The upcoming Hogwarts Legacy game lets Harry Potter fans explore all the nooks and crannies of the Wizarding World's legendary school, and a particularly keen-eyed player may have just cracked the mystery of how many witches and wizards this institution housed in the 19th Century. Hogwarts Legacy puts fans in the role of an exchange student attending Hogwarts in their fifth year and will feature time skips over the course of its narrative, allowing players to explore Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, as well as the Forbidden Forest through a change of seasons – either on foot, astride a flying creature, or on their own customizable broom.
Even though Quidditch may not be included at launch in Hogwarts Legacy, the game still seems to put plenty of emphasis on exploration to make up for it. Players will be able to traverse large distances on their brooms, but they will also be expected to explore the school grounds and the walls within Hogwarts as well. Their base of operations will be in the Room of Requirement, and they will also have a customizable space in the dormitory of their chosen Hogwarts House.
While a player's House in Hogwarts Legacy is picked during character creation, it dictates which common room and dormitories the protagonist will be assigned to for the full duration of the game. A Harry Potter fan named talldude8 made an interesting observation regarding these common rooms and the number of dormitories. Namely, the Hufflepuff common room seems to have exactly fourteen dormitories, and each dormitory is assumed to have four beds. If one extrapolates this data to also cover Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin, then the total amount of students attending Hogwarts could potentially be up to 224.
It would be interesting to see if this logic holds within the game itself, as creating 224 unique NPCs (in addition to school staff) would be a daunting task for the developers of Hogwarts Legacy. That being said, with J. K. Rowling having once claimed that Hogwarts had about a thousand students attending during Harry's time, the number strangely fits the population projects of its time period. Compared to the late 20th Century when the world had six billion people living in it, the late 19th Century only had a billion and a half.
While the school did not change much between Hogwarts Legacy and the Harry Potter movies, the expansion of its common rooms could easily be explained by magic, as the setting is no stranger to secret areas that defy the conventional laws of space. The players will no doubt be able to get their own answer to talldude8's hypothesis, as many in his Reddit thread have eagerly stated that they would count the dormitories themselves when the game officially comes out. The earliest fans can expect Hogwarts Legacy to release through Early Access is on February 7, while Nintendo Switch gamers will sadly have to wait a couple of months after its initial launch.
Hogwarts Legacy launches February 10 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, with PS4 and Xbox One versions coming April 4 and a Nintendo Switch port dropping July 25.
