There has not exactly been a wealth of content released for the Harry Potter franchise since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 was released in 2011. Fans of the series have been able to watch or read the play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, or watch the spinoff film franchise, Fantastic Beasts.
One form of media that has not had a new entry since the last film, is video games. Sure, we’ve had a few spinoff mobile titles, some of which have since been delisted, but we haven’t had a big console game in a decade. We didn’t even get a Fantastic Beasts LEGO game. So you can imagine why some people might be excited at the prospect of an open-world game set in the franchise, called Hogwarts Legacy.
The game is being developed by Avalanche Software and it will be released on Feb. 10, 2023. You might be wondering how connected Hogwarts Legacy is going to be to Harry Potter, even though it is set a century before the events of the original books. There are some characters who are old enough to appear in both stories, like Albus Dumbledore. The headmaster of Hogwarts while Harry attended the school, Dumbledore is old enough to make an appearance in the game. So let’s take a look at Hogwarts Legacy and explore whether Dumbledore could be in the game.Â
Could Albus Dumbledore appear in Hogwarts Legacy?
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was born in 1881, while Hogwarts Legacy takes place in the 1890s. Dumbledore attended Hogwarts as a Gryffindor student from 1892, while his younger brother Aberforth attended the school beginning in 1895. So, it is entirely possible that the game’s story will put us in the path of Albus or his brother while they were still students.
As of writing, Avalanche Software has not used Dumbledore in any of the game’s marketing materials. This could just be to keep his appearance in the game a secret until it is released. Then, once Hogwarts Legacy has been out for a few weeks they might promote that he is in the game. He could just not be in it at all, because you might be in a higher year than him and they never single him out as a student, but that would seem like a missed opportunity.
There are other characters from the series that have already been confirmed to appear, like Nearly Headless Nick and the Sorting Hat. There are also a couple of non-playable characters who are distantly related to some of the main characters in the original series, like Headmaster Phineas Nigellus Black (Simon Pegg), who is a distant relative of Sirius Black, and Professor Matilda Weasley (Lesley Nicol), who is a member of the Weasley family.
If we were to speculate, it seems like the chances of Albus Dumbledore appearing in the game are quite high. We need only look at the other Harry Potter projects that have been released since the last film. The Hogwarts Headmaster talks to Harry Potter multiple times throughout the play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. He is one of the main characters in the Fantastic Beasts series as well. In fact, you could argue that the franchise revolved around him in the last two movies rather than the protagonist, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne.) In the film series, Dumbledore is younger, and at that time, he is still a Professor at Hogwarts, not having become Headmaster yet. He is also a character you can interact with in the mobile game, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery.
You can see that the minds behind these projects obviously wanted to tie them back to the main franchise. As Albus Dumbledore is one of the oldest characters in the series, it is easy to use him as the connection between the new material and the original series. Therefore, not only would it seem like a missed opportunity not to have Dumbledore in the game, it could very well be why they decided to set Hogwarts Legacy in that time period in the first place.
After all, fans of the franchise might have wanted to play as the Marauders, or interact with them in a game like Hogwarts Legacy. But the Marauders would not attend Hogwarts until decades later. At the time of Harry Potter, Hogwarts had been running for about a millennium. So, Avalanche Software had 1000 years to play with, but they settled on the game taking place at the same time as Dumbledore was a student.
Do you think Dumbledore will make an appearance as a student in Hogwarts Legacy? Or how about The Boy Who Lived himself? We will find out if he is in the game when it is released on Feb. 10, 2023, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.
