Hasbro Confirms New Unannounced Dungeons & Dragons Video Game in Development

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks has confirmed that an in-house studio is developing an unannounced Dungeons & Dragons video game. In a feature posted today on Bloomberg News, Cocks stated that Hasbro was actively developing a Dungeons & Dragons video game via one of its in-house studios. No further details were provided about the video game, nor was any timeline given about its release. Hasbro plans to release one to two video games a year by 2026, not including third party licensed games.

Hasbro is actively pivoting into a video game developer, having purchased or created several in-house studios in recent years. One of the most high-profile ventures is Exodus, a sci-fi RPG created by several BioWare veterans. A GI Joe video game focused on Snake-Eyes is also in development at a Hasbro-owned studio.

Hasbro is also actively working with several third party studios on new D&D video games. Gameloft, the maker of Disney Dreamlight Valley, is making a survival-life sim set in the Forgotten Realms, while Starbreeze Entertainment is also actively working on a D&D video game. Hasbro also cancelled several video game projects, including several Dungeons & Dragons-themed games back in 2023 as part of a strategic realignment.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To me it seems like it basically had 2 with variations on the theme with at least one way of ending the game early. But I'd also say Cyberpunk only really had a couple of significant endings for the same reasons.

Yeah I can see the logic there - if we follow it both games have essentially three endings at this point (including all the work done post-launch on both and the PL DLC ending, which is totally different to others).

Better than Mass Effect which promised all your work across 3 games would have dramatic impact and there was effectively 1 ending.

ME3 was a huge victim of being made in 24 months there, yeah. EA "extended" the time they allowed BioWare from 18 months (!!!) but then wouldn't extend it again (absolutely EA of that era was run by morons), so BioWare had to rush to come up with an ending, and Casey Hudson and Mac Walters went into a room and came out with what we got at launch, which was yes, three rather similar endings and the sort of "fail state" ending.

(This rush also mucked up other stuff, like the dream sequences, which seem to all assume you have a Paragon Spaceborn Shepard, personality-wise, because there's no way a mostly-Renegade Earthborn Sole Survivor Shepard, for example, would act like Shepard does in those sequences. The odd lack of choices and single behaviour set makes me think they had more but cut it.)

The real issue I think that was that they did account for most of your work across all three games but in ME3 itself, not in the endings, at launch anyway. There was almost no epilogue at launch, either, nor real send-offs for all these characters people had loved for years.

It wasn't until the combination of the Citadel DLC (which gave you the character send-offs people wanted) and the improved ending (which had actual epilogue scenes) that it really got even into an acceptable state (though the fail state ending somehow became even more insulting).

I will say I agree it was truly dreadful at launch. Like, I'm not a "fan" of many properties (DS9 and ME might be the extent of it). I'm not very emotionally engaged with them. But ME3's launch endings were so bad I repeatedly played through last bit of the game to see if I was missing something, and when I realized I wasn't, I essentially got a Dazed debuff IRL for 24 hours. Which no media had managed to inflict on me since I was a child, let alone for 24 hours. I wasn't even angry, just confused - "Is this it?!".

Of course the longest-term issue with ME3's endings is that in order to make ME5, they're going to have to pick one to make canon, and it's definitely going to be Destroy (probably highest-score Destroy, and with a likely semi-retcon re: the Geth situation).

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Something is happening if some indie titles can be sold better than AAA by big videogame studios. Now the tecnology is better, but it is as if they had forgotten what make videogame to be fun.

It is too soon for a BG4 but this has helped to open some new doors.

Not all the D&D videogames should be dungeon-crawler CRPGs.

Paizo's Pathfinder has got videogame adaptations and it shouldn't have been so bad.

I don't know Japanese market to give an opinion about Japanese CRPGs but lots of them are "one dimension", like in Final Fantasy old titles where ranged attacks didn't mind.

 

[Xamnam]

If I have one criticism of BG3 it's that it can sometimes feel tryhard edgy (especially the Dark Urge storyline).

Seriously, it's honestly been a bit of a turn-off, some of the particular sequences I've heard talked about. It's not the reason I haven't gotten around to it, I know I will with time, but it certainly hasn't helped.

 

[jayoungr]

In a feature posted today on Bloomberg News, Cocks stated that Hasbro was actively developing a Dungeons & Dragons video game via one of its in-house studios.​

I hear it's called Project Sigil.

 

[Oofta]

Seriously, it's honestly been a bit of a turn-off, some of the particular sequences I've heard talked about. It's not the reason I haven't gotten around to it, I know I will with time, but it certainly hasn't helped.

Overall I enjoyed the game and thought it was a lot of fun. However I will say that Larian falls into the "evil is more cool and interesting" side of things than I personally care for. I'm not particularly religious or prudish, it's just that I think good can be just as cool and interesting, if not more so.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Cyberpunk 2077 has some of the most diverse and best-done set of endings of like, any game that's ever existed. Like, you can end up with completely different stuff going on at the end, wildly so, and there's a load of varied epilogue messages and stuff. I won't spoiler any of it here, but it's 6 endings from the main game and 1 which requires Phantom Liberty (which is either the most depressing or most optimistic one depending on how you feel about it!), for a total of 7.

I cannot think of any game that really beats Cyberpunk 2077 for endings except maybe Fallout: New Vegas?

So if you're putting Cyberpunk 2077 as "barely good enough" for endings, I feel like maybe the bar is a bit high! Cyberpunk also has a lot of choices which make pretty big differences, and can lock out or change big sections of the game - a lot of characters you probably care about will live or die or have their lives changed because of your choices. This is despite a somewhat linear story and V being a pretty fixed person (the initial origins make some difference, but not as much as one might hope).


Yeah, but not many AAA RPGs or CRPGs fail to make their money back, even kind of mediocre ones like MEA or The Outer Worlds tend to. AA ones do fail with some regularity, which is partly why more are pushing into AAA. Obsidian have traditionally made AA RPGs, but Avowed and upcoming The Outer Worlds 2 are clearly and intentionally in the AAA space.


Yeah - no definition is perfect for sure, and there's a lot of "I know it when I see it".


Yes I think a good D&D-themed action-adventure game could be very successful - the issue it would face is that unless you had several possible characters with different classes (not necessarily all twelve, but like, probably at least three or four), you'd get a lot of potential customer pushback (unfairly, you might argue, but expectations are expectations, reasonable or not!).

Certainly there are a lot of games which absolutely stand on the junction of "action-adventure" and "RPG" - The Dark Souls/Elden Ring games lean slightly more RPG but with a lot of action-adventure DNA, whereas the Dragon's Dogma games lean slightly more action-adventure (and Dragon's Dogma 1 has some incredible "AD&D 2nd Edition" vibes for sure). In the West, Mass Effect wasn't really action-adventure but was at the juxtaposition of 3rd person shooter (think Gears of War or similar) and RPG, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard is primarily an RPG but also has clear action-adventure leanings. Many games that are action-adventure also have quite RPG-ish progression systems - sometimes to their detriment - I'd argue Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor, was worse because it got more "RPG elements", but having some clearly enhanced both games.

(The main bar to D&D action-adventure games getting made is really the question of "Why licence from WotC who will demand a revenue share and want oversight and veto power over your lore/story/etc. when you could just use generic D&D-esque tropes for free and with no interference?". Hence you get deeply D&D-inspired games which aren't D&D.)

AAA games are starring to fail too, examples Veilguard, Skull & Bones, and Concord. I expect more of this because studios thought they could cheap out on good writing, it's foundational.

 

[GreyLord]

AAA games are starring to fail too, examples Veilguard, Skull & Bones, and Concord. I expect more of this because studios thought they could cheap out on good writing, it's foundational.

How do we know Veilguard failed? It just came out. I'm still deliberating about whether to buy it or not.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

How do we know Veilguard failed?

It's selling well and getting good reviews. May we all fail so spectacularly.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

AAA games are starring to fail too, examples Veilguard, Skull & Bones, and Concord.

AAA games fail all the time.

AAA RPGs rarely fail.

And your examples prove you aren't paying attention. Veilguard has sold extremely well - anti-woke people are pretending it's a failure because they're mad it has a non-binary/trans person in it, and is lead-written by a non-binary person and you should not be listening to people like that.

Skull & Bones is an competitive PvP pirate game, it has absolutely nothing to do with RPGs. It failed for obvious reasons.

Concord was an Overwatch rip-off - a multiplayer competitive FPS. It had absolutely nothing to do with RPGs and again, failed for obvious reasons.

None of these games have "bad writing". You are demonstrating that you have no idea what you're talking about by saying that. Veilguard's writing is flatly good, but some people don't like it for two reasons:

1) Because it's "woke" and the lead writer is a non-binary person. Let's not beat around the bush - the main hostility to Veilguard is transphobia and general hostility to women and non-white people (which is the majority of the characters). So there's a lot of wild and almost funny exaggeration about issues. Characters in previous DA games talking the same way get let off because they weren't "woke". I can give extensive examples.

2) Because you can't be a psychopath. In DAV, Rook is a decent guy. Period. You don't have a choice to make Rook into a horrible scumbag. You can be kind of rude with people - and quite insulting to genuinely bad/dangerous people, you can't be nasty to your friends, or make insane blood-soaked murder-decisions like you can in BG3. You can debate whether that's a style of writing you like but there's nothing that lacks skill about it.

Further proving how you shouldn't listen to weird transphobes and just blithely believe what they say, the main writer on BG3 - who is non-binary as I noted - Trick Weekes (previously Patrick Weekes) - is a proven "good" writer, with a long track record at BioWare, particularly having written a lot of the best characters in ME, including Garrus and Mordin, and who worked on the best DLC for the ME games as well. They're also the person who came up with Solas, and everything about Solas is their work. But because they're non-binary now, people like you are going around repeating absolute nonsense like:

I expect more of this because studios thought they could cheap out on good writing, it's foundational.

Do you really want to be part of an anti-woke pile-on that's being pushed because a lead writer and one of the characters in the game are non-binary/trans? You might want to consider whether that's a good fit for you. Whether that's something you're keen to be involved with and support. Because I'm guessing it wasn't something you intended, and you're just repeating something you heard.

Again, re: bad writing, neither Concord nor Skull & Bones were badly written nor well written - but it didn't matter, because they're competitive multiplayer games, not RPGs, so have very little writing in them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

How do we know Veilguard failed? It just came out. I'm still deliberating about whether to buy it or not.

It didn't "fail". We know for a fact from Steam, given the sales position it maintained, and how long it maintained it, that it sold at least "very well". Better than a lot of recent games that no-one is trying to pretend are not "successes".

The whole "failed game" thing is an anti-"woke" talking point that was largely cooked up by two YouTubers, one of them a well-know ally of the alt-right (MrMattyPlays), who is also a serial liar (provably) and serial leaker, and the other of whom is a good buddy of his (who works for Skill Up). They both did hit pieces on Veilguard, and I do mean literal hit pieces, where they carefully edited and curated footage to try and make the game look as bad as possible (something it's easily shown not to be if you watch an actual stream).

MrMattyPlays also intentionally leaked probably the weakest bit of dialogue in the entire game (via one of his editors, who he claimed was the leaker, but mysteriously hasn't fired!) to try and prime the pump. Something he's done before, I note. BioWare were frankly stupid to send him a review copy, but that'll be down to some poor researcher who was trying to work out who the right YouTubers to send review copies to.

Compounding the issue is that a lot of Useful Idiots wanted to get on the bandwagon because of two things about the game:

1) As I pointed out above, Rook is only given options for a sane and decent person. This is similar to Shepard or Hawke (and to a lesser extent Hero Of Ferelden), in that they have an established personality and a specific role in the game, and frankly Rook is straight-up better-written than the Inquisitor in DAI, but it does limit your options, especially compared to the recent BG3. This particularly offended a lot of people who wanted to be very nasty to the non-binary character. I'm not exaggerating to be clear - I can find you countless "Why can't I be mean to Taash?!?!?!? She's so annoying!!" (misgendering theirs)

2) I won't go into any spoilers, but some long-time players didn't like the lore revelations because they conflicted with the headcanon they'd build up in the nearly 10 years since DAI. Actual lore experts like Ghil Dirthalen (who has an entire YouTube channel about DA's lore) generally loved DAV, because they understand the difference between canon and headcanon, and aren't offended when canon that wasn't what they assumed or wanted to be true is revealed.