While most adventure and RPG titles love putting you in the hero role, some let you be the bad guy. Or, you can choose to do more criminal things throughout the main story and see how it affects the plot and your interactions with certain characters. But how far you can go depends on the game’s team. For Hogwarts Legacy, it’d be very easy to think that there would be a hard line for you to fall on if you wanted to be a dark witch or wizard within the world. But that’s not the case.
In an interview with GamesRadar, the team revealed that you have that option if you want to go down the path of a dark witch or wizard. Furthermore, they felt it was vital to have that option:
“It was important for us to give players who sought out to be a Dark Witch or Wizard an opportunity to do so,” noted lead designer, Kelly Murphy. “This is the ultimate embodiment of role-playing; allowing the player to be evil. Additionally, this was important because it comes from a place of non-judgement by the game creators. If you want to be evil, be evil.”
If you’re curious about what you’ll be able to do through the “evil path,” a preview done by the GamesRadar team noted that you could kill people with relative ease. Their team was dealing with poachers in one mission, and they launched an explosive barrel at them. As you can guess, those poachers weren’t around once the barrel blew up!
It was previously revealed that students in the game could learn the three Unforgivable Curses. In the books, these curses are outlawed by civilized wizard society due to their impact on people. So being able to wield them in the game is a choice that will define the plot and the impact you have on characters.
To that end, it was noted by the team that you won’t learn the three dark curses in a classroom. You’ll have to learn them elsewhere. But even if you learn them, you don’t have to use them. It’s always your choice. However, if you do use them, and you use them in front of others, it’ll affect their perception of you and the world’s perception of you.
So as the team said if you want to go down the dark path, by all means! You might even do a dual-path run where you go and be a good witch/wizard one run and then a dark one the next. Hogwarts Legacy arrives on February 10th.
