The team behind the Skyrim Together Reborn multiplayer mod has turned its attention to something new: HogWarp, a multiplayer mod for Hogwarts Legacy.
Hogwarts Legacy is a big, sprawling game, and its setting and story—a tale of kids attending a massive, ancient magic school—is a natural fit for some sort of multiplayer component. Yet it's strictly a singleplayer game.
That may not be the case forever, though. HogWarp, like Skyrim Together, is rummy golds designed to give players the ability to congregate and play together in the famed school of magic. And it's not just an idle dream: Even though Hogwarts Legacy only went into full release on Friday, the Together Team has already shared a video of a test build in action. There's not a whole lot going on, but that's definitely two students running around in one Hogwarts.
Mod maker Yamashi told me in a Discord chat that the focus of the mod is "on co-op and roleplay." The goal at this point is to enable up to eight people to play together, although that could change depending on how development unfolds.
"Our aim is to figure out how to do the basics such as spawning characters with the player's appearance, animations and NPCs," Yamashi said. "We are not going to create any multiplayer specific content ourselves, we want to provide a stable framework so that people can enjoy the vanilla game and maybe extend it themselves later on."
Currently, Yamashi is working on HogWarp alone, although two members of the Skyrim Together team are "ramping up on the code base" with an eye toward joining the project. As for how they got a test building running so quickly, Yamashi credited pre-release work on Stray, a very different sort of game, and a connection that baffled me for a moment until they explained that it uses Unreal Engine 4.27.2, the same as Hogwarts Legacy.
(Yamashi also clarified, sorry to say, that a Stray Together mod is not in the offing: The pre-release work was related to "creating all the tools to help reverse engineer [Hogwarts Legacy] quickly and understanding the workflow," and that there was never actually a functioning Stray multiplayer mod.)
A test build of HogWarp is available to Yamashi's Patreon subscribers, but they warned that people who sign up for it "have to expect something very barebones and buggy" at this early stage of work. As for a wider release, "it's very hard to say, [but] hopefully we can release a proof of concept to everyone within this month, if rummy mars everything goes according to plan!" Full functionality is still at least "a few months" away, however.
When the HogWarp mod does go into wide release, Yamashi confirmed that it will be open source, so users will be free to do or create whatever they like with it.