The news comes a year after WOTC and Larian Studios parted ways after a successful stint with Baldur’s Gate 3, and comes as Wizards continues to expand on the success of Larian’s RPG and the TTRPG space as a whole.
Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) has announced an exclusive partnership deal for an upcoming Dungeons & Dragons game, this time with developer Giant Skull, a studio founded in 2024 by Respawn veteran Stig Asmussen.
As explained in a press release from Hasbro, WOTC's parent company, the "exclusive partnership agreement" paves the way for Giant Skull to create "gameplay-driven, story-immersed, action-adventure games" within the Dungeons & Dragons universe. The agreement is being kicked-off with a single-player action-adventure title set somewhere in D&D's expansive universe.
“Stig and the team at Giant Skull are exactly the type of exceptionally talented creators we want to work with, and I’m so happy to be reuniting with him on this new project,” president of WOTC and digital gaming at Hasbro John Hight said.
Hight left Blizzard after a 12-year tenure as World of Warcraft general manager and SVP to take on the job at Hasbro in July 2024. This was four months after Asmussen announced Giant Skull. The latter announcement conincidently fell right around the time news broke that Larian Studios, developer of Baldur’s Gate 3, parted ways with WOTC. This meant that they would not be working on any follow up entries nor DLC.
"I think [WOTC] understands how important they are to the community, and I trust they'll be treated with respect," Larian CEO Sven Vincke later said at GDC 2024 regarding the fate of the characters in the game. Many in the sizable fan following behind Baldur's Gate 3 had voiced concerns about the future of the game and its characters once Larian Studios stepped away from the property and any future additions.
WOTC continues to place Baldur’s Gate 3 front and center without Larian
The next slate of Dungeons & Dragons games could have some sizable shoes to fill if WOTC hopes to see success similar to that of Baldur's Gate 3. When it launched in August 3, 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 amassed over 800,000 concurrent players in a matter of days. By the end of 2024, it had reportedly sold over 15 million copies, resulting in €249 million ($260.9 million) pre-tax profit for 2023, and a yearly revenue of €427 million ($447.5 million) at the end of the 2023 fiscal year.
Since the launch and subsequent success of the title, WOTC has continued to capitalize on the Baldur's Gate 3 property in efforts largely driven by the game's memorable cast. As reported by PCGamer, WOTC talked with multiple partners throughout 2024 while planning the future of the series, jokingly hoping that it wouldn’t take another 25 years again in reference to the gap between Baldur's Gate 2 and Larian's BG3.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was in early access for three years, with the entirety of development taking around six years. In September 2023, Vincke told Game Developer that actively listening to community feedback via this model was very important for the team, and encouraged others to follow suit.
At the time time, Vincke was wary of people seeing Baldur’s Gate 3 as a standard. Crucially, there are bigger developers with more resources than Larian, and while independent developers should punch above their weight, there are specific considerations when trying to tackle an RPG with plenty permutations and intertwining systems.
”…I will say you're dealing with large amounts of data to contend with, so chaos and entropy will set in,” Vincke said, reflecting on the process during that earlier interview. ”You need to ensure you're ready to deal with that [amount of data and different permutations]. It's unavoidable when you're dealing with so much information that there will be a level of entropy. So, building systems to deal with that is very, very important. And so this is, I think, my biggest takeaway from it with how it all worked out for us."