The team behind the Hogwarts Legacy multiplayer mod, HogWarp, has shared that it's easier to develop this project compared to its previous Skyrim Together mod, so you shouldn't have to wait as long to see its release.
Earlier this week, we reported that Hogwarts Legacy has already got multiplayer thanks to Skyrim modders. The modders in question are known as The Together Team and were previously responsible for implementing the huge Skyrim Together mod, which allowed up to eight players to play alongside each other in the Bethesda RPG.
Following this, one of the modders working on the project - known as Yamashi - has spoken to 12DOVE about developing its latest ambitious multiplayer project. When asked how the team began rolling out such a big mod for a game that had just been released, Yamashi explained that it's thanks to Unreal Engine that the mod has managed to be built so quickly.
"Reverse engineering Unreal Engine games is an order of magnitude easier than custom engines such as Bethesda's CreationKit," Yamashi explains. "Unreal Engine contains a lot of metadata that we can use to understand better the game, and we also have the Unreal Engine source code to refer to when we struggle to understand what we are looking at."
Speaking of Skyrim Together, Yamashi says: "Having experience with networking and having already developed our tools to reverse engineer and create mods really helps a lot." The modder then goes on to explain, "Things that would have taken a bit of work and trial and error was just a matter of copy/paste, and we already know it will work as it has been used thousands of times in Skyrim Together without any issues."
The Hogwarts Legacy mod, which is instead being referred to as 'HogWarp', is in its very early stages of development. As mentioned in our previous story, the build is currently quite "buggy" and "bareboned", as revealed by the creator themselves, meaning there's still a way to go before it's functioning fully.
Right now, the mod is available through a Patreon page, which Yamashi says was created as "a way to get support" for the mod as "working on it takes time, unpaid time." Don't worry if you're not in a position to support right now, as Yamashi has also confirmed that the Patreon access is only "temporary" and mainly used to release test builds to "hardcore followers" of the project. "Once we get a version everyone is happy about," Yamashi says, "we will release it publicly and make it open source."
As for when we can get our hands on the mod, Yamashi has also revealed that the team is "hoping to have a test build for Patreons this week and are aiming for a public release early March," before adding, "but no promises!"
The release of Hogwarts Legacy has been the subject of criticism and debate due to J.K. Rowling's public stance on gender identity, which continues to challenge the inclusivity at the heart of the Harry Potter community. Here is our explainer on the Hogwarts Legacy controversy.
