Hogwarts is one of the richest and densest locations a video game can possibly be set in, and the recently-released Hogwarts Legacy leverages the setting’s strengths to great effect. Developer Avalanche Software has crammed the castle and the areas around it full of tiny little details, secrets, and easter eggs that players will continue to discover even having put dozens of hours into the game. Here, we’ll be talking about a few such details that caught our eye.
HOGWARTS EXPRESS
You never see the interiors of the famous Hogwarts Express in Hogwarts Legacy, seeing as you arrive at the school by means of a flying carriage, but you can still find the train in the game. There’s no fixed location or time at which it appears, but if you hang around Hogsmeade Station or the train tracks heading out from it, you may spot the it barreling through the tracks.
SUITS OF ARMOUR
The corridors of Hogwarts Castle are lined with scores upon scores of empty suits of armour- though they’re not entirely empty. One particular variety is a pair of suits that you’ll find in various spots, one of whom likes to hum and another who’s not particularly fond of that humming. Walk past them enough times, and you’ll see the latter losing its patience and furiously smacking its companion into pieces to make the humming stop.
DRAGON
While you’re walking (or flying) around the world of Hogwarts Legacy, you can at times randomly spot a dragon flying through the skies and going about its business. As a neat little touch though, you can actually see it in the in-game map as well. When you spot the beast, pull up the menu and you’ll see a dragon flying through the diorama-like map.
CHAMBER OF SECRETS
The Chamber of Secrets is not accessible in Hogwarts Legacy, with developer Avalanche Software wanting to maintain consistency with the official timeline, but you can get (sort of) close to it. The bathroom through which the Chamber is accessed is included in the game, and you can even spot a snake symbol on the faucet that hides the entrance. Sadly, you can’t open it- but hey, at least you can look at it.
SPELLS
If you’ve watched the Harry Potter films, this is a detail you’ll have noticed right off the bat- every single spell in the game sounds exactly the way it does in the movies. Your basic spell attacks, for instance, are more than a little reminiscent of their movie counterparts, while something like Lumos sounds like it has taken the audio effects right out of the films and implemented them as is.
COMMON ROOMS
Hogwarts Legacy lets you choose which house you want to be sorted into, and once you do, the common rooms of the other three houses become inaccessible. A couple of the houses’ common rooms simply get locked behind impassible doors, but if, for instance, you’re not a Hufflepuff and try to enter their common room, the massive barrels that serve as its entrance will spray you in the face with a torrent of liquid.
SQUID
As you’d expect, each house’s common room has unique little details to set them apart from each other. For instance, the Slytherin common room in the dungeons has tall windows that look out at the interiors of the Black Lake, and if you stand in front of it, you can even occasionally see merpeople floating in the distance. Meanwhile, interestingly, if you shoot the window with your basic attack spell enough times, the Black Lake’s famous giant squid will respond by smacking the glass with its tentacles.
GOLDEN SNITCH
There are some neat little details in the Gryffindor common room as well, and one that instantly catches the eye is the Golden Snitch flittering about in the common area. Sadly, Quidditch isn’t playable in Hogwarts Legacy, but you can at least look at the Snitch as it flies about. If only the game allowed us to catch it as a collectible as part of a special side quest, or even for a Trophy.
CLOTHES IN THE WIND
Hogwarts Legacy is a game that suffers from some technical issues, as games of this scale usually do, but it does still have plenty of technical flourishes that impress. For instance, the cloaks that you and most characters in the game wear never fail to amaze with their physics, especially when the wind is blowing. Hop on a broomstick, zoom through the air, and pay close attention to how your cloak flutters behind you to see what we mean.
HOGSMEADE SHOPS
There’s plenty to see in Hogsmeade Village, to the extent that the first time you visit, it’s a good idea to just take about 40 or 50 minutes to explore it as thoroughly as possible. From Zonko’s Joke Shop to Honeydrukes and more, there’s plenty of shops in the village that are crammed full of incredible details and unique interactions, from indoor fireworks to candies that make you levitate in the air.
MUSICAL CORRIDOR
Hogwarts Castle is a place that’s full of whimsy, and there’s no shortage of curious things to see in its halls. One particular corridor is lined with numerous paintings of musicians, who are constantly in concert and playing together. That music can only be heard in that one corridor, and gets louder and louder the closer you get to it.
MUSICIAN
Speaking of unique musicians in the game, there’s one particular one outside of the confines of the castle as well. The first time you spot him, he’s accompanied by an enchanted trumpet floating in the air and playing alongside him, with a hat floating in front of a crowd that you can put a small tip in. If you do that, the next time you spot him out in the open world, he’ll have another enchanted instrument playing with him, and his band will keep growing the more you tip him.
GEAR
Hogwarts Legacy’s gear system might be a fairly ordinary one in terms of how its implemented in the game, but it does come with an amusing detail. If you head into the menu and unequip every single piece of gear, your character will be left in nothing but plain white underclothes. If you decide to walk around the open world dressed like that, it won’t go unnoticed, and NPCs will react to your appearance in a variety of ways.
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