The PS4 and Xbox One versions of Hogwarts Legacy have been delayed by a month and are now slated to launch on May 5th, and the aging of last-gen machines has fans suspicious. We may not be looking at PS1 Hagrid, but it may not be far off.
It’s normal for many games to be released on both old and new platforms during a generational shift, but the period of cross-gen releases has been particularly long on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S. You can speculate on many reasons why – maybe the supply issues that plagued the new machines made developers reluctant to cut off the install base of the old consoles, or maybe multi-generational scaling is easier with modern development processes – but we might end up doing it be of the way.
“Time to put the last generation to bed,” says TX_Sized10-4 (opens in a new tab) on Reddit, lamenting the lag of the last generation of Hogwarts Legacy. “Trying to force games into the limitations of 10-year-old hardware either hampers them on new hardware or makes them a painful experience on old hardware.”
“If you’re still complaining that the old-gen port is awful at release, that’s honestly up to you,” adds JPA17 (opens in new tab), saying, “All indications are that he’s not great, which is entirely to be expected given how old the last generation is at this point.”
You can reach out to the likes of lazymutant256 (opens in new tab) for the drastic option: “I know it’s unpopular to say this at this point, but I think it’s time to think about it to cancel these versions.”
We’ve seen games like God of War Ragnarok and Forza Horizon 5 scale well on older hardware, but we’ve also seen utter disasters like the last-gen versions of Cyberpunk 2077. Old-gen versions of games like Marvel’s Midnight Suns have that seemingly stuck in limbo, too.
To put the age of this hardware in historical perspective, 2023 will mark the tenth anniversary of the launch of PS4 and Xbox One. A decade after the launch of the NES, we were playing 3D revolutions like Super Mario 64. A decade after Super Mario 64, we were embroiled in massive open-world games like Oblivion. A decade later brought us to The Witcher 3 and Uncharted 4.
Technological leaps are a lot less noticeable these days than they used to be, but there’s a big difference between, say, the PS5 and PS4, and it looks like even gamers are starting to appreciate the difficulties and implications of multi-generational development understand. If expectations are so low for the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Hogwarts Legacy, what will this Switch port look like?
The release of Hogwarts Legacy has been the subject of criticism and debate due to JK Rowling’s public stance on gender identity, which continues to question inclusivity at the heart of the Harry Potter community. Here’s our explainer on the Hogwarts legacy controversy.
