Today, Wizards of the Coast announced the next Dungeons & Dragons video game, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a clicker game from Codename Entertainment. It is launching sometime in summer or early fall, and it’ll be on the Steam PC gaming platform.
Idle Champions is the second D&D game announced (so far) this year on the heels of Dungeon Chess, the brand’s first virtual reality experience. Along with steady expansions and additions to Neverwinter (the Forgotten Realms-based MMORPG), we’ve also seen Sword Coast Legends (2015), Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear (2016), and Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition (April). But that’s it when it comes to traditional D&D video games that the public knows about.
When I spoke to D&D director Nathan Stewart and Wizards of the Coast CEO Chris Cooks back in August, they talked about a re-energized push for the brand in video games. I expected this to focus on more hardcore experiences, as we’ve seen since D&D first started licensing its brand for video games. Chess and a clicker game, however, don’t gel with that strategy, but Stewart provided some context for my question. His responses to my questions show that journalists and fans alike don’t always think about the development pipeline beyond what games we want and what’s been announced so far — along for the need for developers to experiment with emerging platforms and genres.
“In all seriousness, game development, and specifically for PC, console, and — [to a growing extent] — mobile, takes a long time, so some of the experiments you see coming out now started long before those comments and not specifically…
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