Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons ditches the quest and objective waypoints seen in many large games, and even lets you disable its small compass, to prioritize organic exploration. It’s music to my ears.
General manager Dominic Guay of Warlock developer Invoke Studios spoke to IGN about the game’s approach.
“We wanted them to engage with the world, to figure things out and feel that when they found things, it was based on their actions and not just blindly trusting a waypoint,” he says.
Guay, like the other former Watch Dogs developers at Invoke, speaks from experience. With a “heavy-handed guiding approach,” he says, “a lot of players will just blindly follow the waypoint, and then you lose that agency, you lose that feeling of curiosity.”
Before the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2, players gathered around a rumor that Rockstar had added pro-exploration settings that would disable waypoint-like hints and add additional, grounded clues into the game’s world, like NPC comments or map details. Warlock uses a system that sounds a little bit like that.
As Guay explains, “Mysteries” can be uncovered through exploration and various interactions. “Not only are there multiple entry points, but depending on how you stumble upon them, it might change how you interact with them,” he says. My read is that it’s sort of an inverted tree structure: lots of branches to find, all leading back to the core.
This discussion on player agency and direction comes as Marvel’s Wolverine, the latest from Insomniac Games, fields criticism of overdone guidance. Amidst the discussion, Insomniac says “we have been 100% listening” and “cooking hard today in response to some of the feedback.” (Our own Marvel’s Wolverine review mostly docks the game for messiness in its story and features, with combat never becoming good enough to carry the experience.)
Last month, we got a fresh, extended look at Warlock gameplay. Very different from D&D standard-bearer Baldur’s Gate 3 and with hints of Dragon’s Dogma 2, the game is shaping up to be, if nothing else, interesting.