First and foremost, like a large swath of third-party Nintendo Switch 2 games, physical copies of Hogwarts Legacy are game key cards. At least the file size won’t set players back too much though. The Switch 2 edition of Hogwarts Legacy takes 23.1GB, which is a tad more than the 17.1GB of the Switch 1. But that small added data is put to good use, as the Switch 2 version boasts a set of improvements over its predecessor.

Many magical wand enthusiasts will be delighted to hear that this edition features Joy-Con 2 mouse functionality. You can switch between mouse controls seamlessly; simply point the sensor on pretty much any surface imaginable. Don’t like how slow or quick the cursor glides? Thankfully, Portkey Games has included a handy mouse sensitivity slider for aiming and camera control. The sensitivity can be adjusted on a sliding scale from .5 to 4, so there’s a good range to accompany all mouse pads (including improvised surfaces like armrests and the like, of course).

"Don’t like how slow or quick the mouse cursor glides? Thankfully, Portkey Games has included a handy mouse sensitivity slider for aiming and camera control."

I like the holistic application of mouse controls here. You can cursor through all the menus, use the mouse for camera control, and of course aim your magical wand to cast precisely targeted spells at all manner of creatures. I just came off of reviewing Hitman for Switch 2, so I appreciate not just the existence of mouse controls (as Hitman doesn’t have any), but the variety of applications for the Joy-Con 2’s mouse mode. Like the Switch 1 version, you can also opt to wave your Joy-Cons to simulate the casting of spells, and even chart a flight path on your broom. The motion controls feel about the same here as they did on the Switch 1, so there’s not much to talk about in that regard. And there’s even touch screen controls to help navigate menus and the like quicker.

Now, HD rumble, that feature is notably improved over its predecessor. Getting hit by an exploding Bombardia spell or merely watching action-packed cutscenes feels much lively and immersive with the variances in rumble intensity that accompany such moments. And there’s quite a few instances of rumble through the game too, showing that the devs put some care into not just how the game looks but feels to play.

Speaking of looks, the game’s graphics are notably improved over the Switch 1. Visuals are about on par with the PS4 Pro, with resolutions at 1440P docked and 1080P in handheld mode. That said, if you’ve played other Unreal Engine 4 titles on modern graphics cards, you’re bound to be fatigued as I am by the janky way that hair shimmers and behaves. That still translates to this edition, with hair tips looking oddly translucent and individual strands phasing in and out of existence. At least, the color pops this time around, thanks to the 4K docked support and wonderful HDR handheld screen.

"The color pops this time around, thanks to the 4K docked support and wonderful HDR handheld screen."

Performance-wise, this is about as good as a AAA third-party game is gonna get on a modern Nintendo system. It runs better than Hitman Signature Edition on Switch 2, usually hovering around 30 FPS with few noticeable dips. I’m also impressed by the load times here. Loading up a save file only takes 10 seconds on average, and going in-between menus is fast, apart from the animated map transition which takes around 5 seconds give or take. As a 40-hour RPG, Hogwarts Legacy is an ideal handheld experience on-the-go, just mind the Switch 2’s three hour battery life. Finally, Hogwarts Legacy is a GameChat compatible game, meaning you can hang out with long-distance friends and share your screen with others as you advance the wizarding ranks. For Switch 1 owners of Hogwarts Legacy, the updated Switch 2 version is absolutely worth the $10 update. And for those entering Hogwarts for the first time within Nintendo’s ecosystem, the Switch 2 edition costs just as much as the Switch 1 version at $59.99.

"Hogwarts Castle is shimmering with environmental detail from every corner."

And for those unfamiliar with the game entirely, here’s a brief overview of my time with it, sprinkled with some impressions of Switch 2 exclusive functionality. The thing that immediately gets my attention is just how littered with rich environmental detail Hogwarts Castle is. There’s loads of nice little interactive doodads around the environment, helping Hogwarts Castle feel that much more alive. I can’t help but grin at all the unique moving portraits hanging up on the gilded walls of the illustrious wizarding school. For Harry Potter fans, you’re getting a ton of referential material here as well, no doubt, and there’s plenty of lore entries in the Field Guide to read through at your leisure.

NPC chatter is also impressive, with character conversations happening in the background as if life were actually occurring separate from the hero’s involvement. Though, background NPC dialogue does tend to repeat quite often if you’ve stopped by to listen to more than a couple of them at a time, rendering it somewhat uncanny seeing different faces uttering the same exact lines with the same voices. But to the credit of all the incidental NPC dialogue, many of the conversations divulge lore about the wider Potter universe and flesh out the world rather wonderfully.

Character conversations happen in the background as if life were actually occurring separate from the hero’s involvement.[/custom-quote]

Helping to further embody the whimsy and magic of the setting is the Williams-esque soundtrack. It’s just a delight for the ears as you explore the castle and the surrounding open-world countryside. What’s surprising is the music isn’t merely a bunch of re-used tracks from the films but entirely fresh scores from a trio of talented composers. While the music draws one into the fantastical world, the same can’t always be said for some of the voice acting. The voices in Hogwarts Legacy varies in quality. Important characters sound like a natural fit to the Potter world and their performances don’t disappoint. However, some of the side NPCs sound…off, like a voice filter was passed through to make them sound younger or vice versa. Which kind of makes sense considering the voice filter within the character creator scales based on the age you select.

All told, Hogwarts Legacy is like an ornately wrapped gift with regards to its presentation. All the menus have neat little animated elements and sound effects which make it more playful and satisfying to sift through inventory the map. And as previously mentioned, the art style and sound has a magic to it that pretty much nails the Harry Potter aesthetic, and it runs and looks great on Switch 2 to boot.

"Your chosen house determines your common room location and grants access to house-exclusive quests."

But Hogwarts Legacy is more than mere aesthetics, even if its world presentation is my favorite aspect. Player-driven choices shape the content you experience throughout the game. For instance, the ever-popular “Which Hogwarts house am I?” quiz is here in truncated form, and your answers directly determine your house placement. Your chosen house determines your common room location and grants access to house-exclusive quests. Decisions like these make Hogwarts Legacy feel like an immersive wizarding school experience.

Beyond house selection, players also make meaningful choices like which relationships to develop and how to respond during pivotal story moments. Though, I have to say, the main plot doesn’t quite do it for me. It hits predictable cliches and makes your character a bit too ‘perfect’, like an untouchable hero who just effortlessly saves the day. I’m not a huge Potter fan, but I can still appreciate all the cool fanservice and worldbuilding done here, but in terms of just pure plot and writing, Hogwarts Legacy doesn’t do much with its unremarkable story and side quests.

"If you’re not confident in aiming damage-dealing spells like Incendio yourself, target lock-in is available to swiftly cycle between enemies."

Combat is your traditional action RPG fare as well, except colored through the lens of the Wizarding World. You fight using various spells cast from your magical wand, execute jumps and dodge rolls to evade attacks and/or run from combat altogether. I’m not super fond of the over-the-shoulder camera here, and would probably prefer a wider field of view or maybe even something resembling an isometric perspective, but it’s not a deal breaker. The zoom aiming and instant shoulder toggle help make the usual clunkiness involved with this perspective more manageable. And being that the Switch 2 version includes mouse control aiming, this version has a leg up on other consoles due to the better precision. If you’re not confident in aiming damage-dealing spells like Incendio yourself, target lock-in is available to swiftly cycle between enemies.

There’s a good selection of spells here, and I like the progression needed to learn them. You basically add new spells to your repertoire as you progress the story and level up, very basic and standard, I know, but I’d rather that than some overly complicated skill tree or worst of all, a battle pass structure. The added immersion from having to complete an acrobatic wand motion with the mouse or thumbstick to learn each individual spell is a nice touch.

"Solving the castle’s numerous secrets rewards the player with Field Guide pages, which provide further history behind the castle."

Lastly, the investigative gameplay here may intrigue some more puzzle or detective-minded game fans, despite how simplistic it can be. Hogwarts is positively brimming with secret rooms, riddles, and a fair amount of invisible portraits asking to be uncovered. Solving the castle’s numerous secrets rewards the player with Field Guide pages, which provide further history behind the castle and lore of the surrounding world. Of course, the entirety of the game isn’t purely set inside the castle walls, so that selfsame riddle-laden gameplay extends to the swamps and caves throughout the fictional portrayal of England.

If you ever wanted to simulate what it might be like to enter into Hogwarts as a student, and perhaps fight a few dragons along the way, Hogwarts Legacy supplies that fantasy with some competent gameplay and a satisfying RPG structure. While Hogwarts Legacy on Switch 2 may not be that much different from other versions, it’s a noticeable  improvement over the Switch 1 port with the support of PC-centric features like mouse controls.

This game was reviewed on the Nintendo Switch 2.

Yves Lachance has been promoted to senior vice president of development for Warner Bros Games Montreal, where the studio will work on games based on Game of Thrones and Harry Potter. NetherRealm, headed by vice president of development Shaun Himmerick, will continue to work on Mortal Kombat games. Warner Bros. Games New York, on the other hand, will be headed up by Steven Flenory as vice president of central tech and services, as well as central tech and services. The studio will focus on QA, user research, and customer service.

The trio will work directly under Warner Bros Discovery’s CEO of global streaming and games, J.B. Perrette. Internally, teams working on production and tech will report to Lachance and Himmerick. The publishing division at WB Games will continue to be under Perrette.

“Our company is home to some of the biggest franchises in the world, and we are optimizing our team structure to develop long-term franchise roadmaps to delight players and fans of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Mortal Kombat and DC games,” Perrette said about the move. “We are very fortunate to have a strong stable of development and technology talent, and Yves, Shaun, and Steven are respected leaders with excellent track records in their areas of expertise. I’m looking forward to working closely with them and the team as we work to make the best games possible for our key franchises.”

Back in March, Warner Bros. had reaffirmed this plans to focus on its big four franchises in a letter to its shareholders. According to the company, it wants WB Games to “refocus our resources and capital on proven IP and games from proven, world-class studios.”

“As we have previously said, 2024 was a disappointing year for our Games business, and we have recently announced a restructuring plan to refocus our resources and capital on proven IP and games from proven, world-class studios,” wrote the company in the letter. “We are focusing our Games business around four tentpole franchises that have each generated over $1 billion in consumer sales in past years: Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Mortal Kombat, and DC – particularly top tier characters like Batman.”

Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav had first spoken about this plan to focus on Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Mortal Kombat, and DC back in November 2024. Talking about the company’s relatively bad year in the gaming market, Zaslav also spoke about how the gaming division at Warner Bros. will bounce back.

“We’re through some of the worst — and it hasn’t been pretty on the gaming business — but we have four games that are really powerful and have a real constituency that loves them, and we’re going to focus on those four primarily,” he said. “We’re going to go away from trying to launch 10, 12, 15, 20 different games. I think we have a real chance now with focus to have the gaming business be steadier.”

“We have four strong and profitable game franchises with loyal, global fans: Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, and DC, in particular Batman. We are focusing our development efforts on those core franchises, with proven studios to improve our success ratio.”

Speaking during Warner Bros. Discover’s recent quarterly earnings call, when asked about the company’s gaming business and future, CEO David Zaslav revealed that the company will be looking to license out some of its IP to other, external development studios- which means internal Warner Bros. studios might not necessarily be the ones developing games on WB IP going forward.

“We have 11 studios here, and we have a lot of IP,” Zaslav said (transcription via IGN). “And there’s also a lot of interest among others in coming to take advantage of some of that IP for gaming, which we’re looking at. Because as JB [Perrette, president of global streaming and games] said, we need to get bigger, and the IP that we own and the value that it has in the gaming space is something we’re looking to take advantage of.”

The list of IP that WB has access to is mouthwatering, to say the very least, with heavy-hitters such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Batman, Superman, and many others included. The prospect of those properties being licensed out to developers across the industry – similar to the approach Marvel and Disney have taken in recent years – would certainly be an intriguing one.

Speaking in a recent interview with Variety, WB Games president David Haddad cited upcoming free-to-play multiplayer game Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions as an example, before adding that the company also has “a series of other things” that it hasn’t yet officially announced that are being worked on. According to Haddad, these games will “let the fans be part of this world and stories and characters in deeper and deeper ways.”

Given the success that Hogwarts Legacy has enjoyed, it should come as no surprise that Warner Bros. already has plans in place for future releases that could potentially do the same. A sequel to the open world action RPG might already be in the works, in fact, with job listings suggesting that developer Avalanche Software was working on a new unannounced AAA game.

It’s been almost two years since we first got a glimpse at an upcoming RPG set in the Harry Potter universe through a leak. Reportedly developed by Avalanche Software, the game – supposedly a AAA production that sees you creating your own wizard student in Hogwarts and choosing whether you want to be a good or bad guy – has been on the radar of many people since then, but official word from Warner Bros. has been non-existent.

It seems, however, that we might have a clue as to when the game will be out. Over on Reddit, a user reports that Warner Bros have been in touch with a localization company for the game’s localization, which will supposedly be out in 2021. No other detail is mentioned- from a specific release date to what country this localization will be for to the name of the localization company.

As is always the case with leaks coming from unverified sources, it’s best to take this with a grain of salt. It’s worth mentioning though, that a 2021 release window for the game doesn’t seem all that unlikely. Just recently, reports emerged that before E3 2020 was cancelled, Warner Bros. were in the process of holding their debut press event at the show, where the Harry Potter RPG would be one of the games they would reveal. Read more on that through here.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no other way they could be successful. There are plenty of franchises out there that we’d like to see branch out and try new things. In this feature, we’ll be listing fourteen video game franchises, and talk about different genres from the one they usually subscribe to that we think would actually work pretty well for them. We’re not going for completely off-rails combinations here – you won’t see us talking about a possible kart racing God of War game in here – and we’ll try to talk only about franchise-genre combinations that we think would actually make sense for the former.

So with that all out of the way, let’s get started.

POKEMON AS MMO

A Pokemon MMORPG is something that people have been dreaming about for years now, and multiple developments in recent months have only solidified the notion that that’s something that would actually work very well. For starters, Pokemon’s mainline games have refused to grow and evolve too much over the years, so at this point, most people are desperate for something fresh. More importantly though, we already have a perfect example of how good a Pokemon-style MMO would be in Crema’s Temtem. That’s not a game without its own issues by any means, but it does prove something we’ve all been shouting about at the top of our voices for some time- that a Pokemon template is actually very well suited to the MMO space.

The ESA just gave an official confirmation that E3 2020 has been cancelled due to “increased and overwhelming concerns about the COVID-19 virus.” Of course, this is a decision that affects several developers and publishers who may have been planning on making important announcements about upcoming games at the event. One such publisher, as it turns out, was going to be Warner Bros.

In a report covering the event’s cancellation, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier spilled the beans that WB Games was planning on hosting its own E3 conference this year, which would have been a first for them. At the show, they were going to announce three megaton games- a new Batman title, a Harry Potter RPG, and the new game being developed by Rocksteady Studios.

There’s been a lot of anticipation surrounding all of these games. Speculation about the next Rocksteady game has been rampant for a long time, especially in the absence of an announcement at several major past events. The Harry Potter RPG in question was leaked back in 2018, was reportedly in development at Avalanche Studios, and recent reports indicated that it was due for a reveal soon. Finally, the next Batman game, in development at Arkham Origins studio at WB Games Montreal, has been at the centre of countless leaks and teases in recent months (and even years).

It remains to be seen whether WB Games will now hold their own digital event to reveal these games or will follow other plans. Either way, the long and arduous wait for these three announcements continues.

Earlier today, the dream of many Harry Potter fans around the world, yours truly included, seemed to be finally nearing a reality. A leak of a full fledged AAA Harry Potter game, which included you being able to make your own character, attend Hogwarts, go to class, and hang out with other students, started making the rounds, which is literally everything that a Harry Potter fan would ever want from a game based on the property.

However, the initial report stated that the game may be developed by Rocksteady, known best for their Batman: Arkham series of video games. We know they are working on something new that they’ve kept secret all this while, but we haven’t know what it is, so the supposition that they could be working on this highly vaunted Warner Bros. property made total sense. That said, according to Eurogamer, it’s not Rocksteady who is working on this game.

Rather, it is Avalanche Software, which we briefly mentioned in our earlier report as well. No, not Avalanche Studios, whom you are probably thinking of, and the folks who hare currently developing Just Cause 4 and RAGE 2, and who have previously worked with Warner on Mad Max. Avalanche Software is a Utah based developer, who is best known for its work on Disney Infinity. Following the cancellation of that project, they were acquired by Warner, and have since been working on a “AAA RPG for consoles”, which “needs knowledge of British culture and grammar”. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty Harry Potter sounding to me.

Eurogamer also reports that the game in question may be called Harry Potter Magic Awakened or Harry Potter Magic Forever, neither of which are good names. Which means they’re probably real.

We’ll keep you posted on more updates as they come in.

It has been a while since we’ve seen a really good Harry Potter game, so if you’re a fan of the game, you’re definitely going to be excited to see this new leaked gameplay footage that has just surfaced out of nowhere. There hasn’t been any announcement made about any major developers working on a new Harry Potter title, so this comes as quite the surprise.

The video was shared on Reddit, and it doesn’t look to be fake, simply because of how polished the gameplay appears to be. As of now, we have no idea which developer could be associated with this game, but there’s a good chance that it could be either Rocksteady Games (they are working on a new game, after all, and have a history with Warner Bros. properties), or Avalanche Software, who were rumored last year to be hiring people to work on a new Harry Potter RPG.

The game looks very exciting in the footage, and it looks like you will be able to create your own character at the start. Based on the description provided with the video, we learn that the game is set in the 19th century Wizarding World, and players can choose from among eight different wizard types for their character, and also whether to play as good or evil. Additionally, it also seems like the game will feature an open world, in which players will be seeing familiar places and also visiting some new locations.

There will also be fantastical beasts to find, obviously, and many supernatural creatures to fight as you go on your journey through Hogwarts. You will also be able to craft potions and use all kinds of different spells throughout your adventure. There will be a new magic system in the game that “creates countless possibilities to master magic.” As you go through the story, you will also be able to choose your own friends and your own House in Hogwarts, and it should be interesting to see how this affects the game’s story.

The description also provides information about the premise of the game’s story. In the game, you will play as a newly arrived 5th year student who has a unique ability to track and “identify remnants of a potent ancient power.” As you arrive, some trouble starts brewing and some strange occurrences take place in the Forbidden Forest. You will have to figure out the cause behind these events with the help of Professor Elezar Fig. Finally, we also learn that story we get to see here is one that is totally separate from what we’ve seen in the books and films, so it looks unlikely that we’ll be seeing any known and beloved events from the franchise.

You can check out the leaked video below (before it gets taken down). Do keep in mind that this is by no means an official announcement, and as things stand right now, this leak could be very true, or not true at all. Hopefully, though, we will get some official announcement regarding this game soon.

https://youtu.be/2-HER1xKQl4

Portkey Games is a brand new label that Warner Bros. that will focus exclusively on Harry Potter games. The first of these was announced yesterday, a Harry Potter riff on Pokemon GO that will be coming from Niantic, the developers of that hit mobile game.

But the label won’t be just about social and mobile games, either- in fact, it sounds like they are also preparing a console game set in the Harry Potter universe, and that they will have something to say about it very soon.

In the announcement, Warner Bros. says that the games will feature not just familiar elements and characters from the books and movies, but also take players to new places in the wizarding world they have not had a chance to glimpse yet. They say that’s all they can say for now- but they leave o a tantalizing note, promising more announcements will be coming very soon.

Does this mean that my long held dream of a Harry Potter skinned Persona game might come to fruition at last? I sure hope so.