D&D Fans Have 'Seven Or Eight' Reasons To Get Hyped

It's no secret that Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) has been enjoying a renaissance lately. The fantasy RPG has made a return to tabletops everywhere, friends gathering to create characters and set out together on perilous adventures. In the coming years, fans of D&D will be able to enjoy "seven or eight" video games officially based on the best-selling tabletop franchise.

At the 2019 Game Awards, D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast announced that Tuque Games would be developing Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance, an RPG starring some of the most iconic characters from the series. The four player co-op action-RPG allows players to embody drow ranger Drizzt Do'Urden, dwarven king Bruenor Battlehammer, human fighter Catti-brie, and barbarian Wulfgar. The trailer for Dark Alliance shows the companions, a kind of D&D dream team, fighting in a blizzard, with spurts of blood and arrows to the throat abound.

Dark Alliance is described as a spiritual successor to the PlayStation 2's Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games. According to Wizards of the Coast president Chris Cocks, Dark Alliance will be the first of many D&D games to come.

"The D&D team's job is to say 'yes' when people want to play something... The best dungeon masters tend to want to figure out how to say 'yes', and have the players do what they want to do..." he said in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, "And we're going to do it in a variety of genres... And in future games we will explore different areas, whether it's grand strategy and combat at army level scale, to really intimate character portrayal."

If Dark Alliance isn't your thing, no worries — there are more games coming. Dark Alliance will release on PC, but will also allow for good old-fashioned split screen couch co-op, a feature that is oddly making a comeback. Cocks emphasized that a good D&D adventure is meant to be enjoyed among friends, but that Wizards of the Coast hasn't forgotten about single players.

"We will have single player games; we think they're important," Cocks said. "There will be single player modes in all of our games, but we always think that our co-operative perspective, that forming a party with your friends and doing great things together — the party is bigger than individual components — will always be an important part of our secret sauce."

Dark Alliance, utilizing that cooperative secret sauce, will release in Fall 2020.