There's a big-budget open-world Dungeons & Dragons game in development

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

At the end of 2019 the president of Wizards of the Coast, Chris Cocks, said there were seven or eight games based on Dungeons & Dragons in the works. We know about Baldur's Gate 3 and Dark Alliance of course, and now, thanks to a tweet from Hidden Path Entertainment, we know about one more.

The creator of the Defense Grid series, as well as co-developer of CS:GO and Age of Empires 2 HD, posted a series of job listings, saying, "We are in development on a AAA, third-person, open-world fantasy RPG that will be taking place inside the Dungeons & Dragons franchise." This was backed up by its project narrative director Whitney Beltrán, who has written for games like State of Decay 2 and Beyond Blue.

Hidden Path is hiring! We are in development on a AAA, third-person, open-world fantasy RPG that will be taking place inside the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.- Graphics Programmer- Lead Graphics Programmer- Senior Technical Artist- WriterMore info:https://t.co/gs8ld6AJL3March 2, 2021

As for what kind of RPG it's going to be, the job listings mention Unreal Engine 4 and the writer position calls for "voiced dialogue writing skills" and "narrative branching skills" as well as experience with "strong ensemble casts". Sure sounds like stuff you'd expect in a big-budget RPG with a party of companions.

The phrase "taking place inside the Dungeons & Dragons franchise", while a horrible mangling of the English language, also suggests it will use one of the existing D&D settings. Both Baldur's Gate 3 and Dark Alliance are set in the Forgotten Realms, but Whitney Beltrán has a writing credit on Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, a forthcoming supplement for the actual tabletop version of D&D describing D&D's underused gothic horror world, which would make a killer backdrop for a videogame. That's not proof Hidden Path is making a Ravenloft videogame, of course. I'm just putting it out there.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.