Oh, fuck off with the industry propaganda already. There are tons of people who are themselves PoC or LGBT who don't like forced diversity, either because it's obvious corporate pandering, or because it's simply inaccurate and immersion-damaging. I personally despise it because it's always obvious when there's an irl moral/social/political agenda behind it, and I'm sick to death of being preached at in my entertainment. I personally know plenty of people (including some of those PoC or LGBT folks I mentioned) who are bothered by it to one degree or another, and not one of them is bothered for racist or homophobic reasons.

I'm really interested in knowing the answer to this as well. How open is the world? How much latitude do you have to make each playthrough a unique character?

 

I'd say it's pretty limited. No dialogue option changes much (there was one sidequest where you chose whether or not to collect a reward). You can choose whether or not you want to pursue the Dark Arts. Still, any choice is almost certainly binary and of little consequence. In the open world, you can only attack enemies and there are open world elements you can run into. It's not a very rich open world. I'd say in terms of world richness, it lies somewhere between cyberpunk 2077 and horizon zero dawn.

In the interest of being civil, I'll simply leave off with the statement that I think it's incredibly naive to think any entertainment will ever be divorced of any "agenda" as you call it. I never said I liked it either. I also think you should do some introspection if you're really that bothered by the fact that the bartender that helps your character is implied to be trans or a notable side character is a black student.

 

It doesn't, and you can't. At least in the first 8 hours.

Main plot so far seems to be identical no matter what you make.

 

Playing on ultra settings at 1440p, no RTX settings, on my GTX 1080 and I get anywhere from 40-60fps, though I've noticed it occasionally dropping to 30fps when there's a lot going on in the background in open spaces.

Much better performance than what I expected, as I've read people's 3080s struggling with the game.

Not that I've noticed, you can attack only hostile NPCs and monsters. You can do magic around people and occasionally they will comment about it, but you can't mess around with non-hostile NPCs, whether they're witches and wizards from Hogsmeade or students from Hogwarts, unless there's a quest directly related to them.

I wish we could go for proper diving in the Black Lake though rather than just swim and press a button to fish out an item from below.

It also bothers me there's no sign of being wet once you get out of the lake or any other body of water.

I'm about 11 hours into the game, enjoying it, but also disappointed with certain aspects of it. Still, from a studio who has never done this sort of game before, this is pretty good, I just hope they continue to build on it and expand the game with expansions that provide additional content and more activities rather than just collectibles.

 

Saw a video of the greenhouse. Man that is just gorgeous. Also, why is the Herbology Professor so attractive? That's illegal.

Fuck it, I'm buying it.

 

Professor Garlic’s lines are also quite…err…you can read innuendos into it pretty easily.

 

Started it.

The male character voice is super annoying and I can't put my finger on why. Even with the pitch lowered (which is jarring and mechanical) he sounds like a weasel.

Paired with the knowledge that player choice doesn't matter much, I guess instead of roleplaying as myself I'll make some female ancestors of Hogwarts students.

 

From I've seen on streams (including endings), the player's choices matter about as much as you would expect when it's a heavily advertised point in marketing for a major AAA release, which is to say, hardly at all. It's an open world game with lots of superficial quest design (aka fetch quests and progress gates in the style of "kill X enemies with Y attack to unlock next quest", "must be X level to unlock this quest") and a linear plot constructed from 2000s fanfic tropes. Nothing here will surprise you.

Credit for world design because it looks goddamn pretty even after YT video compression. A Harry Potter fan will geek out over the castle. No lie, I'd love to play it just for that, but it's not a game that causes FOMO imo.

 

Dumbest quest I've seen so far, no contest.

 

Daniel Radcliffe with pencils up his nostrils.

There goes my Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way playthrough.



Edit: Just found the Chamber of Secrets entrance by absolute chance whilst running around checking things out. 2 hours in, not really exploring yet just getting a feel for the size of the castle, taking in the sights, and boom there it is.

They put it in the girl's bathroom in the dungeons next to the Slytherin common room and not the 2nd floor girl's bathroom though. Literally unplayable, 0/10.

 

Since I've just recently started flying around on a broom, I feel like I can't help but complain about the fact that there are no-fly zones in the game, like Hogsmeade, and that you can't land with your broom on certain parts of Hogwarts, which really fucking kills the immersion for me.

 

Played another 10 hours today.

There's been a lot of complains, and I have several of my own (why don't I get to choose an owl or a pet dammit?!) but I have to say, day 2 had a lot fewer performance issues.

More importantly, the game has drastically changed. The inclusion of talents, unlocking a ton of spells and things like broom travel and the Room of Requirement make this almost a different game to my first 10 hours. Gameplay is now actually fairly diverse, very rewarding, and always enjoyable. Hogwarts remains an absolute joy to explore and traverse, flying has me giddy, and exploring new parts of the castle is still novel and hits all the right spots. It truly feels like a lovingly crafted Hogwarts, like I'm in there exploring it. Going through the hallways, exploring the classrooms and staircases and courtyards, seeing a new ghost interaction every hour at random parts, and just everything in the castle has been amazing.

Collectibles have not been annoying the shit out of me. I've generally enjoyed every type of activity.

That's much less true for the rest of the open world. It feels harsh to call it tacked on because it's not, but it's difficult to compare it to the density of Hogwarts. Maybe it'll feel less tedious once I properly get into exploring the rest of the map; tomorrow.

Anyone who likes Harry Potter even in passing should give this game a good chance. It's absolutely worth the price of admission.

P.S: I never expected Herbology to be my favorite class, but here we are. Those who know, know.

 

Bullshit. What was the irl socio-political agenda behind Die Hard? Or Alien? Or OT Star Wars? Or, fuck, Harry Potter for that matter? The closest thing any of them had to a political agenda was that both Star Wars and Harry Potter essentially say "fascism is bad", and both made that statement decades too late to be controversial or jarring to anyone. For that reason it was obvious that those pieces of entertainment had no real purpose other than to entertain.

??? Who are you responding to here? I was responding to your patently false blanket statement that the only people who ever have any sort of problem with forced diversity are "racists/homophobes/etc."

 

I'm pretty sure that the OT had some anti Vietnam War messages in it, and HP had the whole werewolves standing in for people with aids and then the anti muggleborn sentiment being an allegory for racism.

Either way though, WBs hardly has an 'irl socio-political agenda' that they're pushing beyond selling more copies of the game. All they're doing is trying to appeal to as wide of a consumer base as possible.

 

Grounds for a refund. Critical elements of lore must be respected even in adaptations.

 

Wait, maybe this is the answer to why the entrance to the Chamber was in such a weird place. It's moved over time.

 

Always in a girls‘ bathroom, though? I think dear old Salazar has some explaining to do.

 

The two ultimate evil dudes of her world making it a regular habit to go into girl's bathrooms makes a lot of sense when you think about JKR's transphobia tbh.

100 bucks she's also a nervous pooper.

 

Saw a couple comments on Reddit along the same lines of shader compilation problems. The common theme was overclocked CPU or GPU or both, and the individuals in question reported that the game ran properly once they removed their OC. May also be relevant for you.