With a new year comes new news, this time in the form of a potential hint at next-gen features in the Hogwarts Legacy. The official Unreal Engine YouTube channel dropped a sizzle reel on New Year’s Eve showcasing a wide variety of games, and Hogwarts Legacy featured front and center.
Sadly there were no new shots in the sizzle reel; all the scenes shown from Hogwarts Legacy were pulled from the original launch trailer — we once again saw Hogwarts Castle, the great hall, and the sorting ceremony, as well as action scenes with the troll, spider, Graphorn, and dragon.
So what does this mean for Hogwarts Legacy? Possibly nothing, but here at Muggle Studies we’re hoping that there is a possibility that the game is migrated to the upcoming Unreal 5 engine once it becomes available. Unreal has said that they are making it easy for game developers to move their projects into the new engine when it releases in 2021, and we still don’t have a release date for Hogwarts Legacy yet, so a move to the new engine is still feasible.
The lighting in the game is already fairly impressive
There are some pretty awesome features of Unreal Engine 5 that we would love to see in Hogwarts Legacy, including:
Nanite – “Virtualized micropolygon geometry” is a really fancy way of saying that digital artists can make their graphics ultra detailed, and the engine can run it. We’d personally love to see Hogwarts rendered in as much detail as possible. Crumbling old stone, worn carpet, the sprawling grass of the grounds — there’s a lot of incredible details and textures that we’ll see in Hogwarts Legacy that could benefit from Nanite.
Lumen – The new lighting tech in UE5 renders light in real time down to the millimeter, and up to the kilometer range. With all the flash and sparkle in the spellcasting we’re sure to see, having next-gen lighting features would really make magic shine.
Chaos – The physics and destruction tech in EU5 is impressive, and given that we’ve already seen some potential for destroying environments with magic in Hogwarts Legacy, it seems like a perfect pairing.
Just imagine it… this level of detail, but Hogwarts Castle!
All that being said, Hogwarts Legacy is being released on last-gen consoles as well as on PC, PS5 and XBox Series X, so one wonders how truly next-gen the game will be if Avalanche Software is ensuring it can run on older machines. Additionally, the game has been in development for quite awhile, and if it is truly going to release in 2021, there wouldn’t be much time to actually take advantage of the new engine’s features before the game was released. But hey, we can dream, right?
Would you want Avalanche to take some extra time to move Hogwarts Legacy to the new Unreal 5 engine? Let us know in the comments!
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DanielD
Unabashed FromSoftware fanboy still learning to take his time with games (and everything else, really). The time he doesn't spend on games is spent on music, books, or occasionally going outside.
