For a lot of players, lore is one of the key pillars that draws one into the game. A well-developed and compelling world can make everything a player does in a game feel significant. Some games have to work hard to put their settings together, but licensed games are fortunate enough that they have a well-known setting to build off of. Games like Knights of the Old Republic come from well-loved franchises outside of gaming that are likely to capture players with lore old and new in that setting. Another game like that is Hogwarts Legacy, the upcoming action RPG that offers players a chance to return to Hogwarts and Harry Potter’s wizarding world.
However, there’s more than one thing that Hogwarts Legacy has in common with Knights of the Old Republic that puts it in a unique position. The aforementioned Star Wars game takes place long before the series of movies that form the core of the lore and provide the main information about that universe. In the same way, Hogwarts Legacy is set in the late 1800s. That means it’ll take place long before Harry Potter or Voldemort even came on the scene. It’ll be a very different era in the lore, which means the developer gets to look at the lore through a new lens.
Part of the reason that the first Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them movie was such a big deal on release is that it broke away from the heart of the Harry Potter franchise. Harry Potter himself has nothing to do with Newt Scamander’s tale, considering it takes place a good seventy years before the books. Fans learned a lot more about the wizarding world thanks to the initial setting in America, but it was also important that fans could see the wizarding world’s history firsthand. There’s only so much that recollections from characters can communicate—it’s important for fans to actually get to experience a setting’s history.
That’s exactly what Hogwarts Legacy is offering. There’s bits and pieces that fans already know about this period—for instance, it seems likely players will come face to face with the acerbic Phineas Nigellus Black during his tenure as headmaster in the late 1800s. However, there’s certainly to be a lot of totally new characters teaching various subjects and managing the grounds of Hogwarts. Harry Potter media hasn’t really gone back this far before, focusing on the age of Harry himself instead, so there’s a lot of details to fill in.
An RPG like this will hopefully give players a lot of freedom in exploring the world. One issue with Harry Potter games before this is that they are inescapably tied to the titular character’s story. This time, Avalanche Software can give players a lot more agency to explore Hogwarts on their own terms, since there’s really no limits on what a player-made character could get up to. The options available to player characters don’t even have to tie into Harry Potter’s life at all since the game takes place so far away from him. The developers have a ton of freedom.
It’s not impossible that this game results in a little bit of canon bending. Hardcore fans might take issue with that, but it doesn’t seem likely that Avalanche would rewrite any really major lore — only just enough to develop a brand new story and introduce new characters to this world. Some of these characters might tie into more familiar Harry Potter media, but the glory of the timeframe is that that’s just an option, not a requirement. Anything could happen in this game. Even in games with licensed settings, creative license goes a long way for developers; that kind of agency is what makes really memorable games. Thanks to this timeframe, the makers of Hogwarts Legacy have a lot of creative license.
Hogwarts Legacy will release in 2021 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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