Highlights

  • Hogwarts Legacy offers the ultimate Wizarding World simulation with a fully realized Hogwarts Castle experience for fans to enjoy.
  • While the game excels in many areas, its tone is inconsistent, though that could work to the benefit of beasts in the sequel.
  • With the Hogwarts Legacy protagonist already being a violent wizard, there's no reason to shy away from a Pokemon-like beast-battling feature in the next game.

After years of waiting, Hogwarts Legacy finally gave Harry Potter fans the immersive Hogwarts experience they’d been craving. The game features the most fully realized version of Hogwarts Castle to date and lets players experience the famous school from the point of view of a normal student. From learning the series' most iconic spells, to flying on broomsticks and hippogriffs, to exploring the beautiful highlands surrounding the castle, it truly lived up to the hype of being the ultimate Wizarding World simulator.

And fans certainly showed up for it. Hogwarts Legacy sold more than 22 million copies in 2023 alone, making it the best-selling game of the year. Despite being a one-year-old single player game with no post-launch content, the title continues to sell very well to this day. With this level of success, it should go without saying that a sequel is more than likely in the works over at Avalanche Games, but with the castle already fully fleshed out, one wonders what else a sequel could bring to the table.

Beautiful Environment in Hogwarts Legacy Quest
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The Best Possible Time Periods for a Hogwarts Legacy Sequel

Hogwarts Legacy's sequel could realize its full potential by offering a unique setting, moving away from the 1800s time period.

How Can Hogwarts Legacy 2 Improve the Fantastic Beasts?

One of the coolest features of the first game was the ability to become a magical Steve Irwin, conserving and curating an impressive collection of Harry Potter's fantastic beasts that players can find in the open world. Players can store these magical creatures in terrariums found in the Room of Requirement, name them, breed them, and use some of their byproducts for the crafting system. However, outside the novelty of having a private magical zoo that would provide regular crafting materials, there wasn’t much else to do with these fantastic beasts. A Hogwarts Legacy sequel can and should do more with this promising, if undercooked, feature.

Hogwarts Legacy Sequel Should Take Cues from Pokemon

Avalanche might consider taking some notes from the Pokemon franchise and letting players have some friendly sparring matches with other students’ creatures. It wouldn't be too far off from something like the Crossed Wands dueling club already in the game. These battles probably wouldn’t take place on school grounds (a Graphorn could hardly roam free around the cramped castle corridors) but instead can take place in the vast open world, which admittedly does feel a little empty in certain spaces.

Some might say that such a feature would clash with the series’ messaging, which is a fair criticism. Harry Potter as a franchise has always had a very pro-conservation tilt. Characters like Newt Scamander and Hagrid are all about taking care of their animal friends, and Poppy's entire quest line in Hogwarts Legacy is all about respecting the natural world and the creatures in it. But it wouldn’t be the first time the game had a massive issue maintaining a consistent tone.

Hogwarts Legacy Needs to Embrace its Own Tone Problem

Hogwarts Legacy lets players fully indulge in the darker aspects of the Wizarding World. The entire Sebastian quest line gives players access to the Unforgivable Curses, letting them mind control, torture, and straight up murder anyone in their path. Granted, the player can decline learning these spells if they’re committed to being a “good” character on a given playthrough. But with or without the evil spells, it is an undeniable fact that the 15-year-old player character in Hogwarts Legacy is an absolute menace.

Hogwarts Legacy's Protagonist is Already a Prolific Criminal

Even if players decide they won't be going full Voldemort in their playthrough, Hogwarts Legacy's insanely fun dueling system still ensures they do a lot of killing. Despite the game’s narrative painting them as some sort of Chosen One hero figure, the protagonist spends the entire runtime of the game brutalizing their classmates in unregistered dueling clubs, as well as roaming the countryside lighting people on fire and giving them traumatic brain injuries from slamming them around like rag dolls. While Hogwarts Legacy isn’t the worst example of ludonarrative dissonance in gaming, it’s certainly up there because of this.

Ludonarrative dissonance is a relatively new term that refers to the disconnect between a player's chosen actions in-game and the non-interactive story beats. An example of ludonarrative dissonance can be when Skyrim players can take 20 hours to engage in side quests rather than dealing with the time-sensitive, world-ending threat that Alduin presents in the main story.

Pokemon-style fights probably wouldn't fit with the overall messaging within the rest of the franchise. But if players can accept that the tone will always be inconsistent when they can play as a dark wizard evil enough to make Bellatrix Lestrange blush, beast fights could be just the thing to spice up the lackluster creature gameplay the first entry struggled with. These types of encounters could bring a new level of fun to the inevitable sequel, and at the end of the day, fun should be the primary consideration when thinking about new game features.