The conversations between dead characters inside Hogwarts Legacy are a festival of boredom and banality. I have a feeling the AI would do a better job. Repair!
I’ve been playing Hogwarts Legacy for a few hours now and can’t stand listening to the dialogue anymore. Overcoming them is like reading an email exchange between two bodies, bored with their work, overcome by apathy of such magnitude that even a troll attack (surprisingly, that analogy works here) would barely impress them. There is no complexity, no trauma, no relief, not even a stomach ache afterwards.
At some point our character (if he is a Hufflepuff) is informed that he may soon feel despair, but what will happen. The reaction? With one hand covering the other, like the British Queen, the character is grateful for the information. Are you afraid? But that’s not entirely true either. Is despair announced? Of course not.
So yeah, if people want to have a little romance in this emotional wasteland, I guess I’ll skip to the next station, thank you very much.
Helpers on Xanax
characters in Hogwarts Legacy Doesn’t support any movies when talking. There are no gestures, there are no facial expressions. It is a soft-core petrificus totalus. After a dozen hours of play, I literally saw my character laugh no more than twice. Remember, we are talking about fifteen or sixteen year olds, who live without parents in a castle full of secrets and who have magical abilities. It calls for constant commotion, unrest, parties, and rule breaking; think about the conflicts of social divisions, addictions, behavioral disorders. But her internal experience of these characters must be more like that portrayed in Queen’s Gambit, terribly limited with a large amount of tranquilizers.
As a result, my link with the main character is null and void. I have no way of identifying with her or loving her because she has no personality. She is the epitome of the model neighbor’s daughter; just a number, part of the reprimand at Sunday dinner, when my mother again points out that I got nothing. The girl who succeeds in everything she undertakes, everything she studies, unlike us lazy people! The teachers love him and the classmates do not envy him, but rather admire him. She has the impeccable manners of a forty-year-old British aristocrat sitting in an extravagant hat in the stands of Royal Ascot.
You will not convince me that it can be justified by the time of the action (19th century). I guess it’s just the risk of trying to cook something everyone likes, no matter what allergies they may have. It’s just completely bland and without finesse. In general, the conversations and relationships of the characters in Hogwart’s Legacy are reminiscent of overcooked noodles.
Hogwarts Legacy, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2023
The worst scientist in the world.
Our favorite example of a completely poorly designed line of dialogue is the interaction with Nora Treadwell. The elderly archaeologist became fascinated with Merlin while studying at Hogwarts. She became his researcher and discovered the puzzles he probably created for his fellow Slytherins. He’s been traveling for years, trying to figure out how these puzzles work; something no one has done for hundreds of years. She already has a hypothesis on how to activate these mechanisms; decades of research can finally bear fruit! She has just arrived at the site of one of these puzzles and has set up a research camp to perhaps make a breakthrough discovery and study it further. And then meet our character.
The circumstances are a bit extreme as some bad guys are attacking the camp and you have to hunt them down. We have just started school, but we got through it without any problems. When Nora talks about her research, we immediately guess how the magic mechanism works, but it must have taken her several decades. This is enough to entrust a foreign teenager (that is, us) with the achievements of her entire life. And so we, instead of the scientist, activate the first puzzle in the story. When we figure it out, we learn that each of them is probably different (“this is uncharted territory”), but they’re probably all used the same way. The homework is done, but as often happens in these situations, we are left with more unanswered questions, like: How does it work? I need to review my notes, maybe I missed something. So we should continue to study these objects, right?
Well not really. The archaeologist claims she’s seen enough, even encouraging us to untangle them all (and you should know that’s a task that can’t be repeated). “Go ahead, you can solve them as you go. I think I have enough information to continue my investigation.” Then he packs his bags and leaves. If all archaeologists worked like Nora Treadwell, we probably still wouldn’t know about Pompeii or the Terracotta Army.
The NPCs you can’t even interact with also have bland, contrived dialogue as if from a primitive generator, but there are some real gems too, so I always recommend eavesdropping. My favorite is the dialogue in which one of the students talks to the other about their family. It turns out that each of his brothers was ranked in a different house, that’s how different they are from each other; apparently the only person who wasn’t surprised by this “coincidence” was her father. Drum roll * Ba Dum Tss.
Hogwarts Legacy, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2023
A powerful elixir
After playing Stray I wrote an article about how the game used an emotional component, in this case a cat, and how that alone was enough to sell a nice, if not very average and short video game, which was also a social network. phenomenon surrounded by the oohs and aahs of cat lovers, and some people have even bought consoles just to play the game. Why am I talking about this?
Because even if the characters themselves lack emotions, the game itself has a huge emotional charge. in the form of childhood memories of millions of millennials and Zees. Portkey Games, owned by Warner Bros., the publisher of Hogwarts Legacy, throws us into a cauldron and brews the elixir of success and sales. It also adds a powerful second ingredient: nostalgia, which is currently selling like hotcakes in all sorts of remakes, remasters, and extended game series. That would be enough, but it also adds decent graphics to the mix (for the first time in the history of games in this universe), as well as the ability to customize your own rooms and an open world with hundreds of collectibles. and activities. All complemented by paid access to the deluxe version, the bitter price of which has been broken in the sweet scent of early access (since February 7). A perfectly brewed potion will silence even the authorship controversies of the world of Harry Potter.
An owl brought me my potion fix on Tuesday. I drank it with pleasure.