The PS4 and Xbox One versions of Hogwarts Legacy have been delayed a month and are now scheduled to launch on May 5, and the increasing age of the last-gen machines has fans wary. We might not be looking at PS1 Hagrid, but it might not be far off.
It's normal for a generational transition to feature a lot of games launching on both old and new platforms, but the period of cross-gen releases has been especially lengthy on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S. You can speculate on plenty of reasons why - maybe the supply issues that plagued the new machines made developers reticent to cut off the install base of the old consoles, or maybe scaling for multiple generations is easier with modern development processes - but we might be at the end of the road.
"Time to put last-gen to bed," TX_Sized10-4 (opens in new tab) says on Reddit, lamenting the last-gen Hogwarts Legacy delay. "Trying to force games into the constraints of 10-year-old hardware is either hamstringing them on new hardware or making them a painful experience on old hardware."
"If you guys still complain that the old-gen port is terrible on release then honestly that's on you," JPA17 (opens in new tab) adds, saying "all the signs are pointing to it not being great, which is completely expected considering how old last-gen is at this point."
You can look to folks like lazymutant256 (opens in new tab) for the drastic option: "I know it's an unpopular thing to say at this point, but I think it's time to consider canceling those versions."
We've seen games like God of War Ragnarok and Forza Horizon 5 scale well on older hardware, but we've also seen utter disasters like the last-gen versions of Cyberpunk 2077. Old-gen versions of games like Marvel's Midnight Suns have
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