We’re a few days away from the official release of Hogwarts Legacy, the highly-anticipated but controversial video game that promises unfettered access to the fictional school as one of its students. There’s a problem though, one that’s fairly common for games like this: the PC version is apparently terrible.
Players over on the subreddit r/HarryPotterGame have been lamenting the fact that the game doesn’t run as advertised, and is stricken with bugs and poor frame rates. In a recent review, NME called its performance on PC “by far the biggest issue” with the game.
“Walking into certain areas will see trees violently shaking themselves like a malfunctioning Whomping Willow, obscuring vision as the framerate drops into the single digits. Walking into Hogsmeade’s town square early in the game every NPC in the square started to shimmer in and out of existence, flickering wildly as the trees slowly grew and shook until basically nothing could be seen. This was one of the worst moments that we saw in terms of performance, but bugs of that calibre were common during the 20 hours we spent with the game. Many sections had poor framerates, making tough jumping puzzles and combat difficult with unpredictable stuttering.”
That sounds not good. Not good at all. One enterprising Reddit user (and the author of the main post about the issues) posted a video that demonstrated how the game looks on PC. It’s in German but you don’t need to hear, just see.
People are understandably upset, but they’re also aware that this sort of thing happens often with a console release. This person is just going to wait and see:
Someone else pointed out that OP is running the game on a very high end computer and they still are dealing with pretty bad pop-up issues.
It’s almost sad to see PC users simply used to the fact that console games prioritize consoles and not PCs.
One user shared about five reviews of the game from different publications. Here are those summed up:
Some people are hoping for a Day 1 patch.
Fortunately, there is indeed going to be a day one patch, according to gamerevolution. Of course this will probably benefit PC users the most.
“Warner Bros. Games have confirmed that the day one patch will include ray-tracing and performance improvements. Alongside this, we can expect the usual slate of bug fixes. If players purchased a digital copy of Hogwarts Legacy, they need to connect to the internet to install the patch. Digital owners will receive the patch with their initial download.”
The early reviews on Metacritic for the game on PC all seem to like the game despite the technical difficulties, so that’s something. IGN said “It’s certainly weighed down by technical issues, a lackluster main story, and some poor enemy variety, but even those couldn’t come close to breaking its enchanting spell over me.”
All of this will of course be moot if the day one patch takes care of the bugs and frame rate issues. Hogwarts Legacy releases on PC, PS5 and Xbox on February 10. We’ll know more about how it performs then.