Millenial Gamer

Hogwarts Legacy is an objectively magical experience. For many of my generation; it’s the wizarding game we dreamed of as children. There’s been a lot of controversy around the game from political issues to performance problems, but all in all, it’s a very good game. The world is downright gorgeous. I found myself stopping in awe many a time throughout the game to stare at a horizon or catching my breath when I heard a random dragon fly over my head in the middle of combat. The gameplay is snappy and satisfying, the spells feel powerful and even the puzzles can be fun. The music is beautiful and the first time you get to fly on a broomstick, I genuinely found myself sharing in the feelings of the overly enthusiastic outbursts of my main character flying through the air. So why after all of that, did I still end up feeling bored and frustrated around 40 hours into the game?

A trend in the last 6 or so years however, has been having too much of a good thing. From the gameplay to the setting, Hogwarts Legacy has reminded me of the Witcher 3. An amazing and magical open world filled with side quests, and an enormous checklist of objectives to complete. Commonly you’ll find large differences in the time it takes to beat a game and the time it takes to complete a game. That idea has been around for a very long time, though not on the scale it is now. When a game took only 5 hours to beat, but 10 hours to complete, it was an exciting thing to get to spend 5 more hours with a game you enjoyed and getting to see all it has to offer. The Witcher 3 however takes on average 55 hours to beat and almost 200 hours to complete. The story on it’s own was large enough to fill a full length big-budget game, so why did it need all of that extra content? Some of the side quests are incredible but around 90% of them are lackluster, so why not cut the 90% and increase the overall quality of the game? That’s a thought I couldn’t get out of my head as I explored the world of Hogwarts Legacy.

You start off as a 5th year, clearly so the game is more age appropriate, and you quickly learn that you’re the Mary Sue to end all Mary Sue’s. You’re so incredibly gifted that even the Potters would be jealous. The story is about what you’d expect with a setup like that, but certainly not disappointing. Shockingly enough, the side quests turn out to be some of the most exciting and engaging content the game has to offer, and that’s where the issue pops in. You want to complete side quests because about 1 in 10 are remarkable. When I realized this pattern, I tried to avoid side quests that were simple and repetitive. Focusing on those offered by your classmates was one easy guideline, but if I had stayed true to that, I would have missed what I thought was the best side quest in the game overall.

Running through Hogsmeade constantly throughout the story, side quests continuously piled up there. Eventually I’d pick up a few between story objectives. Slaying something here, fetching something there, for whoever had asked. Late in the game, I’d run past a house elf pleading for my attention about a dozen times over. I had long forgotten about installing optional content with the game and was completely clueless that this was DLC for the PS version of the game. Just wanting to tick off more tedious quests though, I finally accepted it. She wanted me to purchase a shop in Hogsmeade. After directing me to speak with her owner and landlord of the property, it was only 1,500 to purchase the shop. The whole setup is playfully obvious about how you’re falling into a trap, so I played right into it, waiting to activate whatever scheme I was about to be ensnared in. The landlord requests that you open a chest in the back of the shop, surely to release some kind of evil spirit or curse of some kind, but it turns out to be a ladder that beckons the main character immediately down into a secret cellar. Quickly it’s revealed to be a rather large area with all sorts of spooks and scares. Apparently a trapped poltergeist in desperate need of a playmate to torture is the real trap of this side quest, and the zone sprawling with unique design elements was a sight to behold. So much love and attention was put into this zone, filled with creative puzzles, well thought out sound direction, and enough slight jump scares to make it feel like an actual nightmare. I encountered all of this while feeling quite bored of the game from so many Merlin trials and ancient magic hot spots that I felt there was nothing interesting left in the game to discover.

The game has so many magical secrets to uncover, but it kept making me ask myself “Is it worth it?”. Short answer; not really. If you want to enjoy modern games, you aren’t really given a choice since there is no option to toggle tedious quests. I don’t honestly know why games have had to add so much padding to their playtime when the game has 35-45 hours of high quality content within it. From some quick searches online, you’ll find the consensus of completion time for Hogwarts Legacy is about 70 hours, with the main story taking about 35 on it’s own. If around 90% of the side quests and checklist objectives on the map are boring and repetitive, that leaves maybe 5 hours of enjoyable unique optional content. So the question stands, why can’t the game be 40 hours? I’ve been playing the game since it came out on February 7th. With a busy schedule of an average healthy adult, I’ve had an hour here and there a day to play the game. Having 30 additional hours of content in that respect, is such a negative to someone like me, that I don’t know why they would add it. Looking at this game from the perspective that the Harry Potter fan base are almost all in their 30s, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe the answer to that is in the larger question of how unhealthy people are in the way they consume content now. When researching if this opinion was commonplace with others, I found the opposite being proposed. People wanted the game to be even longer than it is. This might be a case of wishing for the wrong thing, since I’d wager a guess that they actually wanted more high quality content. While I suppose all developers hear is, “more”.

In an era where “binge watching”, “games as a service”, and “dopamine scrolling”, are all commonplace, asking for a single player, high quality, moderately paced video game, to be developed is rather foolish of me. I still bought it and invested my own 60 hours in attempting to complete that terrifyingly large checklist, thanks to the autistic drive towards completion that they seek to exploit with such a thing in the first place. Clearly the feedback has been sent that they are doing the right thing and games will continue in this direction. As I contribute to the problem, I will still be here acknowledging and watching the decline of my most beloved form of entertainment. Occasionally getting to feel that adventurous wonder and joy again, now on a slow drip feed to be mined from hidden gems buried deep in mountains of content.

Special thanks to the designers that created “Minding your own business”. As we journey into the horrorscape of AI writing quests for games, I hope the individuals who create content like this will get more individual attention since I could not find credited writers for this side quest specifically.