As revealed in a teaser trailer soundtracked by Tool in The Game Awards, Invoke Studios—one of Wizards of the Coasts' internal videogame developers—is working on a new Dungeons & Dragons videogame called Warlock. And no, it's not going to be anything like Baldur's Gate 3.
"We're making a third-person action adventure open world game that focuses on the warlock," Jeff Hattem, creative director at Invoke, told PC Gamer. This is what we get for taking a one-level warlock dip in our multiclass builds—an entire game based around the class fantasy of the warlock.
"I've always thought that warlocks were really cool because they're a far cry from pointy hat wizard," Hattem said. "They have that edge to them." To be fair, basing an entire game around a single D&D class worked for the Thief trilogy. And the idea of playing a Faust-like character who gets their magical abilities from a pact with a supernatural entity is an intriguing one.
"Warlocks, they make a dangerous pact with a powerful being, and really what it is is they have insanely high charisma. In Dungeons & Dragons, as a stat, they deal damage based on charisma. But for me, that charisma is like… they're able to convince some of the most powerful beings in the world of Dungeons & Dragons to bestow magic upon them. Those kinds of people that they walk in the room and like, everyone takes notice, everyone stops talking."
To depict that kind of charisma, the protagonist of Warlock is being played by Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica, who voiced EDI in the Mass Effect games and Kerrigan in Starcraft 2. So, yeah, fair enough. That is probably what a charisma stat of 18 translates to in the real world.
"The game really focuses on magic," Hattem explained, "and the way that you can utilize a whole bunch of spells, rituals, magic, across all the facets of the game. It's in exploration, solving environmental challenges. When you throw down with monsters, you're using the same spells across everything and so on the surface, spells have an immediate gameplay impact that you can see, but there's a lot of lateral thinking that we're asking players to do, to be creative with magic."
That magic won't work exactly the same way it does in D&D, mechanically speaking. Unlike Baldur's Gate 3, Warlock isn't trying to recreate the rules of D&D in a videogame. "Baldur's Gate 3 was a great game," Hattem said, "I played the heck out of it for sure. And I'm super happy that it's out there and that it exists, because players got to play that and have fun with it. I think that D&D, it's such a rich setting. We celebrated 50 years not too long ago, and 50 years, it's like a big collaborative project, right? There's a lot of designers and artists and people that worked in this setting, in this world, and now we get the chance to kind of add our own twist to it."
We'll see gameplay footage of Warlock in the summer of 2026, and the plan is to launch it in 2027.
