Some footage from a reportedly cancelled Dungeons and Dragons RPG from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive co-developers Hidden Path Entertainment has surfaced online, alongside concept art.
All of it paints a vague picture of a work-in-progress game – which was being assembled under the watchful eye of a Wizards of the Coast that’s currently facing a post-Larian Baldur’s Gate conundrum – that looked a bit like a bunch of the big fantasy RPGs we’ve gotten in recent years.
If you need a quick refresher, this unannounnced Hidden Path D&D game was reported as having been cancelled alongside a bunch of other stuff at WoTC back in 2023, only for the studio to then refute that reporting. Then, last year, Hidden Path creative director Michael Austin posted on LinkedIn that they had made the call to “pause development on that project and reduce the company size until we have an opportunity to return to it”. 44 devs lost their jobs.
Now, this footage (via MP1st) has come out, and looks to have been put together by a music supervisor on the game, which was codenamed Project Dante. It shows off a party of three adventurers, made up of the player and two companions, putting a bunch of bandits to the sword in third person combat that looks quite Dragon Age: The Veilguardy to me.
They then do some puzzles to get the magical water flowing at a temple, explore a bit, and towards the end things get pretty cutsceney with a group of folks chilling in a tavern, before ending with the player sneakily watching a group of NPCs sing while crouching in some grass. I hope they at least tossed the crooning crew a coin as a tip after taking that last bit in.
Overall, not much sticks out to me as beyond what you might expect from a big fantasy RPG like this, though the concept art does have a very nice picture of a flying cat, or a Tressym to give the furry boi its proper name.
Well, I say that, but while the temple puzzling’s going on one of the companions – named Kavar – does say the line “The thing is starting to do a thing with the stuff”. It’s not really noteworthy, maybe a tiny bit eye-roll inducing, but I got a kick out of it.
If this D&D RPG had made it to release rather than that paused/cancelled limbo, I could see myself quoting it to mates in a fashion I’m sure they wouldn’t find irritating whatsoever.
