It seems that many people wouldn’t mind if some of the changes to Hogwarts Legacy for PS4 were also made for PC.
The real unsung heroes of game development are those whose job it is to run new games on older machines that they weren’t designed for. One last-gen release that seems to have done pretty well is Hogwarts Legacy. The game’s PS4 and Xbox One versions were released on May 5, three months after the PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
A few predictable concessions were made for running the 2023 open-world sandbox game on 2013 boxes, such as lower-resolution textures and fewer decorations adorning the walls of Hogwarts.
But Avalanche Software has also made several clever architectural changes in the name of compatibility. Some of which are arguably nicer than what we got on PC.
As Redditor Euden pointed out, the biggest changes to the PS4 version of Hogwarts Legacy involve Hogwarts Castle itself, from the dozens of footbridges between the towers that usually open onto the world to the last-gen enclosed corridors. Fresh air has been replaced here with windows and ceilings that don’t exist elsewhere. An understandable change to limit the game’s loading requirements. However, Avalanche seems to have made the best of it. Some of these new tunnels are lined with beautiful stained glass windows, which is quite spectacular.
Of course, there is a downside to all of this. The stained-glass corridors may look nice. However, the problem is that almost all the corridors, bridges and hallways that used to be open to the outside world are now closed off. It’s as if Hogwarts is in a constant snowstorm…
If you scroll through Euden’s other PS4/PS5 snapshots, you’ll also discover doors around the castle that don’t exist in the current generation version. The corridors, which you can usually see all the way through, are interrupted by loading doors. That’s the price you pay to get your PS4/Xbox One to tackle rendering a new piece of the castle.
Some doors that generally open when you walk through them now require a full loading screen to move from one place to another (an unintentional throwback to the old PS2 Harry Potter games).
When you hit such a loading screen, feel free to bring yourself a snack. According to Digital Foundry, it can take 40-70 seconds to load an open world or quickly navigate a map. That’s about how Skyrim ran on PS3.
That said, it’s to be commended that Hogwarts Legacy is pretty much the same game on PS4 as it is on a modern PC. On consoles, it runs fine (a spotty 30 fps) and achieves the same large-scale sandbox. It manages to recreate the intricacies of the towers, corridors and classrooms at Hogwarts. Now the question is what the delayed Switch version will look like…
More Platform Hogwarts Differences between PS4 & PS5! (PS4/PS5)
by u/Euden in HarryPotterGame
Leave a Reply