Lauren spends most of her time dead in League of Legends, or equally as dead in Valorant. Don’t ask her about Vampire: The Masquerade.
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Post-Baldur’s Gate 3, everyone I’ve ever spoken to has said the same thing: ‘I don’t envy the developer of Baldur’s Gate 4.’ That same sentiment extends to Warlock, Invoke and Wizards of the Coast’s upcoming D&D-set RPG. While we’ve seen the likes of Solasta 2 make use of the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, Invoke’s new adventure is the first triple-A D&D game post-BG3. Sure, it’s a very different look for the franchise – combat is more action-heavy, and there are no turn-based battles here – but it’s still, at its core, a D&D experience.
“I think ignoring the Baldur’s Gate 3-shaped elephant in the room would be a bit stupid,” I say, prompting a chuckle from Invoke’s Vice President and General Manager, Dominic Guay. He nods – “yeah” – and I ask what the team learned from Baldur’s Gate 3 and, in turn, how it inspired them. “I think some of the ways [Larian] realized the spells had some impact – I can guarantee that,” he says. “But I think that, just generally, the thing that impacted us the most – and in a way kind of comforted us in the way we want to do things – is that, in Baldur’s Gate 3, I think Larian did a really good job of rooting everything they did in the lore, while paying tribute to it.
“I’ve been playing D&D for a long time, and I see some stuff in [BG3] and I go ‘wait a sec,’ then I check it on Google and go ‘oh, that’s cool! That’s actually a deep cut, but it exists!’ Even although they had their own story that they wanted to tell, they were able to connect it [together]. That’s what we wanted to do, too, and we were inspired by how they were successful in doing it.”
I return to the point on abilities because, as mentioned in my Warlock preview, Invoke’s spells do look different from Larian’s – something I was pleasantly surprised by. Where Eldritch Blast, perhaps the most iconic Warlock spell, is a bolt of green lightning in BG3, it’s a plume of blue energy engulfed in black mist in Invoke’s RPG.
While D&D’s abilities have always existed in the ‘theater of the mind,’ making them unique to your imagination, BG3’s iteration of various cantrips and spells have likely become ‘canon’ for some players. Guay notes that the team was “for sure inspired by things that came before [including] Baldur’s Gate, even if only subconsciously. Their interpretation of some spells were cool, and I’m sure they kind of impacted how we did some of the [spells]. But, fundamentally, the function was the most important part.”
He recalls that translating “spells that are so bound to being turn-based” was a huge challenge. “We wanted to create spells that have multiple functions so that the player can be creative with them. That’s where we started from. You saw the Misty Step; the typical use case is ‘how do I [get] out of a problem?’ But now all of a sudden barred gates, which in videogames typically signal to the player that they can’t go down that corridor, once [you] have that spell suddenly become an attractor – ‘oh, cool, what’s behind the barred gate?’ The functionality guided us.”
That idea of creativity is fundamental to Dungeons and Dragons; we’ve all been at a table where a player has come up with a weird and wonderful way to solve a problem. It’s something that Baldur’s Gate 3 championed – I remember speaking to Twitch streamer Lua ‘Luality’ about the time she killed Astarion’s nemesis, vampire lord Cazador, by throwing rats at him, and we all recall the guys who scaled a wall using a tower made of boxes.
Warlock, as a single-player, linear experience feels like it can’t have that level of agency, but Guay is resolute that it still offers opportunities to get weird with it. “With any game inside of Dungeons and Dragons, the whole premise of the brand is limitless player agency: that’s the whole premise – it’s in your brain, you can do whatever you want, it’s imagination.
“We had to pick our battles. A lot of games in the past have gone for more narrative agency – I can be the evil character, or the good character; stuff like that. That’s not where we’re going. The story, fundamentally, has written set pieces to it. We wanted to bring the agency to the more low-level gameplay, and that’s where we brought in the idea of creativity with magic. You’re able to use these spells in ways that should almost feel like you’re cheating; like you’re not doing it the way we want you to do it.
“I remember a while ago that a tester had put a bug in because someone had managed to do a crazy stacking and super elaborate series of things to bypass a problem in the game that was supposed to be an important challenge,” he recalls. “They put it as a bug and we were like ‘no, it’s not a bug! If you’re going to work this hard to go through this challenge, you deserve to do it your way; that’s good!’ I think that’s the mindset: it’s giving you that freedom to tell your own stories, but more at the low level of things.”
He notes that this philosophy extends out to exploration, too – “you’re in a world, you see things, you get in there, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You discover the story of a place, and then you live out your little adventure in that part of the world. That’s the big feeling we want.”
The key to creating that sense of limitlessness is ensuring players don’t have to stick to a given waypoint, as Guay believes they often “take over the game. You stop exploring because you’re like, ‘it’s not worth it, I should just follow this waypoint.’ We still need to give the players some tools, but not to the point where it takes over their agency. It’s a tricky thing.
“To give an example, you’re looking for me at Gamescom, so if you opened your world map you’d have the highlight on Kolnmesse [where Gamescom takes place]. But you wouldn’t know I’m here in the booth, sitting here. So you can use [your map] to get to the Messe, but then maybe you need to talk to people to find out where the booth is, then you need to engage in finding me. That’s kind of the feeling we want players to have.” I do love a topical example.
Warlock, fundamentally, does feel like it encapsulates the spirit of D&D. In the short gameplay demo I saw, there is flexibility in both Kaatri’s approach to the world and combat, and every spell feels firmly rooted in the lore, but has its own, unique Invoke-made twist. I was a little worried that Warlock would simply look and play like another Unreal Engine 5 fantasy game, but I have hopes that it’ll manage to stand on its own two feet, while also contributing something new to the D&D RPG space.
With all of this in mind, and the spectre of Baldur’s Gate resting firmly overhead, I ask Guay one last question: is Invoke feeling the pressure?
“There’s always pressure when you make a videogame,” he replies. “You want players to like your game; that’s what we think about all the time. But I’m happy about the marriage between the genre and the brand. I think that’s working for us.”