Earlier this month, Wizards of the Coast announced a deal with Giant Skull to create a new action/adventure game based on the D&D franchise.
As you might remember, Giant Skull was founded by former God of War and Star Wars Jedi director Stig Asmussen in 2024. The newly established triple-A team immediately set out to create a new project. Asmussen had previously worked with John Hight during the production of God of War 3 at Sony, and when Hight became the new president of Wizards of the Coast in 2024, he reached out to Giant Skull. The prototype they were making turned out to be a good fit for D&D, so the deal went forward.
While it is too early to discuss the game's specific mechanics, Asmussen did share that the team was able to greatly improve the character's motion model compared to Star Wars Jedi. In an interview with Polygon, he explained:
We're experts at melee combat, so that’s something that John got to see and it translates very well to D&D. 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.
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.
It sounds very promising, especially since the announcement press release focused on delivering 'exhilarating traversal'. Of course, since work on this project only began in 2024, it might be several years before we get to play this D&D game. Luckily, there's more on the way for gamer fans of Dungeons & Dragons, such as Demeo x DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Battlemarked (out this year), the Starbreeze-developed coop game slated for 2026, the new project in development at Invoke (the studio behind Dark Alliance), and a mysterious D&D game confirmed only six months ago by the CEO of parent company Hasbro.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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