

Hogwarts Legacy's combat is entertaining. It's fast-paced, enemies have different weaknesses, different color protection spells need a matching color offensive spell to remove, you can parry/riposte with Protego!/Stupefy! and you have quite the spellcasting arsenal. Your Ancient Magic charges allow you to throw out highly damaging (and violent) attacks.

The sole annoyance in the action is that your action bar is sad, a mere 4-slotted one. With perks you get more bars to switch to, but it would be better if one action bar had more slots and/or the additional bars were on a modifier key instead. It's the same problem I had with Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Constantly having to check which bar you have active is bothersome.

Standard open world

I often see people stating that the school part -- going to classes and stuff -- is the best part of Hogwarts Legacy. I don't share the sentiment for that experience and the game isn't really focused on it either. You do get an actual class the first time for each subject but on further visits to complete your special assignment from a given professor (since you have to catch up 4 years of school) there's only a brief cutscene.

I suppose the school part does provide something unique compared to the standard open world activity checklist Hogwarts Legacy is outside of its quests. Even if you're not going for 100% completion, your level progression is based on completing the challenges in the Field Guide given to you by Professor Weasley. You have to engage in the activities to gain experience and the epilogue requires you to be at least level 34 (out of 40 max).

The most annoying activity are Merlin Trials that are simple puzzles and 95(!) in number. For a while, completing a set for the challenges gives you increases to your gear carrying capacity, but those upgrades are long done when you finally unlock the achievement for completing every trial. There are a few different types but way too many are the same ones -- I would have removed all repeats to reduce the tedium. Also: was it truly necessary to have a minigame for the lockpicking spell? There are way too many locks in the game and no other spell has such a repetitive bonus activity.

Finding the many missing Field Guide pages within the Hogwarts Castle is also an arduous task because the place is huge. I spent way too much time running around, spamming Revelio!, and trying to figure out from which direction the bell tingle indicating a hidden page was coming from. Sometimes it's above or below you on an entirely different floor.

I am the protagonist

As if your special status wasn't special enough already, Professor Weasley also leads you to the Room of Requirement to have a place to study in peace. There you can conjure up brewing cauldrons, enchanting tables, plant pots, and all manner of cosmetic decorations for your private study. The place can be customized completely visually, and once beast capturing becomes available, the Room starts opening outdoor Vivariums to different biomes for you to release the beasts into. In the Vivariums you can conjure up bigger stuff, like houses, to decorate their environments as well.

I guess the building system was easier to implement than quidditch. The in-game explanation for no quidditch is Headmaster Black having canceled the season due to injuries last year or something. You do you get a broom to fly, though. It's always nice to be to able to take off the ground in an open world game.

Hogwarts Legacy's gear system is basic: one stat with a possible enchantment. Item qualities are color-coded in the usual scheme: orange ones have the highest stats and can have the highest rank of an enchantment. Many of the game's clothes and accessories amplify your main character status by making you look absolutely ridiculous among the school uniform wearing other students. Fortunately the game has an easy transmogrification system so you can tone your drip down. Once found, I used the stylish Embellished Cobalt Overcoat with Prefect Vest outfit appearances until I unlocked the Ravenclaw Relic House Uniform for collecting all the House tokens. The embroidery on the cloak has a glowing, animated color gradient effect and it looks amazing in certain dark areas, such as in the Minding Your Own Business quest.

"Those of wit and learning"

The cloak is respective to your House of course: one of the few things actually affected. The biggest impact of your House choice -- and even its significance is debatable -- is on the House-exclusive quest that leads to your character finding the Map Chamber at which point a House-exclusive achievement is unlocked. Even when beelining the main quest from the start, it will take more than 2 hours to reach it. Except for those 4 achievements, Hogwarts Legacy takes one full playthrough to 100%. I'm slightly bothered for having spent 94 hours of Game Pass time on this when Epic is currently giving the game away for free.

Your House choice is barely mentioned outside the relevant main quests. I had expected more but it's limited to few "Pretty good -- for a Ravenclaw" type of lines. The competitive House Cup isn't really there and Hogwarts isn't the scary social battlefield it's in the books. But again, the game obviously didn't try to provide that kind of an experience.

As Hogwarts Legacy is from Warner Bros., I expected it to come with preaching of the Message. Students and professors sure seem to come all over the world; Hogwarts is the freaking pinnacle of racial diversity in the late 1800s. There is no gender choice and your character is referred to as a they. You do have to pick if you're a witch or wizard, though -- no in-betweens.

From the very start I was waiting for a moment the game would loudly announce its disagreement with Rowling on the one point her feminist views don't align with Western liberals. And it sure happened in the form of Sirona, the innkeeper of the Three Broomsticks. It comes off so performative. "Did you see how bravely she stood her ground against the goblin?" "She's a good one to know."

It is so grating when developers use a setting with fantastical elements to drum up their gospel in. Surely the often so loosely defined magic in this one would actually allow to change one's voice, even permanently. Sirona sounding comedically dubbed was so damn off-putting. Fortunately there is a skip button for cutscenes and dialogue. It must drive Rowling's enemies up the walls that Harry Potter is so massively popular. The author has no doubt been collecting royalties from this game too, which is currently the 26th best-selling video game of all time.

Fairly demanding

Hogwarts Legacy runs on Unreal Engine 4. It's not the lightest title to have been made on the engine -- and I wasn't expecting to run it maxed on my old PC anyway -- but I do wonder how much the performance was hampered by the Xbox app being just terrible. Launching the game sure took its time and the app also got all tangled up when exiting the game.

If you can run Hogwarts Legacy with raytracing on, I believe it will use the tech for mirrors. The prologue has functional mirrors even without RTX; it's probably using the mirrored clone model trick there. Last month I played The Wheel of Time, an Unreal Engine 1 title, which did a cool non-Euclidean geometry trick with a portal pathway. Coincidentally -- and maybe not all that surprisingly -- this game features such at multiple occasions as well.

One big technical issue I encountered once was the game becoming unable to make a save of any kind. This happened during the main quest you're looking for a goblin helmet in a dungeon outside Hogsmeade. Hogwarts Legacy normally autosaves constantly but it doesn't say anything if the saving actually fails. Restarting fixed the problem but I had been playing for 2 hours after it occurring without realizing something was wrong. As per reports, the bug has been known for a long time and, as is evident, it hasn't been completely fixed.

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