Technologies

Hogwarts Legacy Renews That Classic Harry Potter Magic

Commentary: The open-world RPG game, available now, lets you explore a previously unseen era of this enchanting world of wizardry. Despite the controversy around this franchise, it’s a joy.

Playing Hogwarts Legacy instantly reminds me few fictional worlds are as bewitching as Harry Potter’s. In 1998, my mum handed me a copy of Philosopher’s Stone — published under the lesser name Sorcerer’s Stone in the US — and that opening chapter awakened a sense of wonder. I was hooked for life.

Or so I thought. After the core book series wrapped up and there were no more movie adaptations coming, my emotional connection diminished. The overstuffed spinoffs, along with author J.K. Rowling’s inflammatory comments about transgender people, sucked the remaining fun out of the franchise, and I figured it was time to move on.

Most of that baggage fell away as soon as I started Hogwarts Legacy, which hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S and PC on Friday (it arrives on other consoles in the coming months). This open-world action RPG game, developed by Avalanche Software, is designed to let us live out our fantasies of enrolling at the iconic School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as a new student.

Having played the PS5 version for 12 hours, it captures the wonder of the early books, with an intriguing original narrative, engagingly varied gameplay and intricately designed world to explore.

Back to basics

The game sidesteps the narrative restrictions of Harry’s story by jumping way back in the timeline, to the 1890s. After creating your character, you’re whisked off on a brief opening adventure before reaching the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Even though you’re a new student, you’re starting your magical career a little late and enroll as a fifth year. That’s presumably because having a wide-eyed first year, just 11 years old, explore dangerous caves, learn dangerous spells and battle dark wizards would feel kinda weird.

The customization options are a key element in living out your wizarding world fantasy, and they’re a joy. You can choose your character’s gender and appearance. Then you’ll pick and alter your wand (don’t worry, the one you start the game with is a loaner) and broom.

You also get sorted into a Hogwarts house (Slytherin FTW), based on a series of questions you’ll answer shortly after arriving at the school, but you can have a do-over if the initial selection isn’t to your liking.

The house you end up in doesn’t seem to change much beyond the common room, your uniform and some throwaway lines. Though teachers mention house points in some classes, you won’t actually be competing for them in the game.

Your education is occasionally interrupted by the main story, which focuses on your connection to mysterious ancient magic and a sinister dark wizard in league with the intense leader of a goblin rebellion — these baddies sport the excellent names of Victor Rookwood and Ranrok, respectively. It’s an absorbing narrative that expands this universe’s lore nicely, especially when it hints at events further back in the timeline, but sometimes fades into the background amidst all the game’s other distractions.

Living in a wizarding world

The development team’s love for Harry Potter is apparent in every aspect of Hogwarts Legacy, but shines most brightly in the world and its characters. Every teacher, student and location feels distinct and real, with a peppering of familiar names like Weasley and Black to make fans feel comfortable.

Each character is richly written, cleverly voiced — Simon Pegg plays the unpleasant headmaster — and visually diverse, so talking to them and learning about their backgrounds is fascinating. (It’s frustrating that you can’t pause during cutscenes though.) This characterisation is woven through the main story and its side quests, which range from investigating one of the castle’s mysteries and sneakily grabbing potion ingredients to wandering into a dangerous cave.

These are varied and fun in terms of gameplay, exploration and puzzle-solving, but feel even more worthwhile since they present opportunities to learn more about the quest-givers and world. And teenage tomfoolery, like sneaking into the library in the dead of night with the help of an invisibility charm, just feels like vintage Harry Potter.

Your customized avatar’s voice acting is solid, but occasionally a bit flat — like you’re overly polite or reserved. That’s preferable to listening to a realistic teenager, though. The character models are convincing enough, but the eyes sometimes move unnaturally and feel unnerving.

The world is sumptuously designed too, particularly in the beautifully gothic Hogwarts, with its moving paintings, chatty gargoyles and fascinating student banter. Every inch is begging to be explored, with heaps of collectibles and Easter eggs to discover — you hear a satisfying hint of the John Williams theme when you pick up certain items. The nearby village of Hogsmeade isn’t quite as big, but it’s still full of fun diversions.

The colorful rolling hills, plains and hamlets that make up the rest of the world can feel a little bland by comparison, despite their Elder Scrolls vibes.

The game’s technical limitations are occasionally evident as you dash around the environment too; sometimes assets will pop up at the edge of your screen and doors will appear to be stuck as the area beyond loads. It never felt game-breaking, but might briefly shake your sense of immersion. I fell through the scenery and died while wandering outside the castle once too — luckily the game had autosaved seconds beforehand and the glitch didn’t repeat.

Tricks of the magical trade

The multifaceted nature of your wizarding unfolds gradually through Hogwarts Legacy’s early hours. Your character starts out with the most basic dueling skills and spells, but the way you flick out spells with your wand gives combat a unique, kinetic flow.

You block incoming attacks with a magical shield and dodge bigger ones. The combat is similar to that seen in the Batman: Arkham and Spider-Man games, but with a sorcery aesthetic. It’s immediately gratifying, to the point where you’ll be hankering for magical battles.

Once you get to Hogwarts, you’ll learn new spells and skills in classes like Defense Against the Dark Arts, Potions and Herbology. Crucially, the flow of quests gives you time to get comfortable with each new ability before introducing another — you’ll attend a class and then use what you’ve learnt in a few story missions or side quests.

The game encourages you to use every tool in your arsenal, instead getting comfortable with a few basic combos and relying on them to get through every battle. You’ll be playing for a few hours before the skill trees are unlocked, but you’ll likely have a sense of your preferred combat style by then. Pretty much everything you do gives you experience points too, so you’ll level up at a steady clip.

There’s also a constant flow of new gear that’ll enhance your attack and defense, in addition to changing your character’s look. You can also apply the appearance of any previous clothing to new ones, so you aren’t stuck looking ridiculous just because a certain item has higher stats.

Annoyingly, inventory limits add needless friction to exploration — you can find new gear but be unable to pick it up. It’s irritating to have to fast travel to Hogsmeade to sell off excess items while wandering around the castle. You can increase your inventory with certain side quests, at least.

A joyous school reunion

Thankfully, Hogwarts Legacy doesn’t lean too hard into its school setting — you won’t have to adhere to a rigid schedule. Instead, you attend class to advance the narrative and add new gameplay elements rather than going because you have to.

The world opens up in a big way once you finish your first flying lesson and get your own broom. There’s a bit of a learning curve to soaring above it all, but it’s exhilarating and highlights the scope of the playing area.

Hogwarts Legacy evokes the same magic as the first book’s opening chapter and simpler time for the franchise, letting you explore a beautifully realized world, meet a fascinating cast of characters and embark on your own wizarding career. It’s the Harry Potter game fans have been dreaming of for decades, if they’re willing to revisit this universe.

Technologies

Gen AI Chatbots Are Starting to Remember You. Should You Let Them?

An AI model’s long memory can offer a better experience — or a worse one. Good thing you can turn it off.

Until recently, generative AI chatbots didn’t have the best memories: You tell it something and, when you come back later, you start again with a blank slate. Not anymore.

OpenAI started testing a stronger memory in ChatGPT last year and rolled out improvements this month. Grok, the flagship tool of Elon Musk’s xAI, also just got a better memory.

It took significant improvements in math and technology to get here but the real-world benefits seem pretty simple: You can get more consistent and personalized results without having to repeat yourself.

«If it’s able to incorporate every chat I’ve had before, it does not need me to provide all that information the next time,» said Shashank Srivastava, assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Those longer memories can help with solving some frustrations with chatbots but they also pose some new challenges. As with when you talk to a person, what you said yesterday might influence your interactions today.

Here’s a look at how the bots came to have better memories and what it means for you.

Improving an AI model’s memory

For starters, it isn’t quite a «memory.» Mostly, these tools work by incorporating past conversations alongside your latest query. «In effect, it’s as simple as if you just took all your past conversations and combined them into one large prompt,» said Aditya Grover, assistant professor of computer science at UCLA.

Those large prompts are now possible because the latest AI models have significantly larger «context windows» than their predecessors. The context window is, essentially, how much text a model can consider at once, measured in tokens. A token might be a word or part of a word (OpenAI offers one token as three-quarters of a word as a rule of thumb).

Early large language models had context windows of 4,000 or 8,000 tokens — a few thousand words. A few years ago, if you asked ChatGPT something, it could consider roughly as much text as is in this recent CNET cover story on smart thermostats. Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash now has a context window of a million tokens. That’s a bit longer than Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace. Those improvements are driven by some technical advances in how LLMs work, creating faster ways to generate connections between words, Srivastava said.

Other techniques can also boost a model’s memory and ability to answer a question. One is retrieval-augmented generation, in which the model can run a search or otherwise pull up documents as needed to answer a question, without always keeping all of that information in the context window. Instead of having a massive amount of information available at all times, it just needs to know how to find the right resource, like a researcher perusing a library’s card catalog.

Read more: AI Essentials: 27 Ways to Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts

Why context matters for a chatbot

The more an LLM knows about you from its past interactions with you, the better suited to your needs its answers will be. That’s the goal of having a chatbot that can remember your old conversations.

For example, if you ask an LLM with no memory of you what the weather is, it’ll probably follow up first by asking where you are. One that can remember past conversations, however, might know that you often ask it for advice about restaurants or other things in San Francisco, for example, and assume that’s your location. «It’s more user-friendly if the system knows more about you,» Grover said.

A chatbot with a longer memory can provide you with more specific answers. If you ask it to suggest a gift for a family member’s birthday and tell it some details about that family member, it won’t need as much context when you ask again next year. «That would mean smoother conversations because you don’t need to repeat yourself,» Srivatsava said.

A long memory, however, can have its downsides.

You can (and maybe should) tell AI to forget

Having a chatbot recommend a gift poses a conundrum that’s all too common in human memories: You told your aunt you liked airplanes when you were 12 years old, and decades later you still get airplane-themed gifts from her. An LLM that remembers things about you could bias itself too much toward something you told it before.

«There’s definitely that possibility that you can lose your control and that this personalization could haunt you,» Srivastava said. «Instead of getting an unbiased, fresh perspective, its judgment might always be colored by previous interactions.»

LLMs typically allow you to tell them to forget certain things or to exclude some conversations from their memory.

You may also deal with things you don’t want an AI model to remember. If you have private or sensitive information you’re communicating with an LLM (and you should think twice about doing so at all), you probably want to turn off the memory function for those interactions.

Read the guidance on the tool you’re using to be sure you know what it’s remembering, how to turn it on and off and how to delete items from its memory.

Grover said this is an area where gen AI developers should be transparent and offer clear commands in the user interface. «I think they need to be providing more controls that are visible to the user, when to turn it on, when to turn it off,» he said. «Give a sense of urgency for the user base so they don’t get locked into defaults that are hard to find.»

How to turn off gen AI memory features

Here’s how to manage memory features in some common gen AI tools.

ChatGPT

OpenAI has a couple types of memory in its models. One is called «reference saved memories» and it stores details that you specifically ask ChatGPT to save, like your name or dietary preferences. Another, «reference chat history,» remembers information from past conversations (but not everything).

To turn off either of these features, you can go to Settings and Personalization and toggle the items off.

You can ask ChatGPT what it remembers about you and ask it to forget something it has remembered. To completely delete this information, you can delete the saved memories in Settings and the chat where you saved that information.

Gemini

Google’s Gemini model can remember things you’ve discussed or summarize past conversations.

To modify or delete these memories, or to turn off the feature entirely, you can go into your Gemini Apps Activity menu.

Grok

Elon Musk’s xAI announced memory features in Grok this month and they’re turned on by default.

You can turn them off under Settings and Data Controls. The specific setting is different between Grok.com, where it’s «Personalize Grok with your conversation history,» and on the Android and iOS apps, where it’s «Personalize with memories.»

Technologies

It’s OK if You Didn’t Preorder a Switch 2

Commentary: As good as the new console looks, it’s also fine to wait.

FOMO for new tech is hard. And new game consoles are exciting. I get it, and I’ve contributed to that coverage excitement too. The Nintendo Switch 2 finally became available to preorder in the US this week, and as expected, it looks sold out for now. That’ll change over time, but it’s unclear when, or how, and it’s equally unclear what the constant tariff fluctuations might do to future game console pricing.

That said, having played on the Switch 2 recently at an event, may I help ease your FOMO somewhat by saying you’re probably OK waiting on it?

I felt this way after my full-day Switch 2 experience, and I’ll reiterate it now: As good as the upgrades the Switch 2 has, and as fun as the new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong games seem to be — and the GameCube gaming library also seems like a blast of retro fun — the Switch 2 is very much an iterative upgrade for now. The very best games on the Switch 2, and its most unique exclusives, are likely still to come.

Nintendo has clearly designed the Switch 2, at least for the moment, to exist as a bridge to the current Switch, with many upcoming games intended to work on the original Switch too. Much more than the debut of the first Switch, the Switch 2 is designed to be a system you could wait to upgrade to. In that sense, it’s following the path of the current gen of Xbox Series X and S and PlayStation 5 consoles.

You can build up your Switch library now and be Switch 2-ready when you eventually upgrade

The Switch 2 plays all the Switch games, which wasn’t the case with the Switch and previous Wii U and 3DS hardware. That means you could skip the Switch 2 now if you needed to, play games on the Switch, and then move your library over whenever. Switch 2 versions of games cost more (ranging from $10 to $20 more), but you can just buy the Switch 2 game upgrades later for a similar price — or play the versions you’ve already got minus the enhanced graphics and game extras.

The Switch 2’s current upgrades are good, but not shockingly good

After playing several of the Switch 2 Edition versions of Switch games for a bit, I noticed better frame rates and graphics resolution, but I honestly didn’t find it to be that much different. I’d prefer playing the enhanced Switch 2 editions, but the experience reminded me a bit of the PS5 Pro versus PS5 versions of games when I first played on the console with Sony last year.

If you have a big TV, you’ll likely appreciate the difference. The bigger Switch 2 screen shows off games in higher-res 1080p with HDR, but you could play on the older Switch and be fine. I’m playing on a Switch OLED again, and after the Switch 2 experience, I don’t have massive I-wish-this-were-a-Switch-2-envy.

I’m sure this will change as games are developed to take better advantage of the amped-up Nvidia-powered Switch 2 GPU, and when more exclusives arrive. It’s similar to how I felt about the Meta Quest 3, which has better graphics than Quest 2 but didn’t feel like an absolute must-get until a year into its release.

You can still play upcoming Nintendo games on OG Switch

While Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza are Switch 2 exclusives, Metroid Prime 4 Beyond and Pokemon Legends Z-A also play on the Switch. It’s unclear how well these games will play on the Switch versus Switch 2, but you can get a good dose of New Nintendo this year on the older hardware and upgrade the hardware upgrade later. Think of it as a bit of a FOMO buffer.

Looking at Nintendo’s game history, the company often supported its previous consoles for a good couple of years after the new hardware’s release. I’d expect that after 2026 the Switch 2 will start to become the go-to platform for most big game, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a handful of key Nintendo games still supporting original Switch for another year at least.

There’s no ‘whole new experience’ you’ll miss other than Game Chat, that camera and the mouse

The original Switch was an eye-opener because it was a portable, full game console that could dock with your TV and turn into a shareable console with modular controllers. It was different from anything Nintendo had made before. The Switch 2 is mostly the same proposition, just nicer.

You won’t feel the same regret for missing out on a whole new way to play this time, since it’s a continuation of the same idea. There are two new features you might envy: audio or video Game Chat among friends and the new Joy-Cons working like mice in some supported games. But Game Chat works only with other Switch 2 owners and needs a Switch Online subscription. The mouse functions are fun at times, but could also end up as just a gimmick. For now, the Switch 2 hasn’t pulled that many wild new functions out of its hat, but that could change, knowing Nintendo. There are also some fun camera-connected party game modes for Mario Party Jamboree if you happen to connect a camera, but no other games even have new camera-based features yet.

It’s fine to wait, but tariffs are still a question mark

I’m saying this well before I’ve had a chance to review the Switch 2, and for sure, it looks like the best Nintendo console in a long while and worth upgrading to. But take some comfort that missing out on getting one early this time isn’t quite as big a deal as it was in 2017, even if you’re feeling the pull of regret.

The only wild card remains the question of the effect tariffs will have on future console pricing. Will it fluctuate? I hope not, but the prices of Nintendo’s Switch 2 accessories have already gone up as a result of Trump’s chaotic tariff policies, and it’s unclear if that might happen again. The state of pricing and consumer electronics is still in an unknown zone, but in the meantime, you can still have a lot of fun on the Switch you already have, now and even in the near future.

Technologies

Apple to Shift All US iPhone Assembly to India Amid Tariff Turmoil, Report Says

The manufacturing move aims to address massive US tariffs against China that could spur higher prices on the company’s biggest-selling product.

Apple could be sourcing its entire line of iPhones for the US market — about 60 million devices a year — from assembly facilities in India by the end of 2026, according to a report from the Financial Times.

The planned move comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration imposing tariffs against China of up to 145%, although some products such as mobile phones and computers have been exempted for the time being. Apple has long centered its iPhone production in China, making it vulnerable to any trade war between the two countries and spurring speculation that tariffs could mean price increases for the company’s biggest-selling product.

By moving third-party assembly of US iPhones to India, Apple could avoid the most significant cost pressure of a trade war, though India itself faces new tariffs as well.

The company had already begun shipping iPhones made in India, adding to its product reserves, before new tariffs became active.

A representative for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.