The next official D&D game has a fixed story, and Invoke wants that understood early
Invoke Studios boss Dominic Guay says Warlock's main narrative is written down and every player hits the same beats - no Baldur's Gate 3-style branching, and no morality system either.
Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons is the next official D&D video game, it is an open world, and it is not going to do the thing everyone will expect it to do. Invoke Studios is getting ahead of that now rather than at launch.
What Invoke said
Speaking at Gamescom, Invoke vice president and general manager Dominic Guay said there is "fundamentally a linear story contained in the world", and that protagonist Kaatri's story is written with set pieces already fixed. The main narrative moments, he said, are written down, and every player will pass through the same ones. There is no morality system either - no choosing to play the good or the evil version of the character.
What is variable sits around the campaign rather than inside it. Guay described the sidequests and open-world encounters as your own little adventures, which is where the game expects players to go off-script.
Why the comparison is unavoidable
Baldur's Gate 3 reset what an official D&D game is assumed to be: a party of playable characters, branching consequences, and a plot that bends around what players do. Warlock is a single-player third-person action-adventure built around one character in Darkon, a realm from D&D's Ravenloft setting, and Invoke is drawing the line clearly instead of letting expectations build. Guay's own framing is that the two games are simply very different things.
What we know about the game
Warlock is developed by Invoke Studios and published by Wizards of the Coast, and its Steam listing gives a 2027 window with Windows the only platform confirmed so far. The pitch there is forbidden magic used to bend the game's own rules, with exploration and combat as tests of preparation rather than reflexes.
Why it matters
Managing expectations two years out is rarer than it sounds, and an official D&D game that openly says it has no branching narrative and no alignment choice is making a decision players will judge it on. Better to know now than to find out in 2027.
Why it matters
Baldur's Gate 3 set the default expectation for what an official D&D game does. Warlock saying plainly that it has a fixed story and no morality system tells players what kind of game to expect two years ahead of release.