How will we live without an exclusive quest and a Felix Felicis Potion Recipe?
(Image credit: Portkey Games, Warner Bros.)
In an August 26 Twitter thread (opens in new tab) clarifying the different versions of Hogwarts Legacy (opens in new tab) and what comes with them, the game’s official account revealed that PlayStation editions of the game “come with an exclusive quest,” while pre-orders of PlayStation editions also get the vaunted “Felix Felicis Potion Recipe” of Harry Potter lore.
My knee-jerk reaction is to be frustrated with platform exclusive content, but you can almost guess the character of what’s on offer. An NPC who maybe only has idle dialogue in other versions of the game will have some kind of collect-a-thon for you with quest rewards that are kind of OP in the early to mid game. Maybe they’ll even send you to a bespoke dungeon if it’s on the higher end of things. We’ll know more soon, I guess.
Full-on console exclusivity is becoming more and more a thing of the past, but small bits of DLC tied to different consoles and promotions are still stubbornly holding on, remnants of 2010 in 2022.
Long before Bungie was acquired by Sony, Destiny had some exclusive goodies for PlayStation players—a great gun (opens in new tab) or two (opens in new tab) here, an okay Strike (opens in new tab) there. It was never anything earth shattering, and all of the exclusive stuff eventually made its way to other platforms a year or two down the line. Meanwhile, fellow live service game Marvel’s Avengers has Spider-Man forever platform-locked to PlayStation.
The same year as Destiny, Konami double-dipped in platform exclusivity with Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes missions specially made (opens in new tab) for PlayStation and Xbox. On PS4, players got an extra side mission in which Big Boss recreates scenes from MGS1 on the Ground Zeroes map (kinda boring). Xbox pulled the longer straw with a mission starring Metal Gear Revengeance’s Raiden tasked with killing “Body Snatcher” enemies from the 1988 Kojima game Snatcher (sick). Thankfully, all of this content eventually made its way to the PC version.
It wasn’t a console exclusive, but in the same spirit, Mass Effect 2’s coolest helmet, the Recon Hood (opens in new tab), was an exclusive Dr Pepper promotion requiring you to enter a code from a bottle cap. I love Dr Pepper, but I missed out, so I wound up keeping a cracked download for the Recon Hood on my hard drive for 10 years until the Legendary Edition released with all the DLC.
And that absurd little experience really cuts to the core of things here: will we on PC be that much less spiritually fulfilled, deprived as we are of the Harry Potter sidequest to find all of Bloody Bernie Boffo’s Every Flavored Beans in exchange for a green rarity wand that makes Hogwarts Legacy’s first boss slightly easier? Not really, but the concept is just exhausting to even think about. Trying to understand the rest of Hogwarts Legacy’s version differences is similarly tedious.
Whatever happened to $60 for a manual, a cloth map, and an honest day’s gaming? I guess that $300 electromagnetic floating wand edition (opens in new tab) of Legacy is cool, if you’re into that kind of thing.