A Hogwarts Legacy player was so bored waiting for the cutscenes during the Merlin Trials that they decided to count how much time it would take to watch all of them. The results have impressed the Hogwarts Legacy community and shown perhaps these scenes really do take too long.
In the Harry Potter universe, Merlin is a legendary wizard that lived in the Dark Ages and participated actively in King Arthur’s court, just like in the real-world legend. However, in Hogwarts Legacy, he also went to Hogwarts, became a famous member of Slytherin, and left a few challenges for players to solve. These are the famous Merlin Trials, which see the players traveling all over the map to solve them. They are fairly popular Exploration Challenges, and completing them can allow gamers to get new Gear Inventory Slots, which helps Hogwarts Legacy players currently facing gear capacity issues.
Today, Redditor ChezKeetel answered a question that many impatient players had in mind: how long does it take to watch the animation of all 95 Merlin Trials? According to them, it takes 950 seconds, which is around 16 minutes of time that the players will never get back. As each animation takes around 10 seconds to play out, their math is right.
One of the people who commented on the Reddit post, the Gryffindor-aligned AHappyT-Rex, affirmed that the game is in a dire need of a skip button for these scenes, as they take far too much time. They said that they almost stopped trying to get a Platinum Trophy when taking on Hogwarts Legacy endgame content due to that. Others humorously came up with solutions for what to do when the cutscene starts. For instance, a few gamers said that this is a chance for the player to take a break for a quick snack.
This is not the first time that the Merlin Trials were at the center of an online controversy. A few days ago, a Hogwarts Legacy player faced a hilarious glitch that ruined his Merlin Trial attempt. In this case, the major problem was not the animation that starts the trial, but that a large stone ball that was used to complete the challenge glitched, increased in speed, bumped into a fence, and then shot up in the sky like a rocket, and ended up inside Black Lake. The whole ordeal, however, did not take as much time as it takes to see all Merlin Trial cutscenes.
Hogwarts Legacy is out now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S with PS4 and Xbox One versions coming April 4 and a Switch release dropping July 25.
