This prompts Professor Eleazar Fig to take you under his wing, but it’s not long before you discover that goblins and dark wizards are also after the magic that you have a connection to – setting you off on an open world action RPG to further your understanding of magic and traverse the dangers that now face you. Not long after you take control of your character, you learn that you can – unlike other students – wield an ancient kind of magic.
On the plus side, this lack of background knowledge and pre-existing plotlines makes your character feel like someone you can truly make your own, and a good character creation suite enhanced this feeling. Taking place long before the time of Harry, Ron and Hermione, you start off at Hogwarts as a student about to embark on his fifth year there – though if you go off of the amount of things you have to learn you’d be forgiven if you wondered how on earth the first four years were spent. But even that game was tied to an existing script, and Hogwarts Legacy is an entirely original story merely mapped against a familiar background – and it’s more filled with wonder and all the better for it. In a way, that last part is a blessing – most of the previous games were rushed tie-in productions to the movies, and our favorite of the bunch was probably the LEGO version that came out later. It felt as if the odds were definitely stacked against this way turning out reasonably well, but it looks like Avalanche Software managed to defy the odds and deliver what’s quite possibly the best “Harry Potter” game yet – and it doesn’t even have Harry Potter.
Rowling didn’t do the franchise any favors with her remarks either. Warner Bros hadn’t shown it off during the trade show season last year, it was hit with delays and it didn’t tap into the ever-popular cast of characters from the original books.
To be perfectly honest, we didn’t know what to expect from Hogwarts Legacy prior to playing the launch version. Here’s our take on the PlayStation 5 version. After all the anticipation, Hogwarts Legacy has finally launched for Xbox, PlayStation and PC, with a Switch version to follow in a couple of months.