Character creators are frequently criticized for lacking dark skin tones or applying awkward and unrealistic lighting to dark skin. For example, "dark skin is still a radical concept in video games," Vice said in 2017 (opens in new tab). So it felt like waking up on the far shore to discover that Hogwarts Legacy has been criticized for the limits of its paleness.

While it has an air of self-consciousness, many commenters on Reddit complained that the lack of particularly pale skin made it impossible for them to recreate themselves as Hogwarts students.

"I'm of Nordic descent and fair-skinned," said one poster (open in new tab), "and people ask me if I'm sick or something." I'm a little disappointed that I can't replicate that."

One modder wasted no time in giving players what they wanted, creating a Hogwarts Legacy Mod called "Paler and Darker Skins for Player Character (opens in new tab)" that has already been downloaded over 11,000 times! As the name of the mod suggests, it also adds darker skin tones, but the lack of pale skin tones was the complaint that led to the creation of this mod and is the main driving force behind its success. This mod is currently the most popular Hogwarts Legacy mod on NexusMods.

The lightest skin tone of the default Hogwarts Legacy character creator is indeed somewhat tan, at least as far as it is rendered on the character creation screen, compared to the palest skin tone humanity gets (according to some commentary on this issue, characters look slightly different in-game). The images below show the default pale and dark limits on the left and the modified limits on the right.

The NPCs in the Hogwarts Legacy are a much more diverse group than the faculty and students in the original films, at least in terms of skin color. The Harry Potter series, like other popular fantasy films, has been widely criticized for excluding and stereotyping people of color (if the Harry Potter series is not "Harry Potter Day"), and the developers of Hogwarts Legacy had in mind It is clear. In that context, the presence of a day 1 color-white mod could be taken as an unpleasant irony, but the majority of the comments I've seen express only a desire to see their likeness in the game or to create a character like Draco Malfoy. (I'll save my dismay for the inevitable mod that will turn Hogwarts into a whites-only school.)

Hogwarts Legacy also features the first trans character in the Harry Potter universe, but this choice is not seen as a triumph of representation, of course, and instead as an interpreted as an ineffective effort to fend off a campaign. Many have vowed not to buy Hogwarts Legacy because of the author's political activism and have encouraged others to boycott it.