A Skeptic Tries Hogwarts Legacy

it is two in the morning Hogwarts Legacy launched in Early Access about four hours ago for me and I have been playing it non-stop since that moment in a private members only stream on our live Channel long story short if you want to check it out just search Luke Stevens live in the search bar blah blah blah you've heard me say it before the reason I'm staying up so late to do this instead of just waiting till tomorrow like a normal adult especially somebody who has like a kid and a wife at home uh it's because I simply want to play it now and I'm impatient but more specifically I want to get my thoughts on this game out as early as possible because I know a lot of you guys were hoping for a review from me and as you know I was in active conversations with Warner Brothers and they just didn't send a code I was under the impression they would and then they didn't I I can't explain it other reviewers on YouTube didn't get it it is what it is no big deal we're here though now with the game running on the PlayStation 5 and giving it a shot to see whether or not it's actually worth your dime dollar and at this point after going through all of the introductory sections of the game after getting acquainted with the combat system after getting acquainted with World exploration the styles of of everything in this game I mean there's just so much to tackle so I'm gonna try to give my overarching thoughts in a semi-coherent way keep this video a little bit shorter we're going to do a comprehensive review on Friday and of course a big critique of this game breaking down every single little element uh within the next two weeks probably so comprehensive thoughts will be there but this is my overarching thoughts after getting my feet wet in the game and before anybody says anything yeah I still hate the Dual sense Edge I had to plug it in because the battery life is so terrible it would have died two times over in the middle of the live stream we did that was four hours long uh because it's a battery hog and they Shrunk the battery so you know what it is what it is I'm trying to like it but I just don't now let me preface all of this by simply saying that I am a proud skeptic I do not believe things until there is adequate evidence to believe that thing and in the case of video games I don't believe that a game is worth your money until I've seen evidence to prove that point and when there's red flags when there's concerning things going on with the game it can still end up really good but that should start to get you a little bit more critical a little bit more skeptical and you should withhold your money until your opinion has been concretely confirmed to be in one camp or the other based on the evidence in the case of Hogwarts Legacy there were some warning signs going into this it's a studio that hadn't developed something of this scale it's of a franchise that of course has extremely high expectations surrounding it it's technologically a very difficult game to pull off I mean they're creating an entire Giga castle for you to explore and they want you to do that seamlessly without load screens at least in theory they have to come up with some way for combat to be engaging and also not tedious or repetitive over the course of a by some accounts 60 to 70 hour campaign and beyond all of that they just simply have to live up to the hype there's a lot of people that have always wanted a Hogwarts game that is high quality that is polished that's refined that's fun and that also offers a pretty expansive experience for them to enjoy and this game seems to be presenting that very experience to them and so the expectations on hype is very high and even amazing games struggled to live up to the hype even some of the best games ever made disappointed some people because the hype got out of control and so the question really is at the end of the day whether or not Hogwarts Legacy connect actually live up to that hype for the average player and I went into this game highly critical highly skeptical they've got to prove it to me they've got to convince me that this actually is what they're claiming it is and I'll be real with you right here right now I I'm gonna call it like it is I'm not gonna say anything I don't believe because what use is my word at that point uh I am not joking when I say that this is far far better than I could possibly imagine like there's problems I've noticed of course we're very very early in so it's likely that they fix most of the stuff that I'm already talking about not just like by the time the game launches with patches and stuff but also just in terms of gameplay systems and structures we're just getting started at this point I am so blown away at what this team has been able to pull off the world exploration is far better than it has any right to be with little elements such as these Field Guide pages that encourage you to look behind every nook and cranny that encourage you to run around looking for little tidbits very similar to the korok seeds in breath of the wild it's something that they definitely got inspiration from and they implemented it well there's things constantly to interact with to keep engagement high as you explore just like that I was running along I see that bag I grab it and pick it up and I move over here and then there's a narrative moments and little tidbits that catch your attention it's not the sort of Ubisoft open world syndrome where they just sprinkle all this random stuff into the game for you to grab as like Collectibles and collect-a-thons there's actual moments like this where you're pausing to be like what is he talking about what is this guy doing oh this is interesting and it's just something in the world that you can interact with and listen to or you can just keep running who cares you don't have to listen to it if you want to awesome but you can just move on if you don't want to listen to it then you can come over here you see this little dot I can hit Square and I can interact with that object and just there there's a moment of interaction they didn't have to put that there but those little touches start to really increase the amount of of dynamism in this world and keeps things pretty active and you're constantly looking for new things like that to engage with little tidbits like that really add up quickly but let's also talk about some little hiccups I will not ignore them um pop in still a major issue my understanding is that the day one patch has not gone out yet I'm playing this like I said within the first few hours of Early Access and I am seeing a good number of of pop-ins of far-off objects of NPCs of characters there's weird things you round corners and NPCs will pop in or entire like meshes will pop in for various objects so it's a common thing and it doesn't seem to be something that they fixed since the Early Access previews but we do know a big day one patch is coming and maybe that will fix it my understanding is that's probably coming on the 10th Now versus today which I guess since it's after midnight it's uh the seventh but all told you know it's not so aggressive that it's gonna ruin the game but it is distracting and if you are the type of person like me that notices graphical hitches or graphical bugs and things like that it might start to annoy you but again to be perfectly clear that might actually be fixed by the time the full game comes out on the 10th for everybody so this might not even be an issue we just don't know because we don't have the day one patch as of this moment but I think perhaps the most exceptional thing about Hogwarts Legacy so far that I've experienced is that this game is very easy to play and I'm not saying that the difficulty is easy I'm not saying that the combat's easy or lacking in in in challenge what I mean is that it's easy to just play to just turn off your brain and get lost in this world to just explore and not worry about consequences to just wander around and see what you find I will say in the first like four hours of the game it's pretty narrative heavy you're gonna be moving from quest to Quest to Quest to Quest and they're gonna keep you on pretty tight tracks to make sure that you're learning the Spells you need to learn as you are going and then the game will open up like this and like jeez this actually looks very very good this is on performance mode by the way this is not on like a high fidelity mode this is on performance mode and it looks like this that I mean that's that's pretty impressive but anyway I'm moving on but my point is that this is a game that you are going to sit down to play and you're gonna just start running straight to go to your quest objective and then you're gonna see a cat and you're gonna stop and you're gonna pet him and you're gonna cuddle it it's gonna be cute and then you're gonna get up and be like what was I doing oh yeah running over there then you're gonna run over there you're gonna get distracted again and it's gonna happen Time and Time and Time and Time Again one of my biggest pet peeves though is present in this game I bashed forespoken for having this problem and so I have to bash this game for having it as well constant Fade to blacks it's it's like insane you'll start to notice it the moment you you boot the game up and you start playing it it's all over the place whenever there's like a cut scene it fades black and even within cut scenes they fade the black between certain camera angles or when a new character comes in they fade to black and then instantly fade back in it's really really weird like right here I talked to this guy Fade to Black and like I guess it's going into a cinematic so it's not that big of a deal but like when I was petting the cat it also faded to Black here Jacob do an instant replay of that [Music] there was a fade black when I went to pet the cat but when I'm not petting the cat and I disengage from that I guess cinematic moment if you want to call it that I I just like it didn't fade out I I really don't understand it and it's a personal pet peeve it might not bug you it probably doesn't because I'm weird for not liking it to me it's just like when a developer doesn't know what to do or when an author or playwright or or um you know play director or TV show director or film director when they don't know how to transition between two thoughts and two ideas and scenes they just fade the black between them it's the most lazy way of transitioning between two things and I hate it and it's all over the place in this game so it's bugging me a little bit but the fact that I still have overwhelmingly positive things to say about it at this point I think is a testament to just how great it is that I can Overlook like these really really nitpicky stupid things but you see the real positive to having a skeptical Outlook towards games like this and the reason that I've been encouraging people to be a little bit more skeptical and think a little bit more critically about this stuff is because if this game didn't live up to the hype you wouldn't end up being horribly disappointed and devastated you would be like uh well you know there were some warning signs but you know it's a bummer we'll just move on oh well but because now we're we're being skeptical and the game looks to have lived up to the the hype in a lot of ways now we're all the more excited now we're all the more hyped because it's like holy crap I was like pretty skeptical and critical of all of this stuff they showed off and they still blew me away I'm all the more impressed by what they've done here after being skeptical so like in no way means that you don't get to enjoy the game um it just means that you in many cases enjoy it more like it's it's weird I'm sorry I'm fighting dark mongrels that aren't putting up that much of a fight scoopify take him out and then dark magic whatever crap turn them into a whatever goat Ram whatever that is that's pretty badass yeah run away and then he Fades out that's whatever and listen right now I'm just wandering around in the outskirts of hogsmeade if I go back to Hogwarts Itself by going up to this map option and then I can go like here I could select one of these areas or if I want to go maybe right outside the the gate and I want to go here I'll just quick travel there because I want to check it out I'm going to load in real quick PS5 load times built different there we go and we are in the castle itself you see if we go out this door not that door this door you can see the courtyard for Hogwarts and then if I go in I can go up the stairs and I can just start exploring the Castle to my heart's content and have a wonderful time while doing it and when they say that they've recreated this Castle completely they are not joking the entire thing has been redone from scratch and it's it's pretty impressive what they've managed to do here I mean it really is a one-to-one recreation of this this whole castle it's ridiculous uh it's beautiful it's beautiful and like I don't even know where I am right now but I'm having a good time I'm just exploring [Music] and I'm having a wonderful go of it it's again extremely easy to get lost one frustration I do have again Beyond like the fade to blacks and all the other random stuff is uh there is a a really tight fov that you cannot change on Console I think somebody in our our stream today and chat said that you could customize the fov on PC I don't know if that's the case myself because I haven't actually gotten the the PC version of the game up yet it doesn't release for another like seven hours from now so I don't know what the PC version is like but hopefully you can increase the fov because this fov is so tight that when you're rounding some of these Corners it's really tough to even see what's going on it's just not very practical so hopefully they can change that but other than that exploration within the castle is awesome and you noticed I've turned off the minimap entirely you can actually do that in the menus so if you want to just have a more organic explorative experience you can do that and I've had a great time while doing it basically you can turn off the mini map and then you can still select waypoints like this but with a simple press up on the d-pad it creates this little Trail leading you to where you need to go so you don't have to be staring at a mini-map while you explore your eyes can instead be on all of the other stuff in the castle that they've spent so much time and effort putting together you don't need to think about staring at the minimap at all you can just look at all of the wonderful sites that they've put together here all the the crazy people that are running around doing stuff and the Great Hall uh it's it's just everything you were hoping for and like I said there's a lot of little secrets to be found and reasons to keep exploring and uh if you know where to look and you know what you're you're looking for you can find a lot of it and this is going to be a game that I think a lot of people are going to have fun running around and and uh just ticking away at uh for the completionists and those looking for the platinums there's lots to discover lots to look at and yeah I mean the game is just freaking massive it's ridiculous and you know what I really just have to hand it to Avalanche and to Porky games this was an extremely difficult game to pull off and you guys seem to have done it now does this mean the narrative is going to be amazing does this mean that like there aren't going to be problems doesn't mean it's not going to get like repetitive over time not necessarily I'm sure there's going to be more issues as I continue playing but as of right now having just started it my first impressions are very very positive and that doesn't always happen in fact a lot of the time it doesn't happen and I end up getting more into a game after I've put 10 20 hours into it a lot of games within the first 45 minutes you kind of know if it sucks and you don't need to see much more after that what was it was that the owl I think that was the owl that was like freaking out yeah what was I saying anyway what I'm saying is that I'm really enjoying this game so far and my first impressions are so positive that I would recommend that you go and give it a shot if you're somebody who's been interested in this game and if you don't want things spoiled for you because almost without a doubt there will be spoilers leaking all over the place for the story for the characters and for gameplay beats the very moment that this game comes out because everybody is already kind of acting in bad faith with it for various reasons so if this is something you've been interested in I would not leave uh any any possibility of somebody coming along and ruining the game for you so uh that's that's kind of my overarching thoughts I can't wait to keep playing this I'm going to be finishing this over the course of the next two days two three days and I cannot wait it's going to be a long week but I'm very much excited for it and I will be having my wife Nikki actually help me as I play this because she's going to be playing with a different house affiliation and we're going to test to see if two characters actually have different experiences and different quests available to them and stuff like that so we're going to do a little testing and stuff it's going to be fun but until then thank you for watching thank you for subscribing thank you for checking out my live Channel as well Luke Stevens live in the search bar I'm possibly live at the very moment that this video is being watched by you so if you're interested in checking it out go check out my live Channel live stream Clips highlights pretty much any video that doesn't fit on this main Channel I just put up there and so it's a great place for more content if you're interested but until the next time I see you much love I'm so tired I was gonna say something else and I already forgot so much love I'll see you in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 571,902

Keywords: luke stephens, Luke Stephens Hogwarts legacy, Hogwarts legacy gameplay, Hogwarts legacy pc, I tried Hogwarts legacy

Id: 26CL413zVFg

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023