Highlights
- Palia could serve as a blueprint for a Harry Potter MMO, filling in the gaps left by Hogwarts Legacy such as multiplayer and RPG features.
- The sizeable map and real-time NPC movement in Palia draw comparisons to the Marauder's Map, offering potential for an immersive open-world experience in a Hogwarts Legacy-style MMO.
- Features like letter-opening, gift-giving, and farming systems in Palia could be incorporated into a Harry Potter MMO, allowing players to build relationships and actively participate in a magical community.
Palia is a cross-platform, cozy MMO with life sim elements that recently opened its doors to the public with an open PC beta in a game that claims to be the first of its kind. In recent years, Harry Potter games have begun to dip their toes into MMO and life sim territory, with Hogwarts Mystery's Beyond Hogwarts update and the recent launch of MMO-like Harry Potter: Magic Awakened. Yet, both games are currently only for mobile gaming platforms, leaving a big window of opportunity for PC and console players. Having enjoyed ongoing success and popularity since launch, it only seems like a matter of time before games like Hogwarts Legacy could open the door to an MMO experience to further immerse fans in their Harry Potter dreams.
Although Hogwarts Legacy is, so far, an undeniably successful game for the franchise, it did leave several gaps that a more expansive Harry Potter MMO could potentially fill, and Palia could provide the perfect blueprint for several reasons. Hogwarts Legacy is a single-player experience, and there's an evident thirst for multiplayer, as well as highly sought-after RPG features like romance and activities like Quidditch. Additionally, Palia has many features and mechanics that could fit well in a potential Hogwarts Legacy-style MMO.
How Palia Could Inspire A Magical Hogwarts Legacy-Style MMO
Several features in Palia could inspire a magical MMO set in the Harry Potter universe in the style of Hogwarts Legacy's gameplay rather than the card mechanics seen in Harry Potter: Magic Awakened. Perhaps the most obvious is Palia's sizeable map, where players can see NPC icons moving in real-time which draws instant comparisons to the Marauder's Map first seen in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There is a case to say that Hogwarts Legacy's open-world map should be the Marauder's Map to increase immersion in the game's massive open-world design. Palia's live map and its community-created interactive map could fit the bill.
Other transferable features in Palia include a cute mailbox letter-opening system, where players open their mailbox and click the wax seal of individual letters to open and read their content. It's easy to imagine how creative this might get with animated letters like Howlers or owl-delivered mail. Where Hogwarts Legacy missed life sim mechanics like farming and romance, a Hogwarts-Legacy-inspired MMO could incorporate elements of Palia's gift-giving and farming systems, where players might fulfill requests and gift residents or other players items to build relationships with villagers as active members of a local magical community, with the option to romance NPCs and help other players.
How Hogwarts Legacy's Lack Of Quidditch Could Be An MMO World Event
Although an MMO, Palia is not competitive and instead emphasizes the importance of a friendly, supportive community and rewards players for completing activities together. Players can team up together to go on quests or perform simple tasks together, like chopping trees or fishing, for the benefit of all involved. However, Palia does look set to include events, so it will be interesting to see what these are and how they work. That said, given Hogwarts Legacy's absence of Quidditch, a Palia-inspired Harry Potter MMO could still incorporate elements of PVP through World Events involving friendly competition like Quidditch or the Triwizard Tournament, as well as non-competitive social events like dances.
Given the vast popularity of life sims and the Harry Potter universe overall, a Hogwarts Legacy-style farm sim or MMO inspired by games like Palia makes sense as the next potential Harry Potter game, building upon Hogwarts Legacy's impressive foundation for an even more immersive experience for more gamers.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch version releasing November 14.
