Hogwarts Legacy takes place a hundred years before the Harry Potter books and sends you to Hogwarts as a fifth-year student. It’s a single-player game, so you should be able to play it offline. But if you’re on console it’s not quite that simple. Here’s the answer as to whether you can play Hogwarts Legacy offline or not.
If You Have Bought a Physical Copy, You Will Need to Download a Big Update Before You Can Play Hogwarts Legacy Offline
If you have bought Hogwarts Legacy on PC or have bought a digital copy on console, you will need to go online anyway to download the game. But what if you have bought a boxed copy of the Xbox Series X | S or PlayStation 5 version? Maybe you prefer physical versions of games, or maybe your internet is so slow that downloading a digital copy would take a long, long time.
The answer to that is you can only play as far as the end of the tutorial section, before you get to Hogwarts. It will then tell you that you have to download a patch. A lot of games do have big launch-day patches, but if your console is offline you can still play the game.
Hogwarts Legacy will not let you do that because while the disc installs 30 GB of game, it needs approximately another 60 GB as a download patch. You cannot go any further until that patch is installed. If you stay offline, the game will not let you play any further. So if you are buying the game as a present, we would recommend you set the game up the night before.
Once you have installed that patch, you can then go offline with the game any time you like. If your internet cuts out, you will not be kicked out of the game. So you can play Hogwarts Legacy offline, but if you bought a physical copy, you will need to download a very big patch first.
So that’s the rather unusual answer to whether or not you can play Hogwarts Legacy offline.
