What’s better than attending classes at Hogwarts, flying around the grounds on a broom, and learning new spells and potions? Doing all that with a friend, of course!
Hogwarts Legacy is giving Harry Potter fans of all ages the chance to explore an open-world version of the fantastical school for the very first time. Students get sorted into one of Hogwarts’ famous houses, master every form of magic, and find themselves in the middle of all sorts of wild magical adventures.
As of right now, Hogwarts Legacy is an entirely single-player experience. That’s by design — since the game’s first marketing material popped up online, developer Avalanche Software has been consistently clear that the game was not designed to have any co-op or online gameplay.
But there’s still hope for multiplayer action at Hogwarts thanks to modders. It’s still in its early days, but an in-progress mod called HogWarp aims to allow for co-op Hogwarts Legacy gameplay for up to eight players. The mod is being worked on by Together Team, a mod team that has successfully brought multiplayer gameplay to Bethesda’s hit fantasy RPG Skyrim in the past with a project called Skyrim Together.
“Our aim is to figure out how to do the basics, such as spawning characters with the player’s appearance, animations and NPCs,” mod maker Yamashi told PC Gamer in an interview. “We are not going to create any multiplayer-specific content ourselves; we want to provide a stable framework so that people can enjoy the vanilla game and maybe extend it themselves later on.”
Team Together posted a video of the mod’s test build just days after the official Hogwarts Legacy release.
Yamashi is currently working on the mod solo, but other modders are reportedly eyeing the opportunity to join the project. A test build of the mod is available for subscribers to Yamashi’s Patreon, but the modder has warned anyone jumping in “to expect something very bare-bones and buggy” at this point. A more complete version of the mod might be available in several months.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?