Hogwarts Legacy — That RPG that's really upsetting people who liked Harry Potter

[agentorange]

Harry Potter is for little girls. This game is some kind of ubisoft-lite for normies to veg out to. JK Rowling is a woman who supported every single aspect of lgbt and feminism until she got some blowback for saying a very benign thing that only now days is taken as "anti-trans."

[Shillitron]

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[Roguey]

Being surprised this sold well is like being surprised a half-way decent LotR game would be a top seller.

i wouldn't be so sure about LotR videogame being top sellers, not after the damage the brand have sustained due to years of EA fuckery and the recent fiasco from Amazon. Even the supposedly good Assassin's Creed: Middle-Earth games from Monolith, while being financially successful, didn't break any records.

Shadow of Mordor did very well, Shadow of War was just a rehash of their previous title and didn't do so well.

As attractive as SoW Shelob is, it aggravates me beyond belief that they would do something like that and I would hope there were a lot of people out there who refused to get it because of that alone.

[The_Mask]

I haven't seen the video, but the fact that even the Bee is having a take on this is... interesting.

[The_Mask]

I don't know if I should post this one here, on the horror of modern civilization thread.

https://www.wired.com/review/hogwarts-legacy-review/

WIRED
It helped me say goodbye to the setting for good.
TIRED
The story is rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. The gameplay feels dated. The graphics feel like they’re a couple generations behind. All the characters are one-dimensional. It doesn’t stay true to the established lore. Every character feels like an off-brand version of the characters we know and love. There’s no sense of place. No magic, no heart.
YIKES, Y’ALL. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow (or the abyss), because this one’s gonna take a lot out of both of us. (Or get heavy.)

Hogwarts Legacy is a third-person action-RPG set in the same universe as the classic Harry Potter series of children's books. In case you need a refresher, those books, the Wizarding World setting, and the Harry Potter film franchise are all the intellectual property and brainchildren of author J. K. Rowling. This is important because she’s always been inseparable from her work and from work that she’s inspired (and licensed), for better and now mostly for worse. Nothing with a Wizarding World stamp on it can be viewed outside the context of it being a product of Dame J. K. Rowling, CH, OBE.

Within the pages of her books, she made the ordinary seem extraordinary. She created a place where weird lonely kids would be told they were special, where kids who had survived abuse were more than just fundamentally broken. Since 2019 though, the once-beloved children’s author has—well, she’s had some opinions. About people like me. And whether or not we should exist. She’s even gone as far as to suggest that we’re inherently dangerous, a threat to real (ouch) women everywhere.

When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. K. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time. We hear relatives, friends, and parents say awful things about us and to us. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

I don’t hate her. It would honestly be easier if I did. Inside me somewhere, there’s a kid who still loves her despite everything. That kid has a lot of experience loving people who hurt her. She never asks why; she just wants to know what she did wrong and how she can fix it. It’s hard to tell her there’s nothing left to fix. And that there are places we can’t return to. Places like Hogwarts.

Unforgivable Curses
I remember when the first book came out. The gangly boy on the cover illustration. The school book fair. At the time, it was just another chapter book on the shelves beside the likes of Bunnicula and Goosebumps. I’ll be honest. It wasn’t a Neverending Story situation for me. I didn’t open the cover and get transported to a world of magic and mystery. I liked it, but that was that. It was the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, that wrapped its world around me and drew me in.

It was the first one that felt dangerous to me. Watching these characters I knew contend with adult-level-peril, I felt seen. In Harry, I saw my own rough childhood reflected. I shared his frustration with the adult world and that tight knot of anger he couldn’t really understand boiling away in his chest. In Ron, I knew what it was to go to school in hand-me-downs, to worry about money in a way that no child ever should, and I also knew what it was like to be made fun of for being a redhead. In Hermione, I saw my relentless and often annoyingly assertive sense of right and wrong, and how it often got her, and me, in trouble. After Prisoner of Azkaban, I was in deep.

I avoided press about Hogwarts Legacy when it was first announced. I didn’t want to see the gameplay, I didn’t want to be awed by trailers. I avoided them like the plague because I was afraid I would be conflicted, that I’d see a game that captured the magic of the books and my heart would leap out of my chest. I was afraid to see the lavish visuals of the films recreated on modern gaming hardware, realized in 4K and full HDR. I was afraid I’d have to tell 12-year-old me that she couldn’t play it, and explain why. So when I got a code for Hogwarts Legacy, I braced myself.

When Home Isn’t Home Anymore
I thought I’d spend a lot of time in this section nitpicking. Going over every grievance I have with how this game deviates from the source material, how dated it looks and feels, and how every character just feels like an animatronic Chuck-E-Cheese robot waiting for you to come by and put a quarter in so it can say its one line of dialog and perform a grim, herky-jerky facsimile of a living being. But there are no nits to pick, it’s just lice all the way down.

The longer I spent in this version of Hogwarts, the more I could feel a tangible absence. There’s definitely something missing. I thought maybe it was the lackluster art direction, the one-dimensional characters that feel like store-brand versions of the ones we know and love, or even the conspicuous lack of the iconic John Williams score. But there’s a bigger absence here.

Hogwarts Legacy
Hogwarts Legacy

RATING: 1/10

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There’s a hole where this game’s heart should be. You can’t see it at first. You have to really feel around its edges, stop looking for what is there and start noticing what isn’t. There’s no sense of place. The world is lifeless. Character models and facial animations are present but somehow absent. The characters are animated, but they certainly don’t feel alive.

There’s a hole where this game’s heart should be.

The story, besides being rooted in anti-Semitism (a global “cabal” is trying to end slavery but that's bad because the slaves like being slaves), doesn’t even feel compelling. It feels muddy, a minefield of unanswered questions and unexplained motivations. And speaking of which, the characters often flat-out state their motivations, but they don’t feel believable or even particularly coherent. It says it’s Hogwarts, but it doesn’t feel like Hogwarts. Even despite the controversy around Rowling herself, the game feels like it was put together to tap the eager nostalgia of fans without any attention to making it actually worth playing.

For that reason alone, I can't in good conscience recommend spending your money on it. Combined with who this game helps and who it harms, well, it's definitely not worth it unless your goal is to cause harm.

This is a familiar problem though. It’s one we see in the latest Wizarding World films as well.

The new movies are bad. Not just bad morally, but bad qualitatively. They’re not fun to watch. There’s spectacle, but it all feels flat and kind of confusing. If you look closely, you can see the steady decline in quality as the new movies go on, with IP owners trying to wring any remaining semblance of life from a franchise all but poisoned by its owner, despite attempts to right the ship. Some reviews chalk it up to Rowling having more direct control, and fewer people to tell her no or give her edits. The George Lucas problem. But Hogwarts Legacy makes me think this isn’t the case.

Standing Together
There’s a direct correlation between how open Rowling becomes about her bigotry, and how flat and heartless Wizarding World media becomes. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s because LGBTQIA+ people and genuine allies are some of the best creative minds in the world, and these films and this game were made largely without them.

The game industry is far queerer than most people realize. All the things you know and love about your favorite games were made by queer people. I don’t just mean directors or executive producers. I mean the concept artists who bring your favorite games to life, the sound designers, the engineers, the technical artists, the composers, the musicians, the writers, the testers, the producers—the hands that make the best games in the world are queer. We’re the life, the heartbeat, and the magic of great games.

In the yawning emptiness at the heart of Hogwarts Legacy I see the quiet solidarity of queer people and our allies in game development. The people who just said no when the job offers came their way. The ones who didn’t answer the emails from Portkey Games, the ones who politely let their coworkers know that working on a Harry Potter game would be harmful to the trans community, the ones who listened and said, “Okay, yeah, thanks for letting me know.” The people who put their morals, and their loved ones, above an easy paycheck.

In the yawning emptiness at the heart of Hogwarts Legacy I see the quiet solidarity of queer people and our allies in game development.

I probably won’t ever know your names. But you know who you are—I see you, and I appreciate you more than words can ever express. Thank you for making it easy for me to close the book on Hogwarts and Harry Potter. The magic is gone and won’t ever return, because without us, the Wizarding World is as heartless as its creator.

[Konjad]

Wow, I understand nothing in this thread.

[Tweed]

Wow, I understand nothing in this thread.

There's an astonishing correlation between Harry Potter fans and leftist manchildren, that's all you need know.

[Ratcatcher]

Wow, I understand nothing in this thread.

tl:dr for this and other threads on the topic.

Politics: Rowling had a boomer facebook argument years ago. Libs cancelled and labelled her a TERF. Fast forward to now. Game tries to culturally ascknoweledge trans but it's too little too late for them. Game is a huge economic success, probably the biggest this year. Trans activists are seething and raiding zoomers streaming this on twitch.

Product: Game is a shallow 3d person adventure/RPG lite with decent enough cosmetic customization, if the idea of playing a young teen dressed like a 3rd grader fancies you. The environments are apparently very well made and detailed. Very close to what you have in the books and movies. Easily the strong point causing the massive surge in sales.
There have been (I think?) other HP games before but this one is considered the most lively and immershun-friendly due to the already mentioned care for worldbuilding and being the first time you're allowed to make your own character to bring into the Pouter universe.

Gameplay: You must attend classes and use lame spells from a shallowly written book for children as weapons. The most powerful power at your disposal is the souls-like dodge button with built in iframes.

[Konjad]

What is TERF?

[Ratcatcher]

Trans Exclusory Radical Feminist.

[MadPreacher]

What is TERF?

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist

Rowling is still a radical feminist at the end of the day. She just hates men claiming to be women which makes her a female supremacist. You'd have better luck in being friends with a rattlesnake than you would with any feminist if you're a man.

[Segata]

I'm watching my nephew play it and there's a black shopkeeper. Brave progressive attempt but not enough these days.

[Roguey]

I'm watching my nephew play it and there's a black shopkeeper. Brave progressive attempt but not enough these days.

All the minorities in the games were part of the British Empire, so one can't say they're not British.


When you conquer a people, those people become you, that's how it goes.

[Lhynn]

Wow, I understand nothing in this thread.

[NEG]

As attractive as SoW Shelob is, it aggravates me beyond belief that they would do something like that and I would hope there were a lot of people out there who refused to get it because of that alone.

Imagine not liking the random bit of incline in SoW. That and the fact that they made Sauron a white elf, which was technically per Tolkien and almost got added to the movie.

Shelob being able to take a human, or whatever, form is actually not much of a departure from canon. She's the last child of Ungoliant, who was a primordial of unknown origin and could probably take any shape she wished. The Silmarillion says she "took the form of a giant spider", not that she was one exclusively, and this shapeshifting power may have been passed down to Shelob. Shelob could have been a Maia, or at least part Maia, who later got locked into the form of a spider the same way Sauron did his own form. I think the game basically assumes this.

The other non-canon stuff (like the negro/adopted gondorite, who served no purpose other than to black the only white human female in the game, or two of the Nazgul being Chinese princesses or whatever) was far more despicable.

[Segata]

All the minorities in the games were part of the British Empire, so one can't say they're not British.


When you conquer a people, those people become you, that's how it goes.

[The_Mask]

Even Dunkey making fun of this crap.

[Scrooge]

I was hoping for this game to deliver but it seems so bland I wanna buy it on 3 different platforms and finish it 5 times to see if it's really shit

[Lhynn]

@rusty_shackleford Look, its a review from the guy that almost gave you an aneurism.

[MadPreacher]

[Shillitron]

These Hogwart Legacy Mods are pretty good.
(But seriously, the mod that replaced the trans barkeepers voice with a female voice was removed off every mod website)

[rusty_shackleford]

[NEG]

(But seriously, the mod that replaced the trans barkeepers voice with a female voice was removed off every mod website)

What a shock. Glad I didn't waste the money to mod it myself.

I see zero reason for me to play this. It's basically easy Dark Souls for even less mature children.

What is there to this? Graphics? Harry Potter larping? Everyone I see playing it just goes through the plot on rails story and does the mindless quests for a few hours. You could replay Witcher 3 for the 5th time with the new graphics and probably have a 10x enjoyable time doing it than playing this slop to own the libs.

[WhiteShark]

For a moment I forgot what thread I was in and was wondering why there was a service to find out who had streamed a Wizardry game.

[Shillitron]

(But seriously, the mod that replaced the trans barkeepers voice with a female voice was removed off every mod website)

What a shock. Glad I didn't waste the money to mod it myself.

I see zero reason for me to play this. It's basically easy Dark Souls for even less mature children.

What is there to this? Graphics? Harry Potter larping? Everyone I see playing it just goes through the plot on rails story and does the mindless quests for a few hours. You could replay Witcher 3 for the 5th time with the new graphics and probably have a 10x enjoyable time doing it than playing this slop to own the libs.

I wonder if a new modding site will erupt from all this. All the current ones have been completely co-opted.
Nexus, ModDB, LL are all guilty.

Want to change a Trans NPC's voice? Banned & Removed.
Want less Trans flags plastered all across New York in your spider game? Banned & Removed.
Discuss these topics? Thread closed, banned.

(The game is highly moddable, Denuvo only cares about binary hooks AFAIK - but most of the game is stored in pak files. Not sure how heavily they leveraged Blueprint vs hardcoded - that will determine what can easily be changed vs what needs an injected dll for API exposure I think)

All of this is moot though I guess since modding this will be like sprinkling flowers over a turd.

[Segata]

I wonder if a new modding site will erupt from all this

Won't happen, and if it does, trannies will cry enough to have it removed from the internet. The only way left is to distribute the mods through discord/IRC and other semi-private avenues.

[GhostCow]

Gamebana doesn't seem as bad as the other sites and there is some other site I don't remember the name of that hosts non-newtonian mods. Like the one that removes fag flags in spider-man

[Shillitron]

Gamebana doesn't seem as bad as the other sites and there is some other site I don't remember the name of that hosts non-newtonian mods. Like the one that removes fag flags in spider-man

Fragmentation of the modding scene kinda sucks.. I hate digging through 8 different sites to find something.
But also, I don't trust any single mod website to not be retarded - so it's really inevitable.

[Konjad]

Want to change a Trans NPC's voice? Banned & Removed.
Want less Trans flags plastered all across New York in your spider game? Banned & Removed.
Discuss these topics? Thread closed, banned.

Paradox also removed from Steam a Stellaris mod that removed non-caucasian humans

[NEG]

I wonder if a new modding site will erupt from all this. All the current ones have been completely co-opted.

Well, ModDB never removed my whites only Stellaris mod, but it was still a bit of a different time then, and Stellaris wasn't as big then as HL is now.

But basically, I think only 4chan, the Fediverse and file hosting sites are your option. Actually, I would be interested in seeing a modding Fediverse.

That said, all of this is probably limited time. I think the next waves of censorship will get progressively more difficult to overcome. That is, unless there's a big pushback in the opposite direction. Which I'm not sure is likely at this point.

Better to get involved in the games' communities and see what solutions users have come up with rather than rely on Steam or large mod sites.