Fans who were worried Hogwarts Legacy might be a gameplay experience approaching Elden Ring will surely be heartened by this new information revealed by Portkey Games.

Portkey has explained the difficulty settings for Hogwarts Legacy are based around accommodations for better accessibility. So, if FromSoftware studio head Hidetaka Miyazaki is fond of saying they have taken accessibility into account when making a difficult game, Portkey Games have taken the direct approach and just allow you to switch between the four difficulty settings. You can do this at any point in the game, so if you prefer the challenge of some parts of the game over others, you can handpick which portions you play more of and which ones you essentially skip on.

Portkey Games has further clarified how this difficulty – accessibility dichotomy works when it comes to spell casting. So, casting spells comes in the form of a mini-game . While Portkey Games did not elaborate, it would be easy to guess that this is something akin to games like Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color, Okami, or The Wonderful 101. All of these games have a doodle game mechanic, where you have to create a shape in the middle of an action game segment. That would be a simulation of the motions that wizards and witches make with their wands to cast their spells.

Now, of all the games mentioned above, literally only The Wonderful 101 eased the difficulty factor by having you draw the shapes on a touch screen, on the Wii U. Unfortunately, that idea didn’t become popular, even if it objectively makes mini-games like this easier. As a result, it’s unlikely that we will see this implemented on, say, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, even if the DualSense and DualShock 4 are perfectly capable of accepting inputs like it.

But at least Avalanche Software’s solution is, again, no nonsense and straightforward. At the lowest difficulty, you will always pull off the spell you intended to execute. It sounds like this is not an actual skip on the mini-game, but instead a straightforward built in cheat.

Some players may question why these accommodations are even here, but I think Portkey Games knows exactly what they’re doing. Many of Hogwarts Legacy’s players won’t be hardcore gamers, so much as they are Harry Potter fans. This promise of living the life of a Hogwarts student also has appeal for them. To make the game enjoyable for these players too, Portkey needs to add options so they can play more of the parts they want.

Hogwarts Legacy will release on February 10, 2023, for the PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S. It will also be released on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch later this year. 

Source: Aroged