I have to admit, going into Hogwarts Legacy I had no idea what to expect from the game’s open world, nor just how open the world would be. The star environment of the game was always going to be the one in the title, and pretty much everything we saw in the buildup to the game seemed to take place in or around the impressive spaces of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
And that tight focus on the school itself follows through to the first couple of hours of the game itself. Really, there is so much to take in at Hogwarts–from the animated murals to the ghosts chasing each other around, to the secret rooms with goodie-filled chests, even the rather ornate toilets that harbour surprises in their cubicles–that building the whole game around the school and its grounds would’ve been enough to satisfy most players.
But then you take your first trip to the local village of Hogsmeade, strolling past the wonderfully framed Forbidden Forest and taking in the surrounding hills, and you realise that there’s a whole lot more to this game than just Hogwarts. While in the school itself, you probably never thought to switch over to the ‘World Map’ in your menu screen, but then you take a look at it, and see that you’re dealing with a full-on open world here, filled with hamlets, and diverse biomes (well, diverse within the gamut of what the Scottish Highlands have to offer, anyway).
What’s really enthralled me about the game’s open world isn’t its raw scale, however, but the fact that it feels comparatively cosy and condensed compared to what most open-world games these days shoot for. Where the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, you-name-it, impress us with their vistas and daunting sense of sprawl, Hogwarts Legacy’s world is essentially set in a vast valley, surrounded on all sides by vertiginous highlands. Instead of blowing you away with sheer scale, Hogwarts Legacy’s world envelopes you, towering over you like a friendly giant, and keeping you snug and cosy. Even in the ominous Forbidden Forest, there’s a sense of wonderment rather than dread, as chunky branches of its trees huddle in all around you and fireflies light up its natural ponds.
It’s a design perfectly suited to a mythos that’s basically a modern-day (or, well, 19th century, in this case) fairytale. It’s a magical adventure where you play as a teenager, not a mythological epic where you play as a traumatised dad or a world-worn hero, and that’s reflected in its world of rolling hills, verdant meadows, and dense forests. It’s a world that brings out childlike wonder even in tired adult souls, rather than the mixture of awe and wariness that modern open worlds evoke.
In some ways, Hogwarts Legacy’s world takes me back to an earlier era of open-world games, before hardware had the processing power to afford us the kinds of vistas we’ve seen in recent generations. There’s a touch of Fable 2 here in how the world wraps around you, a bit of Bully in the world’s focus mainly around school grounds. Most of all, it reminds me of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, which likewise is set in a kind of valley, with pretty much all the towns and cities orbiting around the Imperial City at its centre–visible from most places in the game world.
A key difference is that Hogwarts Legacy isn’t trying to squeeze a couple of American States, a country, or a whole continent into its open world. Instead, it’s very much centred around the iconic school–really the only major landmark visible from vast swathes of the world–and the villages and hamlets surrounding it. It means that the scale is much more realistic than, say, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, where the part of England it represents is about 1250 times smaller than the real thing.
The fact that Hogwarts Legacy is more proportional to real life means that there’s no wasted space here, no sprawl just for the sake of sprawl. Each little hillock, idyllic village, and road sign feels meticulously placed.
In more recent times, I can only think of medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance as having a similarly proportional, dense world that invites you to simply stroll around it. Both games are refreshingly ‘unstretched,’ and while there’s certainly a lot to be said for those terrifying vistas of an Elden Ring or vast wilderness of a Red Dead, it’s nice to see an open-world game reel that in a bit from time to time.
Now, as someone who’s been too busy running around the world on foot to get a broom yet (I think I’ve kind of messed up the sequencing by going 15 hours without one), I’m excited to see how it all looks and feels from above, even if a bit of me wonders if maybe some of the magic of this open world will fade once I mount my broomstick and it shrinks beneath me as rocket into the skies. Still, I imagine whizzing around the Scottish Highlands on a broom will brings its own flavour of magical experiences…
