Saturday Morning Gaming: Hogwarts Legacy Initial Impressions

(Note: If you want to argue about the controversy surrounding the game, please do so in this thread dedicated to that topic. This post is about the game. Also, we’re going to have some light spoilers about the first couple of hours of the game including screenshots.)

When I first heard about Hogwarts Legacy, I was mostly interested in how the game supposedly took place centuries before the story of Harry Potter. Wow! It’s the 1500s!, I thought. I thought it would be cool to have a game that wasn’t going to be saddled with the stuff that we knew would eventually happen. See Witches and Wizards operating at the height of their power while the rest of the world was barely re-catching up to the glories of Ancient Rome.

So I was excited to sit down with the game and experience this.

First off, the game gives you a shot of your Hogwarts acceptance letter. You’re starting as a fifth year! How exciting! Oh… it’s signed by a Weasley. Well, I suppose we’d have to expect that sort of thing, wouldn’t we? It’s just like the Star Wars universe, I guess. There are only a handful of families and they’ve all known each other since time immemorial.

Then the game gives you a really strong character creation menu. Sadly, you can’t make a fat character. That said, you can probably get the face you want. Different hairstyles, different skintones, different hair colors, different eyebrows, different freckles or moles or scars. It also gives you a couple of voices to choose from and you can change between 4 pitches on the voices. Finally, it asks you would you rather be sorted with the Wizards or the Witches.

I spent about 10 minutes in the character creator to get my guy just right:

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And we’re off to the races. Okay, we’re in London and people are dressed smartly… Victorian or Edwardian, I guess. Sigh, I guess we’re not in the 1500s. We meet our character and one of our professors and an old guy from the Ministry of Magic and we get in our flying carriage and we hear the toiling of Big Ben.

Wait. When was Big Ben completed? September 1843. Given that we’re going to Hogwarts for the Sorting Ceremony, we *MIGHT* be in 1843 but it’s more likely to be 1844 or later. Ah, well.

Our quick little trip to Hogwarts goes awry and we find ourselves in a different situation than we expected… but it’s a great opportunity to learn some new spells on the fly. Lumos, Revelio, Stupefy, Protego, and the standard “zap”. Well, those are all pretty useful, I guess. Run around, get the backstory for the main game, meet some characters, and then we’re off to Hogwarts for real this time.

We show up right as more names that we’ve heard before start to put the hat away but you get there right under the wire and they place the hat on your head!

Now, I admit, I was kind of hoping for a nice little 16 question Myers-Briggs test where you were most likely to be sorted into one of the nice houses but, if you were sneaky and worked for it, you could get into Slytherin. Sadly, that’s not how the sorting ceremony works. You get asked two questions and the first one doesn’t count. The second question has the sorting hat say “oh, there’s an undercurrent here… you’re a fan of which of these four virtues?”

And then you pick the virtue. It might as well ask “What house do you want to be sorted into?”

And then the game whisks you off to the common room of the house you choose, you go to bed and… *FINALLY* the game lets you start playing it for real. You get to run around Hogwarts. And Hogwarts is *BEAUTIFUL*. Any disappointment in the game I felt to this point evaporated.

Hogwarts, seriously, is amazing. It’s like running around a museum. One of the great European Museums before they put everything behind glass.

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One of your professors gives you a book to help you keep track of everything Hogwarts is going to ask of you and, seriously, the book is cool. When I opened the map, I actually gasped. When I opened the collectables tab, I giggled. Here, check this out:

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There are *TONS* of things to find. Some of them are as simple as finding the right statue in the right corner of Hogwarts. Some are complicated like finding potion ingredients. Some of them they don’t even bother telling you about yet because you still need to learn a lot of spells before you can get away with collecting the things they want you to collect.

And you go to your first two classes: Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Charms teaches you Accio. Your DADA teacher mentions something about The Great Poacher Raid of 1878 and mentions it in such a way that it communicates that it happened years and years earlier.

So I looked it up. The game is set in 1890. Dumbledore and Grindelwald had their first duel in 1899. Oh, jeez. We might run into those guys. Sigh.

Anyway, we get our first lesson in DADA and learn Levioso. And then we get to run around some more!

One of the funny things about the game is that they went out of their way to animate the globes. If you see a globe, you can run up to it and spin it. Check this out:

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Those are five different globes in five different parts of the building. And you can run up to them and spin them. No, they don’t do anything. You just spin them if you want.

When I saved the game so I could write this post, I was in the middle of my first trip to Hogsmeade where I have a shopping list and, yes, we visit shops that we first encountered in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

And I kept running around thinking “Oh, I want to go there! No, I want to go there! Wait, that place is here too? I want to go there RIGHT NOW!”

If you were never into Harry Potter, I don’t know what you would think about the game. Maybe “Ho, hum. Yet another Open World Game where you have to run around and collect stuff and people leave their gold out on the counter for any klepto to pick up.”

If, however, you *WERE* into Harry Potter? Or even if you never got into the books or movies but really enjoyed Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? This game throws you into a world that you were into. You get to run around Magical Britain and use your wand and fly around on your broom and go to class and learn spells and join an underground dueling club and cast reparo on broken things and spin globes.

Holy cow, this is the game I wanted to play immediately after finishing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This is the game I wanted to play back in 2003. It only took 20 years to get here.

So… what are you playing?