Hogwarts Legacy boasts a tiring amount of content
A completionist run in the wizarding world will set you back 120 hours
I hope you like sprawling fantasy worlds that will suck up endless hours of your life, because that seems to be exactly the experience Hogwarts Legacy is gunning toward.
The upcoming spellcasting RPG, which has already skyrocketed to the top of Steam’s best-selling games list, will reportedly feature around 120 hours of content in total, although you’ll get away with sinking less time into it if you ignore the optional quests.
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Hogwarts Legacy length
⌛ It sounds like Hogwarts Legacy will be a very, very long game
👍 Expect to spend around 40 hours on your first-time playthrough
🤨 And up to 120 hours on a completionist run
🤔 But does a long game always mean a good game? Not really
Speaking to Gamereactor, lead designer Kelly Murphy said the team is finding it “hard to put a number” on the game’s length, but gave a ballpark estimate: “For a first-time playthrough, if you just go through the mainline, you are looking at a 40-hour plus experience. If you decide that you want to do everything, you are at over 100 hours – 120 hours probably.”
“Anecdotally, I've worked on the game for six years, and I've played through it multiple times, and I have not seen every part of Hogwarts,” he added. “There are parts of Hogwarts, the school, that I haven't even seen.”
Game length has become the subject of contentious debate in the last couple of years. Many publishers are quick to advertise the enormity of their games’ worlds and pitch long playtimes as a consumer feature. The idea is that players get more bang for their buck – more hours on each dollar paid.
Last year, developer Techland boldly proclaimed its parkour zombie slasher Dying Light 2 would feature at least 500 hours of content for those players who wanted to experience everything the game had to offer, but after players expressed frustration at the bloated length, it backtracked to say the main story is only 20 hours long.
Even that’s a pretty big time investment, and I’m not looking forward to Hogwarts Legacy’s 40-hour story very much. That’s a lot of time to sink into a single game. It may well command my attention all the way through, but with so many other titles in my library and back catalog waiting to be played, I can rarely justify dedicating so much time to one game.
Hogwarts Legacy is due to launch on February 10 and is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated PS5 games of 2023 and Xbox Series X games of 2023. It’ll also be coming to PC, and arrive later for the Nintendo Switch on July 25. The PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game will release on April 4.