Aight so I played this for few hours and I get exactly why Harry Potter adults like this game: it successfully captures the magic of the books and especially the earlier films really well. There's a lot of environmental detail in Hogwarts that is fun to look at. Lots of moving paintings and inanimate objects doing fun and whimsical things that really don't need to be there at all but greatly contribute to the atmosphere. I wish more games did that. Aside from the spectacles this game has, it ultimately doesn't really deserve much consideration as a game worth playing.
The story had small amounts of intrigue I can see being interesting down the line , but really most of the plot I saw is just a vehicle for nostalgia baiting to give the casual audience what they paid for. That's fine and all but I was never hooked on a single thing that was happening. It does not help at all that the game spends a lot of time addressing that you are a fifth year student who just joined Hogwarts because you are super cool and smart and almost everybody in school likes you from the jump. It is really hard to shake the notion that your character is anything but a self-insert in for someone's DeviantArt fan fiction power fantasy and doesn't make for a lot of room for a player to make a character they can really express themselves with.
What's really funny is you can see & feel where this game halted development as a live service and 180'd into a single player experience. A really smart move considering the collapse of the live service side of the market, but it's obvious you were meant to run dungeons with another player or two and collect loot exactly like Destiny 2. How you find items and even the equip menu UI is dead on exactly like Destiny. The spell effects are cool and take after the latter Harry Potter movies where they essentially act like wizard bullets -- and doing your special wizard move looks pretty good.
This game also involves a lot of stealth, which is the weakest aspect of this entire game. The two stealth sections I played were linear and really, really boring. All I could think about while playing them was that this game is meant for casual audiences and not meant to be challenging, but then I remembered Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Gamecube that came out twenty-one years ago had the same philosophy on its stealth sections but gave the player more freedom to take on it's stealth challenges.
This game started development before JK Rowling's overt fascist-adjacent views were brought under spotlight and we can go back and forth all fucking decade on the pros and cons of supporting this game as a consumer product. That all said, I'm a second generation Scottish immigrant and a person who recognizes Trans people and their inherit rights as human beings; I'm not gonna throw that aside to support some extraordinarily mid video game even if it doesn't greatly affect JK Rowling's wealth or influence. Fuck her whole ass life, her momma, and her momma's momma. So I pirated this thing and deleted the files after I realized I wasn't engaged at all and everyone was arguing over a product that really isn't special in any way other than emulating the vibes of earlier media of this franchise to get some bucks from an audience who've had a hard life and are not terminally online like all of us. This game's existence is just a touchstone of how pathetic the game industry, the consumer base and internet discourse really is. I kind of want to live in another dimension where Harry Potter doesn't exist so I never have to witness an event like this again. Hogwarts Legacy, everyone!
This game runs like shit on PC too.
The story had small amounts of intrigue I can see being interesting down the line , but really most of the plot I saw is just a vehicle for nostalgia baiting to give the casual audience what they paid for. That's fine and all but I was never hooked on a single thing that was happening. It does not help at all that the game spends a lot of time addressing that you are a fifth year student who just joined Hogwarts because you are super cool and smart and almost everybody in school likes you from the jump. It is really hard to shake the notion that your character is anything but a self-insert in for someone's DeviantArt fan fiction power fantasy and doesn't make for a lot of room for a player to make a character they can really express themselves with.
What's really funny is you can see & feel where this game halted development as a live service and 180'd into a single player experience. A really smart move considering the collapse of the live service side of the market, but it's obvious you were meant to run dungeons with another player or two and collect loot exactly like Destiny 2. How you find items and even the equip menu UI is dead on exactly like Destiny. The spell effects are cool and take after the latter Harry Potter movies where they essentially act like wizard bullets -- and doing your special wizard move looks pretty good.
This game also involves a lot of stealth, which is the weakest aspect of this entire game. The two stealth sections I played were linear and really, really boring. All I could think about while playing them was that this game is meant for casual audiences and not meant to be challenging, but then I remembered Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Gamecube that came out twenty-one years ago had the same philosophy on its stealth sections but gave the player more freedom to take on it's stealth challenges.
This game started development before JK Rowling's overt fascist-adjacent views were brought under spotlight and we can go back and forth all fucking decade on the pros and cons of supporting this game as a consumer product. That all said, I'm a second generation Scottish immigrant and a person who recognizes Trans people and their inherit rights as human beings; I'm not gonna throw that aside to support some extraordinarily mid video game even if it doesn't greatly affect JK Rowling's wealth or influence. Fuck her whole ass life, her momma, and her momma's momma. So I pirated this thing and deleted the files after I realized I wasn't engaged at all and everyone was arguing over a product that really isn't special in any way other than emulating the vibes of earlier media of this franchise to get some bucks from an audience who've had a hard life and are not terminally online like all of us. This game's existence is just a touchstone of how pathetic the game industry, the consumer base and internet discourse really is. I kind of want to live in another dimension where Harry Potter doesn't exist so I never have to witness an event like this again. Hogwarts Legacy, everyone!
This game runs like shit on PC too.