The upcoming game Hogwarts Legacy is still a bit obscure, in that the developers haven’t provided much pre-release material for users to go on. So in the absence of such, they’re speculating about possible gameplay mechanics, and Reddit users have hit upon a great idea: A morality system, or something like it, that allows users to be a dark or evil wizard, as opposed to a more morally upright one. Going by the results of a recent poll, gamers would really be into it.
The Reddit poll by user abKromi has accrued over 1000 votes and offers just two options: Good Wizard and Evil Wizard. In the comments, you can find several users who profess interest in becoming dark wizards. There are a surprising amount of people who want to play a wizard who does not necessarily fall into the classic hero position that the morally pure Harry Potter does. It sort of falls into the same category of questions as to why any potential Hogwarts student would want to be sorted into Slytherin — turns out there are quite a lot of readers/movie watchers who would fit right in with the crafty house of Salazar.
As the Reddit user points out, what little we’ve seen of the game so far implies that players might be able to choose a moral stance, or at least will be put into a position where they have to make moral choices. We won’t know until the game launches, hopefully sometime next year.
Granted, at the time of this writing the “Good Wizard” option was winning out because Harry Potter is fundamentally a children’s story and children’s stories are about good triumphing over evil and all that. But still, the fact that it’s not a landslide victory for Good proves there’s room in the fandom — and potentially in Hogwarts Legacy — for shades of moral grey.