We spoke with the director of Hogwarts Legacy about the game’s success, console performance and trivia
Hogwarts Legacy is “back on sale” May 5 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as it won’t be in stores on Switch until July 25. That’s why Warner allowed me talk to alan tewdirector of the title to answer our questions and solve some questions that Hogwarts Legacy has in the air.
Although Alan did not answer any of our questions about a hypothetical Hogwarts Legacy 2we try to discuss technical issues like the PS4 or Switch performance and more relaxed questions such as the development of Hogwarts or the creation of spells.
Below we present the interviews, marking in italics some of his own comments on his own responses:
Full interview with Alan Tew, director of Hogwarts Legacy
- It was recently published that Hogwarts Legacy exceeded all possible sales expectations, why do you think they exceeded such a high percentage?
Alan Tew, Game Director – I think we all fell in love in our time with what it would be like to be part of the wizarding world. What would it be like to receive our letter? Which wand would we choose? In which house would it be classified? What friends would we make? What patronus would we have? What magic would we excel at?
And for anyone who grew up with Harry Potter and video games, we knew nothing would excite us more than creating a game on this scale, with this level of fidelity and charm. It was something our team had always dreamed of, and we were clearly not the only ones. Hence the great success of the game.
*While this begs the question somewhat, I think it ultimately ties the game’s success to the fact that it’s the first game in many places where the wizarding world actually takes place.
- Now the PS4 and Xbox One versions are on sale but later they will come to Nintendo Switch, what would you say to those who don’t trust the performance the game can have on these machines?
Alan Tew, Game Director – We take great pride in the work we put into each version of the game. Compromises have to be made every time a game is ported to older platforms, but we would never release the game unless we felt that the experience of playing Hogwarts Legacy was still intact. The extra development time went a long way in optimizing the game for these consoles without compromising the vision of the game.
*A priori, they seem confident in the performance of the game on these machines, although as you well indicate, there will be significant concessions, which will surely affect the resolution or the blocking of the frame rate.
- We know that the development of Hogwarts castle took years, what were the biggest challenges during its creation?
Alan Tew, Game Director – The biggest challenge was balancing everything we knew Hogwarts “should” be. It had to be authentically familiar despite different versions over time, while reconciling the differences between the books and the movies. It had to be physically connected, even though the individual spaces that appeared in the novels and movies had never had to be physically connected before.
It was to be as vast and confusing as depicted in the books and movies, yet fully navigable despite being larger than most cities in the games. And it must have been fun to explore no matter how many times you came back to it during your game. It took an incredible effort from an incredible team to bring it to life!
- Which spells were the hardest to recreate in the game? What is the difference between Levioso and Wingardium Leviosa? What’s your favorite?
Alan Tew, Game Director – Each spell had its own difficulty, but the Unforgivable Curses get an honorable mention for having the “feel” just right for them. We wanted players to feel very powerful no matter what spells they decide to lean on, but Unforgivable Curses wouldn’t feel good unless they had some special “weight”, reflecting the path “difficult” to acquire them.
For Levioso and Wingardium Leviosa, we wanted to differentiate them because they have different lore, and we tried to make the game reflect that as much as possible. And of all the spells, my favorite might just be Flipendo. I like to see how a simple spell can play a role in my fights against any enemy.