Does Hogwarts Legacy Still Hold Up
It sold in numbers almost nothing else that year matched, then went quiet for a long time. Three years on it's easier to see what it did well.
Hogwarts Legacy arrived in February 2023, sold in numbers that made it the best performing release of the year, and then did something unusual for a game of that scale: very little. No expansion of consequence, no live service hooks, no seasonal content. It sold its tens of millions of copies and largely stopped.
That makes it an interesting one to revisit, because what you buy today is essentially what shipped.
The castle is still the achievement
Whatever else it does, the recreation of Hogwarts is exceptional and it hasn’t been surpassed. Not just visually, though it is beautiful. Structurally. The castle is a genuine maze with hidden passages, moving staircases that actually change your route, and portraits that react as you pass. It rewards exploration in a way the rest of the game doesn’t.
The first three or four hours, spent lost in corridors and finding rooms you weren’t looking for, remain the strongest stretch of the game. Anyone with an attachment to the setting will get their money’s worth from that alone.
Where it thins out
The open world beyond the castle grounds is the weak half. It’s large, attractively made, and filled with a small number of activity types repeated across a very wide area. Merlin trials in particular become a running joke roughly twenty into the ninety-something the game contains.
Combat is better than it gets credit for. The spell combo system has real depth once you unlock enough of the tree, and higher difficulties turn fights into genuine puzzle solving about ordering and crowd control. The problem is that the enemy variety doesn’t keep pace, so by the late game you’re executing an interesting system against the same three encounter setups.
The story is competent and safe. It gives you a plot with a clear arc, some decent companion characters, and a morality system that gates almost nothing. Playing as an entirely dark wizard is possible in terms of spells and mostly cosmetic in terms of consequence.
The post-launch story
This is where expectations went unmet. The game shipped with content split across platforms, most visibly a quest and a set of cosmetics that were PlayStation exclusive for a period, which irritated the rest of the audience for as long as it lasted. Substantial new content took a long time to materialise, and for a game of that commercial size the gap was conspicuous.
The Switch version, released later in 2023, is the one to avoid outright. The compromises required to fit the castle onto that hardware take away the thing the game is best at.
Warner Bros. has been clear publicly that a follow-up is a major priority for the company, which is the most concrete statement about the franchise’s direction available.
Should you play it now
If you have any affection for the setting, yes, and buy it in a sale rather than at full price, which is where it usually sits these days. Play it as a twenty-five hour game about a castle rather than a sixty hour open world completion project, and skip the Merlin trials entirely once you have enough gear capacity. The experience improves considerably when you stop treating the map markers as a checklist.
If the setting means nothing to you, this is a competent third-person action game with an above average magic system and a very repetitive open world. There isn’t enough there to recommend it on those terms alone.