Warlock has quickly become one of the most exciting new games on the horizon, and it’s not just because we’re all thirsty for more Dungeons & Dragons games after exhausting Baldur’s Gate 3. The open-world action-adventure promises an extensive spell system that’ll let you interact with the objects and enemies in some wild ways. Even the devs were initially worried that the game’s spells were too OP, but as it turns out, that was the perfect starting point.
“There’s this tendency on the dev team to go, ‘That’s too powerful,'” Invoke Studios head Dominic Guay says in Edge Magazine issue #429. “At some point we had to say, ‘No. Make it OP first, make it fun, and then we’ll balance it.'”
You can, for example, use Black Tentacles to tie an ogre’s weapon to the ground, leaving it helpless as you start wailing on the monster. It’s a powerful option in the toolbox, yes, but there are considerations for balance. Use Black Tentacles on the ogre itself, and the creature will break free much more quickly.
You don’t purely cast your spells from a list. Instead, different button combinations will bring out the spells you want. “Once you get the hang of it, you’re able to chain melee attacks, spell, spell, spell, and think on the fly,” Guay explains. “We always wanted that realtime expression of magic instead of something that feels a bit slower.”
Described like this, the spell system reminds me a bit of Magicka, an early title from eventual Helldivers developer Arrowhead Game Studios. There, you combine all sorts of different elemental abilities into spells with various effects. We don’t yet have a great sense of how Warlock’s system will work, but described in these terms it seems to have a similar spirit.
“The player will learn to be a warlock at the same time as the character,” Guay says, explaining that new spells will be unlocked over the course of the game. “You’ll gain more spells pretty fast on your journey, but you need that onboarding because we’re doing things differently on the controller than some other games.”