Highlights

  • Hogwarts Legacy can improve its companion system for the sequel by considering popular features from other action-RPGs and sims.
  • The game's spread of companions across each house helps to dissociate from Harry Potter's biases and lenses, but it still perpetuates reductive stereotypes.
  • The sequel could restrict companions to the player's chosen house, making subsequent playthroughs more rewarding and allowing players to experience different characters and quests.

Hogwarts Legacy can afford to up its game in a lot of areas where it chose to be ambitious. Its companion system is in dire need of an overhaul for the sequel in particular and could be far more favorable by considering popular features from other action-RPGs and sims. Hogwarts Legacy laid the foundation for a sequel to take this concept and run with it, but Avalanche will have to also decide whether it wants to keep companion options open to multiple characters across every Hogwarts house or keep companionships within the player’s own house for the sake of Harry Potter nostalgia.

Because so few wizarding world stories come from the perspective of somebody other than Harry Potter it can be difficult to cleave away from the biases and lenses that Harry Potter instilled into the overarching lore. Hogwarts Legacy helped to dissociate from that by spreading companions across each house, but it still perpetuated reductive stereotypes. Players didn’t have one or two inseparable companions from their own house and instead had four acquaintances from different houses, and Hogwarts Legacy might discover better mileage and longevity in the former approach.

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Hogwarts Legacy 2 Has an Obvious Open World Limitation to Unshackle

Hogwarts Legacy is a massive action-RPG and while some of its boundaries make sense, a couple of them deserve to have their walls down in a sequel.

Hogwarts Legacy 2’s Companions Have a Difficult Balance to Strike

Hogwarts Legacy’s Companions Gave a Nice Breadth of Hogwarts Houses

Instead of students only befriending other students from their house, Hogwarts Legacy allowed players to have a ‘companion’ relationship with characters from each house. This is unprecedented in the IP since Harry only ever had Ron and Hermione as reliable companions.

It’s not as if Harry didn’t speak to students from other houses, but he never had a sense of companionship the same way with anyone from Slytherin, Hufflepuff, or Ravenclaw until he became intimately involved with Ravenclaw’s Cho Chang. Still, that relationship was largely upheld by infatuation, not friendship, and it’s unclear if Hogwarts Legacy’s sequel will make the leap to romantic companionships at Hogwarts.

Harry’s non-Gryffindor acquaintances grow in number upon the inception of Dumbledore’s Army, but again Ron and Hermione are the constant variable throughout the entire Harry Potter franchise and support the idea that Gryffindor is where he meets most of his friends at school. Hogwarts Legacy diversifying the player’s companions into unique houses didn’t impact the narrative much, though it was neat that players would meet certain companions early if they were in the same house as them.

Hogwarts Legacy 2 Could Restrict Companions to the Player’s Chosen House

Taking away that diversity now would be a detriment if players interacted with fewer students from other houses, but restricting companions to the player’s house would make subsequent playthroughs much more rewarding since it would take a new playthrough and a new house selection for players to ever interact with some characters and experience their quests.

It makes sense that players would interact with students from their house more since they share the same living quarters and bedchambers, congregating often and enjoying leisurely time together in their respective common rooms. Ron and Hermione had the added advantage of meeting Harry before he was ever enrolled in Gryffindor, thus influencing his desire to be sorted into the same house as them, and the same situation could occur with players arriving at Hogwarts depending on what school year Avalanche wants its next protagonist to debut in.

Plus, Avalanche would need to ensure that the quality of companions and quests in each house was excellent. If players were stuck with Ravenclaw’s Amit Thakkar as a companion in Hogwarts Legacy, for example, that would have been horribly underwhelming compared to what players could experience in any other house.