An ‘ambitious’ new D&D game is being released from Invoke Studios, formerly Tuque Games • TechCrunch
There’s a new D&D video game on the way from the former Montreal studio called Tuque Games. Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons publishing.
Invoke and Wizards didn’t reveal much about the new game’s setting or genre, only teasing that it will be “built inside the Dungeons & Dragons franchise” and that the game will run on Unreal Engine 5. Invoke is led by Dominic Guay, a veteran producer from Ubisoft who was a senior producer on the Watch Dogs series.
“First, we have a new mission: to create high-quality, ambitious 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 noted that the studio formed a new “core team” last year made up of veteran developers committed to working towards its new goals.
“We have the biggest and most popular fantasy RPG franchise in Dungeons & Dragons,” Guay said in a press release. “Such a brand, with 50 years of history behind it, inspires developers and gives us tremendous creative freedom.”
The Invoke team currently has about 80 people, but plans to expand to more than 200 within the next three years. Wizards, a division of game giant Hasbro, purchased Tuque Games in 2019 for an undisclosed amount to build its list of digital games.
The studio released Dark Alliance, an action RPG set in D&D’s Forgotten Realms, last year. While evaluate doesn’t show that Dark Alliance has broken many new platforms, the reboot studio’s goal of tweaking the D&D source material at its fingertips sounds loftier.
Invoke is just one part of the emerging digital game strategy in Wizards. Publisher D&D currently 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 into horror and suspense games run by the producer Dragon. Age.
While Wizards is ramping up its in-house 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 hit movie Divinity: Original Sin II.
A spokesperson for Wizards of the Coast told TechCrunch in an emailed statement: “We are proud to have a collection of first-rate game developers heading new studios around the world, including Invoke in Montreal led by Dom.
