There’s a ‘AAA’ D&D game coming from the Dark Alliance studio

Invoke Studios is the new name for 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.”

The studio is led by Dominic Guay, a 20-year Ubisoft veteran who rose through the ranks on the technical side before becoming a senior producer on the first two Watch Dogs games. Guay joined the studio in 2021, just before it shipped Dark Alliance.

It sounds as though Wizards of the Coast has ambitions for the studio and its next game that go beyond what it achieved with Dark Alliance, a rough but comforting co-op action role-playing game. 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 has serious ambitions in video games. Earlier this year, it announced the creation of a new Austin, Texas studio called Skeleton Key, led by Dragon Age producer Christian Dailey. In 2020, it founded Archetype Entertainment — also in Austin, also led by BioWare alums — to work on a science-fiction game.