The untitled Dungeons & Dragons video game, which is currently codenamed Project Baxter within the studio - which some reason reminded me of the sort of cutesy nickname you’d give a grey old dog, like Major Muffins - will be set in the world of the hugely influential fantasy TRPG, which marks its 50th anniversary next year. While D&D can technically be played in any setting that players want, its official universe is the Forgotten Realms - familiar from the likes ofBaldur’s Gate 3and this year’sfar-better-than-expected D&D movie Honor Among Thieves.
Starbreeze didn’t say much about what to expect, but indicated that their take on D&D will stick to the sort of formula set by Payday and its ilk in being aco-operative multiplayer gamewith “lifetime commitment through a Games as a Service-model” and elements of “community engagement”. They also said it’ll offer “a larger than life experience”, which you’d really hope for from a game literally titled Dungeons and Dragons - two things I personally don’t experience much in my average day-to-day, but maybe that’s just me.
Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögrenaddedthat “development of the game is in full swing”, describing it as “an amazing Dungeons & Dragons action-adventure”. Sjögren also compared the apparently shared roots of D&D and Starbreeze in “cooperative and community driven experiences, ‘play it your way’ and infinite replayability”, which might give some idea of what to expect.
A bit of extremely grainy teaser art shows some kind of wizard/sorcerer character wielding a staff, along with a fairly generic shot of a fantasy town, and… that’s about all we know for now.
Next year sees the revision of D&D with itstabletop follow-up to the enormously adopted Fifth Edition, which has powered everything from hit series Critical Role to Baldur’s Gate 3’s maths, and will accompany afully-featured virtual tabletopalso made in UE5. With the pen-and-paper RPG pushing ever further into the digital world between that VTT, Baldur’s Gate 3 and now this, no doubt expect more D&D to venture its way into video games soon enough. I hear that Baldur’s Gate game did pretty alright for itself.
