A Magical First Look at Hogwarts Legacy

wands at the ready witches and wizards because I have played Hogwarts Legacy and I'm here to tell you all about it Hogwarts character creation flying combat story you'll see brand new footage of it all in today's video people of the internet retro Records who are here I'm just a dad who loves games and the stories they tell and today we have a Hands-On preview of Hogwarts Legacy the upcoming action RPG from Avalanche software so after all this time is this the game that Wizarding World fans have dreamed of for years is it finally about to arrive well thanks to the folks over at Warner Brothers I recently had the opportunity to meet with some of the devs at Avalanche to talk Hogwarts Legacy and also play the game myself for a two hour gameplay session so I was able to explore the Hogwarts grounds as well as parts of the castle itself and then I got to experience one of the game's main missions that's right A Story Mission which you'll see here shortly here on the screen now you can see my player character complete with a Gryffindor scarf and robes flying around Hogwarts and taking in the absolute beauty of the castle starting with stained glass windows here which feature the school's four houses now I did did get to make my own character before this you can see a little bit of that here didn't spend a lot of time on this because I was so anxious to actually get into the gameplay I was actually pretty surprised how in this very short amount of time I got this character to look pretty close to me minus the beard of course so sorry to all you guys out there who had beards of 15 years of age but really I created my character pretty quickly and just wanted to jump right in and the first thing we got a chance to do is to explore the Hogwarts grounds on broomstick that's right right away grab the broom and quickly start flying around Hogwarts by the way guys you might be wondering what is all this footage running on it was running on a PlayStation 5 using the game's performance mode which targets 60fps and to me it felt incredibly smooth throughout my entire PlayStation I think you'll see that reflected in all of my footage that I'm sharing with you today now was everything perfect technically no we're going to talk about some of that as well but by and large if it's not evident already in my voice I'm super excited for this game and I'm super excited to tell you about some of the things we saw here alright so back to this absolutely gorgeous window you may recall seeing this image back when the game's release date was confirmed they used it in a screenshot here but now actually getting to see these windows while I was playing the game and flying around on them I mean it really was a breathtaking moment to take in Hogwarts like this now you see the water over there in the distance well guess what yep you can swim I can confirm swimming is in Hogwarts Legacy it does not appear you'll be able to dive under or explore anything beneath the surface but seeing that we can swim along the surface I know a lot of fans are going to be very happy about that now aside from the swing stuff I just want to talk about all the little details there are so many details subtle touches that long time fans of The Wizarding World are just gonna absolutely love the castle from what I was able to see is so intricately designed and speaking of these little details I mean just take for example this offhand conversation here that's happening between a group of students and have you seen how these professors look at your clothes black looks at me like I'm a pauper I swear the man thinks I have fleas I wish they'd better run and teach the entire curriculum charms is the only class I can stay away from or this comment from one of the flu flame locations which serve as fast travel points in the game you can't imagine it even appears other students are going to reference things about our character that have already happened in games such as this comment from a Slytherin student watch out it's the troll Slayer of hawksmeade and even though we can't play Quidditch ourselves you can actually fly around the castle even inside the Quidditch pitch I just had to go and test this out yes you can fly around it and then as I go and fly down low here you'll see that you can actually even sometimes find teams practicing quidditch here another detail that I absolutely loved the musical cue that plays whenever you collect one of the game's Field Guide pages come on or this one when I completed a brief side quest I [Music] now we already had heard the Overture to the unwritten it seemed like they had absolutely nailed the music but it is so nice to see that not only did they get the music right but also all of these little extra pieces these little sound effects that are going to happen here and there throughout the game as you unlock different things I mean think about the iconic Zelda sound whenever you open up a chest or same thing with Metroid there's that iconic save station sound right I truly feel like they have found the perfect little music chime for each one of these it fits so well within the Wizarding World they are perfectly striking that balance between something that feels very very familiar but also new at the same time now speaking of that side quest where we heard that little chime that one actually begins when you speak to a Hufflepuff student named Lenora Everly just outside the library here she's stumped by an empty painting and has discovered that casting lumos will have an effect of some kind but she isn't sure what to do next so if you go over Cass lumos in front of the empty painting a location appears in the painting once I managed to find the location I noticed a large moth on the wall here I'm gonna try Akio first nothing happened so then I decide let's try lumos which immediately triggers a reaction from The Moth it begins to circle the wand then I returned it to the painting and was rewarded with a new Field Guide page so this is just a small example I think of some of the puzzles that you can expect to encounter in Hogwarts Legacy definitely wouldn't be surprised if this is one of the easier ones and also I should point out that I had a Dev from Avalanche kind of sitting right behind me sort of pointing out here's how this works here's how that works so I don't know that I would have solved it as quickly if he hadn't been there now when it comes to Quest you also have the option to track quests and when you do this Golden Trail will appear in front of you and lead you to the quest location here I'm on my way to meet up with Lucan bradleby in the crossed wands dueling club now as I was on my way there I got to witness something that the devs at Avalanche refer to internally as a wow moment it's basically when a scripted event is triggered based on your location in the castle or who knows maybe even outside the castle as well but with this particular one here I got to hear some rather humorous dialogue from everyone's favorite Poltergeist peeves of course you know he's in the game and if you're a long time fan of the series and know your Wizarding World lore then I think you'll appreciate this particular line right here he tried to stop me did rancorous cop sought to trip me can find me inside of a jar so as I stood there listening I happened to notice another Field Guide page and then after casting revelio I was able to retrieve it so that's already two different ways here that we've seen you can obtain these Field Guide Pages the Little Pages flying around as well yep you can also use accio on those and I gotta say this was super fun I kept getting distracted they were trying to kind of guide me to one place to the next I was like no I want to go after this field guide page right here now a bit further down that Hall from where I'm at Peas I came across this unlit Brazier and after an accidental acciocast right there I was able to light it with incendio which again gave me another Field Guide page I'm A Trophy Hunter you guys I'm gonna be honest I'm already like just so ready to dive in and look for all these Field Guide pages I hope there's a ton of them in this game so even in just my very short time I think it was pretty interesting to see kind of the wide range of things you can do to actually find these Field Guide Pages throughout Hogwarts alright So eventually I did make my way over to the Cross ones dueling club and I got to have my first experience with the game's combat now everything we've seen so far of the combat is someone at Avalanche playing and Community manager Chandler would stressed to us that hey look guys the person playing this is actually really good at the game they played it a lot because a lot of people thought oh man this looks way too easy well I was playing on the normal difficulty and I never died in my two hours with the game I did come close a few times but I can confirm to you guys that while the system is easy to understand and get into it is going to be very difficult to master and I mean that in a good way if you like challenge in games especially again I was at the normal difficulty I found it very very challenging and one that you're really going to be rewarded for the more you learn the system now I mentioned being very close to dying well thankfully in my playthroughs my inventory included access to a handful of Wicked World healing potions and yes I did have to use quite a few of them as for spells I had access to lumos which wasn't much use here as well as levioso Akio and incendio now the red spell that you see being cast frequently is simply known as a basic shot and while it only does minimal damage it's useful for juggling enemies to set up Combos and to give your other spells time to refresh from their cooldowns notice the color-coded shields on these opposing students which can only be broken by the way if you cast a spell that belongs to the corresponding color category so notice here in the bottom right how each Bell has a color coding with it so in this case the only yellow one I have here is levioso so that is what I have to cast to break this yellow shield now you also have your own Shield charm in the form of protego and at first I was almost completely ignoring it it is mapped to triangle on the PlayStation it's actually very easy to press it's very easy to do and I should have been casting at any time that I saw one of these yellow indicators appearing about my character the red though that means the spell is unblockable so you're going to need to use Circle to kind of Dodge out of the way another aside here I've been playing way too much God of War recently so anytime you see me jump in the middle of the fight I was most likely trying to use the Dodge roll instead which I know that's going to come with practice from there I had to put much of what I'd learned about combat to the test and learn about the game stealth mechanics because our next sequence features a main story Mission with poppy Sweden joining up with our player character now in the opening dialogue of this Mission she asked our character if we know anything about horntail Hall which she overheard a group of poachers discussing now we go through this little brief investigation with poppy casting revello and so sort of finding Clues and eventually we find our way to a group of poachers standing guard around a small tent so Poppy says hey you can use stealth or you can use a less discreet approach I decided to try the stealth approach using the disillusionment charm which we now had access to at this point in the demo so by approaching the enemies quietly from behind you'll see a prompt giving you the option to press square for petrificus totalus and unfortunately for this poacher he'd probably have preferred I used AK on him instead a bit further in I wanted to test out whether or not the enemies would react to seeing someone hit with petrificus totalus if it happened in their line of sight sure enough the poacher on the bridge over there he hears something is up quickly comes over to investigate and yet because I'm still under this disillusionment charm I quickly slip away and I don't think they were able to realize my exact location once the final game is out it'll be interesting to play with us a little bit more and see exactly how that detection Works you're going to see another example here in a second when they do detect me this guy though I don't give him long enough to investigate at this point I built up enough ancient magic to actually unleash one of the game's finishing attacks so L1 and R1 right there I call down lightning from above and just absolutely obliterate this dude right here so after a few more revelio spells and looting we make our way into the tint which holds a rather shocking surprise dragons [Applause] I mean look at that it's like the Weasley family tent right and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire only this time we realize there is a whole dragon fighting ring inside this tent it's called horntail Hall we eventually make our way to the bottom of this area where poppy and our main character find a group of poachers with a captive hubridian black dragon that's right if you've been following the game for a while you will recognize this Dragon so here's where I tried to start the fight with a stealth approach again but with the numerous enemies both on the ground near the dragon and higher up above my cover was quickly blown I think it was this guy right here maybe I stepped a little bit too close and he overheard me also it's important to remember disillusionment is not a complete invisibility spell you know it's not like the invisibility cloak from the series and of course even with the cloak Harry could always be heard but they didn't give me the option to restart so I had to just go crazy start fighting these guys and I had to put all my combat skills to the test so at this point we also had access to eight spells instead of just the slotted Ford you see here so you can quickly get to those by holding R2 and then pressing right on the d-pad again it's all based on where you have them mapped so not only did I have access to levioso De pulso accio and confringo but also Expelliarmus and even the unforgivable curse crucio the other two spells were perro and the disillusionment charm neither were much help here so the fight ensues unfortunately for us we have poppy on our side she's along to help even deploys a few plants on the battlefield here and things are pretty smooth sailing for me for a while until this moment right here this particular animagus transforms into a wolf and even more poachers arrive on the battlefield alright I don't plan on using dark magic in the final game so please don't judge me but finally I had enough of this wolf and well I had to do this [Music] [Applause] and it was here at this moment I really started to feel more comfortable with the combat still nowhere close to mastering I want to highlight this particular moment right here because this is one of my better moments with combat you could see me Dodge the unblockable attack again that red indicator then I nailed this enemy with Akio follow it up with a quick confringo shift my focus to the loyalist Ranger that's attacking here from above Perry that attack from behind with protego again the yellow indicator and then go right back to attacking the ranger even hitting him with an object by using R1 which is known as an ancient magic throw honestly that ancient magic throw I should have been using it a lot more it's a mechanic that I just did not take advantage of enough so I'm nowhere close to Mastery but I can't stress enough guys just how fun the combat was throughout my whole playthrough I thought it was just the right amount of challenge again I was on the game's normal difficulty but I found myself constantly on my toes particularly in this last battle here I mean things are just going crazy it's weird you know going back and watching the footage it feels a lot slower but In the Heat of the Moment I have to stress to you guys it felt absolutely frantic and I mean that in a good way I was trying to remember my perry my Dodge all the combos I could do the ancient magic attack attack the ancient magic throw plus all the other spells that I had at my disposal which I actually kind of forgot about halfway through the fight and then right here at the end I love this you know that little plant I mentioned that Poppy has on the battlefield yeah they finish off the final enemy for us right there so what do I think about the game are there any negatives that I took away from my experience well if it isn't clear by now I love my time with the game absolutely loved it the two hours went by in the blink of an eye when they took the control away I seriously didn't believe it I was like wait are you are you guys serious that's been two hours no way all I wanted to do was play more in fact if you think that having a taste of Hogwarts Legacy has made the wait for launch easier no it hasn't it's had the opposite effect I want to play the game even more I just keep thinking about I want to play more of this game so all that being said guys it would not be fair to you if I didn't point out the issues that I encountered during my two hours because I did encounter some that I have concerns about now we also reached out and asked kind of what build was this that we were playing on we've been told that it is not the final version and also it doesn't have the day one patch so hopefully these things can be ironed out before launch and then fixed with that day one patch alright so let's start with the one I think is the biggest concern at least for me and that is when I was hit with a loading symbol before certain doors would open is this little white circular symbol here and it happened three different times to me usually the loading was very quick it only appeared briefly but one of those three times you can see that I sort of back up from the door and then approach it again before it finally opens I'm pretty confident in saying that they want this game to be a seamless kind of no load experience I don't think they want you to see any kind of loading screen so I don't think that was intentional and even if it does happen occasionally I mean hopefully it's going to be like the quick one rather than the one where you have to kind of back up and wait all in all though I would still prefer this over just having a complete load screen having to take over the screen I also had another issue when I was flying around the open world I decided to stop at this little spot right here and as I Dismount the broom you'll see these students kind of just appear out of nowhere they're not here when I'm flying in and then once I land there they are and then just kind of a strange one it's this lock picking mini game so whenever you cast alohomora to break a lock which is a spell we had to access to in that final mission basically the way it works is you go up to the lock you cast alohomora and then you're taken into this little screen right here where you are charged with breaking this lock so I kind of understand the inclusion of a mini game like this I mean we've seen it in many games before even though it kind of goes against the lore of Aloha more on how it works it's fine you know but the game itself it just didn't feel quite right you have this series of dials as well as two Sparks that you need to position you can see the instructions here on the top right and then they want you to rotate using the left and right stick now I even had a Dev standing right by me kind of guiding me through it and it still just seemed a little bit unclear to me and even after you managed to get the wheel spinning the window seemed very very narrow so it's like I had to hold my left stick just in precisely the right spot and then also start rotating the right stick as well and really what you're looking for here is for those gears on the bottom right to start spinning but then you just have to make sure that you hold both of the Sparks like exactly where you have them so this one to me I think seems like an easy fix maybe they change the directions up a little bit make it a little bit more clear what you're supposed to do and then then also maybe increase that invisible window again we can't really see the window but just make it so it doesn't have to be so precise and truth be told even with my complaints it still only took me a minute I went back and looked at my actual footage to see how long did it take me here to actually get through this it still only took one minute which is not too bad it was more the confusion than anything that bothered me just wasn't exactly clear what I was supposed to be doing there so all in all I absolutely cannot wait to play more Hogwarts Legacy I was particularly impressed Honestly by the visuals there are a few graphical glitches here and there you might have noticed again this is not the final build it does not have that day one patch but even on performance mode I thought the graphics looked great getting to play what felt like a very stable 60fps personally 100 I am going with the performance mode no questions asked as far as how it feels to move around the world I thought the character was very responsive it generally felt good to move it felt good to cast spells when it comes to the spell casting system particularly in combat I think they've absolutely nailed it it feels fresh different than anything I've played before certainly my miles better miles better than the old Harry Potter games and I also love the unique challenge it provides while also giving players options for different play Styles and really being able to find your favorite spells figure out the combos you like and then tailor it to your own style you know set up those slottable spells in a way that works best for you now one thing I wish I'd had more time to do is just run around the castle and see what all you could interact with I tried it a little bit in the library and I also tried it outside when I was running along the beach I tried to cast accio on one of these leeches right here it was a little bit surprising that accio didn't work to kind of pull that leech to me instead I had to walk over and press the square prompt to pick it up and then some things in the library would interact when I cast a spell like this little picture frame right here and then others were not just for the heck of it I had to cast incendio see if it would burn any of the books I also couldn't get over just how immersive and cinematic this whole experience felt I told some of the folks there I said This truly felt like a new story in The Wizarding World I mean right up there with watching a new film that that's what I felt like when I sat down to play it oh my gosh like we are in The Wizarding World again ready to experience a brand new story and frankly this is only scratching the surface the tip of the iceberg if you will just of our footage alone that we were able to get here while we were at this event I have so much more to discuss from my hands on time with game the full mission alone is packed with a ton of new information so you'll definitely want to check out my full playthrough provided without commentary by clicking the video on the right side of your screen now so much more Hogwarts Legacy content coming your way as always guys thank you all so much for watching I'll talk to you again soon

Channel: RetroRaconteur

Views: 2,573,195

Keywords: RetroRaconteur, hogrwats legacy, hogwars legacy, hogwarts legacy, harry potter legacy, harry potter rpg, harry potter video games, hogwarts legacy rpg, hogwarts legacy mmo, harry potter game, ps5 hogwarts legacy, hogwrats legacy, new harry potter game, harry potter gameplay, hogwarts legacy news, hogwarts legacy open world, harry potter legacy gameplay, howard's legacy, hogwarts legacy spells, hogwarts legacy combat, hogwarts legacy preview, hogwarts legacy first look

Id: -LJu_ahj8JA

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023