Hogwarts Legacy Scrapped Morality and Reputation Systems During Development

Upon its launch earlier this year, Hogwarts Legacy received plenty of praise for delivering the full-fledged open world action RPG Harry Potter experience that it did, but there were some omissions in the experience that caught many players’ attention. For instance, even though the game allows players to use the three Unforgivable Curses, they were really unforgivable only in name, with no morality system in place for there to be any consequences to players’ actions.

As it turns out, a morality system was indeed intended to be in the game. As revealed in a video uploaded by dataminer GrandTheftDiamonds (caught by PC Gamer), newly discovered files point to players being penalized and punished in certain ways for a variety of things.

Actions such as extortion, bullying, sleeping and misbehaving in class, and more would result in a deduction of House Points for whichever House you’re in, while other consequences to more serious crimes, like using Unforgivable Curses and murdering people, would see “authority figures” being called in, which presumably would have been the game’s equivalent of a wanted system.

Interestingly, other files found by the dataminer also indicate that developer Avalanche Software had originally also planned to include a reputation system that would dictate how your relationship is faring with characters, with ranks for relationships including Hate, Dislike, Indifferent, Familiar, Cordial, Friendly, and Companion.

Based on all this, it certainly does seem like Avalanche’s original vision for the game would have included a much greater focus on life sim mechanics and open world sandbox systems. Developing games is, of course, an extremely iterative process, and ideas and features getting scrapped is far from an uncommon occurrence- though it should be interesting to see whether Avalanche decides to revisit any of these ideas in a potential sequel- which, given how well the first game is selling, seems like an inevitability at this point.

Hogwarts Legacy is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and launches for the Nintendo Switch on November 14.