Okay so it’s been a while since all the furor over Hogwarts Legacy, between camps that tried to start a shitty little boycott because Rowling-something-something-transphobes and people who bought the game just to stick it to the first group. I think it’s time someone was honest about the game, so here I am to do just that.
It’s not a bad game, but I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to get it if I wasn’t streaming it for my friends. >.<
Unfortunately it suffers from being an Open World Game circa 2010. And no, by that I don’t just mean “it’s not linear therefore it sucks” there are plenty of games that have open worlds which enhance or even define the game’s value. I mean that it suffers from being a game that feels contractually obliged to have the kind of content that a lot of lazily designed open world games are known for, “The Ubisoft Game” comes to mind. You know, the one game Ubisoft keeps making over and over? Sometimes they apply the Assassin’s Creed brand to it, sometimes Far Cry and on more rare occasions Watch_Dogs, but it’s all the same kind of banal trash? Hogwarts Legacy suffers from that in spades.
I know this game was designed to facilitate the Potterhead childhood fantasy of attending Hogwarts and it turns out that when you get there you’re special/the chosen one, heck almost every Potterverse fanfic is based on that idea. But I have to say: The Hogwarts framing device is actually the worst aspect of the narrative. I’m not even joking when I say the story they wanted to tell would have worked better if the protagonist was just a grown up wizard, maybe instead of choosing your house you could choose how your character got roped into the Goblin Rebellion/Victor Rookwood conspiracy plot.
I would suggest at least three options: An Auror (magic police) Agent on the case, A bounty hunter that bit off more then they could chew, or a Prisoner from Azkaban sent to do the Ministry’s dirty work as a deniable asset. That way you could have unique starting perks/drawbacks depending on your origin and it would make the story much more believable. All that’s accomplished by making you a student at Hogwarts is preventing you from using all the game’s mechanics at once and committing one of the worst sins of the Open World Game: Making your entire main campaign into a fifty-hour long tutorial.
Say whatever you will about Skyrim, but at least the game gives you the option to just run wherever you want once you leave Helgen. If you’ve played the game before, as soon as you leave the twenty-minute tutorial dungeon, you know how the game works and it’s happy to just let you go wherever you want and do any quest you feel like. Hogwarts Legacy on the other hand won’t even let you learn the burning spell until you do a round of fight club.
Oh and speaking of the Fight Club, can I just say how this game keeps blue-balling you with side quest story chains? With the exception of companion storylines, they’re barely more then three quests long and usually end rather abruptly. So if you get excited upon hearing about Crossed Wands, an unsanctioned, student-run dueling club that you can join, let me just give you the sad news now: It’s not a guild/faction like the Arena from Oblivion, it’s only three fights that you can complete in five minutes back to back. It’s actually a required assignment to learn the Incendio spell, so it’s not even some cool optional content that you get from performing well in your practice duel in Defence Against the Dark Arts.
At least the game is honest about telling you upfront that there won’t be a Quidditch Club questline in the game, but it does still lie about some kind of Broom Racing Club that’s also a let down.
Compare that to the PC version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets from 2002, which had both an entire Quidditch Season (admittedly not the best minigame) and a proper Dueling Club with rankings and increasingly more difficult opponents. Hogwarts Legacy very easily could have had both, and so much more with the resources it has to work with and systems it already has in place.
Just to give you an idea: Imagine if this game released with proper faction questlines. You know, like TES has been doing since fucking Daggerfall.
There could be several officially sanctioned clubs: like the House Quidditch Teams to take advantage of the broom flying mechanic, a Beast-Tamers club that asks you to use your beasts to complete a series of challenges and yes, even a properly sanctioned Dueling Club where in each round you and your opponent can only use a select list of spells to battle each other.
But those are just the school run clubs, then there would also be student-run clubs to add extra spice. Like a Troublemakers club where the questline is about using the stealth mechanics and supplies from the joke store to pull an escalating series of pranks and japers in a school-friendly version of a thieves guild faction. Crossed Wands can return as an alternative “street fight” version of dueling, where competitors are allowed to fight with whatever spells, potions, plants or artefacts they can get their hands on. This could allow for some really creative fights, with solo-opponents or teams that use some of the tools that are usually restricted to player use like the potions or combat plants, or even some weird artefact fights like a double-team with an enchanted shield and sword, one capable of absorbing any magical attack but vulnerable to having things hurled at him, while the other guy with the sword acts as a melee combat monster you need to dance around and avoid.
But all this squandered potential aside, I’m not even asking they put in proper guilds or factions, just that they cut out all the bitchwork this game expects you to do. The most heinous of all is the “Man Behind the Moons” quest, the requirement for the unlocking charm.
I have no idea which subhuman criminal in the AAA Game Industry thinks the “Run around the open world mashing the scan button to find hidden collectables” is a fun mechanic, but this inferior creature needs to be fucking castrated and fired out of a cannon into the sun so that their defection cannot taint the next generation of game developers.
This kind of mission design is right up there with “escorting a fragile VIP” or “mandatory stealth mission with an easily detectable AI companion” for worst ideas in gaming.
And from all this ranting so far you all probably think I hate this game and that I find it boring, but the most frustrating thing is…this game can be very interesting and fun when it wants to be.
When you’re just going on adventures on your own across the Wizarding World, or exploring the hand-crafted dungeons where all the actual effort went into with the puzzles and combat encounters, the game is great! When you’re just zipping around on your broom taking in the sights, spotting a castle in the distance and flying up to it only to drop right into the middle of a group of dark wizards and goblins and having to quickly take control of the battle, it’s amazing!
I just wish there was more of that, and less of the bitch work and talking to Hufflepuffs about their animal rights cringe. Daily reminder that Hufflepuffs are the worst.
