Hogwarts Legacy developers added an internal-only feature that turned cats into killing machines towards abusive players. Anyone trying to cast spells on the game’s furry felines were harshly punished, a fun bit of karma that we’re sad to see omitted in the final game.
According to the game’s Community Manager, Chandler Wood, the developers were having too much fun casting spells on cats. Soon after, developers made sure to have cats protect themselves and kill players in the process. We mean literally “kill” as well; any cat that was virtually harmed would immediately cast Avada Kedavra on the player.
Wood made sure to point out that this isn’t in the final release of Hogwarts Legacy, which is a bit of a shame. Most players did end up playing with the cats anyway and options to cast spells on them seemed to have been removed. Still, this would have been a fun feature, one that many content creators would have reacted ridiculously to.
Old-school gamers probably see some similarities between this feature and the hilarious chicken payback in The Legend of Zelda. Ever since A Link to the Past on SNES, players who dared to attack a chicken would be attacked by a swarm of them fairly quickly. This feature is so iconic that it’s still included in recent games such as Breath of the Wild and spin-offs like Hyrule Warriors.
Say what you will about Nintendo but the company was brave enough to say “this is what happens when you mess with chickens.” Having that hilarious option in Hogwarts Legacy would have been awesome but they probably didn’t want to encourage animal violence. At the least, players won’t have to see cats kill their OCs in the final game.
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Even without the killer cats, Hogwarts Legacy was still able to break/meet expectations and become one of the best-selling games of the year thus far. It’s only been a month since the game came out and it's still selling like hotcakes. Here’s hoping that the money is enough for J.K. Rowling to keep quiet about her politics.