Lord of the Rings Open-World Game Could Succeed Where Hogwarts Legacy Failed

Few could have foreseen just how successful Hogwarts Legacy was going to be for Portkey Games and parent company Warner Bros., even bearing in mind the existing popularity of Harry Potter and its tangential franchises.

PlayStation recently announced that it's one of the three most played single-player games on the platform to this day, with players spending millions of hours exploring every nook and cranny.

That said, there were plenty of things wrong with the game that could easily have been improved upon if they had the time over, much of which likely came down to particularly stringent deadlines for release.

Now, given confirmation towards the end of last year that an open-world Lord of the Rings game was on the way, it has the chance to really nail down the areas where Hogwarts Legacy didn't achieve success.

Shadow of Mordor

Lord of the Rings is Much More at Home in an Open-World

One of the biggest criticisms of Hogwarts Legacy was the open world that players were given to explore. The school itself was a very impression rendition of a place that we have all seen a million times before, with plenty of interactive features and changing elements that keep things interesting.

Outside of that, the world the developers created is pretty boring on the whole, with Hogsmeade serving as a vaguely interesting locale in an otherwise pretty barren area of land (even if it is nice to look at).

The developers behind the upcoming Lord of the Rings release have a body of work behind them which has considerably more accomplished world building. If there's one thing Tolkien excelled at beyond everything else, it was his ability to cram the world of Middle-earth full of exciting locations and histories that would be a pleasure to see in a new game.

At the same time, it's a considerably more varied world that should feel fresh to explore for a lot longer. Even games like Shadow of War, which largely take place in one portion of Middle-earth, show just how varied the world of Arda can be.

Hogwarts Legacy also suffers from bloated gameplay that requires players to complete very repetitive tasks. Rather than giving players a bunch of stuff to do for the sake of it, there's so much existing lore in Lord of the Rings that they could give us 200 hours of gameplay without us ever having to repeat anything.

A modern open-world Lord of the Rings game has the potential to blow Hogwarts Legacy out of the water, and as a fan, I'm really hoping it does.