The footage we’ve seen so far suggests that Hogwarts Legacy is going to be a beautiful-looking game with well-realized characters and surprisingly scary monsters. While the reveals so far have been heavy on the cutscenes, what we’ve seen of the game looks great. The appeal of Hogwarts Legacy is simple: as an open-world RPG in which you play a Hogwarts student discovering magical abilities in the 1800s, it enables you to inhabit the Wizarding World in a much more immersive way than any previous game. Avalanche Software is the former Disney studio that made the Disney Infinity series – pretty good credentials for a studio tasked with developing an open-world Harry Potter game and its sequels. Given that background, the news that Avalanche was making a Harry Potter game was greeted in much the same way a drowning man greets a lifeboat. But for some in this community, the Wizarding World doesn’t feel so safe anymore.'

'Immersive, open-world games have huge appeal to any gamer, but they’re particularly resonant for LGBT+ gamers, for whom they can be safe spaces to escape to. That criticism has also been levied at other HP games, such as the Pokémon Go-esque Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which was described by Metro GameCentral as “depressing” because of its “constant desire to shake you down for cash”. Reviewing the iOS game Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, the UK’s Guardian newspaper called it “a shameless shakedown… made borderline unplayable by its hyper-aggressive monetization”. Hogwarts Legacy was going to undo the often spotty reputation of Harry Potter games, which have often veered between flimsy film tie-ins and mobile cash grabs.

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