Hogwarts Legacy’s Open World Gives Its Sequel a Big Challenge to Overcome

Highlights

• Hogwarts Legacy’s success as the best Harry Potter game leaves room for improvement in future installments.
• The next game needs to find a way to better the original while exploring new locations for the story to maintain variety.
• The game should take cues from other successful open-world games to evolve and capture the same magic in a unique world.

Hogwarts Legacy threw all its eggs in one basket when it released earlier this year, taking players to the titular school and having them fight enemies in between attending classes and running errands for fellow students. It was right to do so, as the Avalanche-developed project has proven to be the best Harry Potter outing in games, though there’s room for improvement.

Looking to the future, the decision to come out swinging will have to be counterbalanced by the next game, which will somehow have to find a way to better the original while finding a new location to set the story. Variety is the spice of life and could be the savior of Hogwarts Legacy if it is to be a successful franchise moving forward.

Sending players back to Hogwarts as it exists in Hogwarts Legacy could feel repetitive, but changing it too much in pursuit of diversity may compromise the game’s continuity.

Hogwarts is Big, But Already Charted and Explored

Avalanche had a tough task when it set out to craft an all-new experience in the Harry Potter universe, so it had to rely on conventions for it to succeed. That meant bringing in familiar spells like Expelliarmus and Confringo, but that familiarity extended to the setting. The walls of Hogwarts are packed with subtle secrets and impressive world-building that do well to convey a great deal of history.

Whereas films that have succeeded Harry Potter like Fantastic Beasts have the luxury of exploring new places, Hogwarts Legacy is breaking ground in the gaming space and had to be conservative. The result was astronomical sales, so the sequel now has the freedom, and difficult feat, of going in different directions, both narratively and geographically. Sending players back to Hogwarts as it exists in Hogwarts Legacy could feel repetitive, but changing it too much in pursuit of diversity may compromise the game’s continuity.

Harry Potter Has Plenty of Other Iconic Places

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft of Wizardry and its surrounding area including Hagrid’s Hut and Hogsmeade are well-known to Harry Potter fans as they’re where the majority of the story takes place. The castle and its grounds are large and ripe for great narratives, but more places could be explored in the next Hogwarts Legacy outing. Be it fictional areas like Diagon Alley or the Ministry of Magic that are as immersive and magical as the school, to real-life locations like King’s Cross station in London (which is an essential breadcrumb in the Harry Potter tale), taking advantage of new pastures could be the break from Hogwarts Avalanche needs to add some diversity.

Open-World Games Need to Evolve

Non-linearity has been the flavor of gaming over the last couple of decades, with open-world offerings becoming greater and more ambitious with each passing year. Now, games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Horizon Forbidden West lead the charge by showing off densely-packed, but sprawling maps that the player can explore at their own pace. Hogwarts Legacy does the same (though perhaps not on as large of a scale) and as the aforementioned games are follow-ups to popular projects, Hogwarts Legacy needs to take cues from their philosophies.

Tears of the Kingdom is an advancement of Breath of the Wild, offering the sky islands and the Depths as a means to complement a familiar Hyrule in between. Horizon Forbidden West goes to a different part of the United States for its story but retains artistic flourishes that make it feel in keeping with what the first game achieved. Hogwarts Legacy‘s sequel will have to capture the same magic but in a world that is unique enough to not feel like a rehash of what came before. The iconic castle has been fleshed out wonderfully in the 2023 game and the task now is to one-up it elsewhere.