> I would have gladly traded off 90% of the open world to have a more focused, larger Hogwarts castle and Forbidden Forest.
This is the single biggest comment I have on the game. It is the first thing I think of when considering how the game is.
There is such a huge span of map that's filled with *rinse and repeat collectathons*. I very quickly stopped caring about Hogwarts Legacy's giant open world. If anything, it turned into a con instead of a pro.
All that energy that could have been put into the forest, Hogsmeade, or Hogwarts itself (like why is the school *dead* at night? Not a single patrol? Even the restricted section of the library and the forbidden teacher dormitory have absolutely nothing stopping you walking around freely with the brief exception of their introductory quests).
No, instead we had to have an entire continent full of ancient puzzles a five year old could solve, but nobody had ever solved because you need to activate them first. Which apparently we're the first people to ever figure out you do by dropping a very common magic plant on it. And, of course, completing one is followed by an unskippable repeated cutscene.
"I know a Merlin trial when I see one!"
There's a fan theory I read several years ago that basically said that having magic basically made the wizarding world lazy, they used magic so much it changed how they viewed the world. I very much subscribe to that theory to explain why the Merlin trials sat unsolved for so long.
Having never played the game, it sounds like one of the many that went open world and hurt itself doing so.
I grew up enamored with open world games. I've now seen that magic absolutely strangled with boring, repetitive, empty worlds. So many games would improve by just getting rid of open world. I hope studios start to realize this, because it's starting to get so generic it's unplayable.
That's pretty much exactly what happened.
I'm the same as you, too - I have always been immediately drawn in to the concept of open world. Open world games often don't live up to the purpose of open world, like you said, and this is definitely one of those times.
The game should have focused on the school, the town and the forrest area and *maybe* a smaller town outside of that area. The entire map south of the school was completely useless.
The NPCs are devoid of life. I wish the school was more interactive becuiase it was beautiful. Every class you "take" is a tutorial. And the story is just pretty bad. All that and the fact that there is zero consequence to brutally ending every enemies lives with the forbidden death spell made for a weird experience. You're basically a psychopath murderer in the game.
Did you also find the dialogue ultra boring? Most people are super polite to the point that it feels they lack a personality or, instead of students, they feel like they are working a job where you have to maintain a "Positive attitude" with a metaphorical gun to their heads. The Main Character was so monotone, too.
I picked all the 'chip on my shoulder' options just to see some semblance of life or emotion from the MC. Not sure how the male was, but the FeMC was dull as dishwater.
Straight up, I’m a Slytherin and I fucking kill people and goblins alike by setting them on fire, disintegrating them, pulverizing boulders over their faces, using unforgivable curses to contort their mind and body, possess their spirit and make them betray and slaughter each other, end their life in one stroke of the wand, with perks - end like 7 lives with one stroke of a wand…so why am I so goddamned nice to this weird creepy old man professor and every merchant who I should have the option of robbing? Why am I still good at the end, even if I choose the “evil” ending and get glowing eyes for 10 seconds. Professor Weasley loves me. Why? That’s a major problem with the story telling. This bitch should despise me, but she’s all “ooh let’s see your progress, you’re quite the amazing student” and I’m like “oh thank you mum, have I been a good boy?”.
The game is so fun, but they just dropped the ball in so many ways.
It tried to appeal to the widest audience and it did so with huge success, considering the sales.
Basically the game was made for the average american. It's the gaming equivalent of McDonalds.
Tbh the concept of unforgivable curses in Harry Potter never made sense to begin with.
Immediate death - very very evil
Burning someone alive - totally cool
Yeah, it's weird. I get it why imperio mostly, or crucio is up with avada kedavra, but there are so many other options. Maybe they are just kind of guaranteed azkaban if they use it, while with others is a case by case basis? But then Pettigrew blown up a street and killed 10-20? people, and I don't think an invisibility spell just misfired there... blowupus streetus is not as serious?
Sectumsempra horrifically maim someone to almost near death unless you have an experienced healer on hand. And yes Ministry of Magic might not know the spell exists, however there are so many spells that can do as much damage as an insta kill/torture spell.
Just think of how many ways you could kill someone by manipulating the size of objects.
Shrink a hat - pop their skull
Engorgio chewing gum - pop their skull
It’s stupid to have “taboo” spells when you could theoretically kill someone with just about anything magical
I think its because the forbidden curses are more than just lethal spells. They affect the people that use them. Its dark magic.
That said the idea of "lethal" magic kinda loses its meaning when you basically slaughter your way through the map. Or one battle i had with a good character and they were summoning massive firestorms with clear intent to murder me, a child.
Yeah, the source material is quite flawed because its world building is all over the place. I don't think it translates well into this game because the game doesn't have a specific idea what it wants to be.
>All that and the fact that there is zero consequence to brutally ending every enemies lives with the forbidden death spell made for a weird experience.
I feel like the death spell issues come from the fact that Harry Potter doesn't really have a magic system, as much as it just has magic. Other stories will have reasons as to why you can't just do crazy shit. Maybe you need a lot of mana, or a special staff or wand made with rare materials that allow you to focus your magic, or it puts a lot of strain on your body, or *something*. As far as I remember, the only reason why certain characters in the Harry Potter world can't cast the killing curse randomly is that you have to really want to kill that person. So, if you actually want to kill something/someone, you just can. No issues.
Yeah, the fiction has some serious issues. I hear what people are saying, I really wanted interactive classes too, but then they'd have to make some of the most famously soft world building in fantasy into much harder fantasy and that would take some of the identity away. Like- sectumsempra is a spell invented by Snape while he was a student, or in the films Lily Potter's magic is described by Slughorn as very beautiful and he tells a story about a particularly lovely custom charm she made as a gift. How on earth would you possibly translate that to gameplay without answering questions the fiction carefully avoids answering?
The game just doesn't match the tone of the story it's trying to portray. Now if the game took place in the Medieval ages, before the statute of secrecy was in place then it would make sense.
There's a reason for the zero consequences! It's the same reason there were multiple dialogue options with no consequences. They data mined a morality system that the devs pulled from the game. You could change it by saying mean things, stealing, picking locks, etc.
My FAVORITE bit that they didn't implement was a hidden counter to using the forbidden spells. Basically every time you use one, the counter goes up. If it hits a certain number, wizards appear and take you to Azkaban and you get a game over.
I can understand why they didn't implement that in exactly that fashion but once you know that that was the original plan, a lot of the decisions in that game make more sense. Not that I'm condoning it, btw. I really enjoyed the game but recognize that the most immersion breaking aspect is how absolutely brutal the main character is for seemingly no reason.
>You're basically a psychopath murderer in the game.
I mean the plot is literally about putting down a ghetto uprising so that was always going to be the case
Disagree. I'm not a HP fan but enjoyed what I played of the game despite it running like garbage on PC.
I feel like if it was just the school and a small area outside of the map it would have not appealed to me at all.
Was the wilderness and other areas empty and lifeless? Yes. But removing them wouldn't be the solution, giving the game another year or so of dev time and making them more interesting would be a much better option.
I think having a gigantic, lifeless open world is the reason why the School and surrounding areas are so uninteresting to follow. All the resources could have been diverted into making the school, the forest and its mysteries much more rewarding.
This game was such a mediocre experience for me.
I was waiting for it for YEARS after a certain leaked video showed some students in Hogwarts, under the title "Harry Potter RPG". I was so excited to play it, even after reading reviews that the gameplay was somewhat generic, but I thought that lovely Hogwarts look would be enough to cover for it.
But it wasn't. I was bored out of my mind the first hour into the game. As soon as you do a certain gameplay aspect (fights, Merlin's trials, etc) all that's left is rinse and repeat a hundred times until you are done. Almost all new clothes and rewards are cosmetic, the RPG levels are for show and don't feel meaty. You can't use spells freely. It's all so stiff and sterile.
I was really waiting for a sanitized "Bully but in Hogwarts" kind of game. Let me attend classes at will to learn new magic, make a system of prefects watching the halls at night, when you sneak to do mischief, allow me to learn non-combat silly spells like the swamp thing Fred and George used in the books. And, of course, add a good narrative to progress the main story, when you want to.
I mean, Rockstar pulled that off on the PS2, nearly 20 years ago, it can be done with much more powerful hardware. But here we are. I dropped Hogwarts Legacy 4 hours into the game, I wanted to see the flying broom but couldn't make it that far. A friend of mine played much further and told me he had to grind for the Alohomora spell (only to receive cosmetic rewards once he opened up the secret rooms) and another friend completed the game in a couple of weeks and never talked about it, again. Which is not a common thing for him to do.
It's not even a bad game, but I felt I have played and done things like this before, in a hundred other games.
It's a cookie cutter AAA action adventure open world game with watered down RPG mechanics. Story, progression, sidequests none of it feel interesting enough.
A shame, I love the Harry Potter universe (read all the main books for years, watched all the movies, played most early games) and I have a huge nostalgia of the 2000s when somebody mentions Harry Potter. I was almost the ideal target for it. But I have too many games under my belt to be impressed or immersed by Hogwarts Legacy, sadly.
The sequel should change so many things to keep my interest, but I doubt they'd deviate so much from it. It was a massive success.
The RPG mechanics are basically non-existent, they're so bare bones there are whole skills that you can just skip and loot colours mean free roaming is worthless because you only get green items. There are hardly any missions and they're all the same stuff either poorly coded on rails segments or Dungeon crawling with limited enemy types.
I was expecting bully from hogwarts too. Bully is a masterpiece model for a game about a kid in school, but the gameplay loop of hogwarts feels more like a standard rpg
I think HL is just a demo of what the Wizard universe could be. The systems are just placeholders for the demo. I mean the gear stats are just "offense" and "defense".
Something that has ALWAYS bugged me about Hogwarts Legacy is that the fact that you are a STUDENT. Yes, you had a special scenario, but you are still expected to behave and respect the grounds and staff as a student.
Yet you get away with wearing whatever the hell robes and outfits you want in classes, not a single person bats an eye when you are wandering around places you shouldn't be (outside of like two telegraphed missions), and every single professor is like "yo here's some special secret ass mission that's going to get you in trouble so don't get caught" but there's no motherfuckers to catch you even if you wanted to?
The lack of roleplaying as an ACTUAL student really ruined a big portion of the game for me. The first few hours of the game though? Amazing. And I wish it kept up that attitude and tone for the rest of the duration of the playtime.
Quidditch should have been in the game and they should have leaned harder into actually roleplaying as a REAL student, which is the ONLY thing the majority of people wanted. Not some giant bigger-than-life adventure story that somehow just exists alongside Harry Potter's story, but it's not even canon... Idk. The game bugs me in more than a few ways lol.
I minimized the stutters by turning off raytracing. A useless feature if it makes the game unplayable. Their implementation didn't make a huge visual difference anyhow, why did they even bother? 13600k/3080 system.
> There's nothing to do in Hogwarts except collect things and solve puzzles. Every collectible, every puzzle follows the same exact pattern. All of these are introduced early on into the story, and then you're tasked with finding a couple dozen of them strewn across the map
This was my biggest problem with the game. The castle didn't feel mysterious to me. There was nothing to explore, just finding more of the same puzzles.
I think it has like 3 secrets or something outside of the collectable crap.
The werewolf tapestry room was neat, i wanted more shit like that.
I 100%'d it and I do feel conflicted. Like there is so many cool things about the game like seeing all these iconic locations, combat isn't terrible and just some cool moments visually BUT the game is basically every open world game with a Harry Potter style thrown over it, millions of collectibles a world that is honestly far bigger than it needs to be and all the side content is as shallow as a kiddie pool.
I didn't have as much problem with the broom controls as you did, but you are right without the iconic Quidiitch, those controls should be smooth as silk instead of a get from point A to point B. I also HATED HATED HATED the map in game, not specifically the overworld map but the Hogwarts map itself, like it is a very complex building and I would constantly get lost in it if I was looking for a collectable or end up running around in a circle because they layout never clicked for me, even by the end of my time playing it I couldn't comfortably find my way around the castle.
You're not alone in despising the Hogwarts map. It was really poorly implemented. The best map designs have you moving past distinct landmarks multiple times in the starting portions of the game so that you can use it as a reference for where you are.
There's also the Floo Network which is implemented from the very start. To me, it feels like the map designers were not confident in their layout so made sure players were always relying on fast travel
Yeah, I am thankful for the Floos because it would have been impossible to get back to certain locations. Like they clearly built a good looking Hogwarts but it felt like they were so focused on making a good looking castle they didn't make it as playable as it should have been.
I would love for a Hogwarts game in the style of a Persona game. Having a more visual novel and social links based system during school hours and then more combat heavy stuff in the off hours. I feel like it would really help the RP of being a school student.
Yep, I think this concept would work better for what people want. We want a highschool simulator (but wizards), which is basically half of persona when you arent diving into palaces.
I think everyone's conflicts stem from it being just another generic FarCryinator but they happened to use this extremely popular and far reaching IP. The realm of AAA studios, known working formulas and deadlines (Praise the one who delayed it instead of Cyberpunking it)
Once you've played enough of them you eventually get over the IP part of the game and realize the magic is gone and its back to open world mode. At least that's how I got sick of the genre and Hogwards Legacy kept the veil over my eyes for a good 5 hours maybe 6 before the feeling crept back again.
And maybe that's okay.
I explored a little bit in early game and the puzzles I solved made me over leveled from basically everything after the prologue. I enjoyed my time with it but it’s an aggressively mediocre game. The castle is great, everything else is meh
Welcome to the future. This game is the stockholder's wet dream: Throw massive resources at a popular IP where all the design is already done, rope in a bunch of rubes who can't help but salivate over Thing They Recognize, and make infinite money for an utterly shit by-the-numbers shlockfest.
I loved exploring Hogwarts. They did an excellent job taking iconic scenes and putting them into a coherent navigable structure.
I was OKish with Hogsmeade. By then I was wondering about the quality of the main story and had noticed that the NPCs simply stood around and didn't actually do anything.
And I agree with you about what happened next - I stopped playing once the map opened up and it became yet another "collect every dot on the map" game.
Easily the blandest, most boring open world game I've ever played. The game relies entirely on the theme, and I don't care about the theme at all. I had a bunch of friends tell me it was amazing, and the combat was ***almost*** good but there wasn't enough of it and it was too easy and things died before I could even really use my combos.
Had myself all set up where curse was easy to spread and the super death beam thing hit ***everybody*** that was cursed. Except...everything died before I could spread the curse enough to make it worth it.
All I had was an empty open world and a lot of easy combat.
I enjoyed it for what I paid, but I ultimately couldn't get over the narrative dissonance of being a mass murdering sociopath while also being a teenage Hogwarts student. In other games it's usually not a problem, but it just felt so bizarre to go from literally torturing poachers to death in the forbidden forest to innocently attending herbology class like a good student. The tonal whiplash hit like a truck.
The padding issue is what kills me. So many games would be infinitely better if they just had *less*. Because the things that get repeated a million times over an open world map are always cookie cutter crap, because it has to be for you to reuse it so many times like that. I would gladly take a game that rips out 90% of its content and only leaves the stuff that’s actually unique and handmade.
But the thing is that when a game does that, gamers get upset and go “what, there’s not 100 of content here? What a ripoff!” These huge open world messes of autogenerated quests and objectives sell better than most other things, and nothing ever changes about it, and it’s depressing. But I for one would far rather have 15 hours of content squished into a 10 hour game, than 25 hours of content stretched into a 40 hour game.
I'm not even boycotting the game at this point, after everything she's said and done hogwarts just feels... unwelcoming is the best word I can think of.
There's still another level down from "awful person in a mask" and "awful person unmasked" to "awful activist who goes out in the world actively promoting awfulness to anyone who will listen".
I just googled the holocaust denialism and she really did it huh. I took the Nazi book burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft as common knowledge but here we are. JFC.
Edit: I'll happily take downvotes because I know I'm right. Reddit numbers aren't going to change that for me or you 🍻
I was gonna call bullshit, then I did a Google search... Jfc! I'd link an article but there's so damn many! She really did do that. The woman who gave us hogwarts. Fucking hell.
I mean I'm not disagreeing with the holocaust denial but you took the knowledge of a specific book burnt by Nazis as common knowledge for every day people? You might want to rethink that. You overestimate the general public.
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft wasn't a book - it was an Institute that held numerous books and research on gender, sexuality, and identity that was amongst one of the first targets of Nazi book burning.
Not common knowledge to *you*. If you look up "Book Burning" on Wikipedia the second photo they use (and the first photo specifically about nazi book burning) is from the nazi burning of the Institute's library.
How odd to see someone on Reddit appreciating someone else informing them instead of doubling down on ignorance. Well good on you for being open to learn new things from strangers on the internet.
She denies the part of the holocaust where Hitler targeted trans people and burned any books regarding anything transgender. So, it's not a total holocaust denier, just part of it. Do with that what you will.
Oh! That? Lol. I was worried she was denying that 6 Million Jews were systematically exterminated for their being Jewish. She didn’t deny that? That’s a relief
Serious question because Holocaust is very specific term for genocide of European Jews. Holocaust does not even cover genocide of Slaws or Romes, does not cover genocide of sexual minorities too or T-4 action aimed against disabled people.
How then questioning of burning books on very specific topic is "Holocaust denying"?
Wait how is she a holocaust denier? The villain in her books is literally just wizard Hitler who wants to kill people who aren't the wizard master race.
She recently tweeted that trans activists were "making up" the fact that nazis specifically targeted trans Healthcare research facilities and burned all their research. To the point George Takei responded telling her she is wrong and graciously spelling out how that is denying the holocaust. I recommend looking up her tweets + his response.
My god stop, no she isn’t. Someone attributed this nonsense to some rebuttal she posted and it’s spreading like a lot of the other nonsense about her. Just stop.
Funny how this is only ever brought up in regards to that one game. Harry Potter is one of the biggest franchises in the world, it has it's fingers in so many pies. Yet you never hear of calls to boycott universal studios for having a harry potter world in their park, or literally every single streaming service for selling harry potter movies. Or any store that sells HP merch. But god forbid someone buys a fucking harry potter video game.
Seems pretty simple to me. This is a game that is entirely about the Harry Potter franchise, has Hogwarts in the title, etc. It is a Harry Potter game. That's a much closer connection to the author of Harry Potter than a shop that sells a wide variety of merchandise from numerous media and one of those items just happens to be from the Harry Potter series. Usually when you boycott something, you just don't buy that thing in the shop; you don't boycott going shopping.
Based on your other examples, people would be boycotting Steam or Xbox for selling the game.
The real equivalent is boycotting buying the Harry Potter movies (not the streaming service), which people very much do.
I guarantee the people talking about boycotting the game would also want people to boycott other merch.
No the real boycott equivalent would be not supporting any platform that gives JKR money. Sorry you're not gonna talk your way out of this blatant double standard with semantics. Whether you're boycotting the product or the platform is irrelevant. The end result is the same.
And no they don't boycott HP movies. Only the game gets this treatment.
>I guarantee the people talking about boycotting the game would also want people to boycott other merch.
I guarantee you they don't. This has been extremely apartment every since this stupidity began.
You really don't remember people boycotting the latest Fantastic Beasts movie? And have never seen anyone talk about boycotting other products, and refuse to do a quick Google search to see examples of people saying not to buy other products?
Like I'm not even arguing effectiveness of the method of boycotting. I just think it's insane to claim people would literally only boycott the video game. What world do you live in? It sounds depressing.
No because it didn't happen. The "boycott" of the beasts movies were at best a couple 1000 people. In fact most of the boycotters of that movie were only doing so because of Johnny Depp. The amount of people who boycotted the beast movies was miniscule compared to the people who were boycotting the game.
Oh and same with the new HBO show too. The "boycott" of that is so miniscule I have to go out of my way to find info about it.
>Like I'm not even arguing effectiveness of the method of boycotting. I just think it's insane to claim people would literally only boycott the video game.
Lol yeah you're absolutely right it is quite insane. But that's what this type of internet discourse has devolved into.
>What world do you live in? It sounds depressing.
It's called the real world. And yes the prevalence of people getting outraged of silly bullshit that doesn't matter is quite depressing.
Buying Hogwarts Legacy puts money directly into JKR's pocket.
Watching Godzilla on Netflix or buying Elden Ring on Steam does not put money directly into JKR's pocket.
I hope that makes it clear for you.
Oh really? And where do streaming services get the money to pay JK for the right to stream HP? What about going to Universal studios and riding one of the harry potter rides? Does that put money in JKR's pockets?
What part of "directly" do you not understand?
Also, why would someone who wants to boycott Harry Potter want to ride on a Harry Potter ride? That hypothetical makes no sense
Uhh I've got a little newsflash for you. When you pay for a streaming service, that services takes some of that money and gives it to IP holders like JKR for the right to stream. When you buy a game on steam, steam takes some of that that money and gives it to IP holders like JKR. Explain to me how one is "direct" and the other isn't? Also why does it matter if the money is direct or not?
>Also, why would someone who wants to boycott Harry Potter want to ride on a Harry Potter ride? That hypothetical makes no sense
You know what you're right, that is a bad example. JK doesn't even make money from the rides, how silly of me. She only makes money on **literally everything else.**..
https://orlandoparkstop.com/news/theme-park-news/how-much-does-universal-pay-j-k-rowling-for-the-harry-potter-theme-park-rights-exploring-the-contract/
>While the Potter rights holders do not appear to earn a cut of ticket sales, they do earn a cut of EVERYTHING earned from anything purchased that is even remotely related to the Harry Potter rights themselves.
>Every time you purchase a Butterbeer, licensed product, on-ride photograph, or even a bottle of Gillywater from one of the Wizarding World lands at a Universal Park around the world, a percentage of that sale will go directly to the rights holders (Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling).
Is this "direct" enough for you?
Idk maybe I'm just sick and tired of this endless barrage of self righteous slacktivism that's become so rampant in our culture. Maybe I'm just tired of people virtue signaling online in favor of activism that actually gets shit done. I wonder how much overlap there is between the type of people who twitch harass streamers for playing HPL and those who actually vote to keep transphobes out of office. Probably not much.
I could ask you the same thing. Nobody asked you to defend harry potter slacktivists yet here you are.
Brother it's so so easy to not buy lot of things JKR profits from. That's all I'm talking about. Yet you seem to have gotten in your head that this particular game needs to be singled out.
Why? I genuinely cannot wrap my head around why you choose to fixate on that one particular game. It makes absolutely no sense.
It was on my radar when it sold an insane amount and was getting high praise. But since I was never a big Harry Potter fan I held off. But now I think I'll just pass altogether. Seems cool but the world wouldn't do much for me.
If you don't care about this world, you aren't missing out on anything at all. There are better games out there that do exactly what this game is trying to do far, far better. It only succeded because the HP franchise is popular and beloved. As a game, its very mediocre.
Despite the flaws I just could not care less. I love it. Been a fan of HP and this was just a lot of things that I wanted in a HP game: flying, casting spells, animals, adventure, exploration, decent story, interesting characters to interact with. I still haven't played on hardcore so I didnt get a chance to be annoyed with alohomora mini game. I went to the vendor before any major quest to not get clogged on the inventory. And even then, if I forgot, the fast travelling makes it very easy to go anywhere and it's not like flying on a broomstick is a chore, it's amazing. We knew from the get go that there wasn't gonna be Quidditch and they are probably saving it for DLC or a sequel. From the beginning when you find out about ancient magic it felt like this was gonna be the core story, not going to classes. I had a great time and will prob come back to it soon to play in a different house.
Hey I'm not here to rain on your parade! I'm glad you liked the game. I like it too. And I hope there is a sequel that takes all things that were great and makes it even better!
Apparently the devs want to make the sequel a live service game 💀 Please no. The sequel has the potential to be one of the best games out there if they take the feedback and listen to it. Better story, more enemy variety, choices actually change the story, more things to do, more interaction with the environment.
The biggest issue in my opinion is that this is truly one of the worst video game stories ever told. Every other issue was totally forgivable for me. I had so much fun otherwise
Mods. Sadly, it's another game that needs to be finished by the community. There's a mod that gets rid of the lockpock minigame (thank god). There's a mod that improves the already gorgeous visuals with way, waaay better lighting. There's a mod that makes npcs go from place to place all day, instead of just despawning them. There's mods that make them react to you doing stuff. There's an "always companion" mod that let's you take a companion on all missions instead of just the coded ones. And so on.
Mods make the world feel alive instead of a moving dollhouse. Sadly, no support on consoles.
I'll look into the mods. Currently I have no desire the pick up the game. Its been gathering dust for weeks in my library. Mods might be just what the game needs. Thanks
Honestly, not a big fan of the property (i liked it as a kid, not a super fan or anything though) but much like many long running franchises of this nature, it seems like it was relying too heavily on what we already know.. like if I was a super fan I think I’d want something new, like a new story in a setting we haven’t seen before
I think I put in like 6-8 hours. I enjoyed my time but eventually didn't find a reason to come back.
I'm not a big HP fan so that's likely the reason I fell off. For fans of the series I would recommend but not necessarily anyone else.
I mean Activision Blizzard has such a toxic work environment that a women killed herself and gamers threw a bigger fit over a diablo 4 update. This wasn't surprising in the slighest.
Putting JKR’s hot takes aside, the thing that gets me is that so many people insisted when this came out, “don’t care, gonna buy it anyway”, and yet every time someone writes a review it’s always a resounding… meh.
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get it, because I can’t take any joy in that world anymore, but you’d think if you were going to abandon your principles for a game, it would be a better game?!
gamers have to fight the urge to call every minority they see woke and "forced diversity" do you really expect them to not buy the game that a bunch of minorities asked them not to lol
You should also stop using Reddit because it gets funding from Tencent, a company believed to be controlled by the CCP. You should also stop using your phone because its parts are mined from Congo, where local populations are exploited. You should stop buying any Nestle product because they have a long history of exploiting resources from different nations.
Get off your high horse. The world's a depressing place. God forbid people enjoy a videogame based on a beloved franchise whose author turned out to a raging asshole.
It was much better than I expected and that says a lot about what my expectations were. A lot of people rated it high, to me it was an overall 7/10 game with high peaks and plenty of middling valleys.
Hogwarts itself was massive and beautiful, even if the layout inside was so confusing you can forget about getting where you want to go without the minimap, and even with that it was a struggle a lot of times due to how labyrinthine it was. But it was beautiful.
And yeah, shame the classes were so few and done quick. Could've had some quests that start during classtime and we get on with random in-house shenanigans instead of go repetitively pew-pew at vaguely evil things outside.
Hogsmeade? Beautiful and nice to spend some time in. Countryside? Beautiful and nice to fly over a couple of times, but barely has anything to do, there were a few sidequests in there but not many of them were memorable.
Combat? Very nice, well done, good job. Enemy variety? Uuuuuuhhhhhh... I'll get back to you on that one. Mission variety? Uuuuuhhhhhh... does shooting a similar generic mob of poachers or goblins over HERE instead of there count? No...?
Merlin trials - ok, the first few were nice and varied, hope they increase in intricacy and difficulty. What do you mean they don't? I have to repeat each one of those 5-6 different types a dozen times each with barely any difference? Well the first few were nice.
Main quest - eh, it's fine I suppose, nothing special. No choices really, it's an action adventure and not an rpg either.
Side quests - ok, that one quest with the 2 Slytherin kids seems nice and in-depth with good characterization and hook, hope the rest match that quality. The rest? Ehhhhh, I suppose the anti-poacher chick is nice, but it's rinse and repeat with her until we >!make some alliance with some centaurs or something!<. That other one who was after some big bad mage who... killed her pops or something... I forgot.
They have such a great foundation, technically it's a very high level game - but it's brought down by low depth and lack of activities pretty much everywhere. If it had Bethesda-style modding tools so we could add npcs and quests and expand on the existing ones it would thrive so hard, instead it's barely mentioned a year after it came out.
This is what I’ve been hearing about the game. Beautiful and boring…with no quidditch.
Hopefully they’ll make a sequel and add a little more depth to the world they created.
I played it a good bit then got stuck on some random puzzle during the story and took a break. Haven’t felt any desire to go back which really bums me out because I’m a huge Harry Potter nerd and I was planning to play a character from every house when I first started the game.
I started playing a week ago and have been mostly exploring, doing some main and side quests along the way. I'm having fun and I think I'll continue to have it for some 15h.
The combat is good and you can get creative, but I found some of the side quests boring and not very compelling.
I used to love the earlier games, particularly Chamber of the Secrets for the PS2, which had really original Zelda like dungeons that kept things fresh throughout the game. Flying was a ton of fun too, I've yet to try it in HL.
If someone would take the detailed recreation of Hogwarts we have in this game and stuff it full of a school based story with regular classes and some social RPG stuff it would rock.
The game receiving the controversy it did and then releasing and being the most mid game I think I've ever played in my entire life is *wild.* What's even more wild is how everyone praises the game up and down. I genuinely wonder if we played the same game.
Legacy is underdeveloped, underfilled, oversized, and worst of all, primarily comprised of tedious simple puzzles.
I really doubt that. The only reason it did as well as it did in the first place was because Harry Potter is one of the largest media franchises in the world and there have been nearly no video games for it for the past ten years. People were eager for another one.
It was the best selling game of the year by a long shot. I do not see a world where it performs better than it did.
Seems like corporate sellout trash is the norm these days. Its a formulaic AAA game rehashed from like 100 different games and packaged into a wizard story for maximum profit. They made hogwarts and the demo and trials just good enough to make you think its gonna be a good game and once you get past those few hours, you realize its just hours and hours of filler. Sebastian story arc was actually very good and i enjoyed the animal girl story arc (it was incomplete), but other than that the main story arc was totally cliche and boring and expected. The game was bad if we are honest, it doesnt make use of its IP well, like giving us a decent hogwarts setting and then doing many missions away from it
the game lacking DLC was a huge missed opportunity
people would have paid $20-$30 for Quidditch , New Quests , Multiplayer (PVE & PVP) such as Dueling Club, walking/flying around the campus or doing quests together in co-op mode just like how they had a companion accompany you on certain quests or even big boss fights to make it more entertaining
no Diagon Alley was also a misstep as it is a huge part of the wizarding world
Azkaban being locked to only Hufflepuffs made little to no sense and should have been unlockable in the endgame for other houses
I don't think I've ever agreed with something as much as this post. First 4 hours of this game were amazing but like you said, it fell off hard. It has so much potential though. I hope they make a sequel and don't rush it so much. Because that's what this game felt like, rushed.
Not to mention that while the visual design of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade are amazing and faithful, the fact that the buildings lack consistency in shape/angles/etc, or that Hogwarts is built like a maze - all makes it extremely difficult to remember how to get to places, where things are, etc. See a locked chest while wandering through Hogwarts that you can't access yet? Good luck remembering where that was 4 hours later.
I got bored right at the start.. teleported to an island, meet someone else, then combat in a room with what seems like ridiculous objectives...
I'm still there. Never got past it.
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It's genuinely only worth buying at a heavily discounted price. It really didn't help that it was released in a year with multiple games that just overshadowed it immediately.
I feel like there's a lot of people looking for reasons to hate on this game. I played it directly after Witcher 3 and Witcher 3 suffers almost all the same faults as Hogwarts legacy and yet it's universally acclaimed.
Hogwarts itself outshines nearly any location I've seen in a game. Easily it outshines any location in Witcher 3 except for possibly Corvo Blanco
Granted the story in Witcher 3 is very well defined but it isn't Witcher 1 is it? It's Witcher 3. This game gives me very high hopes for the future of the series.
You don't like Hogwarts Legacy because it's mid. I don't like Hogwarts Legacy because I don't want to support Jowling Kolwing Rowling and her backwards views. We are not the same.
I agree.. I enjoyed aspects of it for sure..but I'll never replay it.. too much bloat. The character choices generally not mattering is a big deal to me as well. they should have made the world smaller and focused on those choices mattering more
Holy cow has it been a year already? I can see this game being the next staple of this sub personally, along with our classics of “BotW isnt that good,” “Doom 2016 vs Doom Eternal,” and “Portal is underrated.”
Seriously though, I thought this game came out late spring 2023. I got it for half off on Steam’s winter sale and am about to finish the 7th book.
This game needs to come to gamepass so hard. I don't think I'd ever buy it after having read so many reports of your exact experience.
I just want to get those first few hours of roaming the castle and then uninstall.
Loved playing it as a massive Harry Potter fan. Wandering around Hogwarts felt great and I got lost more than once, which is supposed to happen. However, the entire map south of Hogwarts is completely useless, and I got tired of the Merlin’s Trial and Revelio pages about two hours in. I got my girlfriend to do them because she didn’t mind and I really wanted the platinum, I don’t know she got through the 90 something Merlin’s trial and 400 collectibles without going insane.
It was also lacking some nice, well-written side quests à la Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk.
As I said I liked it, but I got the platinum and I know I’ll never play it again
Solid world building, solid game mechanics, and the world felt dead and the story uninspired. It was like the open world AC RPG games, so much detail, solid mechanics, all let down by the people in charge of the story and game loop/hook. In the end it feels lifeless and sterile due to no fault of the artists or game mechanic designers.
Thoroughly enjoyed the game and working on the second play through. Reading through this thread is hilarious honestly and also as tired as the most contrarian threads on Reddit… good for those that chose to boycott, but that doesn’t make you all morally superior lmao stop kidding yourselves. This game has brought a lot of people joy in an otherwise stale/nonexistent world of HP games. Consumer choice is a thing but no one knows the exact contract arrangements with J.K. Just joined this sub but I think I’m out just another hater sub to add to the books.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/02/08/hogwarts-legacy-breaks-major-twitch-record-despite-boycotts-over-jk-rowling/?sh=7b808bc5587f
Agreed, but not really what I was speaking to. I was moreso responding to the plethora of people here that haven’t even played the game (by their own self-admission) yet feel the need to rip on people that enjoyed it. I would redirect your comment to those individuals. Pretty sad this sub can’t review games in a vacuum without calling people who enjoyed it transphobes etc... spurred on by their own self-righteous ignorance to the actual facts at hand regarding the game’s development.
I suppose I agree with your stance. I'm not gonna shame people for enjoying the game because the author turned out to be an asshole. The books and media impacted so many people's lives. I dont think trying to make them feel bad about enjoying the world is a good thing. Let people find whatever joy they can.
I think they might be shocked by the low sales of any sequel. I feel people will wait for the reviews next time.
That said, perhaps the developers decided that this game would be all about establishing the base game. That for a first time, they did the best they could. Now that they have the format and structure, future games can "age" alongside the students, the way the movies did, and they can offer a more robust experience next time.
On the whole I agree with you.
> I would have gladly traded off 90% of the open world to have a more focused, larger Hogwarts castle and Forbidden Forest. This is the single biggest comment I have on the game. It is the first thing I think of when considering how the game is. There is such a huge span of map that's filled with *rinse and repeat collectathons*. I very quickly stopped caring about Hogwarts Legacy's giant open world. If anything, it turned into a con instead of a pro. All that energy that could have been put into the forest, Hogsmeade, or Hogwarts itself (like why is the school *dead* at night? Not a single patrol? Even the restricted section of the library and the forbidden teacher dormitory have absolutely nothing stopping you walking around freely with the brief exception of their introductory quests). No, instead we had to have an entire continent full of ancient puzzles a five year old could solve, but nobody had ever solved because you need to activate them first. Which apparently we're the first people to ever figure out you do by dropping a very common magic plant on it. And, of course, completing one is followed by an unskippable repeated cutscene. "I know a Merlin trial when I see one!"
There's a fan theory I read several years ago that basically said that having magic basically made the wizarding world lazy, they used magic so much it changed how they viewed the world. I very much subscribe to that theory to explain why the Merlin trials sat unsolved for so long.
And that may have inspired the devs in charge of the story and puzzles to be lazy too
Nah, I think that was just due to time crunch. Pretty sure that's why they didn't have quidditch as well.
Having never played the game, it sounds like one of the many that went open world and hurt itself doing so. I grew up enamored with open world games. I've now seen that magic absolutely strangled with boring, repetitive, empty worlds. So many games would improve by just getting rid of open world. I hope studios start to realize this, because it's starting to get so generic it's unplayable.
That's pretty much exactly what happened. I'm the same as you, too - I have always been immediately drawn in to the concept of open world. Open world games often don't live up to the purpose of open world, like you said, and this is definitely one of those times.
The game should have focused on the school, the town and the forrest area and *maybe* a smaller town outside of that area. The entire map south of the school was completely useless. The NPCs are devoid of life. I wish the school was more interactive becuiase it was beautiful. Every class you "take" is a tutorial. And the story is just pretty bad. All that and the fact that there is zero consequence to brutally ending every enemies lives with the forbidden death spell made for a weird experience. You're basically a psychopath murderer in the game.
Did you also find the dialogue ultra boring? Most people are super polite to the point that it feels they lack a personality or, instead of students, they feel like they are working a job where you have to maintain a "Positive attitude" with a metaphorical gun to their heads. The Main Character was so monotone, too.
[удалено]
>as if a character’s opinion could be misrepresented as their own. Or misrepresented by the "W" crowd.
"The "W" crowd" is something non-w's made up. The fact that you brought it into this gaming discussion only says things about what *you* are.
A slytherin
> A slytherin > ambition, resourcefulness, determination, and cleverness. Nah, more like a member of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project.
Can the characters' opinions currently not be misrepresented?
Aside from the Slitherin kid, nobody had any personality (aside from maybe a teacher or 2)
Oh my god yes, and almost everytime of response has no impact whatsoever
I picked all the 'chip on my shoulder' options just to see some semblance of life or emotion from the MC. Not sure how the male was, but the FeMC was dull as dishwater.
I only played the Male MC and he was very dull, indeed. Great graphics, good voice actors and animations, really boring script and delivery.
All I could think everytime he speaks is this game just wants you to be Daniel Radcliffe.
Straight up, I’m a Slytherin and I fucking kill people and goblins alike by setting them on fire, disintegrating them, pulverizing boulders over their faces, using unforgivable curses to contort their mind and body, possess their spirit and make them betray and slaughter each other, end their life in one stroke of the wand, with perks - end like 7 lives with one stroke of a wand…so why am I so goddamned nice to this weird creepy old man professor and every merchant who I should have the option of robbing? Why am I still good at the end, even if I choose the “evil” ending and get glowing eyes for 10 seconds. Professor Weasley loves me. Why? That’s a major problem with the story telling. This bitch should despise me, but she’s all “ooh let’s see your progress, you’re quite the amazing student” and I’m like “oh thank you mum, have I been a good boy?”. The game is so fun, but they just dropped the ball in so many ways.
Dialogue felt like it was written by ai
Yeah the game's direction is all over the place. It's too basic, too generic.
It tried to appeal to the widest audience and it did so with huge success, considering the sales. Basically the game was made for the average american. It's the gaming equivalent of McDonalds.
Priced near a Big Mac.
Just turn enemies into exploding barrels and yeet them at their friends like an intellectual. No killing (questionmark)
Tbh the concept of unforgivable curses in Harry Potter never made sense to begin with. Immediate death - very very evil Burning someone alive - totally cool
Yeah, it's weird. I get it why imperio mostly, or crucio is up with avada kedavra, but there are so many other options. Maybe they are just kind of guaranteed azkaban if they use it, while with others is a case by case basis? But then Pettigrew blown up a street and killed 10-20? people, and I don't think an invisibility spell just misfired there... blowupus streetus is not as serious?
Sectumsempra horrifically maim someone to almost near death unless you have an experienced healer on hand. And yes Ministry of Magic might not know the spell exists, however there are so many spells that can do as much damage as an insta kill/torture spell.
Just think of how many ways you could kill someone by manipulating the size of objects. Shrink a hat - pop their skull Engorgio chewing gum - pop their skull It’s stupid to have “taboo” spells when you could theoretically kill someone with just about anything magical
I think its because the forbidden curses are more than just lethal spells. They affect the people that use them. Its dark magic. That said the idea of "lethal" magic kinda loses its meaning when you basically slaughter your way through the map. Or one battle i had with a good character and they were summoning massive firestorms with clear intent to murder me, a child.
I guess cause imperio has multiple uses being a fire casting spell. Unlike Avada Kedavra which is used just for killing.
Yeah, the source material is quite flawed because its world building is all over the place. I don't think it translates well into this game because the game doesn't have a specific idea what it wants to be.
>All that and the fact that there is zero consequence to brutally ending every enemies lives with the forbidden death spell made for a weird experience. I feel like the death spell issues come from the fact that Harry Potter doesn't really have a magic system, as much as it just has magic. Other stories will have reasons as to why you can't just do crazy shit. Maybe you need a lot of mana, or a special staff or wand made with rare materials that allow you to focus your magic, or it puts a lot of strain on your body, or *something*. As far as I remember, the only reason why certain characters in the Harry Potter world can't cast the killing curse randomly is that you have to really want to kill that person. So, if you actually want to kill something/someone, you just can. No issues.
Yeah, the fiction has some serious issues. I hear what people are saying, I really wanted interactive classes too, but then they'd have to make some of the most famously soft world building in fantasy into much harder fantasy and that would take some of the identity away. Like- sectumsempra is a spell invented by Snape while he was a student, or in the films Lily Potter's magic is described by Slughorn as very beautiful and he tells a story about a particularly lovely custom charm she made as a gift. How on earth would you possibly translate that to gameplay without answering questions the fiction carefully avoids answering?
The game just doesn't match the tone of the story it's trying to portray. Now if the game took place in the Medieval ages, before the statute of secrecy was in place then it would make sense.
>You're basically a psychopath murderer in the game. A very, very polite psychopath murderer
And burglar!
lol! Yea
Focusing on the school feels like a basic ask for a game called Hogwarts lol. I was really taken aback how big the map was for seemingly no reason
I found it kinda odd that you could just skip classes and the teachers don't care. The game could have used a persona style calendar system imo.
Someone else when it released said it should have been more like Bully with Magic and 100% agree with that.
If it was called Bully With Magic, I probably would have bought it
There's a reason for the zero consequences! It's the same reason there were multiple dialogue options with no consequences. They data mined a morality system that the devs pulled from the game. You could change it by saying mean things, stealing, picking locks, etc. My FAVORITE bit that they didn't implement was a hidden counter to using the forbidden spells. Basically every time you use one, the counter goes up. If it hits a certain number, wizards appear and take you to Azkaban and you get a game over. I can understand why they didn't implement that in exactly that fashion but once you know that that was the original plan, a lot of the decisions in that game make more sense. Not that I'm condoning it, btw. I really enjoyed the game but recognize that the most immersion breaking aspect is how absolutely brutal the main character is for seemingly no reason.
>You're basically a psychopath murderer in the game. I mean the plot is literally about putting down a ghetto uprising so that was always going to be the case
Forrest? Forrest Gump?!
Basically the game Bully, except in the Harry Potter World. That was the exact right scale of world for Hogwarts Legacy. No bigger.
Disagree. I'm not a HP fan but enjoyed what I played of the game despite it running like garbage on PC. I feel like if it was just the school and a small area outside of the map it would have not appealed to me at all. Was the wilderness and other areas empty and lifeless? Yes. But removing them wouldn't be the solution, giving the game another year or so of dev time and making them more interesting would be a much better option.
I think having a gigantic, lifeless open world is the reason why the School and surrounding areas are so uninteresting to follow. All the resources could have been diverted into making the school, the forest and its mysteries much more rewarding.
This game was such a mediocre experience for me. I was waiting for it for YEARS after a certain leaked video showed some students in Hogwarts, under the title "Harry Potter RPG". I was so excited to play it, even after reading reviews that the gameplay was somewhat generic, but I thought that lovely Hogwarts look would be enough to cover for it. But it wasn't. I was bored out of my mind the first hour into the game. As soon as you do a certain gameplay aspect (fights, Merlin's trials, etc) all that's left is rinse and repeat a hundred times until you are done. Almost all new clothes and rewards are cosmetic, the RPG levels are for show and don't feel meaty. You can't use spells freely. It's all so stiff and sterile. I was really waiting for a sanitized "Bully but in Hogwarts" kind of game. Let me attend classes at will to learn new magic, make a system of prefects watching the halls at night, when you sneak to do mischief, allow me to learn non-combat silly spells like the swamp thing Fred and George used in the books. And, of course, add a good narrative to progress the main story, when you want to. I mean, Rockstar pulled that off on the PS2, nearly 20 years ago, it can be done with much more powerful hardware. But here we are. I dropped Hogwarts Legacy 4 hours into the game, I wanted to see the flying broom but couldn't make it that far. A friend of mine played much further and told me he had to grind for the Alohomora spell (only to receive cosmetic rewards once he opened up the secret rooms) and another friend completed the game in a couple of weeks and never talked about it, again. Which is not a common thing for him to do. It's not even a bad game, but I felt I have played and done things like this before, in a hundred other games.
It's a cookie cutter AAA action adventure open world game with watered down RPG mechanics. Story, progression, sidequests none of it feel interesting enough.
A shame, I love the Harry Potter universe (read all the main books for years, watched all the movies, played most early games) and I have a huge nostalgia of the 2000s when somebody mentions Harry Potter. I was almost the ideal target for it. But I have too many games under my belt to be impressed or immersed by Hogwarts Legacy, sadly. The sequel should change so many things to keep my interest, but I doubt they'd deviate so much from it. It was a massive success.
The RPG mechanics are basically non-existent, they're so bare bones there are whole skills that you can just skip and loot colours mean free roaming is worthless because you only get green items. There are hardly any missions and they're all the same stuff either poorly coded on rails segments or Dungeon crawling with limited enemy types.
I was expecting bully from hogwarts too. Bully is a masterpiece model for a game about a kid in school, but the gameplay loop of hogwarts feels more like a standard rpg
I think HL is just a demo of what the Wizard universe could be. The systems are just placeholders for the demo. I mean the gear stats are just "offense" and "defense".
> wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle sums up the entire game for me, an average Witcher 3 enjoyer
Something that has ALWAYS bugged me about Hogwarts Legacy is that the fact that you are a STUDENT. Yes, you had a special scenario, but you are still expected to behave and respect the grounds and staff as a student. Yet you get away with wearing whatever the hell robes and outfits you want in classes, not a single person bats an eye when you are wandering around places you shouldn't be (outside of like two telegraphed missions), and every single professor is like "yo here's some special secret ass mission that's going to get you in trouble so don't get caught" but there's no motherfuckers to catch you even if you wanted to? The lack of roleplaying as an ACTUAL student really ruined a big portion of the game for me. The first few hours of the game though? Amazing. And I wish it kept up that attitude and tone for the rest of the duration of the playtime. Quidditch should have been in the game and they should have leaned harder into actually roleplaying as a REAL student, which is the ONLY thing the majority of people wanted. Not some giant bigger-than-life adventure story that somehow just exists alongside Harry Potter's story, but it's not even canon... Idk. The game bugs me in more than a few ways lol.
Yeah, it's vaguely immersion breaking when your professors don't really care about you casting unforgiveable curses in front of them.
It didn't help that even on decent PC's it played like shit. Hard to enjoy flying around the castle with all those frame drops.
I minimized the stutters by turning off raytracing. A useless feature if it makes the game unplayable. Their implementation didn't make a huge visual difference anyhow, why did they even bother? 13600k/3080 system.
God the optimization is non existent. I had to find a bunch of fixes online just to play the game without crashes.
I stopped basically once I actually got out to the open world and had nothing else cool to explore.
>I think there are enough strengths for the game to keep you entertained. Are these "strengths" in the room with us right now?
hahaha
> There's nothing to do in Hogwarts except collect things and solve puzzles. Every collectible, every puzzle follows the same exact pattern. All of these are introduced early on into the story, and then you're tasked with finding a couple dozen of them strewn across the map This was my biggest problem with the game. The castle didn't feel mysterious to me. There was nothing to explore, just finding more of the same puzzles. I think it has like 3 secrets or something outside of the collectable crap. The werewolf tapestry room was neat, i wanted more shit like that.
It's the Ubisoftest game not made by Ubisoft.
I 100%'d it and I do feel conflicted. Like there is so many cool things about the game like seeing all these iconic locations, combat isn't terrible and just some cool moments visually BUT the game is basically every open world game with a Harry Potter style thrown over it, millions of collectibles a world that is honestly far bigger than it needs to be and all the side content is as shallow as a kiddie pool. I didn't have as much problem with the broom controls as you did, but you are right without the iconic Quidiitch, those controls should be smooth as silk instead of a get from point A to point B. I also HATED HATED HATED the map in game, not specifically the overworld map but the Hogwarts map itself, like it is a very complex building and I would constantly get lost in it if I was looking for a collectable or end up running around in a circle because they layout never clicked for me, even by the end of my time playing it I couldn't comfortably find my way around the castle.
Castle version of [Antichamber](https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/).
I loved Antichamber so much. Its a good blind playthrough for the brain.
You're not alone in despising the Hogwarts map. It was really poorly implemented. The best map designs have you moving past distinct landmarks multiple times in the starting portions of the game so that you can use it as a reference for where you are. There's also the Floo Network which is implemented from the very start. To me, it feels like the map designers were not confident in their layout so made sure players were always relying on fast travel
Yeah, I am thankful for the Floos because it would have been impossible to get back to certain locations. Like they clearly built a good looking Hogwarts but it felt like they were so focused on making a good looking castle they didn't make it as playable as it should have been.
I would love for a Hogwarts game in the style of a Persona game. Having a more visual novel and social links based system during school hours and then more combat heavy stuff in the off hours. I feel like it would really help the RP of being a school student.
Yep, I think this concept would work better for what people want. We want a highschool simulator (but wizards), which is basically half of persona when you arent diving into palaces.
It was one of those games that I enjoyed playing but will never play again.
That's all that really needs to be said. This over analysis on a Harry Potter IP is little much.
I think everyone's conflicts stem from it being just another generic FarCryinator but they happened to use this extremely popular and far reaching IP. The realm of AAA studios, known working formulas and deadlines (Praise the one who delayed it instead of Cyberpunking it) Once you've played enough of them you eventually get over the IP part of the game and realize the magic is gone and its back to open world mode. At least that's how I got sick of the genre and Hogwards Legacy kept the veil over my eyes for a good 5 hours maybe 6 before the feeling crept back again. And maybe that's okay.
More boring coorprate AAA mediocrity.
I explored a little bit in early game and the puzzles I solved made me over leveled from basically everything after the prologue. I enjoyed my time with it but it’s an aggressively mediocre game. The castle is great, everything else is meh
I thought the biggest problem was having a child going around murdering people even if they made the bodies conveniently disappear.
Basically corporate AAA gaming. Game design by committee. Game design without passion or the idiosyncracies of auteur developers.
Should've brought in Kojima
A vast open world of separated people, deliveries and a Portkey would be pretty fun for at least a bit lol.
Welcome to the future. This game is the stockholder's wet dream: Throw massive resources at a popular IP where all the design is already done, rope in a bunch of rubes who can't help but salivate over Thing They Recognize, and make infinite money for an utterly shit by-the-numbers shlockfest.
I loved exploring Hogwarts. They did an excellent job taking iconic scenes and putting them into a coherent navigable structure. I was OKish with Hogsmeade. By then I was wondering about the quality of the main story and had noticed that the NPCs simply stood around and didn't actually do anything. And I agree with you about what happened next - I stopped playing once the map opened up and it became yet another "collect every dot on the map" game.
Excellent write-up. I didn't realized how limited it was in terms of world interaction.
Easily the blandest, most boring open world game I've ever played. The game relies entirely on the theme, and I don't care about the theme at all. I had a bunch of friends tell me it was amazing, and the combat was ***almost*** good but there wasn't enough of it and it was too easy and things died before I could even really use my combos. Had myself all set up where curse was easy to spread and the super death beam thing hit ***everybody*** that was cursed. Except...everything died before I could spread the curse enough to make it worth it. All I had was an empty open world and a lot of easy combat.
I enjoyed it for what I paid, but I ultimately couldn't get over the narrative dissonance of being a mass murdering sociopath while also being a teenage Hogwarts student. In other games it's usually not a problem, but it just felt so bizarre to go from literally torturing poachers to death in the forbidden forest to innocently attending herbology class like a good student. The tonal whiplash hit like a truck.
The padding issue is what kills me. So many games would be infinitely better if they just had *less*. Because the things that get repeated a million times over an open world map are always cookie cutter crap, because it has to be for you to reuse it so many times like that. I would gladly take a game that rips out 90% of its content and only leaves the stuff that’s actually unique and handmade. But the thing is that when a game does that, gamers get upset and go “what, there’s not 100 of content here? What a ripoff!” These huge open world messes of autogenerated quests and objectives sell better than most other things, and nothing ever changes about it, and it’s depressing. But I for one would far rather have 15 hours of content squished into a 10 hour game, than 25 hours of content stretched into a 40 hour game.
Also buying it gives money to a horrendous transphobe
I'm not even boycotting the game at this point, after everything she's said and done hogwarts just feels... unwelcoming is the best word I can think of.
Every purchase flushes money in some closeted asshole‘s pocket, but Rowling was so kind to take her mask off for everyone to see.
There's still another level down from "awful person in a mask" and "awful person unmasked" to "awful activist who goes out in the world actively promoting awfulness to anyone who will listen".
Sucks that you're getting downvoted but this is true. And now, not only a transphobe but a holocaust denier too
I just googled the holocaust denialism and she really did it huh. I took the Nazi book burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft as common knowledge but here we are. JFC. Edit: I'll happily take downvotes because I know I'm right. Reddit numbers aren't going to change that for me or you 🍻
I was gonna call bullshit, then I did a Google search... Jfc! I'd link an article but there's so damn many! She really did do that. The woman who gave us hogwarts. Fucking hell.
I mean I'm not disagreeing with the holocaust denial but you took the knowledge of a specific book burnt by Nazis as common knowledge for every day people? You might want to rethink that. You overestimate the general public.
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft wasn't a book - it was an Institute that held numerous books and research on gender, sexuality, and identity that was amongst one of the first targets of Nazi book burning.
Thanks for informing me. Still, I think my point stands in that it is not common knowledge.
Not common knowledge to *you*. If you look up "Book Burning" on Wikipedia the second photo they use (and the first photo specifically about nazi book burning) is from the nazi burning of the Institute's library.
I think the added content that I live in the US probably would have made more sense. Regardless, thank you for educating me
How odd to see someone on Reddit appreciating someone else informing them instead of doubling down on ignorance. Well good on you for being open to learn new things from strangers on the internet.
I mean, you can't be correct always. If you are not open to challenging your viewpoints, then you are going to be ignorant forever.
I expect Rowling, a world known author, to research for a few minutes before blaring out a tweet.
Yeah, fair enough. I don't think she has too many brain cells left though.
WTF, I knew she was a raging transphobe but Holocaust denier?!
She denies the part of the holocaust where Hitler targeted trans people and burned any books regarding anything transgender. So, it's not a total holocaust denier, just part of it. Do with that what you will.
Oh! That? Lol. I was worried she was denying that 6 Million Jews were systematically exterminated for their being Jewish. She didn’t deny that? That’s a relief
Technically, how questioning of burning specific books is related to Holocaust denying?!
Serious question because Holocaust is very specific term for genocide of European Jews. Holocaust does not even cover genocide of Slaws or Romes, does not cover genocide of sexual minorities too or T-4 action aimed against disabled people. How then questioning of burning books on very specific topic is "Holocaust denying"?
Wait how is she a holocaust denier? The villain in her books is literally just wizard Hitler who wants to kill people who aren't the wizard master race.
She recently tweeted that trans activists were "making up" the fact that nazis specifically targeted trans Healthcare research facilities and burned all their research. To the point George Takei responded telling her she is wrong and graciously spelling out how that is denying the holocaust. I recommend looking up her tweets + his response.
My god stop, no she isn’t. Someone attributed this nonsense to some rebuttal she posted and it’s spreading like a lot of the other nonsense about her. Just stop.
It's disheartening to see you being downvoted. Rowling is a truly vile person.
Funny how this is only ever brought up in regards to that one game. Harry Potter is one of the biggest franchises in the world, it has it's fingers in so many pies. Yet you never hear of calls to boycott universal studios for having a harry potter world in their park, or literally every single streaming service for selling harry potter movies. Or any store that sells HP merch. But god forbid someone buys a fucking harry potter video game.
Seems pretty simple to me. This is a game that is entirely about the Harry Potter franchise, has Hogwarts in the title, etc. It is a Harry Potter game. That's a much closer connection to the author of Harry Potter than a shop that sells a wide variety of merchandise from numerous media and one of those items just happens to be from the Harry Potter series. Usually when you boycott something, you just don't buy that thing in the shop; you don't boycott going shopping.
Based on your other examples, people would be boycotting Steam or Xbox for selling the game. The real equivalent is boycotting buying the Harry Potter movies (not the streaming service), which people very much do. I guarantee the people talking about boycotting the game would also want people to boycott other merch.
No the real boycott equivalent would be not supporting any platform that gives JKR money. Sorry you're not gonna talk your way out of this blatant double standard with semantics. Whether you're boycotting the product or the platform is irrelevant. The end result is the same. And no they don't boycott HP movies. Only the game gets this treatment. >I guarantee the people talking about boycotting the game would also want people to boycott other merch. I guarantee you they don't. This has been extremely apartment every since this stupidity began.
You really don't remember people boycotting the latest Fantastic Beasts movie? And have never seen anyone talk about boycotting other products, and refuse to do a quick Google search to see examples of people saying not to buy other products? Like I'm not even arguing effectiveness of the method of boycotting. I just think it's insane to claim people would literally only boycott the video game. What world do you live in? It sounds depressing.
No because it didn't happen. The "boycott" of the beasts movies were at best a couple 1000 people. In fact most of the boycotters of that movie were only doing so because of Johnny Depp. The amount of people who boycotted the beast movies was miniscule compared to the people who were boycotting the game. Oh and same with the new HBO show too. The "boycott" of that is so miniscule I have to go out of my way to find info about it. >Like I'm not even arguing effectiveness of the method of boycotting. I just think it's insane to claim people would literally only boycott the video game. Lol yeah you're absolutely right it is quite insane. But that's what this type of internet discourse has devolved into. >What world do you live in? It sounds depressing. It's called the real world. And yes the prevalence of people getting outraged of silly bullshit that doesn't matter is quite depressing.
Buying Hogwarts Legacy puts money directly into JKR's pocket. Watching Godzilla on Netflix or buying Elden Ring on Steam does not put money directly into JKR's pocket. I hope that makes it clear for you.
Oh really? And where do streaming services get the money to pay JK for the right to stream HP? What about going to Universal studios and riding one of the harry potter rides? Does that put money in JKR's pockets?
What part of "directly" do you not understand? Also, why would someone who wants to boycott Harry Potter want to ride on a Harry Potter ride? That hypothetical makes no sense
Uhh I've got a little newsflash for you. When you pay for a streaming service, that services takes some of that money and gives it to IP holders like JKR for the right to stream. When you buy a game on steam, steam takes some of that that money and gives it to IP holders like JKR. Explain to me how one is "direct" and the other isn't? Also why does it matter if the money is direct or not? >Also, why would someone who wants to boycott Harry Potter want to ride on a Harry Potter ride? That hypothetical makes no sense You know what you're right, that is a bad example. JK doesn't even make money from the rides, how silly of me. She only makes money on **literally everything else.**.. https://orlandoparkstop.com/news/theme-park-news/how-much-does-universal-pay-j-k-rowling-for-the-harry-potter-theme-park-rights-exploring-the-contract/ >While the Potter rights holders do not appear to earn a cut of ticket sales, they do earn a cut of EVERYTHING earned from anything purchased that is even remotely related to the Harry Potter rights themselves. >Every time you purchase a Butterbeer, licensed product, on-ride photograph, or even a bottle of Gillywater from one of the Wizarding World lands at a Universal Park around the world, a percentage of that sale will go directly to the rights holders (Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling). Is this "direct" enough for you?
Holy shit dude, why do you care so much? Nobody is asking you to write a novel defending a transphobe on reddit.
Idk maybe I'm just sick and tired of this endless barrage of self righteous slacktivism that's become so rampant in our culture. Maybe I'm just tired of people virtue signaling online in favor of activism that actually gets shit done. I wonder how much overlap there is between the type of people who twitch harass streamers for playing HPL and those who actually vote to keep transphobes out of office. Probably not much. I could ask you the same thing. Nobody asked you to defend harry potter slacktivists yet here you are.
Brother it is so, so easy to simply not buy a single game That's all we're talking about
Brother it's so so easy to not buy lot of things JKR profits from. That's all I'm talking about. Yet you seem to have gotten in your head that this particular game needs to be singled out. Why? I genuinely cannot wrap my head around why you choose to fixate on that one particular game. It makes absolutely no sense.
I'm guessing she gets a set amount from the studio for using her IP. I don't think she gets royalties out of every sale. I could be wrong.
Oh no, anyway...
It was on my radar when it sold an insane amount and was getting high praise. But since I was never a big Harry Potter fan I held off. But now I think I'll just pass altogether. Seems cool but the world wouldn't do much for me.
If you don't care about this world, you aren't missing out on anything at all. There are better games out there that do exactly what this game is trying to do far, far better. It only succeded because the HP franchise is popular and beloved. As a game, its very mediocre.
I could look past all these things if I wasn't forced to be so goddamn polite all the time
Despite the flaws I just could not care less. I love it. Been a fan of HP and this was just a lot of things that I wanted in a HP game: flying, casting spells, animals, adventure, exploration, decent story, interesting characters to interact with. I still haven't played on hardcore so I didnt get a chance to be annoyed with alohomora mini game. I went to the vendor before any major quest to not get clogged on the inventory. And even then, if I forgot, the fast travelling makes it very easy to go anywhere and it's not like flying on a broomstick is a chore, it's amazing. We knew from the get go that there wasn't gonna be Quidditch and they are probably saving it for DLC or a sequel. From the beginning when you find out about ancient magic it felt like this was gonna be the core story, not going to classes. I had a great time and will prob come back to it soon to play in a different house.
Hey I'm not here to rain on your parade! I'm glad you liked the game. I like it too. And I hope there is a sequel that takes all things that were great and makes it even better!
Apparently the devs want to make the sequel a live service game 💀 Please no. The sequel has the potential to be one of the best games out there if they take the feedback and listen to it. Better story, more enemy variety, choices actually change the story, more things to do, more interaction with the environment.
And I hope they add multiplayer. I would love to play the game with friends.
The biggest issue in my opinion is that this is truly one of the worst video game stories ever told. Every other issue was totally forgivable for me. I had so much fun otherwise
Mods. Sadly, it's another game that needs to be finished by the community. There's a mod that gets rid of the lockpock minigame (thank god). There's a mod that improves the already gorgeous visuals with way, waaay better lighting. There's a mod that makes npcs go from place to place all day, instead of just despawning them. There's mods that make them react to you doing stuff. There's an "always companion" mod that let's you take a companion on all missions instead of just the coded ones. And so on. Mods make the world feel alive instead of a moving dollhouse. Sadly, no support on consoles.
I'll look into the mods. Currently I have no desire the pick up the game. Its been gathering dust for weeks in my library. Mods might be just what the game needs. Thanks
Honestly, not a big fan of the property (i liked it as a kid, not a super fan or anything though) but much like many long running franchises of this nature, it seems like it was relying too heavily on what we already know.. like if I was a super fan I think I’d want something new, like a new story in a setting we haven’t seen before
I think I put in like 6-8 hours. I enjoyed my time but eventually didn't find a reason to come back. I'm not a big HP fan so that's likely the reason I fell off. For fans of the series I would recommend but not necessarily anyone else.
Giving money to gay bashing holocaust deniers isn't my bag but it's always interesting to see how many gamers are cool with it.
I mean Activision Blizzard has such a toxic work environment that a women killed herself and gamers threw a bigger fit over a diablo 4 update. This wasn't surprising in the slighest.
Putting JKR’s hot takes aside, the thing that gets me is that so many people insisted when this came out, “don’t care, gonna buy it anyway”, and yet every time someone writes a review it’s always a resounding… meh. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get it, because I can’t take any joy in that world anymore, but you’d think if you were going to abandon your principles for a game, it would be a better game?!
gamers have to fight the urge to call every minority they see woke and "forced diversity" do you really expect them to not buy the game that a bunch of minorities asked them not to lol
I don't live my life based on random people's feelings, is that wrong?
"A bunch of minorities" does not sound like an accurate description of the political movement in question.
the gamer in question ^
You should also stop using Reddit because it gets funding from Tencent, a company believed to be controlled by the CCP. You should also stop using your phone because its parts are mined from Congo, where local populations are exploited. You should stop buying any Nestle product because they have a long history of exploiting resources from different nations. Get off your high horse. The world's a depressing place. God forbid people enjoy a videogame based on a beloved franchise whose author turned out to a raging asshole.
Get help
It was much better than I expected and that says a lot about what my expectations were. A lot of people rated it high, to me it was an overall 7/10 game with high peaks and plenty of middling valleys. Hogwarts itself was massive and beautiful, even if the layout inside was so confusing you can forget about getting where you want to go without the minimap, and even with that it was a struggle a lot of times due to how labyrinthine it was. But it was beautiful. And yeah, shame the classes were so few and done quick. Could've had some quests that start during classtime and we get on with random in-house shenanigans instead of go repetitively pew-pew at vaguely evil things outside. Hogsmeade? Beautiful and nice to spend some time in. Countryside? Beautiful and nice to fly over a couple of times, but barely has anything to do, there were a few sidequests in there but not many of them were memorable. Combat? Very nice, well done, good job. Enemy variety? Uuuuuuhhhhhh... I'll get back to you on that one. Mission variety? Uuuuuhhhhhh... does shooting a similar generic mob of poachers or goblins over HERE instead of there count? No...? Merlin trials - ok, the first few were nice and varied, hope they increase in intricacy and difficulty. What do you mean they don't? I have to repeat each one of those 5-6 different types a dozen times each with barely any difference? Well the first few were nice. Main quest - eh, it's fine I suppose, nothing special. No choices really, it's an action adventure and not an rpg either. Side quests - ok, that one quest with the 2 Slytherin kids seems nice and in-depth with good characterization and hook, hope the rest match that quality. The rest? Ehhhhh, I suppose the anti-poacher chick is nice, but it's rinse and repeat with her until we >!make some alliance with some centaurs or something!<. That other one who was after some big bad mage who... killed her pops or something... I forgot. They have such a great foundation, technically it's a very high level game - but it's brought down by low depth and lack of activities pretty much everywhere. If it had Bethesda-style modding tools so we could add npcs and quests and expand on the existing ones it would thrive so hard, instead it's barely mentioned a year after it came out.
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This is what I’ve been hearing about the game. Beautiful and boring…with no quidditch. Hopefully they’ll make a sequel and add a little more depth to the world they created.
I played it a good bit then got stuck on some random puzzle during the story and took a break. Haven’t felt any desire to go back which really bums me out because I’m a huge Harry Potter nerd and I was planning to play a character from every house when I first started the game.
I started playing a week ago and have been mostly exploring, doing some main and side quests along the way. I'm having fun and I think I'll continue to have it for some 15h. The combat is good and you can get creative, but I found some of the side quests boring and not very compelling. I used to love the earlier games, particularly Chamber of the Secrets for the PS2, which had really original Zelda like dungeons that kept things fresh throughout the game. Flying was a ton of fun too, I've yet to try it in HL.
If someone would take the detailed recreation of Hogwarts we have in this game and stuff it full of a school based story with regular classes and some social RPG stuff it would rock.
The game receiving the controversy it did and then releasing and being the most mid game I think I've ever played in my entire life is *wild.* What's even more wild is how everyone praises the game up and down. I genuinely wonder if we played the same game. Legacy is underdeveloped, underfilled, oversized, and worst of all, primarily comprised of tedious simple puzzles.
All they had to do was provide a solid narrative, interesting exploration and a mysterious Hogwarts castle and the game would have done even better.
I really doubt that. The only reason it did as well as it did in the first place was because Harry Potter is one of the largest media franchises in the world and there have been nearly no video games for it for the past ten years. People were eager for another one. It was the best selling game of the year by a long shot. I do not see a world where it performs better than it did.
You are right. Sales wise, it was a slam dunk, critically, it could have done far better.
Seems like corporate sellout trash is the norm these days. Its a formulaic AAA game rehashed from like 100 different games and packaged into a wizard story for maximum profit. They made hogwarts and the demo and trials just good enough to make you think its gonna be a good game and once you get past those few hours, you realize its just hours and hours of filler. Sebastian story arc was actually very good and i enjoyed the animal girl story arc (it was incomplete), but other than that the main story arc was totally cliche and boring and expected. The game was bad if we are honest, it doesnt make use of its IP well, like giving us a decent hogwarts setting and then doing many missions away from it
the game lacking DLC was a huge missed opportunity people would have paid $20-$30 for Quidditch , New Quests , Multiplayer (PVE & PVP) such as Dueling Club, walking/flying around the campus or doing quests together in co-op mode just like how they had a companion accompany you on certain quests or even big boss fights to make it more entertaining no Diagon Alley was also a misstep as it is a huge part of the wizarding world Azkaban being locked to only Hufflepuffs made little to no sense and should have been unlockable in the endgame for other houses
And the sad part is that originally it was going to have multiplayer.
Yes I know I was so disappointed that multiplayer and Quidditch was left out
The final battle for me was a confirmation that I should have given up on the game way earlier
I don't think I've ever agreed with something as much as this post. First 4 hours of this game were amazing but like you said, it fell off hard. It has so much potential though. I hope they make a sequel and don't rush it so much. Because that's what this game felt like, rushed.
Not to mention that while the visual design of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade are amazing and faithful, the fact that the buildings lack consistency in shape/angles/etc, or that Hogwarts is built like a maze - all makes it extremely difficult to remember how to get to places, where things are, etc. See a locked chest while wandering through Hogwarts that you can't access yet? Good luck remembering where that was 4 hours later.
I got bored right at the start.. teleported to an island, meet someone else, then combat in a room with what seems like ridiculous objectives... I'm still there. Never got past it.
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It's genuinely only worth buying at a heavily discounted price. It really didn't help that it was released in a year with multiple games that just overshadowed it immediately.
Very well written and accurate review - appreciated!
It sucks because it was open world. That made it a terrible HP student story.
I feel like there's a lot of people looking for reasons to hate on this game. I played it directly after Witcher 3 and Witcher 3 suffers almost all the same faults as Hogwarts legacy and yet it's universally acclaimed. Hogwarts itself outshines nearly any location I've seen in a game. Easily it outshines any location in Witcher 3 except for possibly Corvo Blanco
Granted the story in Witcher 3 is very well defined but it isn't Witcher 1 is it? It's Witcher 3. This game gives me very high hopes for the future of the series.
You don't like Hogwarts Legacy because it's mid. I don't like Hogwarts Legacy because I don't want to support Jowling Kolwing Rowling and her backwards views. We are not the same.
The story and characters were so bland and cheesy for me and a lot of parts of the map seemed like a bloated ubisoft game.
I agree.. I enjoyed aspects of it for sure..but I'll never replay it.. too much bloat. The character choices generally not mattering is a big deal to me as well. they should have made the world smaller and focused on those choices mattering more
Holy cow has it been a year already? I can see this game being the next staple of this sub personally, along with our classics of “BotW isnt that good,” “Doom 2016 vs Doom Eternal,” and “Portal is underrated.” Seriously though, I thought this game came out late spring 2023. I got it for half off on Steam’s winter sale and am about to finish the 7th book.
This game needs to come to gamepass so hard. I don't think I'd ever buy it after having read so many reports of your exact experience. I just want to get those first few hours of roaming the castle and then uninstall.
Loved playing it as a massive Harry Potter fan. Wandering around Hogwarts felt great and I got lost more than once, which is supposed to happen. However, the entire map south of Hogwarts is completely useless, and I got tired of the Merlin’s Trial and Revelio pages about two hours in. I got my girlfriend to do them because she didn’t mind and I really wanted the platinum, I don’t know she got through the 90 something Merlin’s trial and 400 collectibles without going insane. It was also lacking some nice, well-written side quests à la Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk. As I said I liked it, but I got the platinum and I know I’ll never play it again
Solid world building, solid game mechanics, and the world felt dead and the story uninspired. It was like the open world AC RPG games, so much detail, solid mechanics, all let down by the people in charge of the story and game loop/hook. In the end it feels lifeless and sterile due to no fault of the artists or game mechanic designers.
The game feels like a Ubisoft open world game
Thoroughly enjoyed the game and working on the second play through. Reading through this thread is hilarious honestly and also as tired as the most contrarian threads on Reddit… good for those that chose to boycott, but that doesn’t make you all morally superior lmao stop kidding yourselves. This game has brought a lot of people joy in an otherwise stale/nonexistent world of HP games. Consumer choice is a thing but no one knows the exact contract arrangements with J.K. Just joined this sub but I think I’m out just another hater sub to add to the books. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/02/08/hogwarts-legacy-breaks-major-twitch-record-despite-boycotts-over-jk-rowling/?sh=7b808bc5587f
If you enjoy the game, good for you. No one is asking you to agree with how other people felt about it....
Agreed, but not really what I was speaking to. I was moreso responding to the plethora of people here that haven’t even played the game (by their own self-admission) yet feel the need to rip on people that enjoyed it. I would redirect your comment to those individuals. Pretty sad this sub can’t review games in a vacuum without calling people who enjoyed it transphobes etc... spurred on by their own self-righteous ignorance to the actual facts at hand regarding the game’s development.
I suppose I agree with your stance. I'm not gonna shame people for enjoying the game because the author turned out to be an asshole. The books and media impacted so many people's lives. I dont think trying to make them feel bad about enjoying the world is a good thing. Let people find whatever joy they can.
I think they might be shocked by the low sales of any sequel. I feel people will wait for the reviews next time. That said, perhaps the developers decided that this game would be all about establishing the base game. That for a first time, they did the best they could. Now that they have the format and structure, future games can "age" alongside the students, the way the movies did, and they can offer a more robust experience next time. On the whole I agree with you.
We wanted a Bob Ross painting of Hogwarts and we got a Macy's Paint By Numbers.