Hogwarts Legacy gameplay showcase delivers broom flight, combat, beast care

Hogwarts Legacy developer Avalanche Software hosted a second extended gameplay showcase that delivered new looks at broom flight, Dark Arts combat, beast care, and the Room of Requirement.

Starting with flying those brooms, players can take off from anywhere in the open world. Flying closer to the ground will let you keep up your maximum speed, but as you get further from the ground, your max speed meter will decrease. However, you can both customize and upgrade brooms, including increasing the height at which you can fly at max speed. If you prefer riding a beast over a broom, you can also call in your hippogriff and use it to travel by land or air.

Throughout the massive open Scottish Highlands, players can discover new areas of interests, such as hamlets that offer gameplay opportunities such as side quests and puzzles. Players will also encounter enemies that will prompt combat challenges for you to complete.

During the demo, Avalanche showed the open world in both fall and winter. As the story progresses, the seasons will change. This may determine which characters you can find throughout the open world or spawn new secrets to discover.

From there, Avalanche gave us a look at a combat arena. In this case, the developers showed off the Dark Arts Arena, which is only available for players who order the deluxe editions of the game or purchase the Dark Arts pack separately. Still, there are two other combat arenas that are available to all players, regardless of what edition they purchase.

Combat arenas spawn waves of enemies for players to fight. Besting the competition will earn players cosmetics that let them show off their accomplishments. In the Dark Arts arena, players will fight other wizards as well as magical creatures, including gigantic trolls. The demo also showed the player using Avada Kedavra, the death curse, though it had a long cooldown after using it so that players can’t just spam it.

Items like potions can also be used in combat. Some potions, like the rock skin potion, increases defense against attacks, while the focus potion decreases cooldown times. You can also use physical items during combat. For example, players can whip out a mandrake to stun enemies with their piercing shrieks.

The demo then transported us to the Room of Requirement, where players can customize their characters and upgrade their gear. Players can also customize the Room itself by conjuring decorative items like furniture and rugs, as well as changing the actual architecture of the room with several presets. While certain gear will have better stats, you can customize the cosmetics of the gear to whichever look you like best.

Finally, we got a look at beast care. Here, you will find the magical beasts that you rescue throughout the course of the game and care for them. Not only can you play with creatures like Mooncalfs, Kneazles, Niflers, and Graphorns, but caring for them will net you materials that lets you upgrade your gear and give them unique attributes.

You can watch the entire gameplay showcase below:

The latest Hogwarts Legacy showcase comes soon after Avalanche announced that it delayed the last-gen and Switch versions of the game to April and July 2023 respectively. The current-gen and PC versions will still launch on February 10th, 2023. The previous showcase gave us an extended tour of Hogwarts itself.