Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons Gamescom Interview With Invoke Studios VP Dominique Guay

Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons is an action-adventure game set in an open world. That much we knew after its late 2025 reveal. But it’s at Gamescom 2026 that Invoke Studios and publisher Wizards of the Coast revealed the first in-game demo and elaborated on who Kaatri – a warrior with access to forbidden magic – really is.

After sitting through a live hands-off demo – which seemingly ran at 60 FPS on a PS5 Pro – that mirrored the one released in video form to the public (watch it below), I sat down with Dominique Guay, the studio head at Invoke. His credits include a long run at Ubisoft Montréal, working on Watch Dogs 1 and 2, so he clearly has an understanding of what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to open-world games. But of course, the market is full of them right now, so how does Warlock differentiate itself from the rest?

What I saw firsthand reminded me of a slightly old-fashioned type of action-adventure (sans substantial RPG systems) sandbox in the vein of Shadow of Mordor/War. There’s space for something like that in the triple-A space right now, but at the same time, a simple and floaty melee battle towards the end also had me slightly worried. In any case, I tried to get answers that went deeper from Guay and learn more about what we haven’t seen yet.

The following interview has been trimmed for better flow and ease of reading.

GW: When did development on this game start?

DG: We started back in 2022 more or less; early conception, playing with ideas. It’s been a while, so it’s exciting to finally show where we’re at.

GW: Can you tell us something about the studio size for this game?

DG: We’re about 160-170 people in Montréal. It’s an interesting mix of staff. There’s a lot of core people that have worked together before at previous publishers, mostly on open-world action games.

GW: What can you say about how Warlock differentiates itself from the standard open-world RPG?

DG: There’s quite a bit of RPG systems in many action-adventure games, not just ours. In terms of character progression, a lot of it is centered around magic. So there’s finding new spells in the world, but you’re gonna have to work for them and explore. And most of them are optional and can be upgraded with individual skill trees where you spend currencies to upgrade them.

Then your character kind of levels up, and you can spend some attribute upgrades to unlock skills and perks aligned with the warlock class. Then there’s the gear… They’ll change your look, but most importantly, they have traits. We try to use bespoke equipment instead of just like +2 sword. You can create builds depending on how you want to play.

GW: You mentioned during the demo that you can figure out problems in different ways. Are you able to “sequence break” quest chains or do you have a main path you’re forced to follow in a certain way?

DG: The main path is not a series of missions. You’re set on an objective of finding someone important to you, and you’re gonna have to figure out how to get there. You don’t start with a waypoint that you can trust. You have to work your way towards it through exploration.

Think about it in this way: You need to conquer the world and spread out and find things in the world. While doing this, you can find nooks and crannies and what’s hidden in the world. It’s more world-based; you’re gonna stumble upon side quests or mysteries. And most of the side quests have multiple entry points.

GW: What can you say about how different the regions in the world (we got a tease of them) are?

DG: We wanted to have a lot of variety. I’ve worked on games before where we ultimately had a few biomes, but it was not that diverse in terms of regions. Darkon was great for that because it has a lot of variety in the lore and source material, so you can expect some pretty radical changes in look.

It’s a great brand to do some crazy things, so we’re embracing that. The spells you have are gonna take different meanings in those different environments… For monsters, it’s kind of the same thing. They’ll have different vulnerabilities to spells, so you’re gonna explore a little bit on how to deal with new situations.

GW: Does the world go on without you when you’re not looking?

DG: You got a little piece of that in the demo. When you go into the field, the ogre zombie is being taken down by some vampire enforcers because it’s really near the settlement and it’s a settlement they’re trying to protect. This is happening regardless of you, and actually this fight is made a lot easier thanks to the vampires taking a whack at it before you got there.

Those factions will meet each other and react accordingly. You can even use that to some degree by creating tensions… The state of the world is chaotic in the sense that it’s almost apocalyptic for the people living there. ‘How are people adapting to that craziness in that world?’ That’s an interesting thematic for us… One thing I would say is we’re not creating huge cities. We don’t wanna give you waypoints as soon as you’re in a big city. We go for small settlements where you can go into each building and explore.

GW: Is there an infamy or notoriety system, depending on your actions?

DG: To take a good, well-known brand like Fable, where you can be evil or good, that’s their thing. We’re definitely not going there with this game. Kaatri has a written morality. You can’t go into a village and kill people, for example. It wouldn’t make sense for our character. We also don’t have a conversation system where you can choose to be evil or good. The benefit of it is we can tell a coherent story across the board and deliver it with high production value.

GW: Looking at that first cutscene in the demo, is that something we’re getting early on to set things up, or will we get more of them throughout the journey?

DG: Yeah, definitely. The benefit of having a written story is to go all out in production value, so we’re embracing that. We have a structure that is exploration-driven open world, so we couldn’t have like a hundred cinematics. We balance it out and try to be careful not to give the player crumb lines, giving them the freedom to take their own course through the world. But we had enough opportunities to create those cool moments.

GW: The focus seems to be on magic and how you combine spells, but are you giving players the option to make their melee attacks more powerful or craft melee builds?

DG: Sure, and we’ve got weapons that become really powerful with magical and element upgrades… Players are gonna use melee for sure. Maybe someone goes for a full magic playthrough, but generally, every player is gonna mix melee and magic.

We know some players err more on the side of melee, and that’s totally fine. As long as you’re having fun, that’s good with us… The optimal way to play is to use spells to set up monsters to be vulnerable. Those critical animations, like with the ogre zombie… they’re critical attacks because you put them at a disadvantage using your magic.

GW: We can use spells to traverse and solve problems. Do you have also like big set piece puzzles peppered throughout the adventure?

DG: We could use the term puzzles, but there are situations and challenges… I’m struggling to say there are puzzles because we generally try to avoid one-solution things. Generally, we keep in the spirit of the player being creative and trying different things.

GW: What’s something that you’re particularly proud of in this game?

DG: I’m really proud that we were able to come out with a like a ten-minute gameplay sequence right off the bat. We’re seeing a lot of trailers and that’s great, but being able to, after all this time, come out with a gameplay sequence that we can play live running on a console, right? To me, that felt really good.