Ten days, ago, Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast announced an exclusive publishing agreement with Giant Skull, the game studio started by Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game leader Stig Asmussen.
They announced that Asmussen’s studio is working on a new single-player action adventure title set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons.
I had a chance to talk with the company leaders about the deal. At the Summer Game Fest Play Days, I sat down with John Hight, President of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming at Hasbro; and Asmussen, who is the CEO of Giant Skull and a former leader at Respawn.
This certainly sounds like a big effort, as it will be an original title. It’s a single-player action-adventure title set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and “marks a definitive moment in both companies’ gaming ambitions.”
The game is currently in development for PC and console and more details will be revealed at a later date. Hight himself is a new executive in charge of the Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons game and game licensing business at Hasbro, as he has been on the job for less than a year. He was previously senior vice president and general manager of the Warcraft franchise at Blizzard Entertainment, where he oversaw all development and commercial activities for World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Warcraft Rumble.
During his 12-year tenure at Blizzard, John directed development efforts for multiple World of Warcraft expansions, including Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, and Diablo III on console. Prior to Blizzard, Hight worked on over 30 games on various platforms, including critically acclaimed games in the Command & Conquer, Neverwinter Nights, and God of War franchises.
“It’s been not quite a year stepping into Wizards of the Coast. It’s been incredible. I knew coming into it that the goal is to build a digital publishing division,” Hight said in our interview. “We already had some games underway, but we wanted our goal is essentially to have a couple of premium games a year that we’re releasing as part of the Wizards label. So it was fun, and one of the first calls I made after getting the job was to Stig stick because if you want to build one of the best games out there, you talk to one of the best developers.”
Asmussen was most recently the game director of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for Respawn Entertainment, a division of Electronic Arts. Prior to that, he was the game director on God of War III and the art director for God of War II at Sony Santa Monica. Giant Skull has an elite team, all of whom will be instrumental in shaping this new single-player focused action adventure, utilizing Unreal Engine 5, from the ground-up.
Asmussen said, “We opened up Giant Skull in September 2023, and a year later, John calls me up. He said, ‘Hey, I’m at Wizards now.’ We had been talking throughout that time. When I was thinking about starting a new company, John and I were talking a lot like talking about different ideas and how that could work out. I was picking his brain. when he reached out, and he came out to Encino to see the game and what we had been working on, he got to see our vertical slice.”
Reaching out
Hight reached out in December 2024 and said he was really interested in the team. Hight asked if Asmussen was interested in one of Wizards’ IPs.
“I dug into that a little bit further, and Dungeons and Dragons totally made a lot of sense. It’s something that I grew up on. It’s something that a lot of people on my team are extremely passionate about,” Asmussen said. “We just jumped into a contract at that point and kept that going. We made a visit Redmon in the Seattle area, to the Wizards headquarters. Got to pick the brains of the creative team there and see what a partnership would be like. And I walked away thoroughly impressed. We really wanted to be a part of collaborating this amazing, legendary license.”
Asmussen’s team had a pedigree focused on action-adventure RPGs, and so it was working on something that was melee-combat focused, had a robust traversal system.
Asumssen said, “I certainly don’t want to say that we could skin it into D&D. But there were a lot of elements that we were working on that just seemed like they matched very well.”
The wizard’s ambition
This partnership adds to Wizards of the Coast’s growing lineup of games, which includes both original titles and those based on popular brands. In addition to the Giant Skull project, several other exciting games are in the works across Wizards’ North American studios.
Hight said that Archetype Entertainment in Austin, Texas, is working on Exodus, an epic sci-fi RPG that puts players at the center of an emotional story.
And Atomic Arcade (Raleigh, North Carolina) has released two new images from its first project: a game centered on Snake Eyes, the legendary ninja/commando from G.I. JOE. Invoke (Montreal, Canada) is in full production of another D&D action-adventure game built around magic.
Also, Skeleton Key (Austin, Texas) is working on a project that blends suspense, horror, and memorable gameplay experiences. Finally, the Wizards of the Coast team continues to expand Magic: The Gathering Arena with new content and features.
This relatively new team has a lot to live up to. Hasbro is riding high off of hits like Larian’s big D&D hit, Baldur’s Gate 3, as well as Scopely’s Monopoly Go, which has generated more than $5 billion in revenues to date.
“Awareness for D&D is great. I think the appetite is great. We want to feel to both, you know, the CRPG players, the tabletop players, and just gamers in general, because it’s a wonderful fantasy universe to set games in,” Hight said.
Hight said that the goal with Magic: The Gathering and D&D is essentially to make more people aware of these worlds and bring more players into these communities. He said there are announced games, studios working, and unannounced projects.
Coming together
“With that, there is an open mindedness about how we express that. D&D does not always have to be expressed in a strict computer RPG. Magic doesn’t have to be expressed in strict trading card game. Because the worlds themselves, in the creatures and the villains and the heroes, are the stories that get told in both of those games,” he said. “I think they’re fertile ground to create new things. And when I saw the demo of vertical slice that Stig’s team showed me, I thought this is great.”
Hight added, “It’s one of those things where running around in the world they created was fun. Once you get your hand on the controller — you’ve done this, you know, Dean — you want to play this. They hand you the controller. You look around for a little bit. That’s cool. This is one of those experiences where I couldn’t put it down. Probably played hundreds of demos of action games, combat games. The feel, even in early stages, was so tight and just envisioned if I could have a hero in D&D, or player character in D&D, and running around and battling.”
Hight thought it would be an amazing experience. He also wanted to work with Asmussen again, as they had already gone through building a game together.
“You have that sort of honest and transparent relationship where you can just cut through, you know, all the BS, and know that you have a shared interest in making something great,” Asmussen said. “As desperately as I wanted to do that, I didn’t want to be heavy handed, and I wanted to give him the opportunity. Is this a fit? Is there a brand that we have that interests you, and even within D&D, I wanted to make sure that he felt like he and the team got a lot of license to make it their own.”
For this game idea, D&D made sense while magic wasn’t the same kind of fit.
“When you make a game, there’s the world, there’s the setting, there’s the hero, there’s the things that the player latches onto,” Asmussen said. “But then there’s everything under the hood, and that’s just, this is how the game controls. This is how the motion model works, this is how the camera system works, this is how the sound can use it. And we have all of those things in place for the type of game that we’re good at making, and translating that to Dungeons and Dragons makes a lot of sense. But there’s still a lot that we have to learn. There’s still a lot that we have to do to really capture that spirit the way that justifies it.”
Big teams or small teams
Yet nobody is really convinced that the future is made up of giant triple-A teams. Asmussen’s team has 35 people now, and it isn’t expecting to grow a lot.
“We intend to keep the team around that size for quite a bit. There’s no reason to scale if we don’t need to,” Asmussen said. “You want to get to the point where you’ve got a very strong vertical slice. You do several play tests. Once you’re super confident with it, you can make a confident long term schedule. That would affect head count, but we’re not going to get huge.”
I noted that so many games need to level up now. I wondered if D&D was in that process. There are pressures on studios now. Some need to make players happy and they also need to be less ambitious.
That last phrase threw Asmussen off.
“Did you say less ambitious?” he asked.
And I notd that some teams have gotten too large. The projects on go for years and never end. Then something like Concord happens. So now there is downward pressure on teams, and maybe it’s better to make a 20-hour game than a 50-hour game.
“I think that’s one of the pressures everybody in the whole industry is feeling now,” I said. “What matters more to you? Level up D&D that is something beyond what Larian did, or think about what are the gamers actually telling people they want?”
Hight didn’t hesitate to answer. He said, “They’re telling us what they have told us. I’ve been a gamer and making games for 30 years. They want great games, whether it’s a big budget game, whether it’s a small, experimental game. They’re looking for innovation. They’re looking for a fun experience.”
Deliverance
Hight is confident Giant Skull can deliver that.
“In the case of, you know, working with a team like Giant Skull, they’re going to give us a big game, great execution, wonderful artistry, great storytelling, action — that’s why we signed them up. But I think the main thing is there’s no magic formula. You have to deliver what you set out to do. Make sure there’s a fun aspect to the game. The storytelling is good, the play is good. And then do the best you can. Yeah, I think that’s what people want. They just want great games.”
Asmussen said, “I think the problem might be that people approach making games like there’s a bunch of boxes you have to check. I think it’s about, like John said, make a good game. You make a game that feels good. You make a game that’s got a soul. Look at Expedition 33: Clair Obscur. It’s got a soul. And I think it’s really important for us all not to lose sight of just that moment to moment feeling when when you’re playing a game. You want to continue to play the game.”
As for the approach, Asmussen said he approaches tasks one at a time. As he is doing it, he tries to learn from it and use that to inform him what to do next. Asmussen and Hight talked about production budgets and Asmussen made sure that Hight was OK with making a premium game.
“We’re comfortable with that,” Hight said. “We certainly have a budget we’re working within, and I think it’s healthy enough to do a pretty, seriously amazing game. So it’s not completely open ended. We’re also not heavily restricted, where, if we discover things that we need to add to the game to make it even better, to build even more players on this journey.”
Asmussen added, “We don’t mess around. We do due diligence. We make sure that we create a production schedule that makes sense, and it’s based off of real data, data points that we can point out from history, things that we’ve done that informed success moving forward and along the way, as we find out exactly what it is and what it’s becoming.”
