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Hogwarts Legacy, released this year, brings to life a world that many of us already know well.
I’m not, I should say up front, a devotee of the series. I read and enjoyed some of the books, I watched and enjoyed the movies; and I think I understand why it’s been hugely successful. The world of Harry Potter is a fun, colourful place to allow one’s imagination to spend time.
Still, it took me by surprise just how much I enjoy playing Hogwarts Legacy.
The first word I’d use to describe Hogwarts Legacy is “beautiful”.
I can’t find anything to criticize; it’s as if the game designers reached into my brain, pulled out everything on Harry Potter, then threw it away and did a much better job than I could in my wildest dreams. (Design by wild dream being a well-known and successful paradigm).
It’s a book-to-game transition that could only happen on the back of a tens-of-billions-of-dollars franchise; the work that has gone into this is staggering.
The game takes place long before the events of the books; and this works extremely well. The game is built in a world that you know, but doesn’t interfere with any of the story you know. It is, of course, filled with references to the books, such as places, families, and Hogwarts history; but they don’t get in the way.
You star as a student freshly arriving at Hogwarts; fortunately you don’t go through the multi year experience that Harry does, as that would be far too much for a single game; you get a free pass to the final year of schooling and the game plays out within a single school year.
Of course, there’s a heinous plot to uncover and you’re the one to do it.
Hogwarts Legacy is technically an open world RPG, but it doesn’t feel quite like one because the focus is so strongly on Hogwarts itself. The landscape outside is huge, but you return to Hogwarts or the local village Hogsmeade as part of all the main quests.
Most quests feature spell-based combat; some are also optionally “stealth” quests, and occasionally stealth is required.
The combat is frantic and quite fun; learning new spells as you go is a major part of the game, and combat mostly consists of button mashing to fire off spells as quickly as you can while also button mashing to block, dodge and heal to stay alive.
Enemies can be divided into “small” and “large” foes; against the former all your spells work as advertised, against the latter some of your spells do nothing or only do damage. The “large” foes often have huge amounts of health, making them a bit of a slog to kill. It’s not game breaking but it does slow things down.
Overall the game is quite easy: I’m playing on the “Hard” difficulty level, and the longest I’ve been stuck retrying one battle is probably about half an hour. A bit of preparation—particularly, enough healing potions—and you’re good. The quests, RPG mechanics and plot are also relatively simple. That’s not a bad thing, especially; this is a game for the whole family. My kids both love it.
The one mechanic I really don’t like is the “gear”. As you play you’ll find a random assortment of attire that gradually increases in strength as you progress through the quests. Selling it is your main source of income; continually switching to the latest very slightly better item becomes a chore. It doesn’t make sense at all for the character—it means you change dramatically in appearance from moment to moment. Perhaps realizing this, they added the option to just choose what your clothes look like independent of what you’re wearing—but unfortunately it doesn’t stick, so keeping your look, if you want to, is another chore.
There is one more dubious mechanic that I’ll mention. Once you start a quest that involves working with an NPC you are required to stay near that NPC or it’s “game over”—pretty drastic. It mostly didn’t bother me except for one time when I forgot to sell the “gear” I had accumulated before starting a new quest; this mechanic meant I couldn’t backtrack to do so, and had to forego some loot.
When a game gets this big there are always aspects that look unfinished or underloved.
My favourite by far is when you get to the end of an area and the protagonist says:
> It’d be annoying to have to walk back, maybe there’s a magic door to exactly where we want to go.
And then you find one a few seconds later. Talk about convenient!
I did also hit a couple of game-stopping bugs: falling out of the world, critical NPC gets stuck on the terrain. For a game this size it’s solidly towards the bug-free end of the spectrum; and it was always easy to resume from a saved game.
The game has plenty of things to do alongside the main quests.
There are “field guide pages” to collect, each giving a nugget of in-game lore. There are animals to catch then take care of; plants to grow; potions to brew; and even your own little corner of Hogwarts to build out.
The game is already a solid fifty hours without finishing all the side quests and extras, so all this is more than I have time for; but it’s nice that it’s there.
The game as downloaded from Steam is not quite playable: there is an issue with frequent crashes, particularly when traveling between areas.
Fortunately there’s an easy fix. The problem is due to hitting the system-wide limit `vm.max_map_count`.
The recommended way to increase this setting varies by Linux variant; on Ubuntu you can run:
sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=2000000
This increases it temporarily; run it before you launch the game and it’ll be reset when you reboot. The only downside to a higher value is that a process with a runaway number of maps will be killed less quickly; in this case however it’s exactly not killing the process that you want.
This done the game is very much playable; I’ve still hit occasional crashes but not often enough to be a problem.
It occurred to me while writing this that Hogwarts Legacy must be a contender for the biggest mainstream culture event ever to happen in the video game space.
On this occasion I’m happy to sit back and enjoy what the combination of mainstream culture and capitalism has produced: a staggering amount of investment into creating a playable wizarding world.
I’m currently stuck on the last boss; I think I’ll have to “grind levels” for a while to beat it, picking up side quests and other incidentals to gain power. This should be quite fun. So much for my claim that it’s easy even on Hard difficulty!
So far today, 2024-05-13, feedback has been received 12 times. Of these, 0 were likely from bots, and 12 might have been from real people. Thank you, maybe-real people!
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