So you’ve spent an hour slaving over a character creator, tweaking your in-game avatar to be just right. You’ve carefully adjusted sliders to get their face just so, agonized over the right hair, and thoughtfully considered why and how they might have received any scars. Then you start the game and realize that while you’d created perfection in the character creator, under the in-game lighting… you’ve made a monster.
The very first thing you’ll do in Hogwarts Legacy is to create the student that’ll be your avatar for the game. We’ve detailed that process here, but after a few hours in the game, we found ourselves wishing we could tweak their appearance just a little bit more.
So, can you do it?
The good news
Very early in the game, you’re sent to Hogsmeade to pick up some supplies, where you can visit Madam Snelling’s Tress Emporium. Calliope Snelling was once mocked for focusing on hairstyling rather than studying to become an Auror, but she showed them: “They’re stuck in the dust at the Ministry and I’m here thriving! Absolutely thriving!”
Calliope can change your haircut and color, alter your eye color, eyebrow color, eyebrow shape, add freckles and moles, alter your complexion and uh, give you some fresh facial scars (best not to think too much about that last one).
Hogwarts Legacy has a generous amount of masculine and feminine cuts to consider and a lot of customization, so it’s nice to be able to freshen up your characters’ look now and then.
The bad news
But, sadly, once you’ve chosen a body type and face for your character, those are permanent. Calliope Snelling can apparently only do so much and plastic surgery (magical or otherwise) isn’t in her skill set. This is somewhat annoying if you realize too late you’d rather your hero have a different face, as you’ll have to begin the game from scratch to change it.
This omission from the game is perhaps even more egregious considering that the Harry Potter franchise has an in-built way to alter your appearance with Polyjuice Potion. This even comes up in the core plot of the game, in a mission where you must disguise yourself as another character, and it seems very easy to slightly alter how it works for the sake of letting you alter your appearance permanently.
Facing the music
So, if there’s a lesson here, it’s to only leave the character creation menu when you’re absolutely sure you’ve gotten the body type and face to your liking. Other games of the same type do indeed let you alter your appearance however you see fit, or alternatively at least let you see your incomplete character under typical in-game light in the creation screen.
Thankfully, this seems like a feature that could be easily added in a patch and we suspect one of the first fan-made mods for PC will be to expand Calliope Snelling’s abilities to include full appearance alteration.
