Hogwarts Legacy is an upcoming RPG set in the Wizard World in the late 1800s. Players will take on the role of a student at Hogwarts and according to the reveal trailer will be given the opportunity to do everything from exploring iconic locations from the books and films to taming fantastic beasts.
However, there’s one feature from many BioWare RPGs which Hogwarts Legacy needs to include. Without this feature, Hogwarts Legacy risks losing its replay value, limiting its roleplaying options, and giving players far less of an ability to explore every aspect of the Wizarding World in the upcoming game.
BioWare games often give the player the option to pick from a few origins for their character. One the studio’s games with the biggest singular focus on this is, as its title suggests, Dragon Age: Origins. In Dragon Age: Origins the player got to choose their race and background and had a different starting experience based on what they chose. The dwarf noble background story involved betrayal by a brother, the city elf background involved a wedding gone wrong, and the mage background involved break-outs and blood magic.
Other BioWare games have also included origins in far less central roles. In the Mass Effect series, for example, the player gets the option to choose from three different origins when customizing Commander Shepard: spacer, earthborn, or colonist. They can also choose a psychological profile which also has implications for the character’s backstory: survivor, war hero, or ruthless. While these origins don’t come with a customized prologue like they do in the first Dragon Age game, they do effect different encounters in the game.
If the player chooses the spacer background, the player gets to interact with Hannah Shepard, Commander Shepard’s mother, throughout the trilogy via phone calls. This could be the sort of origins system used in Hogwarts Legacy if the game doesn’t want to be too prescriptive when it comes to events that occur before the protagonist arrives at Hogwarts.
The most obvious origins options would be to do with the character’s wizarding heritage. This would mean selecting whether the player was a pure-blood wizard, a half-blood, or a muggle-born. This could effect certain dialog throughout the game, especially since pure-blood supremacy was more common in the late 1800s in the lore, and could take center stage in the story if the game takes place under Phineas Nigellus Black’s tenure as headmaster. The game could also use the house system to determine a starting experience.
How exactly origins could be implemented would depend on story details which have yet to be released. As it stands, Avalanche Software has not revealed which year of school the game will take place in, or if it will take place over multiple years. It hasn’t been revealed if the entire game will take place at Hogwarts, or if there will be any segments which take place before it where origins choices could shine.
Giving players different origins options, even if it only affects some dialog in the game, can go a long way to letting players create their own story in a game like Hogwarts Legacy. With origin options, the RPG could have greater replay value, with players going back to experience the story from other perspectives, as well as giving players the sort of roleplaying flexibility many will be hoping to receive in the Wizarding World when the game releases.
Hogwarts Legacy is in development for the PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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