Wizards of the Coast knows the people thirst for more more Baldur’s Gate 3-ish CRPGs, and the company’s president has made it clear they still plan on making those kinds of things, even if the D&D action game they recently announced will be a different kettle of magic frogs
“Don’t get me wrong,” said President John Hight when speaking to Polygon about the different possibilities making a D&D game offers being a factor in going that route with this latest game, “we are going to do CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3.”
The WOTC chief was speaking at Summer Game Fest, which mainly focused on the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons action game being developed by Giant Skull, and led by ex-Star Wars Jedi director Stig Asmussen. With this action game, says Hight, the focus is more on giving some new folks a chance to see what else they can do with the universe.
Hight and Asmussen are currently keeping their cards close to their chests as to what that’ll look like, with the former musing that “sometimes people immediately latch on to, oh, here’s the story we have to do and here are all the features that we want in the game. They start building out broadly without discovering: what’s the underlying thing that’s fun?”
It sounds like that’s the stage Asmussen and co are at right now, with the director having concluded that while D&D does come with some of the same canony headaches as Star Wars, there’s room within it to do plenty of interesting stuff. Meanwhile, Hight cited Asmussen’s work adapting all sorts of mythological beings into God of War 3 as something that should translate to integrating D&D monsters “that form the dreams and the nightmares of people, from gelatinous cubes to owl bears”.
Uh oh, how does he know about my dreams of gelatinous cubes gelationously cubing around? Are you infiltrating minds like a nether brain, mr exec man?
Anyway, as for the actual bones of the game, Asmussen was clear that he’s leaning on the single-player action lessons he learned making Star Wars Jedi for this D&D game. There’s a lot of chatter about a movement system that doesn’t feel janky and Asmussen mentions Hight liking his studio being “experts at melee combat”.
It’s early days yet, but even if it isn’t BG3-ish, here’s hoping Giant Skull’s game ends up being interesting enough not to just feel like a Star Wars Jedi game wearing a snazzy D&D poncho.
