I Feel Scammed by Hogwarts Legacy's Deluxe Edition

Hogwarts Legacy is officially out, so now it's time to complain about it: I feel scammed by the game's Deluxe Edition "bonus".

Now, I'm going start this off by saying that I'm a total goody-two-shoes; I've come to terms with that — I feel uncomfortable being mean to in-game characters, and I feel morally disgusting if I even consider committing a heinous act in a game. Despite there being several endings to some games, one of which is usually an evil run, I often don't feel comfortable enough if I don't have a halo and a holy light shining from above naming me an honorary angel.

So, naturally, the Deluxe Edition of Hogwarts Legacy is something that I personally didn't much care for: Dark Arts are things I'll likely never touch because I'll feel morally disgusting if I do. The only allure for me and the Deluxe Edition was really the 72-hour early access (and the Thestral mount — I love you).

 

My idea was to jump into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on the 7th of February, and I even cleared my schedule as much as I could to be able to do so. So when I launched the game, started on my quest with Professor Fig, and then lagged to hell and back, I just tried to ignore it and figured it would go away — surely, my old PC just needed a warmup.

But the lag never went away. I arrived at Hogwarts, went through the lacklustre sorting-hat ceremony, and continued to lag. Opening doors took forever as I couldn't reach the other side until it loaded, and even then, I walked in and endured the lag spikes and stutters.

"Fine!", I said defeatedly as I went into the settings and reduced the graphics from Ultra to High. "Blasphemy!", I thought about how my several-year-old computer couldn't run a new-generation title ultrawide in ultra settings — how dare it?!

 

After all the shenanigans had come and gone, I started to realise that it wasn't my PC struggling to run the game but the game itself (how could I ever doubt my PC?). High settings didn't work, so I went to Medium... and then low. By this point, I had given up on Hogwarts Legacy, and I wanted to see just how much I would have to make the game look disgusting before it stopped stuttering. The answer? Never.

I set DLSS to ultra performance and I set the graphics to the lowest-possible setting — the game looked terrible with its textures due to the DLSS setting and still I lagged whenever I walked or encountered anything new at all. Ultimately, Hogwarts Legacy was unplayable.

By the second day of fiddling with settings and seeing if I could get it to run, I decided I was going to wait for a Day One patch — one that should have been released and addressed for the more than half a million gamers that bought the game's Deluxe Edition. I didn't get to enjoy the single bonus I actually cared for, and for that, I feel scammed.

 

Now, if this was an issue isolated to me, I might have felt embarrassed and silly, but my RTX 2080 computer with an i7 9700k processor more than meets the minimum requirements. But when that can’t run a game on low settings with DLSS and 1920x1080 resolution, you know you have a problem at hand. And the worst part? It was a widespread issue that I saw several people complain about.

Thanks to Hogwarts Legacy's atrocious early access launch, I'm not likely to pre-order a game for a bonus like this any time soon.