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The up coming Harry Potter video game will allow game players a range of customisation to their characters, right from the voice, body type, and gender placement for the school dormitories, taking a step to negate the effects of recent comments by the series writer J.K. Rowling that was largely seem as transphobic.
Hogwarts Legacy is all scheduled to release in 2022 by the publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and the developer Avalanche Software. When players boot up the game, they will be able to create characters that can have masculine or feminine voice no matter what their body seems like, as per the people familiar with the game's development. However the people requested anonymity as they weren't authorised to speak to the press as yet.
Players will then have one of the two options i.e. either “witch” or “wizard”, which will decide the dorm they will eventually get placed in at the magical school of Hogwarts and also how they are addressed by other characters in the game.
Although this level of customisation has become a common thing when it comes to video games and is no longer extra ordinary, however it's noteworthy for Hogwarts Legacy. Last summer Rowling made several comments that were widely seen as degracing to the transgender people and were denounced by many, including Harry Potter film actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson. The comments also jolted some of the people working on the game, reported Bloomberg. As a result, some members of the Hogwarts Legacy development team have worked really hard to make up for the damage done, by pushing for the character customisation and even for a transgender character to be added further. At the beginning, there was resistance from management, the people familiar with the project told, but at present the character customisation is included in the game. However Warner Bros. spokesperson refused to comment.
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is a unit of AT&T and has many good titles under its banner like Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Mortal Kombat 1. The unit had rose interest from several major companies last year and could have earned $4 billion (which is roughly Rs. 29,220 crores), as per a report from CNBC on June 2020. But AT&T missed the given business's growth potential, Bloomberg said in a report, and removed the unit from a list of potential asset sales. Harry Potter is one of the most lucrative franchises in the entertainment industry. The film series itself is the third-highest grossing of all time, with $7.7 billion (which is roughly Rs. 56,240 crores) in revenue, with J.K. Rowling selling more than half a billion books, more than any individual author in entire history.
Hopefully Hogwarts Legacy will be a worthwhile game given the present conditions and the controversies surrounding it.
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