What is pre-story of the main character?

[peter4i4ik]

Funny the game does not tell the origin of the main character, like how come that he/she is 5 year student - at least what did he/she do in prevous years, from what family is he.
From the intro we have the impression, that the main character is not foreign to the wizarding world, however this is all .

[Psyringe]

We don't know. It's probably intentionally left open, so that the players can imagine any pre-story they want. Lots of people are playing Hogwarts Legacy with characters that emulate their identities in other online Potter-themed worlds, leaving the pre-history open supports that.

I'm not quite sure why you think that the main character is "not foreign to the wizarding world". It's made pretty clear that they never cast a spell, they don't have a wand, they don't give any indication that they know anything about famous wizards etc. Professor Fig was sent to them as a mentor, to give them an introduction into magic so that they wouldn't be overwhelmed. That's the only "familiarity" with the wizarding world that the game ever tells us about the main character.

It's never explained why exactly the main character's immense talent for magic was not discovered (or ignored) before, but that brings us back to the first paragraph of this post. ;)

[DarkestOnion]

They went with the 'blank slate' approach. This dovetails well with the standard action game elements. I think they wanted less of an RPG with a lot of backstory and more of a game about how powerful a wizard you become by solving X main quests wherein the game events end the same no matter what your light role playing choices were throughout the narrative of any given playthrough.

[Shahadem]

The backstory is that you were kidnapped by Ranrock as a young child and constantly tortured to force you to develop your ability to manipulate ancient magic which he made you infuse into all those devices we see later in the game. At some point the experience breaks you and forces your personality to split into one naive personality and one pyschopathic personality. At that point your psychopathic personality uses the ancient magic to destroy all the goblins and escape. There you are discovered by Ministry wizards who had been sent on a tip that the goblins were engaging in child slavery and developing some type of super weapon. They discover you, put two and two together and cast Obliviate on you, partially erasing the psychopathic personality.

That is why you have no memory of being captured or your prior family. It is why you turn into a murderer when threatened but are not emotionally affected by it and only have a vague memory afterwards.

[Just Chill]

You perfectly come up with your own.
My char Ronswick Boltzman has the following:

He had a rough incident with a werewolf (hit by the claws) when he was a child, but his mother saved him, even though she got bitten and decided to rather die than live on with the curse.
His father is a muggle and cares very much for him, even though as of the harsher laws he is not allowed to participate much in the magic events his son goes through.

Yet he met Professor Fig and was happy to allow him to care for his son in the magic world.

At least that's how I thought about the scar when I chose it.

[Patricia Hapon]

You play as a wizard from a really rich family that didn't want you to mingle with the lesser ones. Everything was fine, you grew up nicely without knowing much but still being the proud, pure offspring of some great wizards (at least that's how they saw themselve) until a magical force grew in you, something akin to classical magic but different. So different actually that it bypassed the wards and spells placed on your house for secrecy.

You family was so happy when you turned 11 without getting any letter, 12, still no letter... They even had quite a party for your fifteenth birthday, you escaped Hogwarts ! You will not have anything to do with all those lowly wizards ! No diversity, no "exotics peoples" or such to bend your fate as an heir... That's what they all tought until the fated one arrived.

An owl, carrying a letter, the letter inviting you at hogwarts as a fifth year. Your family locked you away, doubling on warding, spells. You saw flashes of light, red, green, your heard voices, you heard curses but in the end, you just heard silence.

The door opened and you saw, for the first time, Fig, smiling at you, explaining that from now on, he'll be your mentor, and you'll be a student in the best school of the wizarding world.

You hesitate, the bodies of your family lying all around. He looked at you, with warm and a fatherly smile, saying that stupefix and petrificus totalus are really great spells. No death, he took on your whole family, the "greats wizards" all by himself, with just some dust as damage and without taking even one life ?

It's time to go and see George Osric, waiting for you, but, what is that in your hands ? That object ? It was with the letter ? Really ? Well, we'll see that on the trip, let's go !

*This is all otter's imagination. Otter isn't responsible of such things. Any ressemblance with anything not otter-related would just be a coincidence and otter is otterly sorry about that.*

[Silvarsson]

Originally posted by peter4i4ik:

Funny the game does not tell the origin of the main character, like how come that he/she is 5 year student - at least what did he/she do in prevous years, from what family is he.
From the intro we have the impression, that the main character is not foreign to the wizarding world, however this is all .

There is none.

There is none because there is no way a single scenario could match the lore created by the original IP designer aka J.K Rowling.

No student ever started @ 5th year. They may change school (not sure about that).

[id795078477]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

We don't know.

Actually, we do - till some extent.

As I stated here it is possible to get a lot of interesting bits about PC.

For instance, PC is assumed to have a "wealthy" social standing and a "pureblood" family. We even know (s)he has a birthday in Spring. So while a poster above wrote it in a somewhat knee-jerk fashion, they were correct about the origins of the PC.

This is probably also the reason they scrapped the PC's background - because it'd be almost impossible for a non-white PC to be of a "wealthy" background during 1890 provided that most people of color came from colonies that before were (and some still are at that time) sub-states - as mostly refugees and migrants, hence they just wouldn't have time or opportunity to build wealth as that requires generations.

And non-white rich pureblood PC is just absolutely impossible: that'd imply their parents and grandparents were rich and pureblood and of color - which would set them to early-mid 17xx - something which is not at all "D&I friendly" and would be unpalatable to serve under this sauce. So likely they just decided to stay away from that pandora box.

[lynn.sabin]

Well, being a mostly retired writer, with a still-rich imagination, I much avoid cookie-cutter protagonists that I cannot portray to my own desires. HL works very well for me in this context.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by Dellecross:

Originally posted by Psyringe:

We don't know.

Actually, we do - till some extent.

As I stated here it is possible to get a lot of interesting bits about PC.

For instance, PC is assumed to have a "wealthy" social standing and a "pureblood" family. We even know (s)he has a birthday in Spring.

While this is certainly interesting data, we have no way of knowing if this data is accurate for the shipped version of the game, or just reflects an earlier stage of development (with a more fleshed-out character) that is now obsolete.

Or, in other words: That data is fertile ground for speculation (and that can be very interesting and a lot of fun), but does not allow us to draw reliable conclusions.

[id795078477]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

Originally posted by Dellecross:

Actually, we do - till some extent.

As I stated here it is possible to get a lot of interesting bits about PC.

For instance, PC is assumed to have a "wealthy" social standing and a "pureblood" family. We even know (s)he has a birthday in Spring.

While this is certainly interesting data, we have no way of knowing if this data is accurate for the shipped version of the game, or just reflects an earlier stage of development (with a more fleshed-out character) that is now obsolete.

Or, in other words: That data is fertile ground for speculation (and that can be very interesting and a lot of fun), but does not allow us to draw reliable conclusions.

Well, it IS in the "shippable" (aka the live) version of the game. It's true that they might have just forgotten about that and left it as is - but at the same time it is not a speculation, it is representing "the latest possible state of the thing - as far as we can track it". This data lives in the same storage where actual live data does (the one used and visible in the game).

It is objective, it is in the data files and wave it off just because it's not "visible" is not something I would do. At least I'd assume it to be correct until denied / rejected officially.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by Dellecross:

It is objective, it is in the data files and wave it off just because it's not "visible" is not something I would do. At least I'd assume it to be correct until denied / rejected officially.

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption, sorry. I'm not sure how much you know about the details of game development, but there are almost always "leftovers" in the code from stuff that was at one point planned but never implemented, or that was just a test. If you find orphaned data that is nowhere referenced in the game itself, then you'd have to assume that this data is not canonical, until a developer says otherwise.

[retsam1]

Originally posted by peter4i4ik:

Funny the game does not tell the origin of the main character, like how come that he/she is 5 year student - at least what did he/she do in prevous years, from what family is he.
From the intro we have the impression, that the main character is not foreign to the wizarding world, however this is all .

This is where you get to put on your thinking cap and make your own fanfic for it..... as intended.

[id795078477]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

Originally posted by Dellecross:

It is objective, it is in the data files and wave it off just because it's not "visible" is not something I would do. At least I'd assume it to be correct until denied / rejected officially.

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption, sorry.

And I think it is :)
Let's agree to have our opinions about what to think of the existing data and leave it at that.

[Ansgar Odinson]

Whatever you want it to be apparently. Datamining suggests that you were originally going to have options of bloodlines and other backstory elements. That seem have gotten scrapped for just leaving it all to your imagination.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by Dellecross:

Originally posted by Psyringe:

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption, sorry.

And I think it is :)
Let's agree to have our opinions about what to think of the existing data and leave it at that.

Well, we can agree to disagree and it's not a terribly important topic anyway. But I'd like to point out that you're kind of evading the arguments I raised.

First, it is well-known that orphaned data in games is often outdated, and not representative of the developers' final vision. That's a regular part of a game's development process, which takes several years and often goes through radical changes.

Second, there is no evidence whatsoever in the game that would support the hypothesis that the orphaned data in the save file structure has any canonical relevance. In fact, the game demonstrably goes out of its way to present the MC as a clean slate, a canvas on which the players can project whatever they like.

Third, your hypothesis runs into problems with elements of the story that are actually canonical. For example, explaining plausibly why a 15-year-old pureblood with immense magical talent has not been in Hogwarts already (or at least one of the other schools), and knows so little about the wizarding world that even the most basic things need to be explained to them, isn't that easy. You can make it work, of course, if you add more assumptions for which there's also no evidence in the game. But the more such assumptions you need to pile up to make your hypothesis work, the weaker the case for that hypothesis becomes in relation to others that can be based on in-game evidence.

But if you just want to stick to your hypothesis without discussing its weaknesses, that's fine. It's just an inconsequential detail of a game, after all. The thing is, if you present your hypothesis as fact ("we know this data about the MC") rather than speculation ("there is orphaned data in the save file that suggests these details about the MC, though it's unconfirmed if this is canonical"), then I'm afraid you'll have to live with people challenging your stance, given that it has some fairly obvious weaknesses.