Hogwarts Legacy
There is no way Hogwarts Legacy would be good for n00bs!… I first thought. But then, I reconsidered. And even though it doesn’t meet many of the standards I usually set for games with the Izzy Mode Certificate, by Merlin’s Beard! If this game doesn’t convince a n00b into gaming, may a centaur get this muggle, because I’m done! At first glance, it seems that we are dealing with a three-dimensional action game in which dexterity is essential, it’s easy to get lost in the vast Hogwarts and even maps won’t help because the castle has many floors and you need to know which one you’re on in addition to the regular floor plan. Initially, it seems that a n00b will be put off by the agility aspects of flying on a broom, fighting, aiming, or catching fantastic creatures, and a casual gamer will tire of the long story, an abundance of side quests, and characters they’ll forget during long breaks between console sessions.
But the first impression is misleading.
Hogwarts Legacy is actually a pretty straightforward game. It draws on the long tradition of console platformers but does not aim to tire the player. On the contrary, it offers many hints: if we have to select symbols, they will probably be slightly illuminated; if we have a path to take, it might also glow. If a quest requires a conversation with someone – we always know who and where, but we never need to rush the conversation. Overwhelmed by fighting? Find new equipment and spells. Can’t jump somewhere? Get on a broom. Don’t want to fight? Hide with an invisibility spell. Don’t like fighting and play essentially for the pleasure of prowling around Hogwarts? You can do that endlessly.
Hogwarts Legacy presents itself as an epic tale of ancient magic, whose sheer size will overwhelm, like the castle itself and the bulky seven volumes of the Harry Potter series, on which it is based. But in reality, it is a game even children can tackle; it has many purely cosmetic elements, gathering them is entirely optional, and with its somewhat candy-like aesthetics and in many places an overbearing dopamine game loop, it resembles mobile games (this certainly is the legacy of Portkey Games – the studio focused mostly on mobile platforms, which stands behind HL). And mobile games are usually more accessible to beginners and occasional players. The Warner Bros connected studio swiftly translated this accessibility from phones to consoles and computers, and it really shows. Sometimes it feels like some game developers were forcibly pulled away from adding microtransactions for cosmetic items, bonuses, and power-ups. Hogwarts Legacy doesn’t practice any of these nasty habits, but you can almost see the ready places in the interface where a big golden, glittering button for buying diamonds for real dollars could be. This, however, means that the game was made by people who know how to make its rhythm just right, keeping players engaged without deterring sudden difficulty jumps and satisfactorily letting them hit new milestones.
If you are between 10 and 50 years old and have not been living under a rock for the past 20 years (which could be especially hard for those 10 years old mentioned…), you know the basics of Harry Potter’s world. If not from the books, then from the movies. That’s nyway more than enough because the game heavily relies on the films’ aesthetics, which was established already in the second part, and its final form was shaped by the narrative failure but visually pretty good Fantastic Beasts series.
Moreover, Harry Potter is an urban fantasy series, which means the storyline takes place in our world. This changes a lot because, contrary to most fantasy works, we don’t have to learn the infrastructure of the presented world from scratch. Even if we don’t live in Britain, we sort of know what life there looks like. Even though the events of HL take place about 100 years ago, we still have a basic idea about 19th-century England. Every child has heard about the existence of Wales and Scotland and has at least a vague idea of their landscapes. There’s no need to learn everything from scratch – even while reading the series for the first time or watching it as a movie, because they draw from the real world. And if we did watch the series (and let’s face it, we did. Many times. More often than we’d like to admit…), then today, booting up HL, we are entering a very familiar place. Without the need for extensive exposition, without the necessity to memorize numerous and exotic names, surnames, histories, politics, economy, and if Tolkien wrote the thing – languages. A few movie marathon nights are enough to feel at home here – 8-9 movies (it’s worth taking a peek at the first part of Fantastic Beasts) and you’re ready to go. Compare this to slogging through the jungle of the D&D world for Baldur’s Gate or the timeline chaos presented by The Witcher series and how far that series lies from the Witcher portrayed in the CD Projekt Red game.
And all this probably would be enough for a high rating of the game from a casual or a n00b perspective. But there’s the magical factor: we’re willing to forgive a game a lot and learn a lot if it draws us into its world. If we dream of living in the land of dungeons and dragons, we won’t be afraid to learn the genealogical trees of local fictional leaders, delve into a complex magical system, or learn a dwarven runic alphabet by heart. If we always dreamed of living on edge and of being a gangsta who owns this city, we would conquer the infamous remote control helicopter mission in GTA… Hogwarts Legacy aims to fulfill a generation’s dream – of receiving a letter to Hogwarts (WHERE THE HECK IS MY OWL!?). And the game, while still far from perfection, is also very close to fulfilling this dream. For such a promise, it’s worth defeating even several very troublesome bosses, getting completely lost in the castle multiple times, getting bored in the surrounding villages, and enduring a rather generic main storyline. Such a promise will make your Non-Gaming-Significant-Other suddenly decide that a powerful graphics card is the best investment for the future, and that a new console actually does deserve a new TV. Listen here… Conservatives risked their souls being taken by the devil for practicing magic for Harry Potter, and liberals risked their souls being taken by a terf for supporting her wealth of the scale of the British monarch’s treasury, and if they did, then you are capable of devoting a few hours to mastering the controls and reminding yourself who that Ranrok guy was. (Ok, I’ve recommended this game, can I finally get my letter now? :< )
(no, but seriously – there are games that can be described as gateways to a certain genre and Hogwarts Legacy is such for big, 3D open world action games. If you are really concerned about the moral aspect of buying this game – for any reason – whether from a conservative standpoint or from a progressive one, just buy a physical copy from Ebay and sell it later. It’s – still – fully legal, gives no money to the person or company you’re cancelling or boycotting, that stands behind a franchise, is really the cheapest option to get the biggest and newest games and still gives you a lot of fun)
Final Izzy Mode Score for Hogwarts Legacy
Casual score: how suitable the game is for casual players – casual players who like a challenge from time to time, but generally just wanna’ have fu-u-n🎵 a few hours a week without stress and just for the fun of playing. The higher the score the more casual-friendly the game.
n00b-o-meter: how suitable the game is for n00b players – new players whose gaming career started and ended with Candy Crush, Tetris or browser games or even never played a game and would like to start. The higher the score the more n00b-friendly the game.
General Izzyness Level: between Izzy Mode, Normal, Hard and Nightmare – how would the title score in the difficulty scale known from games?
