Why i Regret Buying Hogwart's Legacy

So I've been playing Hogwarts Legacy for a

few days now. I decided to buy the deluxe

version, which costs £60 or $72, so I

could get access to the early access, and

I felt pretty sure that I would like the

game. But after playing it for a few days

now, I don't really know if I feel like

I'm getting good value for my money, and I

kind of regret buying the game. One of the

most annoying things about the game is how

damn long it takes until the tutorial and

the hand-holding part of the intro of the

game finishes, and then you can finally

get into the main meat of the game. I

think it took me about 4 hours of having

to be taught how to play the game, being

handheld, being told to go here, go there,

go to this class, go talk to this person

to learn this basic spell. And it was

really frustrating because I'm not an

idiot. I've been playing games for decades

now. I know how the fundamentals of an RPG

works. The game treats you as if you've

never played a game before, as if you're

an idiot. And I was trying to do it as

fast as I could. I was skipping the

cutscenes and the dialogue, and still it

took me nearly 4 hours until the actual

main meat of the game started to begin and

the hand-holding ended and I could just do

what I wanted to do. There's so many

different teachers and they all have like

this introduction where they teach you

about what you need to do and what to do

in Hogwarts and how to get around and

where your common room is. And I was

getting so bored I nearly quit the game

because I thought, is this it? Is the

whole game just like being told what to do

by teachers and having to go here and go

there? Where's the freedom? It wasn't

until nearly 4 hours in then the freedom—

feeling of freedom actually started to

begin in the game and I started to have

actual fun. So in order to unlock new

spells, you have to go and learn learn

them from a classroom in Hogwarts, which

kind of makes sense. But basically all of

these classrooms where you got to learn

things are just like a bunch of gimmicky

minigames. When you learn a new spell,

you've got to guide your mouse cursor

through this line and press buttons to

speed up whilst this red light chases you.

And if you get caught by the red light,

you fail and have to do it again. When you

pick locks, you've got to do this minigame

where you have to align segments in like a

circular pattern. It just makes you feel

like this entire game is just like a load

of gimmicky minigames involving magic. I

also don't like you're forced to wear

things you don't really want to wear. So

in this game, you can change your gear and

you can change your outfit, but the gear

and the clothing have stats. So obviously

you want to equip the gear that has the

best stats, but I want to wear the

traditional Hogwarts robe, and I want to

not have to wear stupid-looking hats,

because when you wear a hat, it hides your

hairstyle. And I don't want to wear

glasses because it looks nerdy. But then

sometimes I get kind of stuck because the

enemies are too tough, so I need to boost

my stats by wearing an outfit that that

looks kind of ugly. A lot of the outfits

in the game do look very brown and dull

and don't look very magical or very

Hogwarts-y. There's no easy way to switch

between different outfits. For example,

it would have been nice if you could just

press one button and create one outfit for

walking around and one outfit for combat

when you really need it. Even better, it

would have been good if they did what they

do in Cyberpunk where you can create a

visual look for your outfits, but it

actually has the stats of gear that you

don't really like the look of. As for the

combat of the game, I kind of had mixed

emotions about it. At first it just felt

kind of spammy, like all you had to do was

spam different spells at the enemies and

they would go down. But as you get further

into the game, the enemies do get tougher

and you do have to use more efficient ways

of taking them down. But then when you get

a few spells like the fire spells, you

realize that it's really easy to take down

the enemies and you quickly find yourself

just repeating the same spells over and

over again in the same order because it's

the most effective. And this makes the

combat feel kind of repetitive. I found

the easiest way to take down enemies was

to do the magnetic pull spell and then

Incendio, which is a short-range fire

spell, and then I'd do Confringo, which is

a longer-range fire spell, and then just

spam basic attack at them until they go

down. And this works for basically any

enemy in the game that I've encountered so

far. I'm playing the game on hard

difficulty because I like to have a bit of

challenge in video games, and still I'm

able to take down groups of enemies that

are like 6 or 7 levels above me. It's kind

of silly how easy the game can be. And the

one thing that really breaks the combat is

going invisible and using the Petrify

spell. So in this game, there is a spell

that makes you go completely invisible,

and it's very hard to get detected unless

you walk right in front of an enemy. And

if you go into an enemy camp and there's

like 5 or 6 of the goblins or guards or

whatever, all you have to do is go around

and one by one turn them into stone using

the Petrify spell. Just press it once,

they turn to stone, drop to the floor,

and then disappear. It kind of makes just

fighting them using fire spells and any

spells you have kind of meaningless,

because why would I fight these enemies 5

versus 1 when I'm just spamming basic

attacks and trying to use my spells and

trying to use my defenses and trying to

survive and not get hit, when all I have

to do is just press one button to go

invisible and then press another button

just to turn them into stone? I don't

really enjoy stealth games. I don't want

to sneak around and have to do like

stealth attacks. I want to rush in and and

use my amazingly devastating spells and

blow them up and blow them to pieces. But

the game just kind of makes it so easy as

a stealther, it kind of makes you think

there's no point doing this any other way.

Next, I want to talk about the PC

optimization of the game and how poor it

is. So I'm running a Razer Blade Pro

gaming laptop, 17-inch, RTX 3060, 16GB of

RAM with a Core i7 10th generation CPU.

This is a pretty expensive laptop. It cost

me £1,800, which is which is over $2,000.

I bought it 2 years ago in 2021, so okay,

it's not exactly a brand new

state-of-the-art laptop with RTX 4060,

but it is a pretty high-end laptop. And

for some reason, my computer is struggling

to run this game at higher settings. I can

play every other AAA game like Elden Ring

or Warhammer Darktide at ultra maxed out

graphics and have good FPS, but for some

reason I have such a stuttery experience

playing Hogwarts Legacy even when I have

graphics turned to low, it still doesn't

really play completely buttery smooth and

I'm getting frame rate drops. You can

probably see in my gameplay footage that

it does suffer from a lot of frame rate

drops, a lot of stuttering and lagging,

especially when I'm running around

Hogwarts School very quickly and the game

is frantically trying to load the map in

Hogwarts before I get there. It doesn't

really feel like a completely open world

game. You can tell that the game is

loading different segments of the map. If

you rush into one of the doors, you'll see

like a little buffering loading circle

thing because you've run too fast before

the game has had a chance to get ready the

next area of the map that you're about to

go into. It's just kind of weird why the

game seems to struggle so much on my

laptop because I played Cyberpunk 2077 and

I maxed out the graphics on that. And

that's also an open world. And I'm pretty

sure the map in Cyberpunk is a lot bigger

than the Hogwarts Legacy map. Also, the

map in Cyberpunk is much more detailed and

has way more NPCs walking around and

driving cars and doing stuff, and there's

random fights happening. In comparison,

the open world in Hogwarts Legacy is just

like a big empty forest with mountains and

lakes and countryside. It's very pretty to

look at, but there's not much going on

apart from a couple of spiders wandering

here and there. So there's not really a

lot going on that should make the game

stutter and lag so much, apart from in

Hogwarts where there are a lot of NPC

students wandering around. So I don't

think they've optimized the game for PC

very well. It looks very smooth and great

on PS5 and consoles, But I think they need

to release some patches to fix the PC

version. I know Cyberpunk is an older game

and it's had a couple of years for the

devs to fix things and improve the bugs

and glitches and the performance, but I

don't want to have to wait like 2 years

for Hogwarts Legacy to finally be playable

on PC without being a stuttering mess. So

as of right now, I don't know if I can

recommend the game on PC. I kind of wish I

had a PS5 to play it on because it looks

like it runs a lot better.