D&D’s next big game won’t play anything like BG3 — and with the director of Jedi: Survivor, that’s the point

Stig Asmussen can finally breathe. The next game from the director of Star: Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor, one he and the team at his recently formed studio Giant Skull have worked on for more than a year, has been revealed as a giant AAA Dungeons & Dragons adventure. As he puts it, the deal between Giant Skull and Hasbro that finalized the actual direction of his project only just closed.

“It’s a big, big deal for both sides, and it takes a while,” Asmussen tells Polygon out of the 2025 Summer Game Fest. “It’s been a rollercoaster, and I think it was only a week and a half, two weeks ago that the ink was dried. And it was a huge exhale.”

When news broke that Asmussen was breaking out to form his own studio after stints at Sony (directing God of War 3) and Respawn overseeing the Jedi games, fans of his story-forward action RPGs rightfully perked up: a visionary was going off to do his own thing. In 2024, Asmussen founded Giant Skull, with plans to immediately set out to produce a “AAA single-player focused action adventure” utilizing Unreal Engine 5. 

Spearheading the deal for Hasbro was Wizards of the Coast president John Hight — who goes way, way back with Asmussen. Hight thinks he met the game developer around 2006, when Asmussen was working on the original God of War. After years at 3DO, ERA, and Atari, Hight came to Sony to work in development on PlayStation Network and indie publishing. He eventually oversaw production on God of War 3, where he forged a creative relationship with Asmussen. When Hight left for Blizzard in 2011, where he worked on World of Warcraft and Diablo III, he always hoped there’d be another chance to work with Asmussen. The chance came when Hight landed at Wizards of the Coast in August 2024, and called Asmussen by December to check out what was cooking at Giant Skull.

“It’s tough when you’re starting a new company to get the team together and come up with an idea — but we had, and still do have, really good momentum,” Asmussen says. “John saw that and he’s like, ‘Hey, can you turn this into Wizards IP?’”

Hight says there were options on the table beyond Dungeons & Dragons — a Giant Skull AAA single-player Magic: The Gathering game was entirely plausible, if Asmussen had sparked to the idea — but the iconography and possibilities of D&D clicked for the Jedi: Survivor director. Asmussen says he’s felt the constraints of canon and lore working on Star Wars games, and there’s little of that pressure going into the D&D game. After a visit to Wizards HQ in February, to learn about future plans for the D&D brand and how his untitled game could sync up, he walked away feeling like he could do just about anything in “a brilliant world that can be dark, but it can also be whimsical, have levity to it.”

There’s no one way to do a D&D game, Hight says, and while the shadow of Baldur’s Gate 3 looms large (“Don’t get me wrong, we are going to do CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3”), the deal with Giant Skull is about unleashing a new set of creatives into the sandbox. Being “faithful” to the property is really about doing right by the imaginations of the players.

“We have 50 years of DMs coming together and creating their own campaigns, and we’ve provided templates for hundreds and hundreds of monsters in D&D,” Hight says. “The things that form the dreams and the nightmares of people, from gelatinous cubes to owl bears. So it’s really important that any manifestation of them in a game be as good as what’s in our own minds. That’s a tall order. And I think about what Stig and Patrick Murphy did on God of War 3, taking that pantheon of both gods and the crazy monsters from mythology and bringing them to life. It’s like, wow, what if we could unleash them on D&D?”

So what did Hight see at Giant Skull that inspired a major AAA gamble on a new studio? In his mind, unparalleled precision. While Asmussen’s game is likely years away — and only now will work start on turning it into an extension of D&D —  Giant Skull has already crafted a model for single-player action that has built on all the team’s years honing combat and movement.  

“We’re experts at melee combat, so that’s something that John got to see and it translates very well [to D&D],” Asmussen says. For Giant Skull, “momentum” is a philosophy more than a lucky gain — Asmussen is fine to admit that “there’s probably still legacy debt that’s in the Jedi games from bad decisions that we made early on. Some of those bad decisions were based on momentum because we don’t get stuck. We just want to keep on moving forward.” Always refining, always innovating. 

“When we started Giant Skull and we started with vanilla Unreal — we couldn’t take what we did with the Jedi games over to a new company,” Asmussen says. “So all of those mistakes that we had made before weren’t there. We had a clean slate and we were able to build very quickly based on all of our learnings over the years before. That’s allowed us to create a motion model that’s so much faster now, so much more fluid. And it doesn’t have points where you get blocked because you don’t understand how to fix jank. It’s buttery smooth.”

Giant Skull has started its new project at the character level, and Hight felt for himself how playing the game would feel in the environments. “It’s this subtlety of control of a character that, honestly, many developers don’t discover until quite late in the finishing process,” he says. “They’ll build out these entire worlds and then you get to move the character around and it just doesn’t feel right. I think from the get go, [Giant Skull] had already been exploring that and it’s amazing.”

Neither Hight nor Asmussen were ready to talk about specific D&D elements to expect from the game or even core mechanics (though Asmussen did promise me you’ll be able to press a button to jump). It’s all too early to say — which is exactly where Hight wants Asmussen and Giant Skull to be at this stage. 

“He always goes to find the fun first,” Hight says of his longtime collaborator. “And sometimes people immediately latch on to, oh, here’s the story we have to do and here are all the features that we want in the game. They start building out broadly without discovering: what’s the underlying thing that’s fun?”

In the announcement of their deal with Giant Skull, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast specifically promised that the untitled game would deliver not just “immersive storytelling” and “heroic combat” but also “exhilarating traversal.” Asmussen can’t help but laugh at the hype-speak, but it’s also true — and fundamental to nailing that underlying fun this early in the development process. 

“Traversal is really important to us,” he says. “Giving the player a suite of different ways to probe and interact with the environment, and eventually build their character up to a point where they’re dominating the environment. It all has to feel silky smooth.”