Hogwarts Legacy has a lot of source material it can consider when deciding what items to include. Certain iconography would still pair well to Hogwarts Legacy’s 1800s setting at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, while a lot will likely be left to the modern era in terms of environmental design. For example, it would be fascinating to see the potential addition of Polyjuice in Hogwarts Legacy’s gameplay.
However, one item could be left to the original books and movies as it could potentially stir more controversy in Hogwarts Legacy. The item in question is the time-turner, which is infamously regarded as one of the worst inclusions to the franchise. Interestingly, one of the few reasons it was ever difficult to comprehend was due to the author, who decided to make changes that stifled them and ultimately eradicated them from the canon. For this reason and more, Hogwarts Legacy would do well to distance itself from the time-turner.
Time-Turners Are Designed More or Less to Have No Effect on Events
Harry Potter’s author decided to change the rules on some of their fiction after the fact, including the logic behind time-turners. The use of Hermione Granger’s time-turner made sense within the parameters of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but the item’s extrapolated lore and origins are not as pertinent to its appearance in the book or movie. Hogwarts Legacy would be no different.
The time-turner essentially allows its user to travel a few hours backward in time by turning an hourglass attached to a necklace. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione had used this item in order to double-down on her studies with a much higher workload, and she and Harry later use it to prevent the death of Buckbeak and rescue Sirius Black. The ‘time travel’ implemented here actually consists of a causal loop that runs parallel to the same events that Hermione and Harry travel back to. Therefore, Harry was able to save himself from a mob of Dementors because he had the first and only time that event had occurred. The idea is that events cannot be changed in the past that affect the past.
Time-Turners Could Make Hogwarts Legacy More Complicated Than Necessary
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Fans have often asked why time-turners were not used to prevent any of the perils of Harry Potter's past beforehand. It seems as though time-turners do not work that way, or they do, but inadvertently. Anyone who is dead cannot be saved from death by returning to the past, and if someone was to be executed by going back into the past via a time-turner, it already would have happened in the events of the causal loop. For instance, if Hogwarts Legacy includes a time-turner, players would have already had to have accomplished whatever feat they have done in their time travel journey.
Time-turners essentially offer a second perspective of the same event, happening all at once. So while time-turners may not make any plot holes from the lack of changes players would be able to make in the past, they would make certain sequences more complicated than needed. Plot holes would only be one paradoxical choice away, especially since the rules around their use are up in the air and restrictive.
WB Games Avalanche would have to account for every detail in Hogwarts Legacy in order to replicate any hour that players wished to go back to, for example, with repeated character dialogue and movements. However, Hogwarts Legacy's use of the magical item could see a return to a previous hour in the day, where players could then attend more classes as Hermione had done. But because nothing drastic could be altered, due to the timeline being parallel with a causal loop, it seems superfluous to add the time-turner in any capacity anyway.
Hogwarts Legacy is set to release in holiday 2022 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.