Again, I’m a bit late to the party, as the game is two years old by now, but over the course of the last few months, I played through Hogwarts Legacy, the open-world action RPG, and I got to say, I really liked it!

How come?

I’m not a true fan of the Harry Potter franchise or Wizarding World in general. I have watched the movies, and even read the first book (in French; don’t ask!), but while I appreciate the author’s world-building efforts, the story never really captivated me. My wife, however, read all the books 3+ times and had them read to her (via audiobooks) several more times, so when I saw Hogwarts Legacy in a Steam sale for less than 20 €, I immediately asked her if she was interested. The answer was lukewarm – she wasn’t sure if such an open-world game was the right thing for her. To my surprise, she nevertheless bought the game a few weeks later – for the full price, and for the Nintendo Switch, a platform that’s one generation older than all others this game has been released on. Consequently, the port looks the part: think PlayStation 3 graphics in PlayStation 2 resolution. But it was the full game, and what I saw from the gameplay was intriguing enough that I spent the 18 € to buy the game again when it went on sale the next time, for myself, on PC, just to see how much better it looks when run on appropriate hardware. Instead of just dabbling around a few hours, as I did in the few open-world games I tried so far, I was sucked in and now, with ca. 100 hours on the clock, I finally finished it.

Background

But first things first. Since Warner Bros. has the exlusive rights to the Wizarding World franchise, it was naturally them who were going to publish a game based on that IP. To do so, they purchased a (then-)small development studio with no prior open-world expertise called Avalanche Software from Disney in 2017 (which is not to be confused with Avalance Studios, the open-world pioneers who created the Just Cause franchise), and they got to work almost immediately. Accoding to the ~30-minute long credits, they enlisted the help of a dozen other game studios, including famous ones like Monolith (No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R.) or TT Games (the LEGO games series, including LEGO Harry Potter). There was one person who was not (or only minimally) involved though, and that’s the series’ creator Joanne K. Rowling. That’s mostly for the better though, not just because it gives a “fresh start”, which is emphasized by the whole story playing 100 years prior to the events of Harry Potter, but also because they avoided JKR’s kinda problematic stance on several ideological topics this way. So let’s not beat around the bush and address the elephant in the room: Yes, the game makes it abundantly clear that the creators had none of JKR’s anti-LGBTQ bullshit – when creating your character, the choices of male/female appearance, voice, and whether they’re living in the witches’ or wizards’ bedrooms are fully orthogonal; and two hours into the game, you’re going to meet an obviously transgender NPC. So while you’re definitely putting a few cents in JKR’s pocket by buying the game, and I can understand people for boycotting it for that reason (I was on the fence too!), it’s at least editorially independent. With that out of the way, let’s not discuss this topic any further and instead talk about the game itself.

Gameplay

One thing I absolutely love about this game is its positive mood. I couldn’t stand GTA V, which forces you to kill an innocent person right in the freakin’ tutorial mission; The Witcher, likewise, has a dark and grimey overall mood; and the Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed series are also based around violence for the sake of itself. While I’m not fundamentally opposed to gore and violence in general (my Steam stats show Doom Eternal in the #3 spot for most hours played), I don’t really like the idea of being a bad or heavily morally conflicted character. In that regard, Hogwarts Legacy feels outright wholesome: Yes, there’s plenty of combat, but it rarely feels like the raison d’être for a mission. Your character is supposed to be a good person, and while you have several options to be mean to others, there’s no point in the entire story where you can do something that’s actually evil.

So, what are you doing in this game? There main story revolves about goblins conspiring to seize the sorcerer’s world, and the player, being able to perceive and utilize some rare kind of Ancient Magic, is destined to prevent that from happening. But the arguably more interesting stories unfold in the side quests – there’s a student who tries to lift a curse from his sister and doesn’t refrain to utilize the darkest of magic to get to his goal; there’s the girl who feels guilty for her father’s death but who ultimately learns, while defeating some of the main antagonists of the game, that he just acted on instinct and there’s nothing she could have done about it; with another girl, you’re going to rescue a fair number of unique beasts; and then there’s the usual some-monster-has-stolen-something-please-kill-it-and-return-my-property-to-me quests, some of which are quite elaborate; some quests are trasure hunts, and so on. And that’s only the quests – there’s so much more stuff you can do in this game, it’s kinda wild: There are caves with treasure chests all over the map, some of which also require solving a few puzzles to get to the loot. Chests in general often contain clothing, which has magical properties to improve your attack and/or defense effectiveness; later in the game, you can even upgrade some pieces of clothing for even better stats, and “weave” special powers into them, e.g. making particular attack spells much more powerful. To do so, you need parts of hair or horn from 13 different species of magical beasts (some of which are reeeally cute!), which you can capture/rescue, domesticate in your own vivarium, and eventually breed to get offspring (which is even more cute). Being a game about wizards and witches, you can also plant magic plants and brew magic potions that assist in combat. You can upgrade your skills in various other ways: there’s a standard RPG talent tree, and the special Ancient Magic capabilities of your character, which can be used for some really powerful attacks, can be enhanced by solving puzzles at Ancient Magic hotspots (typically ruins) all over the map. More puzzle solving awaits in the so-called Merlin Trials, of which there 9 different types and 95 instances in total. Hogwarts itself has its fair share of puzzles too, including several rooms of what can best be described as “3D Sokoban”. There are also minigame tournaments like a “reverse Boules” games where you pull the balls (with magic, of course) instead of throwing them, and broom racing. In a special room in Hogwarts, you can freely change decorations to your liking. I certainly missed some things here in this list – suffice to say, there’s plenty of interesting stuff to do if you’re a completionist. Even doing the bare minimum to get through the main story will still take 20+ hours, I’d guess.

This amount of variety doesn’t apply to the enemies you’re going to face in combat though. It’s basically just various specializations of rogue sorcerers, rogue goblins, wolves, zombies, trolls, and spiders, lots of spiders. You can sometimes sneak onto enemies while cloaked and insta-kill them, but most of the time, combat means flooding the enemies with attack spells. The spells come in several categories, and only a tiny part are directly combat-related. There are many “utility spells” like push/pull, move, flip, illuminate, repair, levitate etc. Some of these a dual-purpose spells; for example, you can not only push objects away, but also enemies, and fire attack spells are also required for puzzles that involve putting some object on fire. One spell is so useful that it has its own hotkey: »Revelio« highlights objects which the player can interact with, even across walls, which is a godsend during exploration; some puzzles are nigh-impossible to solve without it.

Hogwarts itself is a hopeless, yet beautiful, maze of floors, chambers, towers and stairways. The game tries to make navigation a bit easier by having a permanently-displayed automap, but it completely fails in making the castle’s complex layout clear. The only two things that actually work is displaying the path to the next quest target, and using the fast-travel function that’s represented by Floo Flames (which are already known from the Harry Potter books/movies).
The world outside of Hogwarts is the actual star of the show for me. It’s quite substantial in size: There are two areas of what I think should be ca. 10 square kilometers each, full of forests, fields, hills, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, several villages, beast dens, ruins, enemy camps, dungeons etc. To get across these vast distances, the broom that is unlocked a few hours into the game is a very handy tool; not only is it fast (and can be upgraded three times to be even faster), flying high also increases visibility of certain secret locations that are then conveniently added to the game’s automap. Alternatively, around the halfway point of the game you also get access to riding a Hippogriff, a horse/eagle hybrid beast, for flying with even more style. The map is also generally much more useful in that part of the game’s world, but it could be better, as it lacks free zoom and rotate, and there’s no filtering for specific POI types.

The game offers four difficulty levels, and switching between those is possible at any time, as they only affect combat. At the easier levels, hints are displayed whenever a certain button should be pressed or held to counter an attack; at higher levels, the player needs to figure this out themselves, which can be quite hard if the attacker is out of view. The easiest level is called »Story Mode«, and contrary to some other games (I’m looking at you, The Witcher III!), it actually delivers on its promise: only one enemy will attack at any point in time, you’re given plenty of time to counter attacks, and the player’s defenses are much stronger than usual. In this mode, combat isn’t an issue at all, which allows for an examplarily frustration-free gameplay experience without resorting to any further cheats and hacks.

Controls

I played the game exclusively with a gamepad, but switching to keyboard and mouse is possible at any time. In either case, the controls are complex – all buttons on the gamepad (and all keys around WASD) have one, often more, function(s). It takes some time getting used to, and I never managed to not make any undesired inputs, but I accept it as being a consequence of the game’s complexity. At least, I can’t come up with any major ideas that would make it objectively better.

One example: The right trigger is used for shooting in combat. Just pressing it briefly casts the so-called »basic« spell, kinda like a standard unlimited-ammo pistol in traditional shooters. It can be pressed multiple times in quick succession, and such combos can already do a lot of harm, but for serious damage, other spells are required. For those, the right trigger needs to be held down, and one of the ABXY is pressed to select the spell to cast. The mapping of the spells is chosen by the player; there are up to four sets of four spells, and switching sets is possible at any time by pressing the D-pad while the right trigger is held down. (The four D-pad directions have a different function when the trigger isn’t held though!)

The most confusing interface is probably the combat utility menu, called upon by holding down the left shoulder button. It opens a ring menu of potions and plants that can be selected to be used when the left shoulder button is pressed only briefly later on. The caveat: That same menu is also used to mount the broom, using the B button. But when pressing B outside of that menu, a quick dodge movement is being performed. It is possible to summon the broom without waiting for the full-screen combat utility menu to come up, but the timing is incredibly tight – I can’t count the times I accidently dodged something when I just wanted to take off with my broom.

(One nice detail: The ABXY button mappings are platform-independent. For example, the button for jumping is always the bottom one: A on Xbox, ✕ on PlayStation, B on Switch. No need to re-wire your brain when switching platforms!)

Presentation

I have to say that Hogwarts Legacy has a level of polish I’ve rarely seen before in a game. (Mind you, I’m not a hardcore gamer and rarely play recent AAA titles, so this might not mean much.) The world looks and sounds just beautiful. The game takes place across four seasons, and in each one, the world looks convincing. Winter, for example, doesn’t just have snow everywhere, but also Christmas decorations in some places. Sunsets in particular look absolutely stunning. Wandering through a forest at sunset in autumn looks every bit as magical as taking an actual hike under these conditions.

Character animations are good too. You can customize your character’s appearance with a huge assortment of robes, scarfs and hats, and they all wave realistically when in motion. There’s the occasional small intersection bug visible in close-up portraits, but nothing too egregious.

I can’t help but mention one mission explicitly here – it’s one of the main quests, and in contrast to the rest of the game, it’s presented in a non-photorealistic black-and-white chalkboard rendering style, with nice temporally stable stipple patterns everywhere. It looks so off-the-charts awesome, I could imagine entire games made in this style.

The audio part is also outstanding, and it doesn’t stop at the ambient sound and the great music. There’s also a substantial amount of dialogue lines, and all of it is spoken by professional voice actors, with correct, situation-aware intonation. That’s even true for the German localized version, which I played. The translation itself is also very good, with only one exception: Couldn’t they come up with a more universe-fitting term for the healing potion, originally called »Wiggenweld Potion«, than the utterly cringe-worthy »Mega-Power-Trank«? There’s also perfect lip-sync for the localized voiceovers, which I didn’t actually notice until I watched some of the (few!) cutscenes which aren’t rendered in realtime, but played back as pre-rendered videos, with lip-sync for the English voices, of course.

Technical Aspects

Starting to play a game a year and a half after its release means that the most egregious bugs (of which Hogwarts Legacy had its fair share, according to reviews) are supposed to be fixed. Indeed I can’t complain much about the stability of the game – I never encountered any serious game logic bugs, and the game crashed on me exactly once in ~100 hours.

As mentioned before, the game’s graphics are almost solidly in »every frame a painting« territory, and that’s not just at the all-Ultra (including raytracing) native-resolution settings I used on my RTX 4070 Ti Super desktop machine; on the Steam Deck with everything on Medium settings, no RT, and AMD FSR, it’s not appreciably worse, at least not in still images. (Raytracing in general makes surprisingly little difference here, except halving the framerate.) Even TAA, a technology that can have disastrous effects on graphics quality in titles like GTA V, works almost perfectly here: There’s the occasional dithering artifact in fine hair, sure, but it’s far from the blurry, artifactey mess I used to associate with TAA. Even FSR works quite nicely – after scene changes and very quick camera movements, the image looks grainy for a few frames, but that’s the only adverse effect I noticed. So, long story short, everything’s fine at pixel level.

However, that doesn’t mean that the graphics are flawless – far from it! The lighting can we wildly inconsistent, particularily in character portraits during dialogue scenes and cutscenes; when leaving a dungeon, the outside lighting doesn’t represent the current daytime and weather conditions until you fully stepped out; even with RT fully enabled at Ultra settings, large water bodies are still rendered with screen space reflections (SSR); light leaks into some dungeons, making them blindingly bright because exposure is measured from some environment probe and not the actual screen brightness; and there’s an awful lot of detail popping in and out all the time. I can muster some understanding for the latter when flying distances with the broom, but frequently, I had the effect that quickly going into a menu (like the map) and returning from it removed all grass from the floor, only for it to be loaded back in a few seconds later. Another patch arrived in late January, which was supposed to solve the light leakage and SSR water issues, but I didn’t see any difference. It did fix the broken-LOD-after menu issue though, but at the cost of occasionally rendering one completely broken frame every few minutes.

Conclusion

As I already mentioned in the introduction, I really love this game. Its overall positive vibe and versatility and the exceedingly fair difficulty level make it a very fun experience that’s mostly free of frustrations. The audiovisual aspects are likewise outstanding, if you can tolerate the various small graphics issues. I can only recommend everyone to get it when it’s on sale, barring any moral conflicts about giving the Wizarding World creator Joanne K. Rowling any money – but even then, keep in mind that the game tries its best to distance itself from the author’s ideology and just wants to be a nice game set in the world she created, but one that’s otherwise independent from her influence. And boy, does it ever excel at that!