Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons — Everything Confirmed So Far
Wizards of the Coast and Invoke Studios finally showed real gameplay for Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons during gamescom Opening Night Live 2026, following a purely cinematic reveal back at The Game Awards 2025. Here's everything confirmed about the story, magic-driven combat, and the official trailer.
📋 Quick Facts
Developer: Invoke Studios (Montreal) | Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Director: Corinne Busch (Dragon Age: The Veilguard veteran) | Genre: Third-person, single-player action-adventure
Setting: Darkon, a Dread Domain of Ravenloft, in the Dungeons & Dragons universe
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Windows)
Release date: No exact date yet — targeting 2027
🧩 Story: A Dangerous Pact
Players take on the role of Kaatri, a veteran warrior brought to life through full performance capture by Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica, Lucifer, and the voice of EDI in Mass Effect). While searching for someone important to her, Kaatri is drawn into Darkon, a Dread Domain within the Mists of Ravenloft, once ruled by the villain Azalin.
To survive and continue her search, Kaatri strikes a pact with the witch queen Tasha (also known as Iggwilv), played by Maggie Robertson (Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village, Baldur's Gate 3). Tasha becomes Kaatri's patron, teaching her to sense and channel "expressive magic" hidden throughout Darkon — power that grows and evolves across the story, at a cost.
⚙️ Gameplay: Magic as a Tool
Warlock is not a dice-rolling D&D RPG like Baldur's Gate 3 — it's an original, systemic action-adventure where magic drives both combat and exploration. Kaatri can summon weapons and freely switch between melee attacks and spellcasting mid-fight, blending positioning, weather, and terrain into tactical opportunities players chain together.
The eight-minute gameplay reveal showed Kaatri using a thrown lantern to set vines on fire, then dousing the flames with conjured water — and later performing a short ritual to summon a rainstorm that douses bonfires and leaves a group of zombies vulnerable to a follow-up lightning attack. Entangling vines can also hold platforms in place for traversal or pin enemies during a fight.
Invoke has been upfront that Warlock isn't trying to recreate the tabletop ruleset move-for-move; instead, it's built as its own systemic take on the Warlock class fantasy. It's also worth noting the reveal footage was a staged vertical slice with a minimal HUD, so the finished game may look and play somewhat differently by launch.
🏢 About Invoke Studios
Invoke Studios, based in Montreal, was founded in 2022 as a reorganization of the team behind 2021's Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. Warlock is the studio's debut project under the Invoke name, and it survived two leadership shakeups at Wizards of the Coast along with the cancellation of two other D&D game projects in early 2023 before making it to this reveal.
🎬 Official Gameplay Reveal Trailer — gamescom 2026
This is the first real gameplay footage of Warlock, following its cinematic-only announcement trailer at The Game Awards 2025. The eight-minute reveal opens with Kaatri forming her pact — the ritual every D&D warlock performs to gain power — then settles into an extended look at exploration and magic-driven combat inside Darkon.