Hogwarts Legacy Analysis

Preface

This is an in-depth look at the story and gameplay elements of the game Hogwarts Legacy. This is not a political discussion about trans-activism, transphobia, or antisemitism. If you are watching this video hoping that I will spend the whole time dising J.K. Rowling for her personal opinions on a controversial subject, or that I will explore the supposed antisemitic slant found in elements of the game and books (it seems clear to me that the Wizarding World's goblins are a smash-up of dwarfs and goblins from Norse and European folklore - every artist gets their ideas from previous art - and are probably not the result of any Jew-hating tendencies), or that I will analyze the way that kneazle breeding reinforces heteronormative stereotypes, you've clicked on the wrong video. I'm not going to talk about being betrayed by a childhood hero, how words cause real world harm, or the alleged lack of diversity at the development studio. I'm just here to talk about the game mechanics and design in an effort to help myself (and hopefully others) understand what works and what doesn't.

Overview

Hogwarts Legacy is a 3D open world action adventure game with some RPG and simulation elements. It was developed by Avalanche Software and published by the owners of the rights to much of the Wizarding World media, Warner Bro. Games. It released on February 10, 2023. You can find the video version here.

Dramatic Elements

Hogwarts Legacy is a story-heavy game, but it suffers from the same issues that many of the books do: lack of original plotting elements.

Characters and Story

You play as a male or female 5th year student who is transferring to Hogwarts. Right away, your flying carriage is attacked and you soon discover that you have an ability to see (and use) an ancient type of magic that most others cannot. When you arrive at Hogwarts, you will take classes, learn spells, brew potions, raise fantastic beasts, learn to ride a broom, and many other staples and tropes of the Wizarding World. You will also be introduced to a rebellion led by a goblin, and get embroiled in that. You will uncover a wizard from the past who, like Voldemort, tried to transgress the appropriate bounds of magic and brought about a tragedy.
As you progress through the game, your progress in the story will be repeatedly blocked by a list of tasks that you need to complete. These might be attending a new class, completing an assignment for a teacher, or some other to-do item. Upon completing these items, you'll be able to advance and learn more about your connection to this ancient magic, and what Ranrok, the leader of the goblin rebellion, is planning. I purposefully call this a list of tasks because that is how it is presented in the UI, and that is what it feels like. When I'm hit with a set of things I need to do in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I don't usually feel like I'm being gated by the developers. The things I need to do feel like a natural projection from where I am to where I need to reach. In Hogwarts Legacy, you are being tasked by...a teacher that doesn't want you to go too far without completing their homework first.
You will complete several trials which reveal more about the backstory of the conflict. Eventually you will confront the dark wizard who is helping the evil goblin and defeat him. At the end, you will confront Ranrok and defeat him. There are "two" endings, but these both funnel into the same conclusion. You can choose to use the forbidden power, or keep it a secret, but Hogwarts does not become a dark, evil place after choosing the "evil" path.
As you play, you can stumble upon a good number of side quests from NPCs out in the world or from students or teachers at Hogwarts. These follow many of the tropes of other lackluster side content in other open world games: there are no real effects on the game world, the quests feature no surprising twists, and the design is very run-of-the-mill.
The characters themselves suffer from similar problems. Often, they are meant to evoke characters from the original franchise - such as Professor Sharp, the potions professor, being a member of house Slytherin, having shoulder length dark brown hair, and being arrogant and strict. He is clearly meant to stand in for Severius Snape. That said, although the characters are not, for the most part, poorly written, most are one-dimensional, don't have arcs, and are just not interesting.

Formal Elements

Rules

Combat and Movement

You'll be able to walk, run, and jump relatively freely in Hogwarts Legacy. Like most 3D action games, you can climb on specific rocky surfaces. You can even swim on the surface of bodies of water. You will also be able to fly around on a broom and on a hippogryph, although this is limited by area: you cannot fly inside the building of Hogwarts, inside caves or dungeon areas, nor inside the town of Hogsmeade.
The combat has received a lot of attention. You have a basic attack that you can spam over and over. Your other combat spells each have a cooldown and different color: red, purple, and orange. Your magical enemies will periodically cast a color-coded shield, and you must use a spell of matching color to break the shield. You can use different fire and ice-based spells, together with some physics-based push, pull, slow, and slam spells. These are all flashy and fun to use, and they can be combined holistically: use Levioso to fling an enemy up into the air, juggle them a bit with basic attacks, then use Accio to bring them up close and personal before crisping them with Incendio and smashing them into another enemy with Depulso. You can "parry" many magic attacks using Protego, and you can dodge others that are not blockable. Holding the parry button will trigger a Stupify counterattack.
There are two last twists - potions and combat plants, and ancient magic. Potions, such as Focus - which reduces cooldowns; or Edurus - which increases your defense, can be drunk in a pinch. Combat plants are things like Chinese Chomping Cabbage (bobs around and attacks nearby enemies), or Venomous Tentacula (shoots poison at enemies). These are selected from the same ring-based menu and triggered by the left bumper. As you attack, dodge, and use Protego, you will build up your Ancient Magic meter, which lets you unleash a devastating attack against an enemy. There is a secondary use of Ancient Magic, which lets you fling environmental objects into your enemies using the right bumper. These could be explosive barrels, rocks, or the disarmed weapons of your enemies themselves. This is totally context dependent - if there is something flingable, you'll be able to fling it.

Enemies

There is a good variety in the enemies - you have dark wizards, poachers, goblins, mongrels, spiders, and trolls. In each category, you have several different classes and types.

School Simulation

This is for the "I get to be a student at Hogwarts!" fans. There are a number of classes you can attend, and most of these are based on scenes from the Harry Potter books and movies. There are a few minigames related to using Accio, or mixing a potion.

Animal Raising Simulation

This is for the Fantastic Beasts fans. You can "rescue" different species in the wild, release them into the microcosms inside the Room of Requirement. You can decorate these areas, feed your beasts, groom them, and if you have a male and female member and a breeding pen, you can breed them.

Inventory

There are six gear slots: handwear, facewear, headwear, neckwear, cloaks and robes, and outfit. As you explore, complete quests, and kill enemies, you will pick up a lot of gear. Many of them can be upgraded by using different materials harvested from rescued beasts. There are also traits, such as increased damage against mongrels, or reduced damage from trolls, that can be unlocked through completing challenges or found in the environment and applied to your gear. Lastly, there is a transmog system which allows you to change the appearance of any piece of equipment.

Collectibles

There are tons of collectibles and activities in Hogwarts Legacy. There are bandit / poacher camps to clear out, hot spots of Ancient magic to find, Merlin trials to complete, field guide pages to collect, Demiguise statues to find, a house chest to unlock by slapping flying keys, combat arenas to clear, broomstick races to complete...I feel breathless just saying this many, but there are more.

Leveling up

Leveling up is tied to completing field guide challenges. As you unlock these different challenges, and as you progress through completing one of them, you will gain XP. From level 5 to level 40, you will be given one talent point to spend at each level up. There are 5 skill trees, with 10 (Spells), 10 (Dark Arts), 16 (Core), 4 (Stealth), and 8 (Room of Requirement) skills, respectively, that you can unlock. These are mostly tweaks to how spells work: as examples, you can unlock a shock wave that will spread out when you use Descendo to smash an enemy to the ground, or you could increase the amount of time that an enemy will remain stunned by Stupify.

Boundaries

There are limited slots for your gear, such as masks or glasses, scarfs, robes, hats, and regular outfits. Let me say that again: in Hogwarts Legacy, part of the Wizarding World, the same franchise that features tents that are bigger inside than out, bags of essentially infinite capacity, and the microcosms inside briefcases from Fantastic Beasts, has limited inventory space. A question to whoever designed this: why?. And you regularly encounter new items which you cannot pick up, cannot even check the stats on, until you destroy an item you currently have. This happened to me quite often on main quests and during side quests, both of which feature areas which you will not be able to enter again, leaving you with no choice but to destroy one of your currently held items. Oh, and you cannot sell ingredients (herbs or materials harvested from animals) to vendors, meaning that selling gear is almost your only source of income for most of the game, yet you are still forced to destroy these items.
The only way that you can increase your inventory capacity is by completing set numbers of Merlin Trials, which are magic based puzzles scattered around the game. This makes no sense at all. I have have no idea why this is in the game, but, there you have it.
In the Room of Requirements, there are also limitations for each category of item: potion tables, growing tables, breeding corrals, etc.
I'll just reiterate the limitations on the use of your broom here. These usually appear as a text warning "Landing is not available" or "Cannot enter while riding a broom," and you will encounter some kind of magical shield going around the map borders and the town of Hogsmeade.
One last boundary is enemy scaling. Each region of the game has an enemy level range - the enemies will try to scale to your level within that range. So if you are a level 5 but the scaling range is 10-30, the enemies will scale to level 10, whereas if you are level 35, they will scale up to 30.

Outcomes

There are a number of different endings, but these trigger a few minor cosmetic changes. No matter what, you will have to confront the dark wizard and the leader of the goblin rebellion. After you reach level 34, it is possible to take your O.W.L. exams and to receive the yearly cup through the intervention of one of the professors (just like Dumbledore's intervention in the books).

Dynamic Elements

Dynamic Friction

The dynamic friction pattern makes its usual appearance for character leveling and for challenges. Each level requires a larger amount of XP than the previous one, and each challenge requires you to execute the action more times than the previous one.
A second instance of the dynamic friction pattern is in enemy scaling. As mentioned before, enemies will try to scale to your character's level, as long as your character is within the area's scaling range. If you are over or underleveled for the area, the enemy will clamp to the upper or lower limit, respectively.

Static Engine

The static engine pattern occurs in the Room of Requirement plant resource spawning and in the beast resource harvesting. These are on timers of various lengths, but you are guaranteed to receive the resource after waiting.

Stopping Mechanism

The stopping mechanism pattern mainly appears in the cooldowns for the various magical spells in combat. This prevents the player from spamming them.

Worker Placement

The worker placement pattern appears in your spell selection pad. You can equip up to 4 spells at a time for quick use, and you will eventually unlock up to 4 sets of these for a total of 16 that you can switch between at will. That said, you can swap out any of these 16 for any of your spells - a potential of 23 different equippable spells (not counting your basic attack, ancient magic attacks, Alohamora, Petrificus Totalus, Revelio and others that are always available or are contextual available).
Another instance of worker placement is in the potting tables. You can swap out what plant is being raised at any point.

Conclusion

I turned 40 years old a few months ago, and it struck me that one of the reasons I never got into Harry Potter originally was that I was already 15 when the first book was released. At that time, I was just getting into slightly more mature fantasy series, like Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire. In any case, I bypassed Potter-mania, and when the movies started to come out I was pretty underwhelmed and stopped watching after the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Two years ago, I decided it was high time that I start studying Japanese again, and I randomly decided that I would read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Japanese. It took the better part of 7 months, but I was able to read it, out loud, in Japanese. I'm currently about 100 pages into Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I have finally watched all 8 of the Harry Potter movies, and the first movie of the Fantastic Beasts series. I say this to give you some background into my relationship with the franchise. Whatever you might think of J.K. Rowling's political opinions, she is not a bad writer. She is not amazing either, but she is definitely competent. She knows how to plot a story, write decent characters, and describe scenes without tripping over her own feet. That already places her in a class above, say, Dan Brown or E.L. James.
Hogwarts Legacy belongs to the same class: competent, but not amazing. The world itself is gorgeous, and has clearly received hours and hours of love and care to make it look the way it does. The music evokes the atmosphere of the movies wonderfully, and there are hilarious bits of lore scattered everywhere. Most of the puzzles make varied use of your magical abilities, and although not mentally taxing, provide a welcome diversion from the combat. And the combat is solid - it is fast, fun, and frenetic.
As an open world game environment, however, the developers have copied many of the same elements that gamers have grown tired of over the course of the last 10 years: lack of dynamic world events, collectibles that are there more for filling the massive space than for any meaningful purpose, copy-pasted bandit camps, side activities that are included for sake of completeness but never fully fleshed out, non-reactive characters and environments, and much more. Just like the exploding red barrels in Ghost of Tsushima, Hogwarts Legacy has included a lock picking minigame. You have Alohamora, for fuck's sake - what is the point of the minigame if you have the spell? No other spell works this way! And even worse, the lock picking is just a window dressed version of finding the correct angles on the twin sticks (the same activity as decrypting passwords in the Arkham series, or focusing on Elvish runes in Shadow of War, which makes me wonder if Warner Brothers Games force their studios to include this...). This is not the same level of phoned-in game design as recent Ubisoft titles, but it is just a few steps above.
And speaking of Ubisoft, the horror of the UI deserves special mention here. The left stick controls a cursor, which must be manually moved over to the element you want to select. There are almost no situations where the bumpers or triggers can be used to switch between menus, and none where you use the D-pad to switch between menu items. Buying and selling requires holding the A button on the Xbox controller for a second, which disincentivizes going to the shops. I'm not sure of the logic of this, but it makes for a painful experience any time you need to go through several menus.
The "RPG" elements of the game also leave more to be desired. In terms of RPG mechanics, you are technically limited to 35 talent points versus 48 unlockable skills. I cannot imagine many players investing in the 4 skills in the Stealth tree, so let's go with 44 skills. None of your skills drastically changes the effectiveness of your different spells, so you can freely choose among the skills and you will probably end up playing the game in a similar way to much of the rest of the player base. The particular spells you use in combat don't matter so much, as long as you have one Control spell (coded yellow - Arresto Momentum, Glacius, Levioso, Transformation), one Damage spell (coded red - Bombarda, Confringo, Diffendo, Expelliarmus, Incendio), and one Force spell (coded purple - Accio, Depulso, Descendo, Flipendo) equipped, you will be able to go through most combat encounters smoothly. The equipment also amounts to playing dress up. There are only two stats - offense and defense, and you just have to equip items which have the biggest of the those numbers. Having traits and upgrades tied to the beasts in your vivarium is a nice touch, but it is still quite shallow.
In terms of RPG narrative elements, you can't become a superevil character, despite slinging around unforgivable curse after unforgivable curse. I don't really want to hear that we are roleplaying a Hogwarts student, and clearly no Hogwarts student would become evil - just hand-wave about Draco, Voldemort, and all the rest. Further, the NPCs will not really react to what you do or don't do, either. Again, this feels the same as many of the other open world RPGs of the last decade - I'm looking at you Bethesda.
Regarding the sim elements, we have the same problems. You can customize your wand and broomstick, and the game developers have lovingly recreated scenes from the books and movies (such as the mandrake scene in herbology class, or the first time you ride a broomstick), but there are no consequences of class attendance or performance, or your wand choices. Long wands are not slower, for example, and flexible wands do not increase crit chance. The different cores have different descriptions, but they are just window dressing. There are cut-scenes where the teacher will say "Well done, Harry McLightingFace! Points to Hufflepuff." However, you can't affect the points for the different houses by your actions. You can't make Slytherin the masters of the school by answering questions in class or by following the rules, you can't sabotage other houses, and there is no affect of getting these points. These scenes are just there for show.
The other main sim elements, taking care of the beasts, are similarly shallow and facile. You brush them and feed them, and you periodically get some resource from them. But they never eat each other because they are starving due to your lack of care (since you've been busy riding your broomstick and zapping goblins and haven't stopped by the Room of Requirement in ages) nor just because one animal is clearly a carnivore and the other is clearly its prey - you'll never come back to your vivarium to find your kneazles with potbellys and your puffskeins nowhere to be seen. They don't get sick. They don't have life satisfaction meters related to the type of environment in the vivarium. They don't escape or attack each other, unlike the dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Evolution. The system is there, but it does very little.
The Room of Requirements, as a whole, however adds some much needed complexity. The different ways you can set up your plant stations, fertilizer stations, potion stations, etc, are sure to keep some players busy for a time. The way that beasts tie in to upgrading gear is sensible, and the fact that you can breed beasts and sell them for extra money is useful since in the early and midgame money sources are limited, but this also created a lot of dissonance for me - like, how is this different from the poachers? In any case, I found potions mostly useless, with the exception of the Wiggenweld / Healing potion, and I only made other potions to complete task objectives. The combat plants were occasionally useful, but again, I mostly only used them to complete a combat feat or task objective.
To wrap things up, Hogwarts Legacy is not a 1 out of 10, the opinion of sex toy reviewer specialist Jaina Grey over at Wired not withstanding. It is not a 10 out of 10, either, whatever Angry Joe would like you to think. If I were rating this game, I'd give it a solid 7 or 8. It is competently executed in many areas, but has some serious design problems in others. Many of the design problems stem from copying the open world play book that many developers have been using for the last decade. Others stem from trying to stay true to the feeling of the Wizarding World franchise, which is not very well-thought out and makes very little sense in and of itself. Still others are just bad choices made by the developers. Should we give them some shit for their bad choices? Yes, of course. Should we praise them for the areas where they have excelled? Definitely! Should we be fanboys and give them a free pass? How about no. Should we go all political and barely talk about the actual game at all? Again, no.
Hogwarts Legacy has undoubtedly benefited from the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling, but that does not mean it is not worth your time. There are many moments of wonder and fun to be had here, but there are a lot of confoundingly poor design choices, too. Hogwarts Legacy is not an evil game created by a team of evil developers based on an evil franchise written by an evil person. It is a mostly fun piece of entertainment that I'm sure fans of the Wizarding World franchise will love. Even as something of an outsider, I enjoyed a lot of my time with Hogwarts Legacy, while I found the story pretty lackluster and many elements of game design shallow. I can say much the same about many other open world games - Watchdogs 2, or Days Gone, or Fallout 4, for example. To pull out my favorite overly dramatic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quote: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Outro

I hope that you found my analysis and discussion of this game informative and useful. Until next time!