I Have So Much To Tell You About Hogwarts Legacy!

Hogwarts Legacy is finally here after years of rumors hype and excitement I spent the past several days exploring the castle flying high above the grounds creeping through the Forbidden Forest and slowly peeling back the layers of a deep storyline which I won't spoil here today for many fans this is a game 20 years in the making from the moment Harry first received his letter inviting him to a world he didn't even know existed we were all able to imagine what it would be like to get our own acceptance letter to Hogwarts and while the early games had a certain charm they were limited by technology of the late 90s and early 2000s plus they often faced Rush development Cycles to coincide with each new film release Hogwarts Legacy though is the culmination of more than five years of work primarily from Avalanche software a studio that wanted to aim Higher by taking on a passion project far beyond the realm and scope of any game they'd worked on before could a developer whose last game was Cars 3 all the way in 2017 actually deliver on the lofty expectations of such a rabid fan base a truly Global fan base that spans across lines of age culture not to mention hardcore video game players plus non-gamers who are interested solely because it takes place in The Wizarding World well I've now put about 20 hours into the PS5 deluxe version thanks to an early copy provided by WB and here's what I'll say now based on the time I've had with the game so far Hogwarts Legacy is the best Wizarding World game ever made and it's really not particularly close it's truly a love letter to fans of the iconic World of Harry Potter everything from the menus to the sound effects and music the shops and signage the classes and teachers they've all been done with such great respect to the original lore but not only is Hogwarts Legacy the best Wizarding World game ever made it's also a pretty darn good RPG in its own right surprise though it's not perfect no game is of course there are issues here that I expect May hold it back among some of the more hardcore Gamers out there and we'll talk about those here today as well but if I can be real with you all for just a moment here flaws and all I am loving this game so far I haven't been bored a single moment playing it when it comes to video games it really all comes back to that simple word fun is it fun I don't know yet if it's Game of the Year material I don't know if it's better than this better than that all I know is that my 20 hours with Hogwarts Legacy has been an absolute blast and I can't wait to play more so we're gonna get into the gameplay mechanics I'm Gonna Leave the story mostly for you to experience on your own I'll also add that most of the footage you see today is from the first few hours of the game only I will say this one bit about the story though it's engaging right from the start and there's enough there that I want to keep learning more to unravel the mystery of this ancient magic and our main character's connection to it it really does feel like you're starting out a brand new adventure in The Wizarding World we all know and love now one of my early fears of this game is that without the iconic professors of the original series and of course the golden Trio and all their friends The Experience would somehow feel hollow and we just exist in the world but wouldn't have anyone to really care about I'm happy to say that is not the case and there are already a few characters I'm growing attached to through my playthrough one piece of advice I'll give those of you who are about to play the game for the first time it's this savor it Savor and take your time with the experience I actually think the game wants you to take take your time you won't have access to broom flight right away you'll come across quite a few locked rooms in the castle and chances are you'll even have a puzzle or two you can't solve because you don't know the spell you need and while I know many want to immediately start exploring the castle even the grounds of hogsmeade right away I will say that if you don't do that the game still does a pretty good job of encouraging this organically as you simply progress through the early story missions in fact some of my early exploring and travels had to actually be repeated because areas that I went to check out on my own and get a glimpse of the game actually ended up taking me there anyway on a mission now as for the gameplay how does it actually play and feel well as I said in my early Hands-On of the game a few weeks ago the character controls well combat is super fun that remains true in this build as well I've stuck with the normal difficulty but I've actually been kind of on the fence about bumping it up to hard you can change the difficulty at any time so for the experienced Gamers out there who'd like a challenge I recommend going ahead and bumping it up to hard trying that out and then you can always bump it back down if you need to now leading up to this the vertical slices of gameplay that we had seen before launched look entertaining I certainly enjoyed the mission that we got to play early but now having the full game in my hands I've been very pleasantly surprised at the sheer variety of missions and activities there are to do in this game we talked in the beginning about just how many types of fans they're having to try and please with this game and again it's hard to delve too much into where you'll be going and what you'll be doing with the fear of me spoiling too much but rest assured the main story missions offer a nice variety to keep things fresh there's also a good balance of puzzles action exploration and then of course there's a room of requirement and nurturing magical beasts which they've already talked about guys I only recently unlocked the rumor requirements still no caring for Magical beasts I know there were some worried they would lean too heavily in One Direction and while it is true you're gonna have to do a little bit of everything to reach the end so far they've done a really nice job at balancing things here for people of different play styles to where I think everyone can enjoy this game oh and there's something that happens in the story I don't know roughly 10 hours or so that really changes things up gameplay-wise in a way that Avalanche has kept almost entirely Under Wraps throughout the whole marketing process trust me guys some of these things we haven't seen anything about there haven't even been rumors or men mention of some of the things you're going to see here as far as the side quests go yes your basic Fetch and collect quests they do make an appearance here but again there really is a lot of variety here in terms of the things you can do so just for a small preview there are going to be 95 Merlin puzzles of which I've solved like 10 of these so far there's 20 ancient magic hot spots 18 Infamous bows I haven't experienced a single one of those yet despite being 20 hours into the game actually I take that back you know what I just did my first ancient magic hot spot so there we go one of them so far of course that's going to vary based on your play style how much exploring you do off the beaten path especially in the beginning I know people are going to be exploring a lot so guys it takes a lot for me to get emotional when it comes to movies books video games it's not me trying to be macho or something I just don't do it off it just doesn't happen it takes a lot like I said and yet there was something about an early moment in this game for me it was actually when I got to the common room for the first time the way the music swells and then suddenly I was in control of my character able to freely pan around the room and walk over to the furniture and take in all the posters and various trinkets of the the other students it was a single room but in that single room I could see years of hard work from artists developers coders writers who so carefully crafted this game now I'm sure I'm going to discover more things in the coming days that I love maybe even more issues or critiques but make no mistake Hogwarts Legacy is a game for the fans and a game made by the fans and so when it comes to that the characters in and around Hogwarts this starts to touch on one of the not so good things I've seen so far in the game and that is the NPCs and I don't mean the NPCs like Hogwarts teachers are the ones who give you missions or even many of the name students you'll meet up with along the way no I'm talking about the NPCs that are just sort of there to exist with the goal of making the world feel more lived in and some of the time to be fair this works really well I particularly enjoyed how some of the students will linger about after classes and you can go and approach and almost always they'll have a couple of lines of dialogue for you to interact with each one of them but as for a lot of the so-called random NPCs I guess for lack of a better way of describing them there's a lot to be desired now I'm not saying I was expecting like full-on conversations with every person you meet but there are a lot of times you'll find NPCs just stationary staring off into the distance and they won't really interact with you or anything you try to do even if they had just like a single line or two of dialogue that happens if you maybe linger for too long I think that would go a long way toward making it feel a little bit less awkward and if you're just kind of running through and only interacting with the things that you clearly see you can interact with it's not a big deal but sometimes you'll pass by a group of students and they're having a nice conversation and then other times you'll pass by and there's just someone doing this now even though this is probably my biggest issue so far it really hasn't detracted from the overall game for me at least not yet it's still definitely there and something I'll notice occasionally as I'm exploring the castle or even in a place like hogsmeade as far as the castle itself guys I mean it's incredible it's incredible I don't know what more I can say we kind of felt this was going to be the case from everything they'd showed so far and they wanted to do the castle right and I think they've done just a phenomenal job with it again I'm still not finished exploring everything I haven't collected everything I haven't found everything now one thing I would encourage you to do early on when it comes to exploring I would turn off the mini map you can and customize it Hogwarts Legacy includes a wealth of options for customizing the HUD such as turning off the damage numbers and of course the minimap now most of the options are available in this menu here but you should also look through the accessibility menu options as well because there may be a setting there you'd like to tweet too so why turn off the minimap personally I just found it way more immersive you don't have all those little icons popping up you can actually turn off a lot of those as well on the main screen but what I found that I like to do is I'll pull up the big map or Quest log and then Mark my next Quest and then by pressing up on the d-pad this is going to give you a little Golden Trail that kind of exists like in the world and you can follow this instead of having to kind of look down at your map go back and forth and follow those weird yellow dots to all the little points of interest one thing I would love to see them add is sort of a dynamic HUD option for many of these elements specifically for your health and spells essentially a dynamic option would let you freely explore the world with no HUD whatsoever as soon as you pull out your wand to start fighting the spells in health would Auto appear and then Auto Hide once again when the battle is finished now as far as performance goes all the footage you've seen so far is running again on a PS5 and performance mode and you're going to have three modes to choose from Fidelity Fidelity with Ray tracing and of course performance mode you can also choose to cap or uncap the frame rate now if you have a high refresh rate display that supports vrr you'll also have the added options of a balanced mode as well as a high refresh rate mode now the build I was playing on did not include the day one patch which I've been told will add the Fidelity Ray tracing mode so that's why you won't see it shown here hopefully we get a full breakdown on this game from a site like digital Foundry because I'm really curious to see how all these modes perform in terms of the actual numbers and not just me looking at it from an actual visual standpoint as I've done here for me personally I found the performance mode with an uncapped frame rate to be my preference my TV sports vrr I've had that turned on but I have to say I've also been tempted a little bit by that balance mode for that slight increase in visual Fidelity my guess is that this is probably like Ratchet and Clank did where there's like this 40 FPS mode but with vrr it looks a lot better than 30. now I did try bumping it up to a high refresh rate a little bit and I just found that the details suffer too much with that one so I went ahead and took it back down performance and then uncap the frame rate and I've been happy with that so far all right the big one I know a lot of people want to know about glitches and bugs now to be truthful I have noticed a number of them during my 20 hours for the game it's an open world game they're bound to be there you're going to find them most of mine have been visual such as robes or like hair clipping through areas that they shouldn't inconsistent or flickering lighting and then probably I guess the most severe bug I've encountered has been this weird sort of camera shake that I think is triggered by something that's happening near a specific Merlin puzzle that I was trying to solve so I've actually returned to this puzzle a few times because I haven't been able to solve it yet I think I need a different spell and I think it's happened to me twice now definitely more than one occasion where the camera just kind of starts shaking fortunately none of it has been game breaking and with the camera Shake I was able to correct that by just kind of leaving the area and then coming back and it was back to normal the visuals in this game are really interesting I have seen some people on the previous footage I've shared that say it looks absolutely stunning some people say that it looks dated and I can honestly see where both sides are coming from there are times especially outside when you're flying around when you're looking at all the C scenery I mean this game looks downright stunning in the common rooms in the castle the furniture all the details here I mean the artists should really be commended for an absolutely outstanding job they've done to bring the Wizarding World to life the castle architecture common room spell effects and many of the outdoor environments just look truly spectacular but then at other times there are things that look dated or you expect to see a certain effect such as water dripping from a wet cloak and you don't again keep in mind I've been playing on the performance mode so there are some sacrifices to the visual Fidelity there and then one of the most consistent criticisms of the game's visuals has been the motion capture for the facial animations unfortunately that is still present but it's really inconsistent there are times when I think it looks solid it's like okay that looks good that's how it's supposed to look I believe the ability you possess obliges you to be well trained and then other times it just looks a little bit off still Samantha Dale I've been eager to meet you you're the student everyone's been whispering about now as a fan who's followed pretty much every news drop about this game I can't help but wonder how much of this is a result of the unique development environment Avalanche had to work in when it was time to do a lot of this motion capture they participated in an Autodesk presentation where they discussed the challenges of remote work and how many of their plans just had to completely change due to not being able to record and capture many of these actors in person they had to come up with all sorts of creative workarounds to get it to work the door loading issue that I mentioned in my preview is still present but I don't think it's fair to call that a bug it's more just the game having to load the next area on the bright side it does not happen often and when it does I found the loading to be pretty Snappy and then one that frankly I'm not sure if it's a bug or not it relates to the game's music there are times when I'm exploring the castle both night and day with music playing music itself fantastic by the way but then there are other times when it's totally silent no music playing whatsoever honestly I'm not sure if this is intended or not sometimes it feels almost a little too quiet when I'm exploring but then another part of me is like well that kind of gives you an opportunity to hear all the sound effects the little sounds like footsteps and the spell effects in the game and then remember that lock picking minigame that I think pretty much everyone was critical of in the first preview now I don't know if they tweak something but for this build that we played or if it's just me playing the game more and getting better now but I have to say it felt much better I'm knocking these out no problem whatsoever 10 15 seconds tops with every single one of them so it could very well be that we judge that one a little bit too harshly in our first impressions or maybe they did tweak something under the hood and make it a little bit more user friendly now so when it comes to those who are interested in buying Hogwarts Legacy I see three different categories first we have those who love games and The Wizarding World then we have those who just primarily Love The Wizarding World and then we have those who mainly Love video games and just may be interested because of something they've seen in a trailer about this game so for that ladder group there it really all comes down to how you feel about the issues I've mentioned now I fully admit guys being such a long time fan of this series it's hard for me to look at the game from that objective point of view I simply cannot separate it from the world that's meant so much to me for so long and for those people like me that are fans of The Wizarding World Hogwarts Legacy is an absolute must play it's a beautiful example of what happens when you take a chance on an experience experienced and passionate development studio with true fans of the source material who maybe just haven't had that chance yet to try something new something bold while they may not be a rock star or from software at least not yet they put their stamp on the industry in a way that fans of The Wizarding World Won't soon forget in fact I would say with Hogwarts Legacy WB and Avalanche have set off a new phase of Wizarding World fandom they have laid the foundation for future Wizarding World video games and one that can be built upon for years to come enjoy your journey in first playthrough of Hogwarts Legacy and as always thank you all so much for watching I'll talk to you again soon

Channel: RetroRaconteur

Views: 517,770

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, harry potter legacy gameplay, howard's legacy, hogwarts legacy spells, hogwarts legacy combat, hogwarts legacy preview, hogwarts legacy first look, hogwarts legacy review

Id: K_kC8TYrTTw

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023