Avalanche’s Wizarding World RPG just smashed 40 million sales and is temporarily free on Epic. Here’s what’s in the current PC build and whether newcomers should jump in now or wait for what’s next.
If you somehow missed Hogwarts Legacy when it first took over 2023, Epic just removed the last excuse. Avalanche’s open world Wizarding World RPG is currently free to claim on the Epic Games Store for a limited time, turning one of the biggest commercial hits of the generation into a zero‑risk download on PC.
That makes this the perfect moment to ask a bigger question: in late 2025, when the hype has cooled and sales have already soared past 40 million copies, is Hogwarts Legacy still worth starting, and what exactly do you get in the current PC build on Epic?
A historic sales run in the Wizarding World
Hogwarts Legacy did not just open strong, it sustained momentum for almost three years.
Warner Bros. Games and Avalanche Software have confirmed that the RPG has now sold over 40 million units worldwide. The trajectory looks like a greatest‑hits curve: 12 million copies in its first two weeks in February 2023, 15 million by May 2023 with more than $1 billion in revenue, then 24 million in January 2024, 30 million by November 2024, and finally the 40 million milestone announced in December 2025.
It was the best‑selling video game of 2023 globally, and it kept charting as it rolled out to more hardware. The original launch on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC in February 2023 was followed by PS4 and Xbox One in May 2023, a surprisingly capable Switch port in November 2023, and then a dedicated Switch 2 version in June 2025. Layer in frequent discounts and now a free Epic giveaway on PC, and you have a textbook case of a single‑player game treated like a long‑tail platform.
For Epic, featuring Hogwarts Legacy as a weekly freebie is the kind of headline that spikes sign‑ups. For Avalanche and Warner Bros., it is a way to put yet more players into a game that has already more than paid for itself while keeping the Wizarding World brand active between bigger announcements.
What the current PC build includes on Epic
If you grab Hogwarts Legacy on Epic during its free window, you are getting the fully updated PC version that has quietly improved since launch.
The core of the package has not changed. This is still a single‑player, open world action RPG set in the 1800s at Hogwarts, long before Harry and his friends. You create your own witch or wizard, get sorted into a House, attend classes, learn spells, brew potions, tame magical beasts, and explore the castle, Hogsmeade and the surrounding countryside while unraveling an ancient magical secret.
What has changed is the layer of quality of life and extra content that has been added since 2023.
The Epic build supports a full Photo Mode, something that was missing at launch and now feels essential in a game this obsessed with environmental detail. You can also freely reset and reallocate talents, which makes experimenting with different combat and playstyle builds far less punishing than it was in the original release.
Epic’s listing also bundles in the Haunted Hogsmeade Shop Quest, a once platform‑exclusive side questline that sends you into a bespoke dungeon and ultimately unlocks your own shop in Hogsmeade along with a themed cosmetic set. It is a small storyline in the grand scheme of things, but it adds a flavorful, spooky detour and removes a bit of the platform‑fragmentation that plagued the game at launch.
Avalanche has also sprinkled in a handful of free cosmetics for all players that are present in the Epic version: the tongue‑in‑cheek Glasses That Lived, an Azkaban Prisoner outfit and coat, the Onyx Hippogriff mount, a Felix Felicis potion recipe, and a couple of Dark Wizard brooms. None of these transforms the game mechanically, but they round out the fantasy, especially if you lean into a darker or more mischievous character concept.
On the technical side, the PC build continues to target 1080p at 60 fps on mid‑to‑high hardware, with a recommended spec of something like an i7‑8700 or Ryzen 5 3600 paired with a GTX 1080 Ti or RX 5700 XT and 16 GB of RAM. An SSD is strongly recommended to wrangle the game’s large environments and cinematic loads, and the install size sits around 85 GB. Performance at launch was inconsistent on some rigs, but post‑launch patches and driver updates have smoothed out the worst spikes. You still want to spend a few minutes in the options menu finding the right balance between textures, ray traced effects and upscaling, but the current build is in much better shape than the early 2023 release.
Content wise, you are not missing a secret trove of expansions. There is no full‑blown story DLC campaign. The one major paid add‑on highlighted on Epic is the Dark Arts Pack, which folds in a Dark Arts cosmetic set, a Thestral mount and a themed Battle Arena. That pack is often steeply discounted and is flavor more than substance. The main story and the bulk of the side content are contained in the base game you are now getting for free.
How Hogwarts Legacy holds up in 2025
The question for a new PC player in 2025 is not whether Hogwarts Legacy launched well, but how it feels now measured against everything that has come out since.
In terms of pure production value and atmosphere, the game is still exceptional. The castle remains one of the most intricately designed spaces in any modern open world, shot through with shifting staircases, secret rooms, moving portraits and dynamic lighting that sells the feeling of occupying your own slot in Wizarding World canon. Even after Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring and a wave of prestige RPGs, Hogwarts Legacy can still stun just by letting you wander its common rooms or peer out across the lake at sunrise.
Combat has aged a little more like a very good action game than a deep RPG system. The wand duels are flashy and responsive, encouraging you to string together spell combos, levitate and slam enemies, deploy cursed plants and time perfect dodges. It is accessible and satisfying, and Epic’s player reviews still highlight boss fights as a high point. Under the hood though, the RPG stat and build systems are fairly light by 2025 standards. Talents give you clear upgrades rather than wildly divergent playstyles, and loot mostly follows a color‑coded rarity treadmill.
Narratively, the game still leans on the power fantasy of being the special student with a unique connection to ancient magic, and that hook continues to work for most people who want a self‑insert Hogwarts adventure. You will not find the reactive narrative depth of Larian’s work here, but you will get a long, well paced campaign with plenty of optional relationship quests, school‑life vignettes and morally shaded choices that nudge the tone of your playthrough.
The main thing Hogwarts Legacy is not in 2025 is a live service. There are no daily challenges or seasonal passes quietly waiting to lure you back. That makes it unusually approachable now. You can claim it on Epic, install it when you have time, spend 40 to 60 hours finishing the campaign and its key side content, and walk away satisfied without feeling like you missed some fleeting live event.
Should you start now or wait for what comes next?
Because the game is now free on Epic for a week, the first part of the answer is simple: you should claim it now, even if you do not plan to play immediately. Once it is in your Epic library, it is yours, and that preserves your options whether you are ready to dive in this month or next year.
The harder question is whether you should actually start a playthrough in 2025, or hold out for updates or an eventual sequel.
On the update front, Hogwarts Legacy appears to be in its mature, mostly final form. Over the past couple of years Avalanche has rolled out performance patches, the Photo Mode, talent respecs, previously exclusive quests and cosmetic drops. There has been no sign of a full expansion, and nothing in Warner Bros. or Avalanche’s recent messaging suggests they plan to bolt a major new story chapter onto this base. At this point, future support is more likely to be limited to minor fixes and compatibility tweaks than a transformative overhaul.
That makes now one of the safest times to jump in. The rough launch edges have been sanded down, the platform exclusives have softened, you are getting more features than day‑one buyers did, and you are not staring down the barrel of a huge patch that could suddenly invalidate your save or reshuffle core systems.
The sequel question is trickier, because a game that sells over 40 million copies almost certainly gets a follow up. Warner Bros. has already positioned Hogwarts Legacy as the foundation of a broader Wizarding World games push, and the cadence of sales milestones suggests players are still hungry for that fantasy. But even if a sequel is in active development, big budget single‑player RPGs have multi‑year timelines. By the time a hypothetical Hogwarts Legacy 2 is ready, you could have finished the first game once or twice and moved on.
There is also no indication that a sequel would directly replace or obsolete the original. Because Hogwarts Legacy is set so far before the books and films, it functions more like a self‑contained era. A new game would almost certainly shift the timeline, location or cast rather than retreading this exact storyline. Treating the first game as homework for the second is the wrong framing. It is more useful to see it as a standalone Wizarding World fantasy that will make any future projects richer by context, not mandatory by continuity.
The only strong argument for waiting would be if your PC is already struggling with recent releases that target similar or lower specs, or if you are personally hoping for a complete edition that bundles all cosmetic DLC into a single package. In that case, banking the Epic license now and checking back once you have upgraded your hardware or spotted a deep sale on premium cosmetics is reasonable.
For everyone else, particularly anyone with even a passing affection for the Harry Potter setting, there is little upside in delaying. The version on Epic today represents the most stable, convenient and content complete way to experience Hogwarts Legacy on PC. It may not be the most mechanically intricate RPG on the market in 2025, but as a lavish, self contained trip to a lovingly rendered Hogwarts, it still does something no other game quite matches.
If nothing else, claim it now and keep it in your backlog. When you are finally in the mood to hear the Sorting Hat argue about where you belong and watch the castle wake up around you, you will be glad you did not let one of the biggest single player games of the decade slip past while it was free.