Warlock Devs: 'Make Spells OP First, Balance Later'

Invoke Studios initially worried their D&D spells were too powerful, but turned that into a design philosophy. Warlock's real-time spell system lets you chain magic and melee on the fly.

Ever cast a spell in a game and thought, "Wow, this is completely broken"? For the devs behind Warlock, that feeling became the whole point.

In an interview with Edge Magazine issue #429, Invoke Studios head Dominic Guay admitted the team kept worrying their D&D spells were too strong. "There's this tendency on the dev team to go, 'That's too powerful,'" he said. "At some point we had to say, 'No. Make it OP first, make it fun, and then we'll balance it.'"

That philosophy shows in how spells actually work. Take Black Tentacles: you can use them to pin an ogre's weapon to the ground, leaving it flailing while you whale on it. Sounds unstoppable, right? But cast the same spell on the ogre itself, and it'll break free much faster. So the power is there, just with built-in trade-offs.

Warlock isn't about scrolling through a menu and clicking a spell icon, either. You'll trigger magic through different button combos, which lets you weave melee strikes and multiple spells together in real time. "Once you get the hang of it, you're able to chain melee attacks, spell, spell, spell, and think on the fly," Guay explained. "We always wanted that realtime expression of magic instead of something that feels a bit slower."

If that sounds a bit like Magicka — the old Arrowhead game where you combined elements into spells — you're not alone. Warlock seems to share that same spirit of experimentation, though we still don't know exactly how its system will play out. What we do know: you'll learn spells gradually, unlocking more as you go. "The player will learn to be a warlock at the same time as the character," Guay said. "You'll gain more spells pretty fast on your journey, but you need that onboarding because we're doing things differently on the controller than some other games."

After Baldur's Gate 3, it's hard not to compare every D&D game to that giant. But Warlock is clearly trying to escape its shadow with a very different take on the formula — one that leans into real-time action and lets you feel like an overpowered magic user from the start.

Will you be picking up Warlock when it launches? And what spell would you want to break first?