I.....totally didn't make that connection. That makes more sense in that context

 

So I just completed the game.

Let's start with everything excellent.

The performance has been perfect all throughout. no frame drops, no lag and no crash to desktop. All super duper.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I really enjoy the combat. Its clear it's optimized for playstation - so if thats your jam, you will not be disappointed.

I play on pc, and I was not bothered by the controls - I would however recommend a mouse with at least two buttons on it for shortcut purposes.

The auto target is swift, you can lock if you wish, all of your spells are available and can be quickly switched between.

You don't start out as a god. So you are really incentivized to dodge, this will be useful until you become the god you wish to be.

After about 45 hours I completed the main quest and 2/3 of the achievement.

Would I recommend the game?

I would.

It's a solid game.

6/10

It's made into an 8/10 because I love the setting.

However, I really dislike how identity politics has to encompass the whole game.

It's clear that the developers really wanted to distance themselves from Rowling (who the fuck gives a fuck about their transgender character?)

Diversity is the name of the game, and I would wager that there are more people with accents from beyond the British isles that from people that are native.

From a personal view, I find this distracting. The game is trying so hard to show me how diverse it is - that it is taking me out of my immersion.

The ending is utterly hopeless. Why would you tease a goblin rebellion - only to deliver the haft-assed bullshit you did.

If you wish to explore hogwarts for yourself, then you will have plenty to do. Just know that the developers, for some unknown reason, thought they had something to prove.

 

Oh no, not diversity.

 

And another thing.

I have always found the double standard here amusing.

When giving criticism to fanfic it's all about worldbuilding, setting characters, "feel" etc.

But nobody that played this game found it at all forced that there were as many people from Uganda as Ireland?

representing is fundamentally a good thing - but it should never become an excuse for lazy writing/world-building.

 

Hogwarts has always been noticeably diverse. There’s nothing new about the unusual amount of foreigners to be seen.

 

Hogwarts has indeed always been a home to people of all colours and creeds.

But they were always majority British. And I honestly don't understand why I even have to argue this.

Do you think the magical school of Uagadou. is a perfect representation of the whole earth?

Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that the hogwarts in this game feels constructed? Doubtlessly to distance themselves from rowling.

 

From what I know of Rowling, I doubt she objects to the presence of Ugandans in the game.

 

So, I haven't played the game. I also value diversity and pluralism.

That being said, it sounds to me that the argument here is that it's diverse to the point where it's not realistic. How diverse is canon Hogwarts? From memory it'd be like 10% at best right?

Would it be fair to say that the game is noticeably more diverse than 10%?

 

Most definitely.

And there is nothing wrong with that - it's just not very consistent with the world that has been established.

JK insisted on a majority British cast. The world of hogwarts has been framed as a British school for witches and wizards.

But suddenly half of the professors are Korean/ Japanese/ Ugandan/ Indian.

And it's not that they have the look or feel or these nations. They don't seem like brits that have a different heritage. They appear as citizens of there varies nations. and thats pretty jarring.

 

I'm really scratching my head about what you are talking about here. Like 95% of the speaking characters in the game have English, Scottish, and Irish accents.

There is Natsai and her mom, the Indian ravenclaw kid, Professor Shah, the Quidditch teacher, and a couple shopkeepers and rando npcs. Everybody else is very UK coded.

 

Yeah, this seems very reasonable to me. It makes more sense that professors may not be British as well.

I was getting the impression that half the kids in the school weren't British.

 

I could see Professors leaning more international. Especially when British Empire was still a thing.

 

people can ride brooms and teleport across great distances, so its not wild to think Hogwarts could find the best possible teachers from around the world.

Maybe the only reason the staff isnt more diverse in Harrys time is because the international community didnt want to fuck with England after the First Wizarding War.

Or maybe Dumbledore has nothing against muggleborns but has some STRONG nationalist opinions. Dude was living at the height of the British Empire afterall. Bet Rowling tweets that Dumbledore wouldve supported Brexit.

 

It blows my mind that any of this matters to anyone. It's a game. What does it matter that the cast is marginally more diverse than the books? Pretty sure HP wizards don't have a spell wheel or an inventory either but I don't see people whinging about that.

 

It’s just a different medium of fanfiction. Do you get bothered by these kind of differences in your fanfiction?

I also don’t understand why this is an issue, there’s way more egregious inconsistencies between the books and game than the diversity and none of that has impacted my enjoyment much.

The writing & story structure… Is a bit bad imo, but that’s hardly unique in fanfiction. Still a really fun world to explore.

 

It's not that nobody sees the cast, it's just that it doesn't merit more than an eye roll.

Yes, the cast are more diverse than a snapshot of a Scottish boarding school in that time period would have been. And a bit more than even the already diverse cast of the HP books themselves were. Obviously this has been done to appeal to the sensibilities of a modern audience.

But so what? I don't value this direction much but it's not like it's something which will diminish my enjoyment of the game, or which undermines the basic tenets of the source material.

This is night and day compared to, say, Disney's retcon of Luke Skywalker which did shit all over an established character.

 

I didn't super care about it, but it does feel a bit like the D&I committee came through and plopped in some stuff to check the boxes.

The trans character is the only one I really felt was jarring and ham-handed and aimed directly at refuting JKR. Like...you're telling me there isn't a potion for that...?

 

Since we're on this track, I remember once reading in a Polish-language fic (though I don't remember if was a translation from English, do not ask me to look for it) that played on the "Blaise Zabini was a fanon girl until HBP released" trope. Blaise Zabini was... I don't even know what to call it in English, but basically the character was written to change sex (as well as changing behavior between masculine and feminine) at night. So on Monday Blaise Zabini was a dude and on Tuesday Blaise Zabini was a girl. It wasn't just cross-dressing, the character was said to physically change between male and female, basically if Harry and fem!Harry were the same person. I thought it was a clever meta-play on the character that had gained one kind of identity in fanon before canon actually gave a clear answer.

And because I have now reminded myself of it, I always found the simulacrum subplot in @Silens Cursor's Renegade Cause to be one of the most interesting and wished it had been explored more.

Spoiler

In case you don't remember or haven't read RC, Harry kills a female Death Eater and does a ritual that allows him to possess the body and have complete normal control of it while the physical body of Harry Potter was left on a table. In the fic it was used as the perfect undetectable disguise. To this day I think it's a really awesome idea to put in a story and I might just end up stealing it some day.

 

Quoting myself from a few months earlier in this thread, it looks like my hopes might be proving true after readingthis articlewith quotes from WB's CEO at a recent earnings call. They're looking at further investment into video games as a result of Hogwarts Legacy's success, and specifically mentioned Game of Thrones alongside Superman. I'm not sure I'm a fan of Zaslav's interpretation (or at least my understanding of what he's saying in that brief quote) that the success is due to some sort of metaverse self insert concept appealing to people - rather than there just having been an untapped market for HP games that let you immerse yourself in an accurate representation of the world described in the source material. When it comes to a Superman game I'd much rather be playing as Superman than some random Kryptonian OC self insert.

While I've also been wanting to play a good Superman game since Arkham Origins, I'm not sure people have the same desire to explore Metropolis as they do for Hogwarts. I could definitely see this being an appealing factor for a Game of Thrones game though, although there would be obvious difficulties with depicting something the scale of Westeros. Maybe you just have a few of the more iconic kingdoms from the show like the Crownlands, Riverlands, North and Vale. Pretty awesome that it's even a real, officially acknowledged possibility now as they apparently own the rights. I did just see that development on 'the Hedge Knight' has been paused due to the writer's strike, maybe that gives them time to work on a Ser Duncan the Tall game to release concurrently to the show. You probably want a time with dragons though, so maybe something based more around the Dance/House of the Dragon. Personally I think doing something pre-Aegon's conquest (maybe during the Century of Blood) could be cool to give the devs some more flexibility around fitting in with the rest of the story. I'm sure with this writer's strike happening GRRM could use another medium to distract himself consulting on instead of writing Winds.