‘We’re trying to go easy on the hand-holding’ — Invoke says Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons’ HUD and waypoint guidance will be minimal and can even be toggled on and off so as not to ‘overwhelm’ players and encourage exploration Demi Williams | usagoldmines.com

• Invoke Studios head Dominic Guay confirms Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons will have a toggleable HUD and minimal waypoint guidance
• Guay says this is to encourage exploration and reduce the “hand-holding” experience
• With these options, he says the game will be “immersive”

Invoke Studios has said Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons will encourage players to explore Darkon’s open world by offering a toggleable HUD and minimal waypoint guidance.

That’s according to Invoke Studios head Dominic Guay, who told TechRadar Gaming in an interview at Gamescom that the upcoming D&D action-adventure game will ease up on the “hand-holding” you often find in other open-world role-playing games (RPGs).

“It helps that we’re trying to go easy on the hand-holding, so that allows us to pull back a little bit,” Guay replied when asked why the hands-on demo had such a minimal HUD. “In this case, I’ll be honest, though, we turned off some elements of HUD so that it wasn’t overwhelming for people watching the demo.”

The studio head confirmed the team will add “some” elements to the HUD to help players, but it can also be turned on and off in the settings, adding that there was a time when it “felt the need to put a lot of things in the middle of a screen.”

“We realized that players, because they’re being eased in with the number of spells they have, the number of things they can do, we don’t need to overwhelm them,” Guay continued. “And then we will give you some guidance. So the example I always give is, if the quest was to find me, you know, at Gamescom, and you open up the map, then you’d see it.

“We’d put a highlight around [the area], and we say, ‘Well, he’s somewhere in there, right?’ So then you have a compass; you can get there, but we don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information. [We want to] keep it immersive.”

During the same interview, Guay explained why Invoke chose a warlock protagonist for the game, explaining that the concept of “creative magic” was central to gameplay and story.

Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons launches in 2027 for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.