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Invoke Studios is the developer of Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons. It is a Canadian studio based in Montreal, Quebec, and it is an internal development team of Wizards of the Coast, which also publishes the game.

Studio Profile

Background

The studio was founded in 2012 as Tuque Games by Jeff Hattem. It was acquired by Wizards of the Coast in October 2019 and renamed to Invoke Studios in late 2022, since when it has operated as one of the publisher's internal video game teams. Its earlier releases are separate games and are not connected to Warlock's content.

Making Warlock

The team began from a mechanic rather than a character. The studio head has said they knew they wanted a magic user because creative magic use was at the core of what they wanted the gameplay to be, and that the warlock was the class they landed on after considering the options. The creative director framed the appeal in character terms, describing warlocks as a far cry from the pointy-hat wizard, with an edge to them, and as people who talk the most powerful beings in the setting into lending them magic.

That reading fed the casting. The team wanted a protagonist with enormous presence, the kind of person a room stops for, which is how it explains casting Tricia Helfer as Kaatri. See Voice Cast.

Design Principles

Three positions recur in the team's public statements about the game.

1. Magic is a toolbox. The credo the team quotes internally is that spells are tools, and that the same tool should work in combat, in exploration and in solving a problem. Every spell was designed by asking how it could be used in more than one way. See Spells.

2. Go easy on the hand-holding. Guidance is deliberately sparse: the interface is minimal and toggleable, the demo build carried no quest markers, and objectives are given as a highlighted area and a compass rather than a pin. See Exploration.

3. Support what players invent. The team's stated position is that what designers imagine is only a starting point, and that when players surprise them with an unexpected use they try to support it in the game rather than close it off.

Writing for Two Audiences

The studio has said it filled the game with deep-cut references drawn from the tabletop game, across monsters, items and spells, while designing so that a player with no background can work things out as they go. The stated goal is that neither audience arrives already knowing everything, and that experienced players still have a mystery to live in. That is also why the studio has been explicit that this is a third-person action-adventure open world game focused on the warlock, and not the kind of party-based role-playing game the licence is currently best known for.

Scope

The studio head has described the open world as taking tens of hours to explore and has explicitly declined the hundred-hour framing, and has said that managing the scope of the magic system is a real challenge for the team. He has also said the protagonist has a written morality that limits what the player can do with her, which places the project closer to a directed action-adventure than to an open sandbox. See Gameplay.

Not Yet Confirmed

• Team size on Warlock and the studio's current headcount.

• The engine the game is built on.

• Full credited leadership, including narrative, art and audio direction.

• How long Warlock has been in development.

• Whether the studio has any other project in progress.

• Post-launch support plans for Warlock.