Four years ago, Hidden Path Entertainment—the studio behind the Defense Grid series and the codeveloper of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—posted a bunch of job listings that revealed it was developing a big-budget open world Dungeons & Dragons game. Bad news came in 2024 when its creative director posted on LinkedIn to reveal the studio had spent six months searching for “replacement funding” to continue work on it, but in the absence of that funding, made the decision to “pause development on that project and reduce the company size until we have an opportunity to return to it.” 44 developers lost their jobs.
Now, an eight-minute video and a collection of concept art for the game has leaked (via MP1st). Codenamed Project Dante, it’s a third-person RPG with action combat (very early-in-development action combat, I feel obliged to say), and two AI-controlled companions. After an initial fight we see a simple puzzle being solved to activate a magical temple, some exploration, a flashback cutscene, a snippet of tavern conversation, and then a song.
The fact there’s a full song being sung by a group of NPCs you can overhear just by sneaking up on them is the most surprising thing in the footage, which is otherwise fairly by-the-numbers fantasy RPG stuff. It reminds me of Dragon’s Dogma, only with a Forgotten Realms skin.
The concept art is a nice collection of D&D imagery, showcasing an adventuring party that includes an orc bard, a tiefling rogue, and an elf lady with a tiny dragon pet. There’s a bunch of dragons, some displacer beast kittens, and an adorable tressym—one of the flying cats like Gale has in Baldur’s Gate 3. It looks exactly like the kind of art I show my players when I’m running D&D.
”
While nothing about what’s been leaked seems exceptional, it does seem like development was fairly far along. While Wizards of the Coast did reportedly cancel five in-development videogames a couple of years ago, it seems like Project Dante was put on indefinite hold due to a loss of funding. Either way, it’s a shame to see so much hard work go nowhere.
Another D&D game that’s definitely still in the works is the singleplayer action-adventure coming from the former director of Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi games. That one’s being developed by Giant Skull and all we know is that it will apparently contain “immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal” and is being made in Unreal Engine 5.
Read the full article here
