The record was broken before official release of the Hogwarts Legacy
The launch of the Hogwarts Legacy game on YouTube and in the epoch of cross-generational open-world games
Hogwarts Legacy – the new open-world video game by Avalanche and Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, will be released Friday, to much anticipation.
The single-player game has been five years in the making — experts put its budget at $150 million. The game already broke a record on Twitch for being the most-watched single-player game, played by streamers who got the game early. And it’s the No. 1 pre-sale this week on gaming platform Steam.
The games market is heavily influenced by open world style games and they are important to the industry, says a former CEO of a games market research firm. “The expectations are quite high not just from the consumers, but also from the game makers themselves.”
The Warner Bros. games have been hit and miss, says Dan Martin, general manager at videogamesnewyork.
The game’s release has been delayed twice — building excitement from Potter fans but then fizzling. Videogamesnewyork, a New York City store that sells modern and retro video games, is ordering just enough games to their store based on pre-orders.
“There was a time when I thought it was going to impact my view on the whole Harry Potter world, but I am able to separate the situation with JK Rowling with the Harry Potter world,” said Camila Rodrigues, a Harry Potter fan who says she plans to buy the game.
The game features a trans character, a first for the franchise. The character Sirona Ryan doesn’t explicitly say that she is trans, but there is a scene in the book where she says that she was actually a witch.
Warner Bros. Discovery said creating diverse characters was a high priority in order to encompass all people who play the games including the LGBTQIA+ community.
According to some estimates a blockbuster release iseasily selling 10 million copies. It’s a chance for the franchise to re-brand itself.
“It perhaps has room to develop something new, to iterate on the existing relationship with its fan base,” said van Dreunen. “Perhaps making it into this big production video game allows the franchise to kind of save itself a little bit from the drag it’s been experiencing culturally.”
Hogwarts Legacy: A Place for Strangers to Come and See (and Not Wanna Come To) You, and We Can’t Let You Go Again
Yikes, y’all. I feel like I need a cigarette and don’t know if I’ll start this thing. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow (or the abyss), because this one’s gonna take a lot out of both of us. (Or get heavy.)
She made the ordinary seem extraordinary in the pages of her books. She created a place where weird lonely kids were told that they were special, and that the children who had survived abuse were more than just broken. The once-beloved children’s author has had some opinions since 2019. People like me. And whether or not we should exist. She has implied that we are inherently dangerous, which is a threat to real women everywhere.
I remember when I was a kid, every word she wrote was magic, but now it hurts. When queer kids are growing up, they hear about homophobic and transphobic stuff for a very long time. We hear terrible things about us from family and friends. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. It hurts when one of those voices comes from someone that taught you how to accept yourself, a person you thought actually saw you and kids like you. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
I do not hate her. It would be simpler if I did. There is a child who still loves her despite everything. That kid has a lot of experience loving people who hurt her. She never asks why; she just wants to know what she did wrong and how she can fix it. It is hard to tell her there is nothing left to fix. There are a lot of places that we can’t return to. Places like Hogwarts.
Source: https://www.wired.com/review/hogwarts-legacy-review/
The first book of Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban: Where I am going, where I’m going, and what I can do about it
I remember when the first book came out. The boy is depicted on the cover. The school is having a book fair. At the time, it was just another chapter book on the shelves beside the likes of Bunnicula and Goosebumps. I’ll be honest. It was not a Neverending Story situation for me. I did not open the cover and get exposed to a world of magic and mystery. I liked it, but it was only about one thing. It was the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, that wrapped its world around me and drew me in.
The first one that felt dangerous, to me. I felt like I saw what these characters were going through. In Harry, I saw my own rough childhood reflected. I shared his anger and frustration with other people, and he couldn’t understand it. In Ron, I knew what it was to go to school in hand-me-downs, to worry about money in a way that no child ever should, and I also knew what it was like to be made fun of for being a redhead. My aggressive sense of right and wrong made me and her in trouble, and it was in Hermione where I saw it in action. I was feeling deep after Prisoner of Azkaban.
Source: https://www.wired.com/review/hogwarts-legacy-review/
On the absence of an animatronic Cheek-E-Cheese robot in the 1D Hogwarts game
I thought I would find a lot of time in this section to complain. Going over every grievance I have with how this game deviates from the source material, how dated it looks and feels, and how every character just feels like an animatronic Chuck-E-Cheese robot waiting for you to come by and put a quarter in so it can say its one line of dialog and perform a grim, herky-jerky facsimile of a living being. There aren’t any nits to pick, they are just lice.
The longer I spent in this version of Hogwarts, the more I could feel a tangible absence. There’s definitely something missing. I was thinking it might be the lackluster art direction, the one-dimensional characters that feel like store-brand versions of the ones we know and love, or perhaps even the lack of the John Williams score. But there’s a bigger absence here.
