Hogwarts Legacy was already one of the most controversial games set to release in 2023 before its launch. Since February 10th, the game has been available, and reviews on Steam are almost exclusively positive.
Even before the official release, opponents tried to slander the game with false tags on Steam. Here, Valve, the operator behind Steam, had disabled the tagging function to prevent worse issues.
The background of the major controversy surrounding Hogwarts Legacy is the ongoing discussion about the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
Critics view her as a “transphobic, radical feminist” – Rowling fiercely defends herself against this accusation, the situation has escalated further for months.
Thanks to Early Access, some have already been able to play the game on PC and Steam since February 7, 2023, while the official release for everyone else began on February 10. The reactions have been overwhelming.
Game releases on February 10 on Steam, now has 28,000 reviews
What do users say? The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. At this point, over 28,000 people have reviewed the game. The game currently has 94% positive ratings. This is actually not surprising, as even before the release, Hogwarts Legacy was among the bestsellers on Steam.
By now (as of 12.02), the game has over 45,000 ratings and is rated 93% positive.
Many praise the vast game world and that there is so much to discover. Additionally, there aren’t annoying microtransactions or other nasty traps to spend real money at every corner. We have selected a few reviews for you:
- “It’s nice to finally play a game that isn’t a complete disaster at launch. Attention to detail, nostalgic and exciting. Hogwarts Legacy was nearly perfectly implemented in my opinion!”
- “Amazing and one of the best games I’ve played in years! Engaging and designed with so much love for detail. Thanks to the developers, it’s magical and brilliant.”
- “Finally something that isn’t a half-baked, microtransaction-laden live service disaster at launch.”
Is there any criticism? Yes, the performance of the PC version is sometimes very poor and there are significant frame drops. Some have stated that a game at release and priced at 70 euros shouldn’t struggle with such issues.
We also tested the performance in our editorial office and found that especially ray tracing with AMD and Nvidia cards is a major performance killer. If you have problems, turn off ray tracing features under the game options.
Another tip is to turn on DLSS (Nvidia) or FSR 2.0 (AMD). Here, the game is calculated at a lower resolution and then upscaled: for your graphics card, this means less work, but the game still looks just as good.
We had AMD’s FSR 1.0 set, but we would recommend switching to FSR 2.0. This provided us with a significant performance boost.
On the PS5, the performance looks much better, and on the Steam Deck, the game also runs quite stably at around 50 FPS.
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