I have shifted from a position of ‘really? A third-person action D&D game?’ to cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons. Partially because of a really solid showing at Gamescom, actually leveraging the prospect of playing a spellcaster with a bunch of interesting interactions and some swanky-looking combat.
My optimism continues to grow after an interview with IGN, in which general manager Dominic Guay tells the site that the game will be getting rid of traditional quest markers—there’s a compass you can turn off, but that’s about it: “We wanted them to engage with the world, to figure things out and feel that when they found things, it was based on their actions and not just blindly trusting a waypoint.”
While I’m not always opposed to a waypoint—it really depends on the kind of game—I can say that a surplus of hand-holding is always irritating. Developer Invoke Studios has lucked into a topical time to talk about this stuff, too, since such obnoxious waypointery has made us feel a lot better about not getting the PS5 exclusive Wolverine anytime soon.
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Guay continues that “the core team on this game have worked on other open world games before and we’ve done the, let’s say, the heavy-handed guiding approach before. What ends up happening at some point—and it’s normal—a lot of players will just [blindly follow] the waypoint, and then you lose that agency, you lose that feeling of curiosity because you’re like, well, why even bother? And so we didn’t want to go there. We wanted the player to explore.”
Instead of typical quests, the game revolves around “Mysteries”, which sound like a sort of light immersive sim way of going about things. Like asking for rumours in a D&D game, players can bumble around town chatting to NPCs to accrue clues and information—creating the illusion of stumbling across something organically.
“Not only are there multiple entry points, but depending on how you stumble upon them, it might change how you interact with them … You can chance upon that Mystery from a completely different place, and then it’ll lead you toward that settlement, and you’ll know before coming in there’s something fishy going on here. So then you’ll approach that settlement differently than in this case where you learn it from within.”
Not all of these mysteries are so straightforward—but this all sounds pretty solid to me. What’ll really make this system good is whether Invoke Studios can pull it off in a way that feels natural. Creating the illusion that I’m some super-smart warlock detective is neat on paper, but if every beggar I bump into starts talking about a sinister basement, I might feel just as coddled as I am with big glowing map markers and prompts. Or yellow paint. At least we aren’t doing yellow paint again.
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