After my first few hours with Hogwarts yesterday my intial impressions boil down to this: Hogwarts Legacy is an early GOTY contender. Of course, it's still early days, I have a lot of game ahead of me and I'm always conscious of the "honeymoon period" when everything feels fresh, new and exciting but this is how I feel right *now*, Elden Ring gave me similar vibes in the first few hours and ended up being not only my GOTY but one of my all-time faves so let's see where the chips fall when it's all said and done.
The thing that immediately struck me when entering Hogwarts School proper was just how rich and lovingly crafted everything around me was. Gorgeous stained-glass windows, ornate balustrades, golden filigree, vaulted ceilings, paintings rich and alive. There is an attention to detail and clear love of the source material, I'm blown away by it all. Amidst all this countless rooms begging to be explored, surprises around every corner, treasures waiting to be plundered. Mirrors that comment on your appearance, a ghost couple floating through the halls mid-argument, NPC's going about their business, some promising new quests.
There have already been plenty of cool moments but this one is my favourite: I enter a hallway that has 2 suits of armor, one of them is humming a tune, the other smacks him in the head to shut him up, they both revert to their frozen position, I'm quite amused. I go through this same hallway a couple of hours later, armor dude is humming again, I run past since I've seen this show before. All of a sudden there is a loud crash, I turn back around and THIS time the other armor dude is literally beating the shit out of hummer boy culminating in him knocking him to the ground and breaking him to pieces with his giant axe, wow!
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room... the technical issues (gotcha!). Playing performance mode on PS5, overall smooth but there are various issues from standing in front of doors loading up the next area to some texture pop-in to weird stuff with lighting. Ultimately every single open world game I've ever played has had bugs of some kind but it's still worth pointing out, maybe the game could have benefited from a second delay, really polish things up. I'm sure patches will improve these issues but I won't pretend the game is running flawlessly because it isn't.
I could write a lot more, I hope the feeling I have now can be sustained for the dozens of hours I plan to spend in this world, could be something special indeed, I'm already intrigued by the possibilities of the future for this franchise, eager to visit places like Uagadou the "largest wizarding school in the world", located in Africa and "built into the side of a mountain", so much potential, so many directions it could go. But first, back to Hogwarts
PS: as someone who has read all the books and seen all the movies you don't need to know anything about HP to jump into this world. There are some references here and there and obviously if you know Hogwarts then seeing it fully realized and physically explorable is an extra joy but otherwise it's the same as jumping into any game world, you don't know anything and you learn as you go along
