An Amazon Germany listing for Hogwarts Legacy has suggested that a certain quest may be exclusive to the $300 Collector’s Edition of the game.

Initially spotted by Reddit user Tintinnabuearly and then verified across multiple listings by VGC, the quest – which translates to “Hogsmeade Haunted Shop” – appears as a listed feature of both the Xbox and PS5 versions of the Collector’s Edition, but isn’t mentioned in the listings for the other versions.

This could be a listing error – the quest could be available in the cheaper special editions of the game, or could actually be the PlayStation exclusive quest that was revealed earlier today, also mentioned in the Xbox listing by mistake.

Update – Developer responds27th Aug 2022 / 1:54 pm

Hogwarts Legacy’s developer has claimed that all editions of the PlayStation version will include its exclusive quest.

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If the listing is correct, however, it would mean that a portion of the game could be locked behind the $300 version, at least on day one.

“Hogsmeade Haunted Shop” could refer to The Shrieking Shack, an abandoned house in Hogsmeade that was featured in the third entry in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

VGC has reached out to Warner Bros for clarification and will update this story should we get a reply.

This is the second quest-based surprise for Hogwarts Legacy fans following the news that an unknown quest will be exclusive to PlayStation.

In response to a fan question about the quest, which was only discovered when the game was listed for pre-order on the PlayStation Store, Avalanche Games community manager Chandler Wood replied: “The PlayStation exclusive quest comes with any PlayStation version of the game. It is not tied to pre-order.

He added: “Pre-order on PlayStation will get you the Felix Felicis potion recipe. More details are coming soon.”

The Felix Felicis potion does not appear to be exclusive to PlayStation, as the Epic Games Store is also listing it as a pre-order bonus.

Earlier this week Warner Bros Games showed off the floating wand that comes with the Hogwarts Legacy’s Collector’s Edition in a new unboxing video.

Warner Bros also recently announced that Hogwarts Legacy has been delayed until 2023.

In a post to Twitter, the company said: “Hogwarts Legacy will launch on February 10, 2023 for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. The Nintendo Switch launch date will be revealed soon.

Further reading

“The team is excited for you to play, but we need a little more time to deliver the best possible game experience.”

Developed by Avalanche Software (Disney Infinity), the title is described as an open-world RPG that takes players beyond Hogwarts to new and familiar locations, as they “live the unwritten and embark on a dangerous journey to uncover a hidden truth of the wizarding world.”

• I started reading “Harry Potter” out loud to my daughter when she was in kindergarten.
• It became more of a practice as she went through cancer treatment.
• When she returned to school, she had something to talk about with her friends.

I started reading the “Harry Potter” series aloud to my daughter when she was in kindergarten.

Magic and belief were as accessible for her as air, even when, a few chapters in, she was gasping for breath. “Keep reading,” she would say — until we learned her cancer was so advanced that her lungs were collapsing, and then she could only point.

Barely capable of thought, I would ask her if she wanted me to read. She would nod. Sweaty, drifting in and out of sleep, she listened.

Too sick to complain about being sick, she longed for mother comforts. My voice. My body, close to hers. And magic. I straddled two fantastical landscapes: one a boarding school for witches and wizards, the other a pediatric intensive-care unit.

Between the pulpy soft pages came the diagnosis, the treatment, and, eventually, the hope.

We read through her cancer treatment

We moved slowly through the first book of the series as we were both exhausted and constantly interrupted. Cytarabine could easily have been a character born of J.K. Rowling’s imagination, perhaps a Death Eater. Medically and metaphorically speaking it was a death eater, another tool to kill her “bad cells.”

“I’m hot,” my daughter said one day. As soon as I touched her, I jumped. Fevers were not unexpected with cytarabine, but even after she was given meds her temperature kept going up. When her fever hit 107.9 degrees, our nurse said, “I’m getting some ice.” “Wingardium leviosa,” I thought to myself. “Let’s fly away.”

On we went, reading and talking about The Boy Who Lived while I begged the universe for my child to do the same. Some days I would read pages and pages aloud to my daughter without absorbing a single word.

By book three, the children at Hogwarts were more real to her than her own friends, whom she hadn’t seen in months. She missed almost a year of school — nearly all of first grade — but she did return cancer-free and bald as a baby.

The distance we felt from our old life held a chasm of changes. How would she reconnect with her little friends? She has been to places I hope they never have to go to and experienced pain I hope they never feel.

The books helped her connect with her friends

But something magical happened. While we were in the hospital going through chapter after chapter, her friends were doing the same back home in their bedrooms. She easily fell into a shared experience with her long-lost playmates using a common language of giants and spells and Triwizard Tournaments.

She got better, and we kept up with our reading ritual.

According to Scholastic, the publisher of the series, there are 4,224 pages in the US editions. I look at those paperbacks stacked high at my bedside and think of the wiggly teeth lost, the sight words learned, the blood-pressure checks, the bad days at school, the good days in the hospital, negative COVID-19 tests, positive COVID-19 tests, Google Classroom instead of real classrooms — all these moments tangibly turned into piles of pages.

Over the course of our reading quest, my daughter’s hairstyle evolved from pigtails to baldness to buzz cut to pixie to shag to bob to chin length to shoulder length to long, smooth, shiny, deep-brown hair that swings down her back when she throws her head back laughing.

We read all the “Harry Potter” books together over the rest of her time in elementary school. Last night, she turned to me and said, “You did a good job reading that.”

“Which part?” I asked.  

“All of it,” she said.

I can’t help but wonder if I will ever read aloud to her again. In the fall, she’ll begin middle school. She’s older now. She’s better now. I stared at her, The Girl Who Lived, and got a little choked up — until she said, “How about we read the ‘Lord of the Rings’ books next?”

If you’ve ever been to Universal Orlando, then you might have noticed that the Wizarding World of Harry Potter has some interactive capabilities.

If you purchase a wand from the Wizarding World (or if you have one already), you can take it around the two Harry Potter lands — one at Universal Studios and one at Islands of Adventure — and interact with the things around you. This technology is similar to the interactive features of the new MagicBand+ in Disney World. Now, Universal Orlando has filed a new patent to expand this technology.

The new patent is called “Variable Effects Activation in an Interactive Environment” and it was filed with the intent to make it easier for Universal guests to interact with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, according to Orlando Business Journal.

This technology will be used for guests who are unable to perform the action that makes the interactive experiences in the parks activate. For example, if someone is unable to move their wand in the exact way required in order to make a light turn on, this patent could help make sure that those guests are still able to participate. The patent does state that the interactive environment will still be activated with a device (like a wand).

The technology will allow these individuals to perform the movement in their own way that still activates the experience. So, for example, if a certain interactive experience requires a guest to strike a certain pose, the experience will pick up on and accept more than the exact pose asked for — so the guest doesn’t have to pose perfectly to activate the experience. It may also be able to pick up on various ranges of motion, different voice volumes, or “different speed and/or strength capabilities.”

This technology is still in its infancy as the patent has just been filed (and in many cases, patents don’t always come to fruition), but it is definitely something worth keeping an eye on, especially as construction continues on Universal Orlando’s newest theme park — Epic Universe. We’ll be on the lookout for more updates.

In the meantime, Universal Orlando is gearing up for Halloween Horror Nights with a bunch of new Halloween decorations and merchandise items available now in the parks.

Universal is slowly releasing details about what houses will be available during Halloween Horror Nights, so click here to see what’s been announced so far! As always, make sure to stay tuned to AllEars for the latest Universal news.

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Have you ever been to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando? Let us know in the comments!

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