Ambitious New D&D Game Warlock Won’t Be a 100-Hour Open-World Slog

Warlock, the upcoming open-world Dungeons & Dragonsvideo game from Invoke Studios and Wizards of the Coast, isn't going to be as long as some people may expect. That may be a good thing for gaming fans who reject open-world game bloat.

At Gamescom 2026, I saw an extended version of Warlock's public gameplay demo behind closed doors. I watched the protagonist, a young woman named Kaatri, explore a small village called Crickshank, then speak with a beggar sitting on the ground. This led to her noticing a trail of blood leading inside a doorway; following it revealed a huge underground network of tunnels.

This sort of gameplay, where no two players will have exactly the same experience due to how much optional content is available, is emblematic of a vast, sprawling, 100-plus hour RPG. However, when chatting with studio head Dominic Guay afterward, he explained that Warlock actually isn't that sort of game.

How long will Warlock be?

"It's going to be longer than what you'd expect from a more linear game for sure, but it's not gigantic like some open worlds that are hundreds and hundreds of hours," he revealed. "One of the reasons for that is we want to have a denser open world, where you're more quickly rewarded by finding things when you explore. So we didn't want to have to draw out such far away distances that it takes forever to get to places like some other games do."

Invoke's approach sounds awfully similar to what Playground Games said about how long its new Fable will be. Guay elaborated though, to give a little more specificity. "It's still like tens and tens of hours, you're going to have plenty of time," Guay said. "I think to a degree, one of the reasons why it's so hard to answer depends on how much you explore versus how much you really want to get that story going. If you explore, you'll get more powerful eventually, which will help on the main quest. If you're really focused on the main quest, then you might get stumped a little bit at some point and want to explore to get more powerful."

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• Image: Invoke Studios/Wizards of the Coast
• Image: Invoke Studios/Wizards of the Coast
• Image: Invoke Studios/Wizards of the Coast

Warlock will still keep players in check

In that regard, it sounds like most RPGs, then, but Guay also confirmed that enemies won't scale with you, so if you blitz through the story as quickly as possible, you'll likely hit a wall where foes are too tough to kill. "Enemies don't become magically stronger just because you get stronger," he said. "If an area has weak enemies, even if you get really powerful, they're still weak."

Given that Warlock is set in the D&D universe, where you can famously do pretty much anything you like, learning the game is that short may come as a surprise. Baldur's Gate 3 is widely considered to be the best D&D game of all time, and according to HowLongToBeat, a completionist run takes over 180 hours. D&D campaigns themselves typically last anywhere from a few weeks to several years, with each session lasting for hours at a time. So Warlock is much more restrained, in comparison, but hey; in a world where Grand Theft Auto 6is promising an 80-plus hour story, I'm not complaining.