The latest news is that things are not looking good for Warner Bros. Games, which wants to focus on major, profitable licenses in the future, but also continues to look at service games to try to boost its coffers. Particularly anticipated, Hogwarts Legacy 2 should, on paper, take us back to Hogwarts for a good dose of magic. A recent job offer at Avalanche Software, however, risks dividing fans of the original game. We take a closer look.
Hogwarts Legacy 2: Hogwarts Royale?
Released in 2023, Hogwarts Legacy was a phenomenal success, even becoming the best-selling game of that year, despite its exclusively single-player focus. Last November, Avalanche Software officially announced Hogwarts Legacy 2, along with the first details about it. Naturally, we'll be returning to Hogwarts, still in the shoes of a student. But it could be that Warner Bros. Games isn't escaping its old demons and intends to integrate game-as-a-service elements. At least, that's what we can gather from a job ad for a Lead Narrative Designer at Avalanche Software.
Among the responsibilities of this position, which targets Hogwarts Legacy 2, we can read the following: "Integrating the story into multiplayer systems," as well as explicit keywords that might raise some eyebrows like "PvP," "matchmaking," and "game-as-a-service." The offer also reveals that "some narrative elements of the game would be told through these multiplayer elements."
To an as yet undetermined extent, Hogwarts Legacy 2 seems to be heading in a direction that scared fans, who had launched a petition to "save" the game from an attempt to turn it into a service game. However, it remains to be seen how these multiplayer elements will be integrated. Will we get a single-player only section, and a side section open to multiplayer? Or will the whole game be a sort of MMO set in Hogwarts? Time will tell, and we may still have to wait a few years before we see what will truly happen to Hogwarts Legacy 2.
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