‘Hogwarts Legacy’ Release Date, Early Access, PC Performance Issues, And Everything You Need To Know

Post updated 2/7/23. See update below.

Hogwarts Legacy is almost here, and fans of Harry Potter are practically bursting at the seams in their eagerness to get their hands on the game. It’s already the best-selling game of the year on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X despite calls for a boycott over author J.K. Rowling’s statements on the trans-rights debate (yet another unfortunate example of politics and the pop culture wars spilling over into something that’s supposed to be good clean fun).

Here’s everything you need to know about Hogwarts Legacy as we hurtle toward launch.

Launch Date And Platforms

Hogwarts Legacy releases on PC (via Steam and the Epic Game Store), PS5 and Xbox Series X on February 10th. The PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game come out on April 4th, while the Nintendo Switch version is currently slated for July 25th. Read below for information about Early Access.

What Is Hogwarts Legacy?

Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world RPG set in the world of Harry Potter. It takes place in and around the magical school for witches and wizards Hogwarts and will include spells, flying brooms, monsters and a school filled with students and professors. You play as a fifth-year student who is coming to Hogwarts for the first time—which is very unusual. The story is set a hundred years before the events of the Harry Potter books.

What Kind Of Stuff Can You Do?

Players will attend classes at Hogwarts where they’ll learn new spells and how to make potions as well as other abilities. You can fight magical beasts like dragons and trolls, take a break in the cozy Vivarium (see video below) and go to various nearby locations like the Forbidden Forest and Hogsmeade. You can fully customize your character’s appearance, gender and magical House, and interact with a wide array of NPCs.

Is There Multiplayer?

No, Hogwarts Legacy is a single-player game only.

Can You Play Quidditch?

No, at least not at launch. While you will be able to fly around on a broomstick, Quidditch is not in the game (though it would make a great DLC).

Who Is The Developer Of Hogwarts Legacy?

Avalanche Software has been working on this game for the past few years. The studio is most famous for the toys-to-life game Disney Infinity, though it’s developed dozens of games over the years beginning with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 in 1996.

Early Access Explained

Pre-ordering Hogwarts Legacy’s Collector’s or Digital Deluxe Edition gets you early access to the game before its February 10th release date. Read all about that right here. The PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch versions of the game will not have Early Access.

To pre-order the game, go here.

When Can You Pre-Load?

Pre-loading is available now for PS5 and Xbox Series X if you have Early Access, or February 8th if you don’t. There is no pre-load for PC though it should be downloadable when Early Access begins.

What’s The Game’s File Size?

The game is roughly 77GB on Xbox Series X, 80GB on PS5 and 85GB on PC.

When Do Reviews Drop?

The review embargo lifts today, Monday February 6th. Not all reviewers got early codes, however, with many review codes going out today or this week. You should get a good sense of what early critics think of the game today, however. I’ll have my impressions out either this evening or this week prior to launch here on this blog and on my YouTube channel (so subscribe to both!)

Edit: Reviews are in and they are solid.

What Are The Game’s PC System Requirements?

Read all about the PC requirements for Hogwarts Legacy right here.

Watch The Latest Trailer

Finally we come to the game’s launch trailer. This should get you in the mood for some good wholesome wizarding fun:

If you want to learn more about the controversy surrounding Hogwarts Legacy, I made a video discussing this very thing which you can watch right here. My best advice, however, is to try to separate the politics and the game as much as possible and just play and have fun.

Update:

PC Technical Problems

An array of technical problems faced Early Access PC players today, lending credence to the notion that Early Access–while a paid privilege for pre-order customers of the Collector’s and Digital Deluxe Editions of Hogwarts Legacy–are often little more than canaries in the coal mine.

The first technical issue to greet PC players on Steam was the inability to actually launch the game when Early Access began at 10am PT / 1pm ET. The ‘Play’ button was grayed out even when the game was downloaded. For me, simply restarting Steam did the trick and I was able to login to my PC copy of the game (I was playing on PS5 but soon realized it would be a competition between myself and my children for play time!).

Others were not so lucky. It appears that anyone who purchased a key from a third-party retailer, such as GreenManGaming.com where you can buy the game, at launch, for a discount, were having trouble loading in. According to some gamers, product support told them that Warner Bros Interactive had failed to activate the Early Access keys for these customers. Regardless, some mix-up between Steam and Warner Bros. happened and it wasn’t until several hours after Early Access began that many PC players were able to actually play.

Frustrations continued when PC performance ended up being fairly bad for many players. I experienced stuttering and framerate dips, and when I tested out ray-tracing my FPS dove into unplayable territory–despite having a fairly high-end gaming PC with an RTX 3080 GPU and an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU with 32GB of RAM and fast SSD drives. Turning off ray-tracing and changing the settings from Ultra to High ended up working wonders, however, and my game is running without a hitch now. The graphical hit is minimal, and I plan on increasing specific settings from High to Ultra one by one.

You can see my tips for improving your game’s performance right here.

Controversy Intensifies

Beyond this, the game has sparked enormous controversy online where both sides of the J.K. Rowling and transgender debate are lobbing grenades at one another. Protestors have boycotted the game and gone after streamers who stream it. But this has done little to slow Hogwarts Legacy’s momentum. Already, the Wizarding World game has broken Twitch’s single-player streaming records with over 1.2 million viewers tuning in to streams today.

Most gaming outlets have chosen to take a nuanced approach to reviewing the game, setting aside the controversy and judging it on its own merits, while still making note of the controversial positions of the Harry Potter author. Others have dug their heels in, refusing to write reviews (but continuing to get hate-clicks by posting myriad anti-Hogwarts Legacy pieces).

I fall into the first camp. I acknowledge that Rowling is controversial and remain baffled by her decision to wade into one of the most toxic debates on the internet when she could just spend her days writing more Wizarding novels and giving her money away to charities for the needy. Staking her legacy on such a divisive issue is strange, but here we are. I am not giving up Harry Potter or Hogwarts Legacy because some people despise her so much. I prefer, at least in this case, to separate the art from the artist and enjoy the hard work and imagination that the game developers clearly poured into the open-world RPG.

I will have a review/impressions piece later this week after I spend a couple more days exploring Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, the Forbidden Forest and unraveling the mysteries of the game’s exciting story. I hope you enjoy the game, too, or if you’re boycotting it, I hope you can find something else magical to play. We all need a little magic.

Watch Part 1 of my Hogwarts Legacy playthrough below:

As always, I’d love it if you’d follow me here on this blog and subscribe to my YouTube channel and my Substack so you can stay up-to-date on all my TV, movie and video game reviews and coverage. Thanks!