Hogwarts Legacy is easily one of the biggest success stories in gaming in the last few years, a totally new series (albeit based on a big IP) that has sold over 30 million copies at this point, previously having beat out its launch year’s Call of Duty, an extremely rare feat.
Now, Bloomberg is reporting that a big, unannounced expansion for the game, set to release this year with a “Definitive Edition” of the game, is cancelled.
This is confusing, as we couldn’t have been more than half a year or so away from this launching, and presumably a bunch of it has already been developed. But the report says the total amount of content did not match the cost of the expansion. Cost-cutting has been a theme as of late with WB, having cancelled its previously announced Wonder Woman game and closing that studio. It began laying off Rocksteady devs after the disastrous Suicide Squad release,
This is somewhat reminiscent of what happened with GTA 5, a game that sold an incredible amount of copies and had some single player DLC planned, but ultimately it was all scrapped in favor of GTA Online and pumping out content for that instead. That did in fact work out quite well, but in the case of Hogwarts Legacy, there’s no online component to fall back to, much to David Zaslav’s dismay.
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On the other hand I…can sort of understand this. The reason being is that there is a Hogwarts Legacy sequel in development that was greenlit the moment WB realized the game was going to be a hit. Releasing an expansion two and a half years after the game arrived instead of just throwing all that effort and money into the already in-development sequel does not seem like the craziest decision ever. That said, if this was going to happen, it probably should have been killed well before this.
One of the most pressing questions about the Hogwarts Legacy sequel is, well, are they doing Hogwarts again? The original game dove deep into the school and its surrounding landscape, and it was the central location for all the books. Do you just use that same zone and layer a new story on top of it? The game dipped briefly into other locations like Azkaban, but it would be surprising to see a game avoid Hogwarts itself in any meaningful way. But that raises some questions about how it will be handled. But no, no expansion, which will no doubt disappoint some.
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