By Chris Kerr
Senior Editor, News, GameDeveloper.com
August 28, 2026
Executive Overview
The shadow cast by Baldur’s Gate 3 across the tabletop-to-video-game adaptation landscape is immense. Larian Studios’ smash hit successfully captured the chaotic, unpredictable energy and collaborative social mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) by relying on tactical isometric perspectives and an unwavering commitment to absurd player choices. Yet, Wizards of the Coast—the intellectual property owner behind the sprawling fantasy empire—is already looking toward a very different horizon.
Enter Warlock, a new single-player action-adventure title set within the iconic D&D universe, developed by Montreal-based Invoke Studios. Slated for a 2027 commercial release, Warlock aims to capture the same overarching audience as its predecessor, but through a fundamentally divergent lens. Crucially, the development team is building a game that does not rely on traditional, explicit "role-playing game" (RPG) tropes. Instead, Invoke Studios is tackling a monumental design challenge: distilling the beating heart of a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG)—ultimate player agency—and embedding it into a systemic, single-player action-adventure framework.
Led by Jeff Hattem, Invoke Studios founder, vice president of creative, and veteran Dungeon Master (DM) with over 25 years of industry experience, the team has spent years rethinking how digital magic, environmental reactivity, and optional lore delivery can simulate the boundless freedom of a physical tabletop session. This article examines the developmental trajectory of Warlock, exploring how Invoke scaled its workforce from 50 to 180 employees, embraced systemic design paradigms, and turned emergent bugs into design features to redefine what a fantasy action-adventure game can achieve.
Detailed Chronology: From 50-Person Concept to 180-Strong Execution
The origins of Warlock trace back to 2022, a period when Invoke Studios operated as a lean, agile developer composed of roughly 50 core industry veterans. In those early conceptualization phases, Hattem and his leadership team confronted a sprawling creative mandate: how to honor the rich, decades-old legacy of the Dungeons & Dragons brand without merely imitating what came before.
The 2022 Genesis and Scoping Phases
During the initial conceptualization windows, the team engaged in philosophical exercises to locate the absolute core of the D&D experience.
- "Early on we asked ‘what is D&D about? Is it about monsters? About dungeons? Is it about a found party?’" Hattem recalls.
- The team quickly realized they were merely listing superficial components of the brand.
By stripping away the superficial trappings of stat blocks, dice rolls, and tactical grids, they arrived at the foundational truth of the hobby: ultimate player agency. In Hattem’s view, no other medium or game style on Earth can offer the boundless freedom found in a physical TTRPG campaign. To illustrate this, he points to a personal campaign he has run with friends spanning years and countless sessions—many of which have been entirely consumed by protracted, non-combat arguments inside local virtual taverns.
Scaling the Studio (2022–2026)
As the project transitioned from pre-production blueprints into full-scale vertical slice development, Invoke Studios underwent a calculated operational expansion. Scaling from 50 developers to a robust 180-person workforce required careful administrative and creative restructuring.
Hattem emphasizes that this measured expansion was vital for establishing a clear organizational hierarchy that retained individual creative flexibility. Rather than dictating every micro-decision from the top down, Hattem adopted a guiding-light leadership philosophy.
- "As a creative director, I’m not telling the team where to land," Hattem explains. "I give them a vision and say ‘this is where we’re steering the boat’ so we have a vague sense of the destination we want to get to."
Setting a nebulous, flexible course during the initial developmental stages allowed the studio to embrace near-inevitable design failures early, rather than locking into rigid systems too late in the production cycle. Hattem reflects candidly on the iterative realities of game development, noting that his quarter-century career has taught him one universal truth:
- "It always surprises me how many times we get it wrong the first try. It’s never right on the first try. You always fuck it up somehow, and then you’ve got to iterate. I see [the end product] in my head as a creative director, but then when I see that [early version] it’s like ‘okay, this is the shit version that we’re going to work on. It’s going to get better and we’ve just got to keep iterating. It’s always the same.’"
Supporting Context & Metrics: Systemic Magic and Emergent Playtesting
Because Warlock is designed as a single-player, linear narrative experience rather than an open-ended tabletop sandbox, it cannot structurally prioritize boundless choices that completely derail core narrative pacing. Infinite narrative branching would quickly fracture the production pipeline. Consequently, Invoke Studios made a defining architectural pivot: they chose to anchor player agency entirely within a deep, systemic magic system.
Engineering the Magic Sandbox
"We chose to build player agency around magic," Hattem states. "It would have been a trap to try and do everything […] so we focused on the magic and then started really thinking about the systems and how everything was connected."
This focus transformed Warlock into a deeply systemic video game. Spells are not merely damage-dealing inputs; they are dynamic modifiers that interact fundamentally with:
- The Environment: Terrain deformation, flammable materials, and physical barriers.
- Weather Systems: Meteorological shifts that amplify, dampen, or alter elemental spell vectors.
- Monster AI and Behavior: Enemy reactions to spatial manipulation and magical hazards.
- Physical Terrain: Height advantages, chokepoints, and structural integrity.
This tightly integrated web of interconnected variables forced Invoke Studios to completely overhaul their internal development methodologies, transitioning away from scripted encounters toward emergent systemic design.
Playtesting, Bugs, and Emergent Design
To ensure the magic system could match the wild, unpredictable imaginations of players, Warlock underwent rigorous, continuous playtesting. A core tenet of Invoke’s quality assurance philosophy involves reframing game-breaking exploits. Whenever a playtester used a spell in a way that effectively broke the intended design parameters, the QA team initially flagged it as a bug—not to patch it out, but to evaluate whether it could be transformed into a core feature.
A prime example centers on a traversal spell that summons eldritch tentacles capable of gripping physical objects and establishing temporary, makeshift platforms. Early in the development cycle, a particularly inventive tester received additional spell slots and began daisy-chaining the tentacles together. This unexpected maneuver allowed the tester to scale sheer vertical cliffs and access hidden structural ledges that the level designers had never intended anyone to reach.
Rather than nerfing the spell or adding invisible walls to block off the area, Invoke Studios chose to embrace the player’s ingenuity. The development team retroactively populated those unreachable spaces with secret treasure troves and exclusive lore caches, creating a rich organic reward loop specifically for players with entrepreneurial flair.
Official Statements and Design Philosophy
Navigating narrative delivery in a single-player adaptation of an expansive tabletop lore universe presents unique pitfalls. Developers often fall into the trap of overexposure—bombarding players with heavy exposition, unskippable cinematics, and forced companion banter in an attempt to justify the intellectual property’s historical weight.
Curbing the DM’s Urge to Railroad
Drawing from his extensive background as a Dungeon Master, Hattem openly admits to falling into this narrative trap himself. When running tabletop sessions, inexperienced (and even veteran) DMs frequently feel compelled to overshare world-building details, railroading players down a linear path by feeding them too much information upfront instead of letting organic interactions breathe.
"We learned to avoid spending time overexposing players to the world building," Hattem explains. "We are about the [D&D] brand and the lore. I can really geek out over it, and I love all the little details—I’m like, ‘oh this is cool we’re in the Domains of Dread and the Dark Lord has escaped and the world is getting ripped apart.’ That sounds cool to me, but it can feel like I’m shoving it down my players’ throats."
Hattem notes that because he has played D&D his entire life, pulling back on exposition requires a conscious, sustained effort. The studio eventually realized that building modular, optional narrative systems yields a far superior player experience than forcing linear cutscenes.
The Opt-In Lore Paradigm
Warlock shifts away from bombarding players with dialogue trees and forced companion chatter. Instead, the game champions an opt-in narrative model:
- Lore Integration: Optional, in-world reading materials scattered organically across environments.
- Conversational Depth: Optional dialogues with NPCs and companions that players can engage with entirely on their own terms.
- Environmental Storytelling: Visual world-building elements that allow inquisitive players to piece together the history of the Domains of Dread without halting the momentum of gameplay.
"It sounds cliché, but having stuff that you can read or conversations you can optionally get into to learn more about the world—that is better than forcing them into cinematics or bombarding [them] with banter from [companion] characters," Hattem notes.
Future Outlook: The Road to 2027
As Warlock charges down its production runway toward an anticipated 2027 launch window, the stakes for Wizards of the Coast’s digital strategy are exceptionally high. While titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 proved that isometric, tactical adaptations of classic tabletop rulesets can achieve mainstream cultural dominance, Invoke Studios is charting a distinct, risk-laden path.
By discarding explicit RPG signifiers in favor of a focused, single-player action-adventure framework powered by systemic magic and emergent environmental interaction, Warlock represents a bold diversification of the D&D digital portfolio. The studio’s commitment to organic lore delivery, combined with a willingness to turn player exploits and bugs into rewarding secret discoveries, demonstrates a deep reverence for the chaotic, player-driven spirit of tabletop gaming.
With a fully scaled team of 180 developers now operating under a clear, iterative vision, Invoke Studios is positioning Warlock not as a rulebook simulator, but as a playground where player imagination bends the fabric of digital reality. If the studio can successfully balance its systemic magic sandbox with restrained, opt-in storytelling, Warlock may well establish a powerful new benchmark for how interactive entertainment adapts the soul of tabletop role-playing.
