A couple of months ago, PAYDAY developer Starbreeze announced it was making a Dungeons and Dragons co-op game after licensing the popular franchise from Wizards of the Coast.
At the time, Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren said the development was in ‘full swing’. However, the Swedish company published its full fiscal year financial report today, and the information about this Dungeons and Dragons project seems a bit different. Sjögren stated:
In early December, we were finally able to reveal that we licensed Dungeons and Dragons for use in our next game title. It is a brand that was always on the top of our lists of potential licenses to develop an action-adventure game on. The Baxter team is currently in full pre-production and on track to launch in 2026.
It sounds like the game is still in pre-production. Even so, the Starbreeze executive reckons it is on track to launch in 2026. That means there would be just two years of production time, which is definitely not promising at all for the game’s final quality. As gamers know all too well, game development is constantly taking longer, leading to long wait times between new iterations of prized franchises. Making a triple-A game requires four to five years, at the very least.
Chances are this Dungeons and Dragons co-op game won’t be triple-A, then. It’ll probably even be priced accordingly, as with PAYDAY 3. However, Starbreeze’s latest game is the perfect example of an undercooked game. In today’s report, CEO Tobias Sjögren also admitted that both PAYDAY 3 sales and player activity were significantly lower compared to Starbreeze’s hopes.
We don’t know much about the Dungeons and Dragons game except that it will be set in Waterdeep, the Jewel of the North in D&D’s most popular setting, the Forgotten Realms. The gameplay will be action-focused. At the same time, Creative Director Leif Westerholm said it won’t be just hack-and-slash.
When you have a group of adventurers, a party of adventurers, working together, it’s very important that it’s not a hack and slash game. It’s more than that. It’s trying to look at what makes D&D special. And to me, it’s not rolling the 20 Miss/Hit. It’s more than that. It’s the connection between the players, how they overcome enemies that seem to be beyond us.
In other Dungeons and Dragons gaming news, Hidden Path Entertainment recently halted the development of its open world RPG.
