I’ve had a fair bit to say about Hogwarts Legacy, some of it good, some of it a bit ‘eh.’ I like the game’s open world for a start, which gives me some of those old-school Obliviony feels; conversely, I felt that the lack of freedom or consequence in character development was a bit of a missed opportunity.
My fantasies of being a crappy Slytherin despised by all will just have to wait until a real Hogwarts RPG comes along…
Now we swing back round to another thing that I’ve enjoyed in Hogwarts Legacy, but which has also given me a little pause for thought. I’m talking about the absurdly fun broomstick, which I first procured some 15 hours into the game. Now, players will tell me that that’s a pretty long time to go broomless, but I was busy exploring, alright?
And yes, I know that exploring would’ve been a hell of a lot more efficient had I done it aback a broom, but I guess I’m just old-school like that–feeling the cold soggy Scottish soil between my toes and so on; when I play open-world games, I’ve a fondness for getting a bit lost and feeling some sense of peril in my wanderings.
That’s where my conflicted feelings about the broomstick come in. It’s fun to fly in Hogwarts Legacy, damn fun in fact. Once you get the broom, you’re pretty much unrestricted in where and how much you want to use it, completely untethering yourself from gravity and the perils of the world down below. Got a bit tangled up with some spiders in the Forbidden Forest? Just broom on outta there. Want to zip over to the village nestled in the most remote corner of the map? Hop onto your Dingus 2000 broomstick and you’ll be there in a matter of minutes. Suddenly, the world is a whole lot more convenient, and that bit less mysterious.
The broomstick is not just practical for traversal, but it may well be the most accessible flying… vehicle (I guess?) in any 3D game I’ve played. It doesn’t plummet to the Earth if you take your hands off the controls, letting you float in the air indefinitely for those cool photo opps; it doesn’t have some kind of magic-based fuel limit; and you’re kind of untouchable on it. The only limitations on it are the super speed boost, which you can only do for several seconds before it automatically recharges over the next several seconds, and the inability to fly it around indoors or a few areas surrounded by force-fields (Victoria-era Hogwarts was a pioneer of Health & Safety Regulations, don’tcha know).
In other words, Hogwarts’ broomstick is basically an old-school cheat code like ‘noclip’ in Doom, where you can freely float in and around the game world in ways that you almost feel like you’re not meant to. Suddenly the artifice of the world becomes tangible, its scale not feeling quite so impressive as it did in those early hours; at the same time as this mechanically kickass tool feeling like a definite gain for your character, and it’s exhilarating to zip around with it, the world also loses some of its magic.
Obviously, a rideable broom is essential to a Hogwarts game– clearly more essential than the ability to go around catching what are basically Pokemon. But getting it so early on makes traversal feel breezy, even trivial, in a way you don’t normally expect to see until the later stages of a game. I think back to the jetpack of GTA: San Andreas, which you only get late on after you’ve familiarised yourself with the world and done the bulk of your exploration. Same goes for other GTA games, Horizon: Forbidden West–where you unlock a flying mount right near the end of the game–flying mounts in (sensibly paced) MMOs, and so on. In games where the bulk of the action takes place on the ground, aerial traversal is often held off until a satisfying late-game reward, giving you a new perspective on a game world that may not feel quite so mysterious or magical some couple of dozen hours in.
With that said, Hogwarts Legacy’s world isn’t necessarily a massive one; it looks lovely and feels magical, but doesn’t harbour as many mysteries as your epic open-world RPG, or even an Assassin’s Creed game. With that in mind, maybe letting players just whizz around on a broom was more important to the devs here than making us feel utterly absorbed in the vast world Avalanche created.
A case in point is that I was looking after my 10-year-old nephew the other night, plonked him down in front of the game, and within minutes he was flying around the game world, mouth agape in amazement, swooping down to fight a few baddies, hopping back on the broom when things got a bit spicy, then flying off to seek new adventures. He only played for half an hour or so, but I’m sure that was all the time it took for the game to get its hooks into him and for him to embark on a nagging campaign for his mum to buy the game for him.
The broom is awesome, no doubt about it, but that awesomeness comes at a bit of a price (that price being those nebulous qualities of immersion and mystery for me, and probably £50/$60 for my nephew’s mum).
