Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons Wants Out of Baldur's Gate 3's Shadow

Every new Dungeons & Dragons video game now has to answer the same question: how does it stack up against Baldur's Gate 3? Invoke Studios, the team behind Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, appears keen to sidestep that contest entirely, and its Gamescom demo suggests it has a different kind of game in mind.

The presentation opened on a wide fantasy landscape. Crooked hovels cluster along a ragged coastline, jagged mountains rise behind them, and a huge tower looms in the distance over everything. It is an open world built to be explored, not a string of tightly authored set pieces.

What stood out most, though, was tone. When warrior protagonist Kaatri walks into the town of Crickshank, the locals greet her with a couple of colorful insults. That small moment set the mood for the demo, and it gave one observer an unexpected comparison to the cheeky, character-driven feel of the Fable series, even though Warlock is clearly its own thing.

That matters because Warlock does not look like it is chasing Larian's turn-based approach. Instead, the demo pointed toward a world where the atmosphere and the personality of its inhabitants carry as much weight as the mechanics. Kaatri is a fighter by trade, and the game appears to put her in the middle of a rough, lived-in setting where people have opinions about outsiders.

Invoke's pitch is essentially that D&D is big enough for more than one kind of video game. Baldur's Gate 3 set a very high bar for tabletop adaptations, but copying its structure would invite unflattering comparisons. Building an open world with its own rhythm gives the studio room to stand apart.

Plenty remains unanswered. The demo was short, and questions about combat depth, progression, and how much freedom players will really have are still open. For now, Warlock has made a confident first impression through setting and attitude, and that is a reasonable place to start for a game trying to escape a very large shadow.