A Hogwarts Legacy player has encountered a strange bug that caused a bizarre pattern to appear all over their character's face, promptly heading online to share their unsettling discovery. Their account arrives days after another fan discovered a game-breaking Hogwarts Legacy glitch that traps players inside a table.
Bug incidence tends to be exponentially proportional to software complexity, and a massive open-world RPG in the vein of the latest Harry Potter game is arguably as complex as interactive entertainment gets. There's consequently been no shortage of reports detailing weird Hogwarts Legacy glitches ever since the game hit the store shelves on February 10.
And while many of those issues tend to be minor and even entertaining, few are as bizarre as the glitch encountered by Reddit user d3vourm3nt, who recently went online to share a screenshot of their Hogwarts Legacy character who somehow ended up with a weird, chainmail-like pattern embedded into her face and neck. Making matters even worse is the fact that this unsettling model kept rendering even after the player restarted the game and reloaded their save.
While there are currently no other online reports detailing this exact issue that are substantiated with screenshots, it would appear d3vourm3nt is not the only player who encountered problems of this category. A search of Hogwarts Legacy's open-source bug reporting platform reveals plenty of complaints about "checkerboard" patterns and other kinds of distortions appearing on the playable character's face at seemingly random times. A March 7 review of over a dozen latest reports of this nature suggests that most of the affected fans are playing the game on the Xbox Series X/S, with only one of those tracked issues being observed with the Steam version of Hogwarts Legacy.
As for this newly depicted case of unsettling face patterning, its effects suggest it might result from a bump mapping bug that caused the game to mistake the affected character's face texture with an entirely different – but possibly wrongly labeled or similarly named – file. Some of the fans reacting to the March 6 Reddit post claimed they encountered the same problem and that it went away after a while, but none of the issues tracked through the official bug reporting site have yet been marked as resolved. The possibly permanent nature of this bizarre problem makes it potentially much more serious than most other visual glitches reported by Hogwarts Legacy players to date.
It's debatable whether addressing this sort of bizarre yet benign bugs will be a priority for Avalanche Software in the immediate future. Not least because the Salt Lake City-based studio currently appears to be focused on polishing the last-generation ports of its hit RPG. Doing so is seemingly proving to be quite a challenge, as evidenced by the fact that the studio had to delay Hogwarts Legacy's PS4 and Xbox One versions yet again on March 7.
Hogwarts Legacy is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with PS4 and Xbox One versions launching May 5 and a Switch port releasing July 25.