Hogwarts Legacy is now available for the Nintendo Switch, roughly nine months after the open-world RPG was released on consoles and PC platforms.

The game was highly successful when it first launched in February 2023, so much so that one month before it was released, Hogwarts Legacy was already one of the top sellers on Steam. However, it did not play quite the same on the Switch console due to one big missing feature, there is no open world.

Instead, its world consists of connected 3D levels separated by loading screens. A similar concept can be found in Pokemon Legends: Arceus. More comparisons were shown by Mark Walker under the YouTube channel SwitchUp.

On the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC versions, players can embark on a seamless journey that takes them from Hogwarts to Hogsmeade and into a shop without any loading times. However, Walker highlights that on the Switch version, players will experience loading screens when entering Hogsmeade, with wait times ranging from 30 to 50 seconds. Additionally, while players on other versions of the game can directly enter shops from the street in Hogsmeade, on the Switch, an additional load screen is present.

Walker mentions that “none of these things are deal breakers for most people, but as far as gameplay goes, having to load between every single shop in a town that has about 10-15 buildings, it certainly does impact the flow”.

Whereas, players who never played the game on other formats may be more tolerant of the loading screens since they “wouldn’t know any different”, and that overall “being able to play the game on the Nintendo Switch in the first place is kind of mind-blowing”.

There is a possibility that the decision to split up areas was made to improve performance and overall stability. With the Switch’s limited hardware, rendering one large open area of such a large game would have been difficult. After all, the Switch is based on six-year-old mobile technology.

Even The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, despite its status as a dedicated first-party title that had been in development for several years, experienced some performance issues when attempting to create an open world. This is especially notable in the case of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, where the title encountered performance issues despite Game Freaks’ efforts to make it the first open-world RPG for the Pokémon series.

Check out the full video below.