Hogwarts Legacy features three ‘companion’ characters as well as a handful of student and professor NPCs who players routinely interact with. Professors linger in players’ academic pursuits to assign them menial gameplay tasks and reward them with new spells, while miscellaneous students have odd requests and fetch quests for players to complete. Likewise, Hogwarts Legacy’s Scottish Highlands and Hogsmeade also have their own cast of characters with some being more eccentric or intriguing than others depending on how exciting their quests are.
Assuming that a Hogwarts Legacy sequel or successor would take place in and around the castle, it’ll be interesting to see what era or period it is set in. If it’s a direct sequel, for instance, many characters should be expected to return, even if they don’t have big roles anymore. Either way, rather than populating its open world with more NPCs in the flesh, Hogwarts Legacy 2 could have endless character potential by literally framing them and hanging them on walls as animated portraits.
Hogwarts Legacy 2 Should Reward Gryffindors with a Nostalgic House-Exclusive Quest Item
Hogwarts Legacy would more than redeem itself if a sequel's house-exclusive quests included an iconic weapon given to Gryffindors in need.
Hogwarts Legacy’s Portraits are Underutilized as Castle Decor
They adorn Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and players do get to interact with many of them as they progress through Hogwarts Legacy, but Hogwarts Legacy 2 should let players interact more with the lively, animated portraits lining the castle walls and stairwell atrium. Portraits could allow for stagnant NPCs whom players are able to locate easily if they know which wall they’re stuck to, and yet characters within portraits are known to move about between others and could naturally justify why a character in one portrait might be found roaming around the castle.
Portraits wouldn’t necessarily need to have lengthy companion quests, but having them dole out tasks within the school or share tidbits about the castle’s lore and secrets would be fascinating as they could’ve presumably been there for a big chunk of Hogwarts’ magical history.
This is also something that ghosts could contribute to a sequel if they were fleshed out more, but portraits would have a wider breadth of personality as they might interact with their environment in a frame and multiple portrait characters may belong to a single frame, too. Portrait characters may be dressed uniquely to depict them with individuality, not unlike how portraits of Quidditch players can be seen around Hogwarts, and it’d be great to hear stories from them and immediately gain a sense of who these people are or were.
Hogwarts Legacy’s Portraits Should Add Meaningful Lore to the School’s History
Portraits play a considerable role in Hogwarts Legacy’s main story, namely as it pertains to the Map Chamber’s Keepers. Players communicate with the Keepers exclusively via portraits as they’re no longer around, and that presents Hogwarts Legacy and its sequel with a phenomenal premise: a way to talk with characters who have passed away, even if it’s not the person themselves.
Indeed, while a portrait can never suffice the same way that a living being would, the portrait is precisely that—a photograph of a person, and one that could sustain conversation and reflect on memories or events.
It obviously wouldn’t be realistic to expect that every portrait could be interacted with, though having many that players could talk to would make moment-to-moment exploration in the castle far richer. NPCs who players attend classes with and NPCs players are taught by certainly shouldn’t be neglected, and yet portraits could sustain a lot of baked-in Harry Potter lore if players find the time to stop and chat with them.
Hogwarts Legacy
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 84 /100 Critics Rec: 88%
- Released
- February 10, 2023
- ESRB
- T For Teen Due To Blood, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Use of Alcohol
- Developer(s)
- Avalanche Software
- Publisher(s)
- Warner Bros. Games
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 4
- Cross-Platform Play
- Hogwarts Legacy doesn't have crossplay or crossplatform support
- Cross Save
- you can freely use your saved data between each console as long as you are connected to the internet and signed into the same account where the saved data was created
WHERE TO PLAY
- Franchise
- Harry Potter
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Verified
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PC
- How Long To Beat
- 26 Hours
- X|S Optimized
- yes
- PS Plus Availability
- Extra & Premium
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
