Harry Potter's Triwizard Tournament Could Make Multiplayer Exhilarating in Hogwarts Legacy
Highlights Hogwarts Legacy’s success as a game was not just due to its popular IP, but also its impressive design and critical reception, dispelling skeptics’ doubts about its potential. The game’s ability to balance faithfulness to the Harry Potter brand with its own unique elements, such as original characters, contributed to its strengths and set it apart. The idea of a multiplayer mode for Hogwarts Legacy or its sequel, potentially centered around a Triwizard Tournament, holds vast potential for expanding the game’s success and offering new gameplay experiences.
Hogwarts Legacy’s sales may not have been a total shocker given the popularity of its IP, but its critical reception and adept design left a lot of skeptics second-guessing their pessimism. A great game that helped set the pace for a generational year in gaming so far, Hogwarts Legacy showcased the talented team at Avalanche and their passion for the Harry Potter brand. With a number of ways the studio could expand on its newfound success, a multiplayer mode for Hogwarts Legacy or its sequel could prove it has the chops to tackle something outside narrative-driven single-player adventure games.
Set a century before the events of Harry Potter, Hogwarts Legacy deftly walked the line between faithfulness to its IP and the freedom to be its own entity. Its biggest selling point was the recreation of treasured locals from the books and films, which Avalanche absolutely nailed, but its characters were created uniquely for the game and present some of the title’s greatest strengths. Expanding on those relationships could be done in different ways, and one out-of-left-field option for a follow-up title could be designing a multiplayer experience, letting another player inhabit a companion or mentor.
Multiplayer for Hogwarts Legacy Has Boundless Possibilities
Looking at possible avenues for a multiplayer mode for Hogwarts Legacy, Avalanche has a wealth of options. From Quidditch to an expanded dueling club all the way to a full-fledged co-op, all are viable options, but perhaps the most intriguing would be a potential Triwizard Tournament in Hogwarts Legacy. The competition between wizarding schools featured in Goblet of Fire could be the perfect opportunity for an event akin to its source material while still being ambiguous enough for Avalanche to make its own.
The layout of the tournament would provide variety in gameplay and a competitive rule set, and being a tournament between the three biggest schools in Europe would provide a perfect opportunity to expand the lore of the game outside the UK. Harry Potter’s Triwizard Tournament is a round-based, point-allocating contest between champions chosen from their representative schools.
Its translation to a game could be a fairly seamless fit, but like all new ideas, novel or otherwise, its inception begs comparison. A video game version of the Triwizard Tournament could take inspiration from a multitude of genres, from sports games and battle royales to mini-game titles and even some elements from extraction shooters.
Maybe the most notable example of a gameplay model that suits a Triwizard Tournament multiplayer mode is Fall Guys. With rounds of varying obstacles, the only major tweak would be distributing points based on rank for each round instead of eliminations, though given the Triwizard Tournament’s perilous nature, elimination could work just as well. Maybe less rounds but a longer duration, and a level-based progression that persists to the end of each match to make it properly distinct.
Avalanche would not have to stick to the script for a Triwizard Tournament mode. Each round could pull from any combination of combat encounters or activities in the game, or it could design entirely new ones around the mode. Elements of it could even be procedurally generated, ratcheting up its replayability. Like the recently released Exoprimal, the start of each match could consist of PvE challenges and culminate in a final where challengers face off against each other.
That route could also keep things competitive into the endgame, as those with early leads could be conquered by being dispatched in the finals. There is a ton of potential for rotating rounds, seasonal content, and even designing a ranked mode or battle pass around the mode. In fact, its premise could be expanded on enough to be a standalone title if Avalanche was so inclined.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch release scheduled for November 14, 2023.