Hogwarts Legacy is Avalanche Software’ upcoming RPG set in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Players will take on the role of a Hogwarts student as they learn spells, care for fantastic beasts, make new friends, and explore the mysteries hidden beyond the school’s magical walls.
Hogwarts Legacy is confirmed to take place some time in the late 1800s. However, there’s one event from 1899 that the game should not include if it wants to avoid an issue many fans have identified with the series' storytelling.
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The late 1800s saw new developments in an important kind of magic in Hogwarts Legacy's Wizarding World. Unspeakables are witches and wizards who worked in the Department of Mysteries, a part of the Ministry of Magic. Their work is top secret, hence the name, but there’s one event from 1899 which gives insights into the sorts of experiments they might have been doing in the late 19th century.
An event in 1899 is used to explain why Time-Turners and other time magic shouldn’t be used to travel back more than a few hours at once. That year, an Unspeakable named Eloise Mintumble attempted a magical time travel experiment that went wrong, though it remains unclear what the original intention of that experiment was. Mintumble’s experiment trapped her in the year 1402 for five days. When she returned, her body aged five centuries, and she died at St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries shortly after her re-arrival in 1899. The Harry Potter series has had problems with time travel in the past, and while based on the setting, this event may coincide, that doesn't mean it should.
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It’s likely the reason that Eloise Mintumble exists in the lore at all is to explain why the Time-Turner seen in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban can’t be used to defeat Voldemort despite how immensely powerful an item like that would be. Indeed, the Time-Turner was seen by many Harry Potter fans as creating far more questions than it resolved, including how time travel in the Harry Potter universe works at all.
In the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, an even more powerful version of the Time-Turner is introduced that does allow characters to go further back in time and explicitly change events in the present. This raises questions in and of itself – for a start, it doesn’t make much sense for updated versions of Time-Turners to come out at all considering that all it would take was a powerful Time-Turner and a wizard willing to use it to muck up the Wizarding World timeline.
It might seem easy for Hogwarts Legacy to avoid the 1899 time travel incident and all the potential plot holes that come with it, but there’s another problem. Not only was Eloise Mintumble killed by the experiment, but 25 people from the Wizarding World were “un-born” as a result. After she returned to 1899, the following Tuesday lasted two and a half days, while the Thursday after that lasted just four hours. In other words, it’s an event that most wizards, at least in Britain, would presumably be aware of.
It’s probably for the best that Hogwarts Legacy avoid this event by ending its plot before 1899. Many Harry Potter fans would be relieved to learn that time travel would not feature prominently in the next game, and there are likely more character-driven plotlines and events that Avalanche could focus on when building the world of its upcoming RPG.
Hogwarts Legacy launches in 2022 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.