Dungeons & Dragons: Warlock Video Game Announced by Invoke Studios

Invoke Studios, a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, has announced Dungeons & Dragons: Warlock, a new video game due out for 2027. The game features a new character named Kaati, played by Tricia Helfer, and will be a third-person action-adventure game. Players will use spellcraft to "solve challenges and take down monsters" with players having some freedom in how they solve problems.

"We're not trying to simulate the tabletop RPG experience, so there is no dice-rolling in the game — we're trying to really deliver a video-game experience first," said Dominic Guay, studio lead at Invoke Studios, in an interview with IGN. "If you are not familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, you are not going to feel friction, like in that you're missing details of the world. But if you are a fan of the universe, you are going to be really excited about what we are doing with the lore of the series for Warlock."

Invoke Studios was previously called Tuque Games, and made the much-derided Dark Alliance game in 2021.

Gameplay will be revealed in 2026, with a planned release for 2027.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That could be cool if the magic system actually feels creative and not just flashy combat spam. They keep talking about “expressive” spell use and exploration puzzles, which sounds promising… but also vague until we see it in motion.

Right?

That's the the sort of thing that it's very easy to claim, and countless games have claimed something along those lines, but relatively few of them have actually lived up to that. More often it's just that you have a couple of kinda-flexible abilities and some really easy puzzles.

Breath of the Wild and the sequel are two of the ones you might argue did succeed at that. I'd also personally say the fairly recent Eternal Strands does (it's kind of a great game, and rather overlooked - also talking of Mike Laidlaw as @Charlequin was, Mike was the game director on it).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I wonder if the visual quirks of the character reflect things analogous to invocations and patron features. Like the little shadow tendtrils from her eyelids could be something that lets her read all writing or see in magical darkness.

Like the NEXT playtest concept of warlocks physically changing over time in ways that reflect their patron.

Just the idea makes me want to lean into that more when i play warlocks.

 

[Okland]

Not really, no. The original founders were Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip. They were at the helm during the Baldur’s Gate era. Yip left before the EA acquisition in 2007. Muzyka and Zeschuk were still there until 2016, but there was a lot of internal restructuring after the EA acquisition, so while they were still at the company I think they were much less involved in Dragon Age and Mass Effect than they were with the classic BioWare games. Casey Hudson was the creative director for Mass Effect 1-3. He left in 2014, came back in 2017 to try to save Anthem and left again in 2020. David Gaider was the creative director for DA:O, DA2, and DA:I, but left in 2017. Studio head Aaryn Flynn left in 2018. Mike Laidlaw Was also creative director for a while, I don’t remember when he left. And I’m probably forgetting other significant departures. BioWare leadership was kind of a revolving door in the 2010s, honestly.

Moreover, stories from former BioWare developers and writers paint a picture of a studio that was kind of always a hot mess, but at first that felt like part of the “scrappy indie studio” charm. As they got bigger and more corporatized, they lost that “little developer that could” spirit but never grew out of the messy, inefficient part.

It’s wild to see how many of the heavy hitters who defined that "BioWare Magic" jumped ship once the culture got too corporate. I guess that "scrappy indie" chaos only works when you have the freedom to iterate, which definitely isn't the vibe under EA. It honestly feels like the name is just a brand now rather than the actual studio that gave us those legendary RPGs.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I guess that "scrappy indie" chaos only works when you have the freedom to iterate

They were never a "scrappy indie". Bioware was an AAA company (for the time) since day 1, and Bioware was owned by EA for the vast majority of the time it put out what you call "legendary RPGs".

Further, those people didn't quite when things "got too corporate", they quit when the games started failing, by and large.

Except the two doctors who started Bioware - they quit because they had a ton of money and were never obsessed with making videogames (indeed, IIRC Bioware not founded explicitly to make videogames but rather to make a piece of medical software, but they all then decided to make a game). One of them I know wanted to primarily run a microbrewery not make games. That's pretty common - one of the founders of CDPR, despite games making bazillions and being their own publisher and so on, quit because he didn't really want to make game, he wanted to run his loss-making restaurant on the millions he'd made making games!

So let's not over-mythologise this.

Also re:

It honestly feels like the name is just a brand now rather than the actual studio that gave us those legendary RPGs.

You could say the same about basically every long-lived company except Bethesda Game Studios.

Like, look at Blizzard - almost no-one who founded Blizzard or came up with the big games or w/e is still there. They've pretty much all quit. But is Blizzard getting worse? No. Blizzard is getting better. WoW improved quite a lot after the sex abuse scandals and so on came out, because it seems a lot of the creeps were kind of holding back a newer generation. Diablo 4 is on a steady trajectory of improvement. It's not for everyone but it's clearly succeeding and undeniably getting better at being the kind of game it is. Overwatch has had some issues over the years, but is pretty much universally agreed to be in a really good place right now, adding a bunch of new character, 6v6 is back, etc. etc.

Whereas look at Bethesda Game Studios - almost everyone at the top of BGS, Todd Howard, Emil Pagliarulo etc. has been there for 20+ years, and indeed we know that's true of senior positions within BGS generally - the same people are at the top working on Elder Scrolls 6 as were on Oblivion and Fallout 3.

But their quality of output has pretty steadily declined (or at best remained static whilst others improve - I'd argue declined though, as they lost the ability to self-edit). Many people see the peak as Morrowind. Some might see it as Skyrim. But FO4 was clearly much worse written, and much full of itself and confused about what kind of game it was than previous ones, and Starfield took most of a decade, but was bland, bloated with generic, forgettable "content" and so wildly outdated in virtually every way that it felt like an HD remake of a game from, well, 15 years ago. And not in a good way!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

in a really good place right now, adding a bunch of new character

Well obviously, there isn't a game that can't be improved by the addition of a flying cat.