Harry Potter Video Games

The only people I see praising Hogwarts Legacy at all really expose how much of their nostalgia for the IP and their desire for a pretty looking Hogwarts pave over lot of the game's other problems for them. I've never seen a more critical look at the story and characters than the playthrough of the game in this topic. At most they just say the characters were kinda weak unless they were saying Sebastian's plotline was good, but the main plot just gets ignored when it comes to its writing quality unless they say that liked the story.

Edited by VeryMelon on Apr 11th 2023 at 8:53:07 AM

It's peak Triple A™, really. Simultaneously overwrought and unremarkable, all backed by controversy.

Edited by Chortleous on Apr 11th 2023 at 7:35:10 AM

Meh, I kind of stopped caring about this game after a while. None of the playthroughs really hooked me longer than a few videos and I was skipping over parts.

Yeah, there’s just so much absurd drama over this series.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 11th 2023 at 8:36:19 PM

It won't be peak Triple A until we get DLC too.

Supposedly DLC isn't in the plans for this game. Which feels bizarre but also I can't imagine what DLC would even be.

Also a bizarre point; they bring up an even name an entire section of the game as "Prepare for your O.W.L.S.".

When do your OWLS occurs? During the montage after the final fight and you have no interaction with them nor are you ever graded.

To be clear on how other games handled "finals", Prisoner of Azkaban put each of the Golden Trio through a much harder and longer Final Test dungeon and put you through your paces on understanding and using the spells. It wasn't perfect but it worked for what the game was trying to convey.

I think they took OWLS too literally to the lore as, well, a written exam which doesn't translate to gameplay thus cutscene.

Which... is just bad adaptation. Great lore accuracy but it's terrible video game adaptation.

As I said on previous pages, does sending one student (and always the lead) into some lengthy and dangerous dungeon to teach them a spell make sense in-universe? Of course it doesn't. But it adapts the concept of learning a new magic spell and teaching you the mechanics of how to use it which is what made it work. And boy does it really convey Hogwarts as a "Fantastic Location of Adventure" far more than a literal castle.

Hogwarts in this game is fully realized. Maybe not fully utilized, but it's fantastically detailed. Yet... I can't help but feel like it missed some of the magic? In the sense that the castle isn't utilized that much for the story nor is it that interactable.

Like, because the magic tends to combat utility or basic environmental usage (i.e. move box and hover), I never quite got that metroid-vainia level of exploration of the castle that I felt earlier games nailed. I never stood in front of a massive floor to ceiling mirror and tried to see if it was a normal mirror or if there was a hidden room. And I very rarely had the experience of seeing a chest somewhere and wondering how to get to it.

ESPECIALLY once brooms were introduced and removed all environmental navigation challenges. I get why brooms needed to be added because of the map size but I can't help but feel like... brooms really ruined exploring this environment.

The only Harry Potter game I played was the Prisoner of Azkaban one, but it got a lot of mileage out of using the school itself to make dungeons to visit and did bother making the three leads play differently by giving them different spells and traits to learn to diversify the gameplay loop and making exploration more interesting. Flying on Hippogriff was also really fun to me as a kid because getting to see the school from the air was awesome, but it also opened up ways to get certain secrets you couldn't get normally since this wasn't an open world game.

In general, it made the most of what it had to produce something fun for a tie-in game. Ubisoft game design was never going to produce an interesting Harry Potter game to actually play.

Gave up trying to 100% it out.

The collection book is terrible. Like... who designed this bad? TLDR; The book will tell you how many items you have left to collect. However, collection chests' contents are randomized. So, even if you know what item you're missing, you have no way to figure out where it is. Further, while dungeons and enemy camps will have a x/y collection chest count, I couldn't find the final three chests I was missing and it's not like the game has a larger break down of "You have 30/36 in this major region of the map".

Further, the game had begun crashing every time I fast traveled across the game-map. So, I gave up trying to search further. Thought about fully designing out my Room of Requirement but... I didn't really see the point. It'd be cute to dress it all up with couches and etc but... why? Same kinda went for the Vivarium rooms (the places where you store your fantastic beasts).

The Fantastic Beast catching is another aspect that feels... wierdly out of place. Nevermind the thematic issues I mentioned earlier but... this just doesn't feel like a game that could support this mechanic?

The idea is you're supposed to go out into the world and catch them and put them into your personal zoo. You get four rooms as the game progresses; a sunset field, a cliff-side ocean beach, a dark swamp, and a mountaintop. You get a bunch of building pieces to decorate and add to your rooms and you could build a cottage or a castle ruins or whatever.

Beyond this, you can sell your beasts for coin. Or you can breed them together to create "shiny" variants which.. far as I'm aware sell the same. ALL beasts sell the same. You can also play and feed them to get resources from them for upgrading your gear with a few minor stat boosts.

But all of this feels a bit... pointless? Like, why breed the beasts when they each sell for 120 coins every time? There's no reason to breed a Thestral vs a basic Puffskein. Second, even if they did have a more comprehensive beast economy, that doesn't work if there's fuck all to spend your money on. Once you've bought all the recipes for Ro R furniture, you really only have clothing to buy. You could buy beast resources, but why do that when you can harvest them yourselves and the vendor doesn't sell them in high enough quantities to make it worth it? You could also buy potions but I was never using my potions in the first place and Ro R lets you use Hopping Pots which brew a random potion every few mins.

You only spend your money on clothing really, but because of the transmog system, I only ever have one set of equipment on at any one time and I just transform it to look as I want it to. And I didn't really invest in clothing stats and thus the beast resources until I neared Max Level.

Even if I did really invest time into beast collecting and building my vivariums early on, I don't see what the point might have been? I didn't really feel like the offense/defense boost would have mattered that much and I probably would have encountered a new item with better stats that I could make look like my old gear in the next dungeon.

The beasts mechanics feel very in-depth... but don't work on such an empty economy.

And, further, such a short game? Like I said, the game kinda just ends at the end of the Winter Season. Per Harry Potter, I'd been expecting to have Spring and then Finals. But the story just ends. This kinda mechanic could have worked over a longer game with a lot more difficulty where stats were meaningful and where there could be a lot of down-time and investing in builds, but Legacy just isn't that game.

So... it's ultimately depth without reason.

Gotta artificially extend the gameplay somehow.

I think that quotation misses the point the poster was making that "The people praising the game seem to be doing so out of love for the property". Which is not the same as "Loving a game I hate". That very very few of the conversations from the "positive- love it" crowd had much to say on the game itself. Least as far as I've seen.

You can like the games you like. I'm usually not one to hate on people for liking a thing. But when all of the praises for something stem from stuff beyond the actual literal game they're playing, I feel like that indicates something about what is being praised and what isn't.

When people love a game, I usually expect to hear a lot about the gameplay or a particular level or a companion character they loved the storyline of. People will talk about builds or strategies or something. With the equipment and transmog, I usually expect people to be going all Fashion Souls and etc. The most I got from the "loves it" crowd was praise for Sebastian's storyline and even that was faint praise after a week or two and people actually played the storyline.

Idk. I also feel like it's telling that the game pretty much fell quiet after a month and a half. The controversy died down and the players quieted down too. It makes me think, officially, one fed the other and the game couldn't stand on it's own.

Edited by InkDagger on Aug 4th 2023 at 12:41:08 PM

I Do wonder how this would have turned out sales wise if people hadn't invoked No Such Thing as Bad Publicity and got the game plastered all over the news for months.

Like ignoring imo is better than giving something attention.

It's Harry Potter. People were never not going to talk about it. If nothing else, it had a strong advertising campaign behind it.

Dude, by May the game sold 15 millions of units. I find hilarious that you think it's a failure.

No-one said it failed. They asserted it's success is based more on the brand it belongs to, than on the merits of the game itself.

That's somewhat disingenous, don't you think?. After all Fantastic Beasts ended being a disaster and the last Potter's movie was in 2011. If Hogwarts Legacy only had the brand going for itself, it wouldn't have sold as much.

Edited by Edward45 on Aug 4th 2023 at 2:32:54 AM

What exactly was the point of bumping this thread after four months just to attack a strawman?

Mediocre video games sell well based on hype and brand all the damn time, what are you talking about?

Edited by Perseus on Aug 4th 2023 at 9:34:06 PM

I'd also point out there's other metrics for success here.

If we're talking pure financials, mobile games make fuck tons of money on dirt cheap budgets all the time. And, yes, Hogwarts Legacy probably was a financial success.

But there's other metrics.

Was this a respectable entry into the larger franchise? No, I'd say it's rather forgettable all things considered and, 10 years from now, will probably be that oddity of "Hey, remember when Simon Pegg was in that HP game?".

Was it a successful adaptation of the series it was trying to build a video game out of? No, it has the aesthetics but it breaks so many lore rules and drops the touchstones that every "OC goes to Hogwarts" fic has been hitting on for decades now. I feel like, if you're going in for "I want my own Hogwarts adventure", it's half-assed.

Was it a good game? I don't think so either. The dungeons are copy-paste, the combat has a rhythm but not much depth, there's not much platforming or puzzle solving to speak of, and the story isn't particularly compelling to get you through the other middling elements.

If anything, it being a financial success was a success of marketing; either on the nostalgia front or the "controversial topic where people will buy four copies out of pure spite" front.

Hogwarts Legacy has officially cleared Zelda as 2023’s best-selling game worldwide.

Congrats to Avalanche Software.