Dungeons & Dragons owner Wizards of the Coast has been working with development studio Giant Skull on a new game based on the tabletop RPG. The studio, headed up by a veteran of the God of War and Star Wars Jedi franchises, Stig Asmussen, is working on a AAA title. In a recent interview with Polygon, Asmussen spoke about how the new technology used at Giant Skull will allow the studio to have animations that are even better than what we saw from Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi series.
“We’re experts at melee combat, so that’s something that John got to see and it translates very well to D&D,” said Asmussen, referring to Wizards of the Coast president John Hight who previously worked with him on God of War 3. “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.”
It is worth noting that Asmussen’s team at Respawn Entertainment had worked on Unreal Engine 4 to develop Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and its sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. In this interview, he spoke about how Giant Skull is trying to avoid tech debt by making sure that it doesn’t bring over any of the bad decisions that were made with the Jedi games by starting with “vanilla Unreal”. Ultimately, this clean slate allowed the studio to make a “motion model” that ends up being much faster and smoother than what we saw in the two Star Wars Jedi titles.
“When we started Giant Skull and we started with vanilla Unreal, we couldn’t take what we did with the Jedi games over to a new company. So, all of those mistakes that we had made before weren’t there. We had a clean slate and we were able to build very quickly based on all of our learnings over the years before. That’s allowed us to create a motion model that’s so much faster now, so much more fluid. And it doesn’t have points where you get blocked because you don’t understand how to fix jank. It’s buttery smooth.”
While no other details about this Dungeons & Dragons title developed by Giant Skull have been revealed so far, this emphasis on having high-quality animations for melee combat would indicate that it will be a hack-and-slash game. When the title was announced, some of the words used to describe it were “immersive storytelling”, “heroic combat”, and “exhilarating traversal”. Asmussen noted in the interview that traversal would be a major part of the upcoming title’s gameplay.
“Traversal is really important to us,” he explained. “Giving the player a suite of different ways to probe and interact with the environment, and eventually build their character up to a point where they’re dominating the environment. It all has to feel silky smooth.”
The new title is being developed using Unreal Engine 5, and will likely come to PC and modern consoles.
