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| Her looks aren't exactly right, but close enough. |
Yes, after a purchase on sale from what seems like an age ago, I finally got around to creating a toon or two for Hogwarts Legacy.
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| This is... actually pretty close to what I'd look like back then. The hair would have been not quite so wavy, but the coloring and shape of the face are about right. Can't turn those glasses into 80s style metal frames, however. (I went with Miller because it's a pretty generic name.) |
The irony is that while I first created a toon that looked like me --not out of vanity, but just something I do because I can't not make decisions as if I were doing them-- I went full Mage and created Cardwyn, as if she were plucked out of Azeroth and dropped straight into the Wizarding World.
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| See? I got her hair right! |
If she were 15 or 16 years old, that is.* The story begins with you as a new student going to Hogwarts, but with the specific tweak that you're a Fifth Year student, something almost never done before. I suspect this plot device was conceived to not spread out the plot too much. If you're a First Year student, your abilities are a bit limited, and Portkey Games doesn't really have the time to play the long game, plot wise. There's also the additional bonus of being able to insert into the game themes better handled by a mid-late teenager than a tween of 11 or 12.
Although I played through only the Intro Zone (as it were) of the story, I couldn't exactly tell what the time frame for the story was. Given that the visual cues I've seen so far it very much fits within the Steampunk-ish vibe that the original series had, it seems that the Wizarding World doesn't exactly change that much in aesthetic. Meeting M. Weasley at Hogwarts made me think that this was a continuation of the original story, set some years later, but the more I think about it (and the hair design of the students) I think it might be earlier, from anywhere between the late 19th Century to the early 20th Century.
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| Geez, Card, you ought to be able to see the Arcane flows. |
Okay, confession time: I've only read the first four books in the original Harry Potter series. The fifth book had come out when I originally read the first four, but I held off in case there was a cliffhanger at the end of the fifth book. Given that the sixth book was a year away from publication at the time, by the time the sixth book was released I just never got back into reading the series. Given that there apparently was a cliffhanger at the end of the sixth book, it's probably for the best that I stopped reading the series when I did. I don't take cliffhangers well.
Still, I was interested enough in the worldbuilding behind the series --whether it was created by the seat of her pants or not-- to see what Portkey did with the world.
That's not a really good excuse to buy a game, especially one with a premium cost such as this one. I'll readily admit that. However, it's also a third person single player RPG in a development paradigm where more and more RPGs are either isometric or first person. Looking at all of the RPGs that I'd love to play that I simply can't --Cyberpunk 2077 and The Outer Worlds to name two-- it's nice to actually have a game that I can play. That it was massively on sale when I bought it (something like 50% or more off) doesn't hurt either.
So we'll see where this leads me. I have no idea when I'll finish it, given that I've not progressed in Baldur's Gate 3 since March 2024 or so, but at least it's an option on the table.
*Having raised three kids, I can tell you those 2-3 years can be quite huge for a person's physical and mental development.
