Dungeons & Dragons co-op multiplayer game on the way from Payday devs
Rolling out in (d)2026
Payday devs Starbreeze are working on a co-op multiplayer game based on storied tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons. It’ll be out in 2026, and Starbreeze are being upfront with the fact it’ll be a games-as-a-service-type game.
The untitled Dungeons & Dragons video game, which is currently codenamed Project Baxter within the studio - which some reason reminded me of the sort of cutesy nickname you’d give a grey old dog, like Major Muffins - will be set in the world of the hugely influential fantasy TRPG, which marks its 50th anniversary next year. While D&D can technically be played in any setting that players want, its official universe is the Forgotten Realms - familiar from the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and this year’s far-better-than-expected D&D movie Honor Among Thieves.
Starbreeze didn’t say much about what to expect, but indicated that their take on D&D will stick to the sort of formula set by Payday and its ilk in being a co-operative multiplayer game with “lifetime commitment through a Games as a Service-model” and elements of “community engagement”. They also said it’ll offer “a larger than life experience”, which you’d really hope for from a game literally titled Dungeons and Dragons - two things I personally don’t experience much in my average day-to-day, but maybe that’s just me.
We are excited to unveil Dungeons & Dragons® as the IP for our next game, codename ”Project Baxter”. A co-operative multiplayer title to be released on all major platforms in 2026!
— Starbreeze Entertainment (@StarbreezeAB) December 4, 2023
Read more here: https://t.co/JROgMApCzl pic.twitter.com/2SIOUZycyV
Otherwise, we know that Starbreeze will be both developer and publisher for the game, which is due to release sometime in 2026 on “all major platforms” - so that’ll be a yes to PC. It’ll play nice with consoles, though, thanks to confirmed cross-play support. And those Dungeons And/Or Dragons will probably look fairly nice, being built on Unreal Engine 5.
Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren added that “development of the game is in full swing”, describing it as “an amazing Dungeons & Dragons action-adventure”. Sjögren also compared the apparently shared roots of D&D and Starbreeze in “cooperative and community driven experiences, ‘play it your way’ and infinite replayability”, which might give some idea of what to expect.
A bit of extremely grainy teaser art shows some kind of wizard/sorcerer character wielding a staff, along with a fairly generic shot of a fantasy town, and… that’s about all we know for now.
Next year sees the revision of D&D with its tabletop follow-up to the enormously adopted Fifth Edition, which has powered everything from hit series Critical Role to Baldur’s Gate 3’s maths, and will accompany a fully-featured virtual tabletop also made in UE5. With the pen-and-paper RPG pushing ever further into the digital world between that VTT, Baldur’s Gate 3 and now this, no doubt expect more D&D to venture its way into video games soon enough. I hear that Baldur’s Gate game did pretty alright for itself.