There are "seven or eight" Dungeons & Dragons videogames in the works

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

Dungeons & Dragons may be enjoying a cultural relevance it hasn't seen since the 1980s, but while its fifth edition has flourished it hasn't been well represented in videogames. The Neverwinter MMO continues receiving updates, and in 2017 we got a clicker called Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and adaptations of the board game spin-offs Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation and Lords of Waterdeep, but pickings have been slim.

The announcements of new Baldur's Gate and Dark Alliance games suggest a change, and that's backed up by Wizards of the Coast. In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Wizards of the Coast president Chris Cocks explained that this is only the beginning and there are "seven or eight" videogames based on D&D coming out in the next few years.

"We want each game to have a point of view, and to really keep on just a couple of things and do it really, really well," he said. "What you don't want to do is have every game in the franchise try to do the same thing, and try to do everything all at once."

That's promising news. But please, for the love of god, can at least one of them be a singleplayer RPG with turn-based combat that's relatively close to the rules of the actual tabletop game.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.