Hogwarts Legacy helped significantly in building the legacy of 2023 as the year of poor video game launches. One of many bad performers on day one that we’ve seen these past few months, Portkey Games’ offering hasn’t truly earned the community’s trust in regards to raw performance. It’s little surprise that the May 12 news surrounding Hogwarts Legacy’s release date on the Nintendo Switch has left the community a little worried.
Hogwarts Legacy’s release cycle has been quite tumultuous. The game’s very first target for launch was the latter half of 2021, but it suffered a minor delay of a year and a half to eventually hit the shelves in February 2023. This was a sign of things to come, as delays would be the name of the game for subsequent ports.
The recently released Hogwarts Legacy ports for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were a month late from their original launch dates, arriving on May 5. The huge positive of this delay is that it was totally worth it. Hogwarts Legacy is an excellent old-gen experience, which makes the one month wait feel like a minor sacrifice.
But what about several months of delay for a port on a much weaker platform? That’s the current situation with the Nintendo Switch version of Hogwarts Legacy, and it’s not making fans happy. What was speculated for the past few days was confirmed by an official tweet: Hogwarts Legacy on Nintendo Switch is being delayed from July 25 to November 14.
Related: Hogwarts Legacy has finally fixed one of its most annoying issues
Fans’ reaction can be summarized in a single word: uncertainty. Most commenters on social media can’t grasp how a game as visually impressive and hardware-demanding as Hogwarts Legacy could be successfully ported to the much weaker hardware of the Nintendo Switch. Some harsh, albeit admittedly funny “screenshots” from the Switch version of Legacy show what some players expect to see on November 14.
One comment even went so far as to say that Hogwarts Legacy will need actual magic to run well on Nintendo Switch. Ouch.
The port is most definitely a tough challenge for the developers, as evidenced by the lengthy delay, and pulling it off would be a tremendous achievement. On the other hand, the PS4/Xbox One versions proved that the port in Portkey Games doesn’t stand for nothing, so Switch fans can feel at least a little hopeful that their version of Hogwarts Legacy will look much better than Twitter memes suggest.
