We’ve been waiting to find out what the new, internally made Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game will be, and now we know: it’s a third-person action adventure game called Warlock which is pulling on open-world and immersive sim ideas – and stars Battlestar Galactica’s Tricia Helfer. Perhaps more to the point: it’s not Baldur’s Gate 4, or a follow-up in any way to Baldur’s Gate 3, as some people, like me, had expected it might be.
Warlock is in development at Invoke Studios, which has a surprisingly large team of around 180-200 people working on the game, though it’s not due until March 2027, as I learned during a press briefing ahead of The Game Awards reveal. And note: while the name Invoke might be unfamiliar, the studio was previously called Tuque Games, which you’ll know if you played the rather disastrous Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance game from 2021 – a game I was probably too lenient on in my review.
Tuque rebranded to Invoke in late 2022, and the Warlock team assured assembled press during the presentation Q&A that it had little to do with the Dark Alliance game that preceded it. “Ultimately, we’re a different team,” said studio lead Dominic Guay, who joined the team after Dark Alliance was released, coming from a Ubisoft, Watch Dogs background. “They’re focused on making a game that is in a genre that they’ve – many of them – mastered in the past, as much as we can master any genre in this industry.”
So, what is Warlock? We didn’t see any gameplay – that’s coming next summer – but a cinematic trailer showed a raven-haired and dark-eyed female Warlock using her telltale dark magical powers to lay waste to undead creatures and other iconic Dungeons & Dragons foes.
“Warlock is a third-person action adventure game built around immersive, expressive magic,” Jeff Hattem, VP of creative at Invoke, explained after the trailer was shown. “You use that clever spellcraft across all axes of the game, whether it’s exploring the world, solving challenges, taking down monsters, and you do it all in your own creative way, with all spells in all facets of the game.”
The main character is Katri, who is obviously a warlock, a kind of character in Dungeons & Dragons who has their magic bestowed upon them by an enormously powerful being, usually as part of a bargain or deal. We don’t know who Katri’s patron is but keen-eyed people assembled in our press group noticed the raven feathers on Katri, suggesting a possible link to the Raven Queen, who perhaps most famously was used during Critical Role’s Vox Machina campaign.
“Our focus is on making a video game first, so an immersive, single-player, open-world experience”
Note, however, that while this game is D&D based, “we’re not trying to simulate the tabletop RPG experience, so there’s no dice rolling”, Dominic Guay said. “Our focus is on making a video game first, so an immersive, single-player, open-world experience, but it’s definitely set in the universe of Dungeons and Dragons.
“So if you’re not familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, you’re not going to feel friction like you’re missing information to understand the story or the game world; you’re going to get everything you need to figure out the mysteries of the world. But if you are a fan of the brand of the universe, then I think you’re going to be surprised and excited about what we’re doing, how we’re heavily leaning into the lore and the universe of D&D.”
Actual gameplay details were intentionally limited during the presentation, but it sounds like you’ll be a lone adventurer in the game, as in RPGs like Avowed or Elder Scrolls – or Arkane’s Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, which was name-checked by Wizards’ moderator at one point, perhaps tellingly. “You can meet characters but you’re going to be focused on the immersion from the eyes of Katri,” Guay said.
A better clue as to the game’s overall direction might come from the studio’s make-up instead, populated as it is by a lot of former Ubisoft Montreal developers, including Guay. “So if you think about games like Far Cry or Watch Dogs, these are games that were trying to have that approach, where, as a player, you can understand the systems and you can play with these systems, and this is definitely how we’re thinking about building games. It’s part of the DNA of this team, for sure,” he said.
“And when you’re talking about immersive sims, it’s the same thing at a different scale. They’re less wide, big, open worlds, but they’re also about understanding how things work in the world, discovering, experimenting. So this is definitely part of our DNA.”
Warlock constitutes one major part of Wizards of the Coast’s big internal push towards making video games. The other is Exodus, a sci-fi RPG made by Archetype Entertainment, that looks a lot like Mass Effect and is also due to be released in early 2027.
