New D&D game coming from studio behind Dark Alliance

Invoke Studios is now the name of the company. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance developer Tuque Games, and it’s working on a major new Dungeons & Dragons video game.

D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast, which bought the studio in 2019, announced the rebrand in a press release, and said that the studio was currently working on “a AAA game derived from the Dungeons & Dragons universe and developed on the Unreal 5 engine.”

Dominic Guay leads the studio. He is a Ubisoft veteran of 20 years who has worked on both the technical and production sides before becoming the senior producer for the Watch Dogs titles. Guay joined Studio Ubisoft just before the game shipped in 2021. Dark Alliance.

Wizards of the Coast seems to have ambitions beyond the ones it had with the first game. Dark AllianceA co-op role-playing action game that is both comforting and rough. The plan is for Invoke to staff up from its current team size of 80 to “more than 200 employees by 2025 to realize the studio’s full vision,” according to the press release.

There’s no word on what form this game will take, although an open-world fantasy RPG in the mold of The Witcher or Dragon Age seems a safe bet. The Montreal development community — including, of course, Guay himself — has plenty of experience making this kind of game at Ubisoft Montreal and other studios.

You can check out Invoke Studios’ fancy new website here; it has a nice animated dragon on it.

Wizards of the Coast is serious about videogame development. It announced earlier this year the opening of Skeleton Key Studios in Austin, Texas, which is led by Christian Dailey, a Dragon Age producer. In 2020, it founded Archetype Entertainment — also in Austin, also led by BioWare alums — to work on a science-fiction game.