Marvel’s Wolverine’s release seems to have kicked off quite a bit of discussion regarding exploration in games and the nature of waypoints and other guidance to ensure that players don’t get lost. Pre-empting this, however, Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons developer Invoke Studios revealed during Gamescom that the RPG won’t feature waypoints, and will instead give players more agency to explore and find their own way forward.
Speaking to IGN, the studio’s general manager Dominic Guay spoke about how the team wanted to encourage exploration in Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons. “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.” He went on to speak about the development team’s experience with working on other open-world games, and how the inclusion of waypoints ultimately leads to players blindly following them at a certain point, and in the process, giving up their agency to satisfy curiosity that can arise from exploration.
“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 follow blindly 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.”
To further tie into this, Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons will feature a “Mystery” system that involves players slowly uncovering mysteries throughout their time exploring the world. This could happen when the players talk to NPCs in towns, or even accidentally stumble into a new area while exploring. These mysteries will tell their own small stories, and can be of varying length and depth.
“There are multiple entry points. They’re kind of harder for us to do in that way, but we love that challenge. Not only are there multiple entry points, but depending on how you stumble upon them, it might change how you interact with them, meaning that maybe you could have found actually 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.
“Some [Mysteries] are a little bit more straightforward, some are a little bit more deep and require more engagement and exploration, but that’s really how they’re built.”
Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release in 2027. Invoke gave us our first look at the action RPG during Gamescom with a trailer introducing some of its characters, as well as an extended look at gameplay. Interestingly, this trailer may have given us our first look at the Mystery system, which involved the protagonist investigating a cellar that is seemingly filled with hostile enemies.
