Open-world games are likely to blossom now in response to the overwhelming success of games such as Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring. Open-world games were surely popular beforehand as well, but Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring’s enormous success in particular could inspire other developers to learn from what they have achieved. Of course, a lot of Hogwarts Legacy’s success could have come from the fact that it belongs to an IP fans have adored for ages, but Avalanche also managed to deliver an open-world action-RPG experience in Hogwarts Legacy that refuses to rest on the laurels of its established IP.
Elden Ring feels like a much more emergent open-world experience, however, due to how linear and region-locked FromSoftware’s previous games have been. Indeed, Elden Ring introduced crafting and open-world exploration to its traditional Soulsborne formula, and what it produced was an immersive one-hundred-hour epic in a dark fantasy setting. Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring share some similarities as many games might, but there is a key difference distinguishing one from the other: an emphasis placed on narrative versus an emphasis placed on exploration.
What Makes Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring’s Open Worlds Similar
Both Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring’s open worlds are filled with activities to stumble upon and horrors to find lurking. Hogwarts Legacy’s Acromantula are as fearsome as Elden Ring’s Runebears, for example, and heading in any direction will inevitably result in a new area the player has not come across before.
Hogwarts Legacy is entirely narrative-driven, but its open world stretches far below where players may presume they can traverse. In this regard, both games are intriguing since they mark fairly dramatic design shifts from previous Harry Potter games and previous FromSoftware games, which were both largely linear.
Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring’s open worlds have the same map reveal effect, with both maps being revealed piecemeal to players before its entire scale is fully depicted, showing an enormous environment for players to take in. That is about where Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring’s open world similarities end, though, due to how much of Hogwarts Legacy is locked to narrative progression.
What Makes Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring’s Open Worlds Different
Hogwarts Legacy’s open world is bound to rigid side quests and the discovery of several collection-based activities for field guide progression, while Elden Ring’s open world is almost entirely free to explore with discovery being its primary goal. Unlike FromSoftware’s linear Souls games, Elden Ring still bars players from entering into certain regions until they have felled a particular boss, but players can explore for hours in any direction and continue into new regions without having to encounter any hard-lock boss fights between Limgrave, Liurnia, and Caelid.
Moreover, Elden Ring far surpasses Hogwarts Legacy in environment diversity since the Lands Between stretch between colorful and distinguished biomes, whereas Hogwarts Legacy is naturally confined to its coastal and wooded Highlands. There are NPCs to meet and talk to in Elden Ring, but the quests that some of them present to the player are not bound to a marked waypoint path and linear quest-restriction boundaries.
Elden Ring truly makes its open world freely traversable in this way, where players know they have progressed once another character is talked to or after a difficult and spectacular boss fight has been completed. Hogwarts Legacy has UI plastered onto the screen—players can thankfully turn these prompts and HUDs off if they wish—that point them in the direction of quests, and the use of Revelio is needed almost every five seconds in order for players to find anything in the area because a lot of its gameplay revolves around finding loot or collectibles.
Likewise, Hogwarts Legacy’s broomstick flight is not unlocked until further into its narrative and discourages early-game open world exploration as a result, while Elden Ring’s Torrent mount is retrievable in mere minutes once players step out from the tutorial cave and into Limgrave for the first time.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. PS4 and Xbox One ports are scheduled to release on May 5, and the Nintendo Switch version arrives July 25, 2023.
