Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons turned up at Gamescom 2026 Opening Night Live with eight full minutes of gameplay, which is a seriously confident move for a game that had shown nothing but a Tool-scored teaser until now, and continues to lack a set release date beyond 2027. It wasn’t a perfect outing due to some narrative shaky spots, but all things considered, that confidence seems to have paid off in spades. Even now, Warlock looks like a devilishly good time, and a lot of that comes down to how versatile the deftly adapted D&D magic system already looks—both in combat and in how players guide protagonist Kaatri through the world.
Developer Invoke Studios describes this Warlock‘s magic as a “toolbox”, and that’s not a teaser joke, it really shows: over eight minutes, Kaatri levitated enemies in the air, and a sword off the ground into another foe’s face. She created her own magically rooted platforms to jump onto, misty-stepped through both combat and traversal obstacles alike, and even pulled water from a stream to douse a fire she herself had started to clear a path through the environment. It was all magic, all the time, and since most open-world RPGs to come out in the last decade have missed the bus on emergent gameplay like that, it was wildly impressive how organic Warlock‘s magic looked.
Open-World Magic Systems Usually Fall Flat
-
-
-
Of course, Warlock isn’t technically an RPG, at least according to Studio Head Dominic Guay, who described Warlock as a real-time open-world action-adventure with RPG systems layered in as he fielded questions in a Q&A held after the gameplay reveal. But since existing magic mundanity lies more with the open-world part of that phrase, I think the comparison is actually better. In that sense, Warlock is doing something that games far more comfortable calling themselves RPGs have traditionally declined even to try.
Put the consoles in the correct order.
The standard arrangement in this genre is that magic is mostly a combat vocabulary: regardless of the form it takes, be it a buff, a ranged spell, or a summon, it all works toward the same goals—doing damage, healing it, or preventing it. Elements like traversal can play a role in the best cases, but even that is usually relegated to entirely separate systems: mounts, stamina bars, or fast travel. Some critics may disagree, but I think Hogwarts Legacy is an unfortunately great example of this, as despite being a game entirely about wizards, the broom or legwork is all players have to move around, and most environmental spells don’t pull double duty, instead working as keys with one correct use each.
Warlock’s Spells Are Doing Several Jobs At Once
-
-
-
That standard fare is certainly reasonable from a development standpoint, given most authored quest design depends on sequence control, or knowing where the player is and what tools they have. But watching Kaatri throw Misty Step, Levitate, and Witch Bolt around with no regard for spell slots is intoxicating because they are consistently layering into bespoke gameplay opportunities. Warlock’s spells work together and have more than one job: Black Tentacles pins an ogre enemy to the ground so Kaatri can rip a sword from it with Tasha’s Leash and score a killing blow, but in a different moment, it’s able to embed into a wall, catch a levitated chunk of stone, and create a platform to jump across a gap.
In Warlock, other higher-level D&D spells like Gust of Wind have also been demoted to cantrips for the sake of gameplay flow; short rest bookkeeping works for the tabletop, but reducing the resource cost likely makes for a better action-adventure game.
The way a ritual like Downpour is used in the showcase really sold me, too, because while the cynic in me assumed it was scripted, Invoke’s Jeff Hattem confirmed that none of it was authored. In the gameplay, Kaatri lays out a board and spell components—worms, an eye, something unpleasant in a jar—all to call down a localized storm that soaks the battlefield. This act allowed another new cantrip, Witch Bolt, to propagate through any wet ground and metal, killing some enemies and stunning the rest.
Warlock’s Ex-Ubisoft Team Seems To Have Learned The Right Lessons
Warlock’s magic system is even more interesting given the studio’s pedigree: Guay spent fifteen years at Ubisoft Montreal and was a senior producer on the first two Watch Dogs games, and the rest of Invoke’s core team came off games like Far Cry, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Deus Ex. This background partially implies that these are the people who built the checklist open-world trope as it currently exists. Yet, when speaking to DualShockers after the reveal, Guay couched the studio’s efforts in an ideal, that these developers “always wanted to build games with systems that the player could play with.”
It was all magic, all the time, and since most open-world RPGs to come out in the last decade have missed the bus on emergent gameplay like that, it was wildly impressive how organic Warlock‘s magic looked.
The already clear specifics of the magic toolbox, as well as other comments about how Warlock will actually play in practice, seem to support this ideal. According to that Gamescom Q&A, the game’s map is deliberately minimalistic; Invoke’s stated preference is for density over travel time, and Guay told the press that Warlock‘s open-world is an exploration-driven one. Some areas apparently do open up once you find particular spells—some of which are optional—but Guay was careful to add that there’s rarely only one route to a given place.
There Are Still Several Reasons for (Cautious) Optimism
-
-
-
There are still bumps on Warlock‘s road to release that have yet to pan out: the sword and board combat looked a touch easy, which might be easily chalked up to the usual “watch someone play thematically” trailer format that gets less charming every year it survives. But the strangely generic sensibility that undercuts much of what makes Warlock seem narratively interesting is more worrying, as The Domains of Dread is an undoubtedly cool setting. As I see it, the writing and voice acting on display were the culprits; that’s fine for now, in an eight-minute vertical slice, but it’s much harder to ignore across a whole game.
Then there’s Invoke’s last D&D game, Dark Alliance. Though it was called Tuque Games at that point, the studio’s 2021 D&D action game landed pretty disastrously. Guay arrived roughly a month before it shipped, and the team has changed a great deal since then, but if one is deciding whether to preorder something eighteen months out based on previous work, that history is a reasonable thing to hold on to.
Ultimately, though Warlock‘s (despite certain red flags) magic system is what’s primarily keeping my interest, that won’t be enough to sustain it alone; Forspoken had an interesting, layered magic system for supplementing its open-world, and it did not save Forspoken. But Warlock already looks to be made of more varied, quality parts—it’s set in an unforgettable D&D setting, it’s got the presentation, the combat, bones and all. If Invoke can land even most of it, I’d be extremely happy to dive into Warlock whenever it actually releases in 2027.
- Released
-
2027
- Developer(s)
-
Invoke Studios
- Publisher(s)
-
Wizards of the Coast
- Franchise
-
Dungeons & Dragons
