Hogwarts Legacy - What needs to be changed

Although Hogwarts Legacy is a fun enough game, there are a lot of questionable, immersion-breaking, and outright badly thought out systems that really should never have made it into the game. We mention some of them in our game review of Hogwarts Legacy but in this post we'll go in-depth on the various systems that really need to be changed.

• Containers and the meaning of gear drops
• As a student in a school, the player character should be going to classes
• Rescuing Magical Beasts should not be like poaching

Containers, gear drops, fashion, and coin

Fact: Gear drops isn't about gearing in Hogwarts Legacy. It's a way to give the player coin.

While early exploration may have you thinking that the fancy containers that give you high-grade gear are to be valued, in fact they are just things to clutter your inventory and to offload to the nearest vendor.

• In the early to mid game, the items you get are quickly made obsolete by the next item you pick up, because you are levelling quite quickly.
• In the late game, you will rarely get any item that is better than what you are wearing.

The end result is that pretty much every piece of gear you pick up gets sold in short order.

Getting gear also gives you the opportunity to collect the appearance of the item so that you can apply it in the future, whether you sell that piece of gear or not. However, this is probably better handled at Gladrags Wizardwear, and gives that store proper relevance as a fashion destination.

The current system in Hogwarts Legacy has an excess of containers sprinkled throughout the game world in a highly immersion-breaking way:

• Allowing players to just break into someone's home and grab their stuff.
• Containers of loot strewn around unguarded for anyone to take.
• Camps of poachers and criminals supposedly engaged in lucrative illicit activities, but having less loot amassed than what you can pick up randomly from a highly populated settlement.
• And criminals engaged in supposedly lucrative poaching don't have enough coin on their persons to afford even a butterbeer.

Overall, various mechanics are entangled with each other here, and some separation would make them better. Here's how Hogwarts Legacy should be changed:

• Delete most of the random containers.
• Leave only rewards for exploration or solving tasks, such as in Treasure Vaults.
• Make those containers actually give a decent amount of coin so it feels like a reward when you solve the puzzle or find a secret location.
• Let enemies have more in their wallets and enemy strongholds/large camps have a stash of loot that eventually respawns.
• Change Gladrags Wizardwear to sell fashion. That is, they will only stock a random selection of Appearances that the player has not yet collected.
• We have from the very start seen that clothing can be transmuted from one appearance to another. Surely this is not uncommon magic, and we can borrow the idea of Spellcrafts (transmutation "formulas") and apply them to Appearances.
• Give role-playing alternatives to making coin in the early game, since we are going to remove many of the containers.
• Let players grow plants or make potions and sell them to outlying settlements.
• Let players work (do repeatable tasks) in Hogsmeade for coin.
• This can be related to their Care for Magical Beasts, Herbology, and Potions classes.
• Or helping in various establishments with their utility spells such as Reparo and Wingardium Leviosa.
• Instead of obtaining combat gear, the player has to upgrade their gear throughout the game to keep up with their level, using a variant of the existing system involving the Magical Beasts and the Magic Loom.
• So the player upgrades each gear slot, and sets the Appearance of that gear slot.

As a student in school, the player character should be going to classes (and wearing a uniform)

And if we're going to make the player character go to classes, they should of course have relevance to the rest of the game. There are many ways to make repeatable classes or a class schedule relevant as well as increase actual role-playing opportunities:

• Repeat classes to unlock related Talents or Traits, instead of tying all those systems to Ancient Magic or getting them from enemy camps.
• Enemy camps and Ancient Magic should unlock only what the player cannot learn in school, such as Talents and Traits related to the Dark Arts.
• Have the opportunity to safely ("in a classroom environment") attempt Dueling Feats.
• Get small amounts of ingredients through Herbology or Care of Magical Beasts classes, instead of having to find them in the wild.
• Learn utility spells and potions that may not have relevance in combat, but which the player can then make on their own time for sale. Examples:
• Cure for Boils potion
• The colour-changing Colovaria spell, which could then enable them to work at Gladrags Wizardwear for coin.
• The cleaning spell Scourgify, which could then enable them to work at the Hog's Head or the Three Broomsticks for coin.
• Healing spells and potions like Episkey and Skele-gro, for use on injured Beasts.

Finally, this is a school. Everyone is wearing a uniform when they are in class, and the player should as well. When the player (and other characters) are out of class, such as in Hogsmeade on their own time, they should not be wearing a uniform.

So the player should have two appearance loadouts -- one for classes (with limitations) and one when they are not at Hogwarts.

Rescuing Magical Beasts should not be like poaching

The game tries to reframe the player character as "rescuing" Magical Beasts because they would be safer living with them, but this is totally nonsense. They are basically poaching the creatures and putting them in their private zoo, or selling them to a pet store.

Just like in the real world, "rescuing" animals should not mean relocating them all into zoos.

To "rescue" a Beast, the player character should actually rescue something that needs rescuing:

• A beast that has been injured.
• For example, at a beast den, the player might have to defeat a couple of poachers who have injured a beast in their attempt to capture it.
• A caged beast (possibly also injured)
• Unlock their cage or delete the cage with Evanesco and set them free.
• A rescued but not injured beast might actually then want to go with the player character.