I originally downloaded Avalanche Software’s âHogwarts Legacyâ during its release in February 2023. During this time, there was some controversy surrounding the author of the Harry Potter Franchise, J.K. Rowling due to her transphobic remarks. One of these remarks was tweeted in response to a woman being fired from her job for being transphobic in the workplace, âDress however you please, but force women out of their jobs for saying sex is real? #IStandWithMaya.â The author has been open about her beliefs that âif sex isnât real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.â She also expressed her opposition to Scotland’s gender recognition bill. Due to this, critics have identified her as a TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist), which she has denied. Many Harry Potter supporters and others awaiting the gameâs release were taken aback by the authorâs statements, and many decided to boycott the game. At the time of the release, I was blissfully unaware of the situation, but I too was disturbed by the inappropriate comments being made by Rowling when I discovered them.While âHogwarts Legacyâ was made using Rowling’s world that she created, she was not directly working with the creation team of the game itself, because of this I support the game, just not Rowling.
In honor of the gameâs two year anniversary, I picked up playing it again this December. After hours of updates, I found that the game was monumentally different from before. âHogwarts Legacy,â is a first-person adventure/fantasy game. The game takes place in 1890, 100 years before the time Harry Potter takes place. The player takes the form of a Hogwarts 5th year student, starting late, who possesses an ancient magic that no one else seems to have. Across the game you meet a variety of characters, each with their own storyline and quests. The common goal is to defeat Ranrok, an evil goblin who wants to steal all the ancient magic to become an all-powerful being. Ranrokâs reasoning for this was that all goblins had been treated unfairly and prohibited from using magic, often only being able to work in Gringotts, a wizard bank. A variety of goblins also attack and rampage cities throughout the game for the same reason, leaving many characters in the game being distrusting and discriminatory towards them. There was also a smaller villain, which honestly I forgot about until I had to battle him at the end of the game. He seemed like a minimal threat to Ranrok and he was significantly easier to defeat than Ranrok. He was just an average wizard named Rookwood who trafficked magical creatures and owned dragon fight rings. Many of the enemies you would encounter would be a genre of Ashwinders, which seemed to be the equivalent of the Death Eaters or dark wizards in Harry Potter, but instead of following Voldemort, they trafficked animals.
Hogwarts Legacy Scenery – TrueAchievements.
The scenery of the game was beautiful. Sometimes in the game I would just go into the wilderness or the forbidden forest and walk around to explore. There are all kinds of lakes, beaches, mountains, caves and of course Hogwarts. Hogwarts was more confusing to navigate and I had to use my map until the end of the game, just because Hogwarts was so large. Luckily, in the game controls there is a Fast-Travel feature that allows you to travel using way-points, which are statues that you can discover throughout the game in each area.
The game includes several choices that tend to include moral and immoral decisions in quests and discussions. Unfortunately, most of these choices donât have any effect on the storyline or the end of the game, but they can result in extra cash, which can be used to buy gear to increase your stats. The controls of the game itself took a bit of time to figure out, but they do get more understandable as the game progresses. The game doesnât really explain a lot of the controls and itâs left to you and Google to figure them out. For example, I had no idea I could make gear invisible, and I looked like a combination of Snoop Dogg and Frank Gallagher for the majority of my game. I didnât figure out how to use plants against enemies until later in the game as well, which can assist heavily in combat, and they just sat in my inventory. The spells were easy to cast, but I found the quests to figure them out a waste of time. They required you to do random challenges like use three plants at once against an enemy, with no actual storyline or quest. In fact, the challenge has absolutely nothing to do with the spell. However, I did enjoy the storylines and found myself on the edge of my seat at times or gasping at certain scenes which Iâve never felt for a game before. This being said, I think I wouldnât have been able to put the game down, if it werenât for the glitches that originally made the game unplayable.Â
During the first fight in Hogsmeade, I was greeted by a massive troll destroying everything. It was a hard task to defeat it, as my stats were pretty much nonexistent that early in the game. However, just as I was about to defeat it, my game would crash. Every. Single. Time. I attempted the challenge five times in total before giving up the game all-together before this year. Many players experienced the same thing with numerous other glitches. Many of these glitches were minor and didnât affect the gameplay that severely, but there were other ones that greatly affected the quality of the game. According to other playersâ experiences, the glitches and crashes seem to have appeared more when played on Xbox and PS5, than on PC. Many players reported small instances of falling through the floors, trees floating in mid-air, fast-traveling and ending up in the sky frozen, items getting stuck in walls, getting stuck in tables, characterâs faces being deconstructed, characters glitching out and repeating motions, characters getting stuck and making them fail a quest and characters running the opposite direction, and many more, often comical issues that donât present a huge problem. Many of these glitches donât seem to have a pattern, often happening at random with a small portion of players. However, everyone seems to have noticed a small glitch in gameplay at some point, whether it was game-altering or not. Players on Reddit expressed their discontentment with the glitches and crashes saying things like, âMy goal was to 100% this game, but itâs actually impossibleâ and â…Iâm basically done with it at this point until they patch up some stuff. Honestly shocked itâs this bad.â As a result of this, the game issued several updates, which (mostly) seemed to repair a lot of the glitches.Â
Facial Deconstruction Glitch – Reddit.
Two years later, I was able to complete the first fight without it crashing, but I still experienced small glitches. For example, a common issue for many players is not being able to retrieve a field guide page, a collection of pages found on landmarks to attempt to complete a book in the game. I was unable to get the page in the kitchen, because the game wouldnât let me enter. This happened with numerous players, and because of that, even though I completed the main storyline, I can’t fully complete the game. I also experienced getting quest items stuck in walls and having to restart the game, my forcefield-like spell âprotegoâ not going away, a character not being able to jump to follow me, getting stuck in between a wall, my character disappearing and not being able to open my field guide and map. Thankfully, most of these issues could be solved by a simple game restart; it’s just very inconvenient to have to replay the part leading up to the glitch. I felt that these were odd problems to happen after two years of updates. I did notice it didnât have nearly as much of an impact on my gameplay as it did two years ago, which made the game much more playable and enjoyable. Avalanche has alluded to a âHogwarts Legacy 2,â though no official announcement has been made, leaving players to wonder if it will be playable, considering how glitchy the original is, and if J.K. Rowling will have yet another controversy surrounding the sequel.Â