Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons Ditches Waypoints to Put Discovery Back in Players' Hands

What We Know About Warlock

Warlock is a single-player action RPG set in the Forgotten Realms, developed by Invoke Studios, a Montreal-based team founded in 2022 and staffed by veterans of Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex, and Rainbow Six. The game casts players as one of the titular warlocks, bound by pact to a powerful patron, and is built in Unreal Engine 5. It is currently confirmed for PC and current-generation consoles, though Invoke has not yet announced a release window.

The waypoint decision emerged from a studio that has been unusually candid about its design intentions. In a developer diary released alongside the game's announcement, creative director Dominic Guay framed navigation as a core pillar rather than an afterthought, describing a world the team wants players to read rather than follow. That framing is the clearest public statement of intent the studio has offered, and it anchors everything that follows.

The Design Philosophy Behind Removing Waypoints

Waypoints have become the connective tissue of the modern RPG. They exist because open worlds got big, quest logs got complicated, and studios decided that players would rather be directed than delayed. A marker on the screen is an invisible hand on the shoulder, steering you toward the next story beat with zero ambiguity.

The developers behind Warlock see that hand as a problem. Their stated reasoning is straightforward: players should figure things out for themselves rather than blindly trusting a UI element to tell them where to go. The waypoint, in this view, is not a convenience. It is a substitute for engagement, a small surrender of agency that quietly reshapes how a player experiences a world.

That philosophy sits inside a broader "trust the player" movement that has quietly gained momentum in RPG design. Elden Ring shipped without a quest log and let players piece together objectives from dialogue and environmental detail. Outer Wilds built its entire structure around player-driven knowledge, with a rumor map that records discoveries rather than directing them. Tunic buried its manual in the world itself, turning instruction into a collectible. None of these games eliminated guidance entirely, but each treated navigation as a design problem worth solving rather than a UI problem worth automating.

How Players Will Navigate Instead

Removing waypoints does not mean removing guidance. It means relocating it.

In place of floating markers, Warlock leans on the world itself. Landmarks serve as anchors. Environmental storytelling plants clues in the terrain. NPC dialogue carries directional weight, and in-world maps offer reference points without making decisions for the player. The information is present, but it is embedded rather than overlaid.

This shift changes the player's relationship with the screen. Attention moves from the corner of the HUD to the horizon. Instead of scanning for a marker, players scan for a silhouette, a distinctive tower, a river bend that matches what an NPC described. Navigation becomes an act of observation rather than compliance.

The approach is not without risk. Getting lost can frustrate, and not every player wants their exploration to double as a geography exam. Accessibility matters here too. Waypoints serve players with limited time, differing cognitive needs, or simple preferences for efficiency, and a game that removes them entirely must offer alternative supports or accept that it is narrowing its audience. The developers' wager, and it is explicitly a wager, not a confirmed feature set, is that the payoff, a world that feels genuinely discovered, outweighs the cost.

The announcement trailer below offers the first look at how that philosophy translates on screen, with extended stretches of traversal and no objective markers in sight.

The Dungeons & Dragons Connection

The decision makes particular sense given the source material.

Tabletop Dungeons & Dragons has never had waypoints. A Dungeon Master describes a world, players describe their actions, and navigation happens through conversation, imagination, and the occasional wildly misguided assumption. There is no minimap in a pen-and-paper session. There is a map someone sketched on graph paper, and there is the DM's voice telling you that the forest grows darker to the north.

That structure is built on player agency. Tabletop D&D hands players a problem and trusts them to solve it, improvise around it, or fail spectacularly. Discovery is the reward, and it is earned through attention and curiosity rather than delivered by a system.

Warlock appears to be translating that pen-and-paper freedom into a digital format by treating the game world as the primary source of information. The design echoes the tabletop experience in spirit: the game describes, the player interprets. It is a meaningful attempt to preserve what makes D&D feel like D&D, rather than reducing it to a series of objective markers strung across a map.

A second developer feature, embedded below, walks through the studio's approach to environmental design and how the team is building landmarks meant to function as navigational anchors.

A Bet on Curiosity Over Convenience

Removing waypoints is a gamble, and it is worth naming as one. The developers are wagering that players will trade a measure of comfort for a greater sense of ownership over their journey. If they are right, Warlock could offer something increasingly rare: a world that feels like it existed before you arrived, and that expects you to learn its contours on your own terms.

If they are wrong, players will bounce off a forest they cannot navigate and a quest they cannot locate, and the waypoint will quietly return in a patch.

What would success actually look like? The signals will be visible in player behavior rather than review scores. If players finish Warlock and can describe the route to a major location from memory, if they talk about a landmark the way they talk about a place they have been rather than a level they cleared, the experiment will have worked. If completion rates crater and forum threads fill with requests for a compass toggle, the studio will have its answer too.

Either way, the decision is a useful provocation. It asks whether the guidance systems we have accepted as standard are serving players or merely managing them. And it leaves an open question for the rest of the genre: will other RPGs follow suit, or is this a bold experiment suited only to games confident enough to survive without a compass?

The answer will come from players. Discovery, when it is earned, tends to be remembered far longer than a marker ever could be.