If you have nothing else to play and want a simple open world game set in and around Hogwarts, it’s perfectly servicable as long as you pirate it. Don’t expect to be blown away by it though.
I assumed that after literally nobody or any media outlets have talked about it since release. Telltale sign of bang on average game. Probably great for potter fans and boring for those who don’t care or haven’t seen the films/read the books.
I would - and I hate my saying this - rather recommend Avatar then. Yeah it’s a Ubisoft game. I know. Yeah, it needs a beefier machine to actually look really pretty.
But oh my fucking hell is it pretty when cranked up. And it helps the generic open world gameplay a lot to be this awesome looking. Fun to just wander around and take in the scenery, even when you leave the jungle areas and go to the plains and see the wind-swept grass and all.
Hogwarts Legacy is a 7.5 of 10. It’s a fun game. But it’s not revolutionary or break new ground. I hadn’t played Tears of the Kingdom.
The two things the boycott did is to make the trans community look bad and made people hate them. The final thing was to give the game free advertising.
If you hated trans people because some people online told you to boycott the product of a piece of shit celeb, not gonna lie dude you were a shit person and it had nothing to do with seeing the backlash to the game.
No joke, if this drama in any way altered your opinion of “trans folk” as a concept, you need to sit yourself down in front of a mirror and not get back up until youve fixed the rot in your personality. Utterly brainless take.
If some completely anonymous random strangers doxxing people you dont know made you hate trans folk as a concept, it had literally nothing to do with the doxxing and you know it.
What a stupid thing to say. Invest in therapy asap.
When did I say I hate trans people? All I did is to point out an problem with the boycott. You had a group of people who harass and dox people. That group made trans people look bad. Keep on looking the other way. That will totally help the trans community. /s
Honestly surprised that people seem to have forgotten about the harassment. It was really bad for some streamers and was inexcusable. It’s like how gamingcirclejerk tried to deny that the harassment even happened.
Culture wars sell games. If not for all of the noise surrounding JK Rowling, the right wing contingent of the internet probably would have passed it over as “a game for kids”. If comment sections are any metric to go by, everyone that played it either thought it was completely mid or bought it to own the libs.
Because they are wrong? You don’t actually think everyone that bought it is a trumptard do you? Please touch grass, twitter drama isn’t relevant to the real world.
I don’t get the whole “this game isn’t even good, there’s no way it was the best selling game of the year without rightoids overwhelmingly buying it simply to own the libs” idea when year after year after year the best selling games are Call of Duty X+1, Madden X+1, and FIFA X+1
A game doesn’t need to be good to be popular, and I’d bet probably 99% of the owners are just normal people who aren’t even aware of the controversy
Right, but COD is good. Good in the sense that it’s been refined over the years to give gamers the ultimate fast paced arcade FPS experience. The controls are tight and responsive, and the game is easy to understand. It’s essentially one of the hallmarks of the genre. But yes, the political controversy surrounding the game was above and beyond the controversy surrounding yearly COD releases. The sales numbers speak for themselves.
Correct. I’ve never bought a video game in my life and I ain’t about to start but everyone had a take on that shit, it was so tiresome, I imagine for a lot of babytrans/babylgbt it might’ve been a shock that people will choose a game of their beloved childhood corporate intellectual property over being allies and that being allies was to a lot of people always virtue signaling, but I was far too cynical to let that bother me at that point.
I’m playing this game right now and it’s honestly a six out of 10. The only reason to launch the game at all is because of the world design which is top notch. So top notch it scores all of those six points, because the plot characters story and gameplay are all a let down otherwise. This is the type of game that will disable the controls for your magical flying broom and then tell you that you need to climb a wall. I wish it wasn’t so successful so they didn’t think this formula was so good, because if they made the game actually good AND a Harry Potter property, that would have really been something special. But as it is now, it’s just an uninspired video game painted in a pretty coat of a popular franchise. I’m sure we’ll get a sequel.
I would have loved to have this game as a kid. It may be a 6 out of 10 but most of the other harry potter shovelware they shit out when the movies were coming was at best a 0.2 out of 10. The only arguably not that bad one was the prisoner of azkaban movie based game.
IDK. Most of the early games were actually pretty entertaining. I fairly recently played sorcerer’s stone on the gbc, and it was still pretty fantastic.
I’m curious, what open world games do you rate as a 9 or 10? I’m not saying Hogwarts did anything revolutionary, but it did most things pretty solidly. It’s been a while since Ive played an open world game that does a good job on making the world actually feel alive.
Subnautica gets a 9/10. Fallout 2 and 3, if we’re specifically going RPGs. NieR: Automata for action RPGs. Look at Persona for school influenced RPGs. I’d have geeked out so hard if we got even Persona-style class experiences in Hogwarts Legacy. Instead, all we get is completely contextless montage cutscenes.
Yeah I wish Hogwarts Legacy had taken more inspiration from Persona. Having a schedule, working on social links, engaging in fun activities outside of school, it all lends itself incredibly well to a Hogwarts game.
Unfortunately it sounds like the creators haven’t ever even touched a Persona game. I remember before the game launched they were asked if there’d be romance options, and they seemed almost offended by the thought since the characters are kids, despite Persona doing the same for literal decades.
Going to a ball in Hogwarts Legacy, or going on a date in Hogsmeade, would’ve been so much fun too.
Imagine that, teens dating… What a wild concept, they didn’t even had to play Persona, our own culture is filled with teen drama series, even DC made gotham academy.
Not the person you asked, but for me personally to rate some open world games:
Hogwarts: 4-5/10. It’s pretty damn bad IMO, beyond the fan pandering.
Avatar Frontiers of Pandora: 5-7/10, it’s a slightly worse Far Cry (which is already damn tepid) but looks insanely pretty which makes it a good braindead time waster.
Cyberpunk 2077: Originally 2/10, laughably underdesigned and so buggy it felt like industry-criticizing sarcasm. Nowadays 7/10 if including the expansion, still quite buggy but not in a bad way, and the redesigned combat and character systems feel artificial but pretty fun. City still too dead and underdesigned, sadly.
Skyrim: 6-7/10, damn impressive at the time, but only briefly as the game was shallow as all hell, even in its best moments. Still impressive but it’s all on the mods and hence the players, not the game designers.
Witcher 3: 8-9/10, essentially same design flaws as modern CP2077, but given its fantasy world suffers much less from it, of course the empty countryside is, well, empty.
Subnautica: 10/10, amazing horror vibes, good progression, not too open and not too confined, focus on exploration.
Outer Wilds: 10/10, completely open and pure exploration, reductive game design done perfectly right.
No like… it feels pretty obvious they weren’t that way originally, if that makes sense? That this got changed after the game was already out for a while, this wasn’t how it was designed at first?
I got Subnautica for free twice (PlayStation and Epic), I should really look at giving it a proper try. I have the feeling it’d be really good in VR, played No Man’s Sky in VR recently and I immediately loved it while on flatscreen it didn’t click with me as much.
The people who tried cancelling the game are the reason it sold so well and that is hilarious. Everyone was talking about it, any advertising is good advertising
So. You’re saying the developer and everyone that worked on the game are part of a crusade against a minority group?
Or is it just that you’re delusional enough to think that because the creator or the IP is a blowhard hag of a human being, everyone associated with her IP should be thoroughly punished?
Nah thats not what im saying. But the millions raked in by harry potter enterprises goes in to Rowlings pockets. Also, i dont weep for the devs, they were paid already…
The game allowed you to create a trans protagonist (male voice/female body, pronouns, …). It isn’t a crusade against them at all, it is empowering them. No matter what the author said.
Honestly it was just a good game. I saw it attracting both Potterheads and non-Potterheads. (I would not consider myself a Potterhead).
Does it have a bunch of replay value? Not really (neither do a lot of games). But man, that initial playthrough was just really good. It also looks like I clocked 113 hours on the game, so that’s a pretty decent return to me.
Also, despite the source material and the author, it had a lot of very inclusive elements, which were a nice touch.
I absolutely loved hogwarts legacy personally. Any other year it would have won more awards, just that Baldurs Gate and Alan Wake were even better. We really were spoiled in 2023
She makes money, directly and indirectly from the success of this game. She increases her relevance and thus the weight of her voice with the ongoing success of the game.
Theyre trying to argue that JKR being a massive TERF is fine because theres one trans character in the game. The “I cant be racist, I have a black friend” defense.
I don’t care for JK. But JK didn’t make the game. Hundreds of designers, artists and programmers did. And you think those people should be boycotted because one person is a TERF.
Those people were already paid, and you can make a game about wizards and magic without licensing the Harry Potter IP and further enriching JK Rowling.
She collected royalties from it. It doesnt matter if she had any input or not. Buying that game results in some of that money going into her pocket and I dont want to give her a dime. If she didnt get a dime for it that might be different but as it is she does and she revels in the shit stirring that shes done that resulted in blow back. I cant justify giving that troll the satisfaction of buying products that benefit her financially.
Maybe in your fantasy world, but in real life when a game bombs the studio gets cut down, downsized, etc. Volition was recently closed because of the bombing of the Saints Row reboot. Avalanche is great studio and I wish them to continue existing.
When the series creator is vocally advocating to marginalize transgender people and financially supporting other members of the hate movement, it takes more than a token NPC to make up for it.
Most likely that character is an insincere PR move from Warner Bros, but some trans people also pointed out that naming her Miss Ryan was probably done in bad faith. If anything, sounds exactly like the kind of tasteless thoughtless naming that JKR is infamous for.
If you are WB, I can't see how you compare the performance of this game vs the performance of Suicide Squad (which had similar development time) and not rethink your approach to future licensed titles
Completed both 100% and they’re such great fun games.
Hogwarts was awesome to walk through the wizardry world. Battling wizards, poachers, spiders, etc. Finding all the secrets and going through the story. Finished the game in a week, I just couldn’t put the controller down.
Eh, people don’t buy for the gameplay mechanics most of the time, they buy for what they see in the trailers and read in the descriptions. Being the only videogame available for this IP, having the WB marketing juggernaut behind it, releasing at a time of the year without much competition, coming out on every single platform - it would have been weird if this game wasn’t the best selling one in 2023.
Exactly. You don’t know what the gameplay is until after you buy the game, unless you are savvy and watch reviews or something, which hardly any consumers do.
Also, it’s not like the gameplay was mind bogglingly terrible, just some bland questing and a serviceable combat system. The main thing the game had to do to sell well imo was sell the environment and vibe which I think it did decently.
My wife, whose entire history with video games is Sims 3, Animal Crossing: NH, and Pokémon Go, played through this game start to finish and loved it. It wasn’t really made for “gamers”, it was made for Harry Potter fans that wanted to play a Hogwarts game. It didn’t succeed as a gaming revolution, it succeeded in bringing non-gamers to buy it.
Personally, I love that she got into it whether it’s mid or not, because it introduced her to a lot of the mechanics necessary to play “real” games in the future. And she had a lot of fun.
Fellow HP fan, I was kinda weirded out by the whole “free access to unforgivable curses” and “canonically killing people” and the honestly kinda disheartening stance on goblin personhood but man flying around the grounds is so fun
Oh yeah me too. There are a lot of moments in the writing that make me go “wait… what? are you sure about that?” and some of the game design was iffy here and there but the main attraction is just the fact that they’ve given us a “full-scale” Hogwarts and surroundings.
Oh no kidding, I loved how they handled the curses. For the most part at least. Like, I would’ve been pretty disappointed if they weren’t usable in-game at all, but was never sure how they could introduce them in a realistic way. So HL literally having entire side quests devoted to you discovering the curses and learning how to use them honestly blew away my expectations.
My only issue with them is being able to use them in front of others so casually. They should’ve just made them unusable if you had another character accompanying you.
The IP was my only interest. Games like this I get bored with so I generally avoid. But the views of the school looked great and I’ve always wanted to walk around it, like the fantasy version of it. I’ve been to the real set and walked around that which is cool. My only complaint is I bought it on PC so I didn’t get to see Azkaban.
I found the combat to be serviceable, and at some points I had fun with it. But it kind of got repetitive really quick. Like once you learn the core mechanics, they didn’t really introduce a lot after that to keep you on your toes. But the main problem I had with the game came from the quests, they just felt so monotonous. I love exploring the castle, but finding every little collectible just felt tedious and didn’t really seem to have any payoff.
All things I hope can be improved with an eventual sequel, I’m definitely glad I picked up the game. But it’s not something I’ve ever considered revisiting once I beat it.
Yeah, agree with these points. It had that first entry vibe to it, similar to the Outer Worlds. Lack of enemy variety was a pretty big one, once you were a few hours in.
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