The Dungeons & Dragons project by studio Giant Skull – headed up by industry veterans including God of War 3, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen – is not going to be a new entry in the Baldur’s Gate series. In an interview with The Game Business, Wizards of the Coast president John Hight spoke about how “of course, we’re going to do a successor”, but Asmussen’s team is working on a different project.
In the interview, Hight spoke about how the universe of Dungeons & Dragons is vast, allowing players and developers to come up with plenty of stories on their own. In that vein, the project that Giant Skull is working on is slated to have a broad appeal, including Dungeons & Dragons players as well as those that aren’t already involved with the tabletop RPG hobby.
“Baldur’s Gate is an incredible game,” said Hight. “And of course, we’re going to do a successor. This is not the successor to that game. We go to Stig and his team to tell an incredible story and bring D&D to a very broad audience. Ideally, the game will appeal to D&D players because it will help them realise their imagination. But it’s also going to hopefully appeal to people that love playing action games, that love the Jedi games, that love God of War games.”
“D&D, as Stig said, it’s a playground and it really is for everyone. Hundreds of millions of people have either played D&D or been aware of D&D, and we want to perpetuate that for the next 50 years.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Hight also spoke about how Wizards of the Coast is looking to team up with all sorts of studios, and not just those run by industry veterans. Rather, the company wants to bet on up-and-coming studios as well.
“You don’t find folks like Stig every day,” explained Hight. “So, we’re going to have to make some bets on up-and-coming talent, and maybe do smaller games and give them a shot at building up teams and learning along the way. We’re going to do some experimental stuff.”
Giant Skull’s collaboration with Wizards of the Coast for a Dungeons & Dragons title has been going on for a while now. Back in June, Asmussen had spoken about how Giant Skull’s experience with third-person melee combat will help with the development of the new game.
“We’re experts at melee combat, so that’s something that John [Hight] got to see and it translates very well to D&D,” said Asmussen. “There’s probably still legacy debt that’s in the Jedi games from bad decisions that we made early on. Some of those bad decisions were based on momentum because we don’t get stuck. We just want to keep on moving forward.”
Asmussen also confirmed that the new project is being developed using a vanilla version of Unreal Engine 5 rather than one that has been filled to the rim with custom enhancements. This, he noted, allows the studio a “clean slate” to build the project very quickly on.
