There’s a new D&D video game on the way from the Montreal studio formerly known as Tuque Games. Wizards of the Coast, which publishes Dungeons & Dragons, has relaunched the Canadian game developer as Invoke Studios — a revamped company with a focus on crafting big games out of the considerable source material that comes with the territory.
Invoke and Wizards aren’t revealing much about the new game’s setting or genre, teasing only that it will be “built inside of the Dungeons & Dragons brand” and that the game will run on Unreal Engine 5. Invoke is led by Dominic Guay, a veteran producer from Ubisoft who worked as a senior producer on the Watch Dogs franchise.
“First, we have a new mission: make ambitious, high quality AAA games,” Guay told TechCrunch. “Who joins the studio, how we work and the means we have at Invoke are all defined and focused on our mission.” He notes that the studio formed a new “core team” over the last year comprised of committed veteran developers in order to steer toward its new goals.
“We have the largest and most popular brand of fantasy role-playing games in Dungeons & Dragons,” Guay said in a press release. “Such a brand, with 50 years of history behind it, inspires developers and gives us enormous creative freedom.”
The Invoke team currently boasts around 80 people, but plans to scale up to more than 200 within the next three years. Wizards, itself a division within game giant Hasbro, purchased Tuque Games in 2019 for an undisclosed amount to build out its roster of digital games.
The studio released Dark Alliance, an action RPG set in D&D’s Forgotten Realms, last year. While reviews didn’t suggest that Dark Alliance broke much new ground, the relaunched studio’s aims for adapting the D&D source material at its fingertips sound loftier.
Invoke is just one piece of the emerging digital game strategy within Wizards. The D&D publisher now boasts six different video game studios, including Austin-based Archetype Entertainment, which is working on a sci-fi RPG, Atomic Arcade, and Skeleton Key, a studio focused on suspense and horror games that’s helmed by a producer from Dragon Age.
While Wizards is cranking up the intensity on its internal video game efforts, the most anticipated D&D game right now is Baldur’s Gate III, which is being developed through a licensing partnership with Larian, developer of the critical hit Divinity: Original Sin II.
“We are proud to have a collection of first-class game developers heading up new studios around the world, including Invoke in Montreal led by Dom,” a Wizards of the Coast spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.
