The director of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Survivor, and God of War 3 is working on a Dungeons & Dragons game, and says his team “wanted to sink our teeth into something that’s legendary.”
Stig Asmussen previously left Respawn Entertainment to form his own studio – Giant Skull – which was officially unveiled last year. Since then, he’s clearly been busy, as more recently it was announced that Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast had “signed an exclusive publishing agreement” with the studio to build “an all-new, single-player action-adventure title set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons.”
In a new interview with The Game Business, it’s revealed that Asmussen had invited Wizards of the Coast president John Hight to look at Giant Skull’s first prototype, after the devs had “been working on our own IP.” Hight was clearly a big fan of what he saw, because he promptly asked if Asmussen would want to work on a Hasbro or Wizards of the Coast IP.
“Stig said: ‘like what?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. We’ve got D&D, we’ve got Magic The Gathering, we have a thousand different brands within Hasbro… tell me what interests you?'” Hight recalls. “They looked at a lot of possibilities and landed on D&D. So, we set them up with the D&D [tabletop RPG] team, they riffed, and I think that resonated.”
Adding to this, Asmussen explains: “The decision to go with D&D wasn’t very difficult, because it plays into the wheelhouse of the things we’ve done in the past, like God of War, and the Jedi series. We wanted to sink our teeth into something that’s legendary, that’s mythical, that has a lot of space for us to spread our wings, jump into a world and capture the spirit of it.”
Asmussen also notes that although Giant Skull is “very excited” about its new IP, the opportunity to work on a D&D game “wasn’t something that we could just walk away from.” Not only have “a lot of us” grown up with it, but “for me, with a new company, this is something that we’re good at. We’re good at working with partners. We’re good at capturing the spirit of those worlds.”
One thing is for sure, though, Asmussen’s new game definitely isn’t Baldur’s Gate 4 – something Hight clarifies later in the same interview. Don’t worry, though, “of course” that sequel is happening eventually, but at this point, who knows who’ll be developing it?
“We are going to do CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3,” says Wizards of the Coast president, but Star Wars Jedi director’s D&D action game is very different to Larian’s RPG.
