Hogwarts Legacy — The Good, Bad and Ugly of the Wizarding World’s Biggest Gaming Success Story

Harry Potter is one of the most celebrated and recognizable media franchises in the world, to the point where you would be hard pressed to find someone who has not heard of it. The popularity of the novels and films set the foundation for Harry Potter’s commercial success across numerous avenues such as theatre, merchandise and even in-person themed attractions at amusement parks. Even though Harry Potter is one of the biggest pop culture phenomena of the past two decades, I have always found it puzzling to hear that Harry Potter video games have garnered only moderate to mediocre performance and critical reception.

The near zero impact of Harry Potter video games on the broader gaming subculture is hard to fathom, especially when you consider that the sophistication and depth of the Harry Potter universe makes the franchise well-equipped to tell compelling new stories and deliver innovative experiences through gaming. The limited success of Harry Potter games becomes even more jarring when you compare Harry Potter’s track record in gaming with other media franchises possessing a similar level of mainstream recognition and cultural impact. The difference between Harry Potter and a franchise like Star Wars — which has seen repeated financial success and critical acclaim for games spanning multiple genres — is night and day, and begs the question of what went wrong with Harry Potter’s library of games?

Harry Potter video games largely aimed to piggyback off the theatrical releases of the films, leading to shortened development cycles. From a narrative perspective, these games often stayed within the established universe and plotlines featured in the books and movies over telling new stories within the Harry Potter world. With a focus on meeting timelines and attracting movie / novel fans, these Harry Potter games often failed to deliver the imaginative and cutting-edge gameplay needed for mainstream gamers to take them seriously. These games often received mixed to negative reception with Metacritic scores averaging around 60–70%. For most gamers, scores this low signal a game with some significant red flags and flaws. Personally, I often would not even consider buying a game with average review scores in that range.

In the late 2010s, Warner Bros. took a major step to reposition the Wizarding World for greater success and profitability in gaming by greenlighting the game we now know today as Hogwarts Legacy. Unlike other Harry Potter games, Hogwarts Legacy had a much lengthier development cycle and budget, and placed more emphasis on appealing to mainstream gamers. The game features open world exploration, modern action-RPG gameplay, next gen graphics and a completely original story set in the Wizarding World universe separate from the books and movies. The announcement of Hogwarts Legacy was met with intense hype and excitement, and a fair share of skepticism given that the studio behind the game — Avalanche Software — was primarily known for developing licensed games as opposed to popular Triple A titles. At this time, Hogwarts Legacy really looked like it had a chance to be the real deal — the expansive Harry Potter game that diehard fans and gamers have waited tirelessly for.

Now that four months have passed since Hogwarts Legacy’s release, I would honestly say that the game was a smashing hit and surpassed how well people thought it would perform. It generated $1 billion in sales (more sales than all Harry Potter games combined from 2004–2010), became the most popular game ever streamed on Twitch in the history of the platform, and possibly marked the breakthrough the Harry Potter franchise desperately needed sustain meaningful growth and greater recognition in the gaming industry for years to come.

Although Hogwarts Legacy succeeded financially and made a significant impression on the wider gaming community, it does not necessarily suggest that the game matches the quality of comparable open world games developed by other studios. My review will explore the highs and lows of Hogwarts Legacy to evaluate how well the game measures up against the standard of excellence set by the vast sea of acclaimed open world titles released in recent years.

The Good

Hogwarts Legacy is a stunning game with most locations on the map being visually breathtaking. With exceptionally polished broomstick controls and movement, it is honestly a delight to fly freely around the map and fully immerse yourself within the world Avalanche has put together.

Hogwarts Legacy’s most outstanding achievement in art direction has to be the game’s near perfect recreation and reimagination of the Hogwarts castle and school grounds. Familiar locations like the Great Hall and Grand Staircase are adapted perfectly for the game, and the visual design and architecture of the school is fully consistent with the way Hogwarts is described and illustrated in the Harry Potter books and movies. In Hogwarts Legacy, my first visit to Hogwarts induced an immediate rush of nostalgia because the school nailed everything that made Hogwarts so unique and memorable to devout fans of the series. Hogwarts Legacy effectively captured the scale, majesty and air of mysteriousness that made Hogwarts one of the most unique and memorable settings ever featured in literature and film. The school in game is massive and brimming with life, yet contains so many secrets tucked away from plain sight — hidden rooms, corridors and details that players can only find when they go off of the beaten path. A player can easily entertain themselves for hours roaming around and exploring Hogwarts like a little kid in a museum, which is a true testament to the love and care that Avalanche put into designing the school and ensuring that was done right.

On the topic of exploration, I loved how the game’s Field Notes mechanic connects players to the open world on a deeper level and makes exploration more fun and engaging. Field Notes are lore entries for key landmarks unique to the Wizarding World, and they can only be collected when the player casts the spell Revelio while standing near the landmark. The lore in Hogwarts Legacy is meaningful to acquire because it helps tie the game to other Harry Potter media where the same locations, history and magical concepts highlighted in Field Note entries are also referenced. In addition, the fact that the player constantly sees the same landmarks repeatedly as a Hogwarts student makes this lore continuously relevant to the player throughout the course of the game. Subsequent visits to old locations are elevated by Field Notes due to the additional background and story they layer onto the landmarks in these areas. Lastly, Field Notes also provide players with XP. I absolutely love how this bonus — albeit small — creates a link between exploration and in-game progression by giving players some extra incentive to hunt these Field Notes down.

The combat and implementation of spells in Hogwarts Legacy is what kept me coming back to the game. With regards to spells, I felt Hogwarts did a fine job emphasizing spell use as an integral part of in-game exploration. Almost all spells can be used in the overworld to solve puzzles and clear obstacles. This helps ensure that the vast majority of spells stay useful throughout the game, and encourages the player to truly master and understand the applications of all the spells in their repertoire.

Combat is where Hogwarts Legacy really shined for me. Casting magic at enemies felt snappy, quick and responsive, and I loved the game’s sandbox approach to combat because it never restricts the player to a single playstyle. Players have the option to experiment with different combinations of spells, stealth, ancient magic attacks and battle items (e.g. potions, magical plants) during combat encounters. It was a blast coming up with new strategies to more effectively manage and defeat certain enemy types, and interesting to learn about the synergies that exist between different spells (e.g. cursing enemies) and how these synergies can be exploited in combat to steamroll through normally challenging battles.

The Average to Bad

There is a LOT of content in Hogwarts Legacy outside of the main questline. This includes side quests, collecting beasts, puzzle trials and even decorating your own secret room in Hogwarts. Although the breadth of optional content in Hogwarts Legacy is impressive, most optional objectives lacked the creativity, depth and payoffs needed for them to feel purposeful and worth completing. They all typically evoked a “once you have seen it once, you have seen it all” kind of feeling. For instance, many side quests follow a similar uninspiring fetch quest formula with cosmetic rewards only and most points of interest in the open world ended up repeating the same puzzles.

The open world in Hogwarts Legacy also faces similar challenges, struggling at times to make locations feel meaningful to the player. This is hardly an issue at the start of the game as many of the areas introduced early like the Forbidden Forest are the backdrop of multiple story missions and visited frequently. As a result, players are given more background into these areas and become more intimately acquainted and appreciative of them. New regions accessed in the latter half of the game start to feel less important in comparison because only 1–2 smaller locations in these sections of the map are tied to the game’s major missions. The remaining space in these large regions are relegated to side content only, and players are given substantially less insight on what makes these regions special and unique compared to the rest of the game’s world. I wish Hogwarts Legacy had a better distribution and balance of engaging content across the entire open world to highlight the game’s latter areas and foster a more consistent, holistic exploration experience as the player travels to new spaces.

Although I personally have no complaints about the combat in Hogwarts Legacy, there are some aspects of the combat that players may be let down by. First, the enemy variety in Hogwarts Legacy is somewhat lacking. There are only a handful of different enemy types outside of a few special boss encounters. In addition, hardly any new enemy types are introduced as the player progresses to new areas and missions. The lack of diversity inherent to the game’s combat encounters does make combat feel more repetitive and predictable over time, which is unfortunate given how fine tuned the actual combat gameplay is.

Seasoned action RPG fans may also be turned off by the simplicity of the game’s combat. In comparison to other titles in the action-RPG genre, Hogwarts Legacy has straightforward inputs and demands less coordination from the player in terms of movement, positioning and aiming precision (all magic attacks typically seek out enemies automatically). My only suggestion for improvement would be to feature more close quarters combat options and make it a more central part of Hogwarts’ combat. The risk versus reward for getting close to enemies is practically non-existent in Hogwarts with almost every attack in the game being a ranged attack, and I feel this is a key dimension to third person action combat that Avalanche should have factored in when they designed Hogwarts’ combat gameplay. In the end, it is debatable whether the game would have fared better if it featured more sophisticated action combat with a higher skill ceiling for players to reach. I would argue that the level of depth is perfect though for a Harry Potter game to accommodate the large audience of diehard Harry Potter fans who have zero to limited experience playing modern video games.

The Ugly

Almost all the characters in Hogwarts Legacy are flat characters that do not grow or change at all over the course of the story. This is especially true with the protagonist of the story, which the player customizes and names at the beginning of the game. The main issue I have with the protagonist is that they are just boring. There is nothing memorable about them, and they lack a proper backstory — all we know about them is that they are transferring to Hogwarts and can harness an ancient form of magic. Over the course of the story, the protagonist essentially acts as a plot device, carrying out the necessary tasks and quests needed to save the Wizarding World from its greatest threats because only they possess the natural gifts and abilities to do so. They never encounter any major internal or interpersonal conflict over the story that provides the player insight into the protagonist’s emotions and what makes them unique as an individual. With Hogwarts’ narrative being a key pillar of the game, I feel the use of a flat, stock protagonist hurts the player experience because the player can never fully relate to the character they are playing as. I would have personally preferred it if Hogwarts Legacy had a named protagonist with a more fleshed out character arc.

Even though the protagonist’s lack of character development can be excused somewhat given that they are player customized, it was disappointing to see a similar lack of depth with the game’s secondary characters. The game has far too many secondary characters involved in the main questline, which made it difficult to get invested in most characters because there is only enough screentime for players to learn about them on a superficial level. Although many of these characters are given backstory, it often fails to leave an impact because it is usually told verbally rather than shown through their actions and choices. The lack of attention devoted to characters central to the story (in favor of highlighting a wider range of characters and companions) ruins many of the game’s big moments and makes them less gratifying and impactful. An example would be the final showdowns with the game’s primary antagonists. Despite driving the game’s central conflict, the game’s main villains probably have under 25–30 minutes of dialogue collectively and interact with the player only once or twice. Although we hear about and see their pursuits throughout the game, their inevitable defeat feels incredibly shallow because we are not acquainted with these villains intimately enough to care about our triumph.

I got the sense that Avalanche Software did not want to play it safe with the main story of Hogwarts Legacy. The story is ambitious and introduces many new ideas and concepts to the Wizarding World, but ultimately ends up being too big for its own good. One of the biggest missteps of the story is that the main conflict is not set up well. Hogwarts Legacy focuses on unravelling the mystery of an ancient form of magic that Ranrok, the leader of the goblin rebellion, is also searching for. However, the game fails to establish the stakes of this conflict in a timely manner. Although the secret of ancient magic is revealed by the conclusion of the main story, the lack of insight the player has on its true power for a majority of the game makes it harder to engage with the narrative because it is unclear what the player is fighting to protect. This is further exacerbated by the ambiguity of Ranrok’s motivations for acquiring this magic. The game dives into the steps he takes to search for this magic, but never effectively communicates what he plans to do with it and the threat that he will pose to the Wizarding World if he succeeds. Without a well-defined conflict anchoring the narrative and keeping it focused, playing through the Hogwarts Legacy story can make you feel like you are going through the motions at times rather than working towards a comprehensive goal or objective.

Another shortcoming of the Hogwarts’ narrative is that it becomes increasingly complicated and hard to follow as the story unfolds because the game constantly introduces new background details and exposition. The need to constantly process and remember the game’s frequent information dumps detailing things like the history of ancient magic and the goblin rebellion’s activities makes it overwhelming to play the game because it keeps adding in relevant moving parts. Keeping track of all these overlapping details unfortunately reduced my enjoyment of the story because I had to circle back to these details all the time to fully comprehend the scenes that were playing out.

The pacing of Hogwarts’ story consistently feels unnatural and forced because the game has a tendency to explicitly tell you where to go next and what to do next. For example, an early story quest in the game reveals a map to the player. The map points the player to a location in the library, and in the library the player finds a book. The book has missing pages, and you just happen to stumble upon someone who knows about the missing pages. The convenient, almost perfect sequencing of quests leading the protagonist to where they need to be made it more difficult for me to take the narrative seriously, while the game’s over-telegraphing of story quests takes away from their overall surprise factor.

Despite my many criticisms with Hogwarts’ narrative, I do feel that the Avalanche team possesses the talent to create compelling and well-structured stories. There is a glimmer of hope with the game’s relationship quests, which are all multi-part optional quests outside of the main story focusing on one of the protagonist’s student companions from Hogwarts. For example, Sebastian Sallow’s relationship quest involves the protagonist helping Sebastian search for a cure for his sister who was cursed in a goblin attack. These relationship quests were easily my favorite parts of Hogwarts Legacy because they avoided many of the pitfalls holding the main story back. They each focused on a clear, simple objective and intended to deeply examine each character beneath the surface through their actions, decisions and overall thought process during the questline. The quality of these relationship quests demonstrates that capable writing skill is something that Avalanche is not missing; it just was not applied in the right places during the development of Hogwarts Legacy.

The only other point of critical feedback I would put in the Ugly category is that the game has several poorly implemented or seemingly useless RPG elements. Most of the ones that stand out relate to the game’s gear system. In Hogwarts Legacy, the player can equip different clothing items to increase their offense and defense stats. My biggest gripe with gear in Hogwarts Legacy that the inventory management is terrible. Like many games with a limited amount of gear slots, players need to constantly discard gear to free up inventory space for any new gear collected in the world. Although this issue is not new to action-RPG games, the game unintentionally makes it harder to manage inventory by disincentivizing the player to destroy items for nothing as gear can be sold in shops for gold (and selling gear is also the best way to accumulate gold as well). Ultimately, the optimal way to manage inventory involves deliberately travelling to a shop to sell off excess gear, adding unnecessary time and effort to an otherwise simple and straightforward process.

With regards to deciding which gear to use, it often never felt like it mattered at all in the grand scheme of things. Equipping Gear with the highest raw stats was usually sufficient, and I never felt that the gear I equipped made a noticeable difference on my performance in battle. There are traits that can be woven into gear to add passive bonuses like increased damage for specific spells. Given the high amount of enemy health especially at later levels, I do not think these traits are particularly important and often do not impact the outcome of fights with how much more of a role positioning and movement plays in Hogwarts’ combat. The gear in Hogwarts honestly feels like an afterthought as there is not a lot of tactical decision making involved when it comes to which gear to use, contrasting other action-RPG titles which actively challenge players to switch up their equipment and gear in response to changing enemy types and environments.

Final Thoughts

Even though there were many things about Hogwarts Legacy that I believe could have been improved, I still had a ton of fun playing this game and getting lost in Avalanche Software’s rendition of the Wizarding World. Avalanche can be incredibly proud that they successfully developed the core gaming mechanics and foundation that the Harry Potter series so desperately needed to get up to speed with what players would expect from a modern gaming experience. I do feel that the quality of the final Hogwarts Legacy product — and the following it has built— is indisputable proof that Harry Potter is here to stay in the video gaming universe.

For a first attempt at a modern Harry Potter game, Hogwarts Legacy is stellar. In comparison to its peers, I feel that Hogwarts still has not reached or surpassed that bar that these titles have set. Given the enormity of the game’s shortcomings, especially concerning its writing, I feel there is still a long, long way to go for a future installment to reach this level. Although there is a lot of work that still needs to be done, Harry Potter fans and gaming fans should still rejoice. We have something. It is small right now, like an unpolished diamond. But gamers now live in a reality where this diamond will one day shine, and we should be pinching ourselves knowing that we are closer than we think to getting the world-class experience we have always dreamed of for a Harry Potter game.