The developers of Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons have said they avoided putting waypoints into the game because they want players to actually explore.
The open-world single-player action-adventure goes easy on the hand-holding by ditching traditional quest markers that guide players directly from one story section to the next. While it does have a compass on the top of the screen — which you can turn off — the player is left to work out where to go by exploring, talking to NPCs, and thinking about what to do next.
Dominic Guay, General Manager at Invoke Studios, told IGN at gamescom 2026 the decision was all about wanting to encourage exploration. “We wanted them to engage with the world, to figure things out and feel that when they found things, it was based on their actions and not just blindly trusting a waypoint,” he said.
Guay and the rest of the developers at Invoke have experience making open world games that include waypoints, such as Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs series. But this time around, for Warlock, they wanted to do things differently.
“The core team on this game have worked on other open world games before and we’ve done the, let’s say, the heavy-handed guiding approach before,” Guay said. “What ends up happening at some point — and it’s normal — a lot of players will just follow blindly the waypoint, and then you lose that agency, you lose that feeling of curiosity because you’re like, well, why even bother? And so we didn’t want to go there. We wanted the player to explore.”
To that end, Warlock has a Mystery system that are triggered when players take certain actions, typically in a settlement. The idea is players will uncover mysteries by exploring, talking to NPCs, and gathering information, rather than following a quest market to where the Mystery officially kicks off.
“There are multiple entry points,” Guay explained. “They’re kind of harder for us to do in that way, but we love that challenge. Not only are there multiple entry points, but depending on how you stumble upon them, it might change how you interact with them, meaning that maybe you could have found actually you can chance upon that Mystery from a completely different place and then it’ll lead you toward that settlement, and you’ll know before coming in there’s something fishy going on here. So then you’ll approach that settlement differently than in this case where you learn it from within.
“Some [Mysteries] are a little bit more straightforward, some are a little bit more deep and requires more engagement and exploration, but that’s really how they’re built.”
Video game hand-holding is of course a hot topic right now with the release of PlayStation 5 exclusive Marvel’s Wolverine, which has been criticized for its now infamous “fart gas” — the depiction of Logan’s scent trail as he tracks other characters, chases down enemies, and sniffs out collectibles. Some want to be able to turn it off.
The two games are very different, of course. Warlock is an open-world action adventure with emergent gameplay that comes from its unique magic system, whereas Wolverine is a linear action adventure with combat that takes place in constrained areas. Insomniac’s effort isn’t a quest marker sort of game, but it is interesting to hear Invoke’s philosophy when it comes to player hand-holding, and how it set out to avoid it.
