Dungeons & Dragons’ first virtual reality game likely won’t be Baldur’s Gate 3 in VR, but we can live in hope

Veteran pen-and-paper RPG Dungeons & Dragons is getting its first official virtual reality game. Before you get all excited about being able to let Astarion bite your neck in first-person or shack up with a bear-shaped druid using hand tracking, know that it’s more likely to be a virtual reality experience emulating the original experience of rolling dice on a tabletop. Still, that’s what imaginations are for, right?

The untitled D&D VR game is in the works over at Resolution Games, the studio with talent including former Left 4 Dead creator Mike Booth behind neat VR-compatible dungeon-crawler Demeo. (Thanks, Dicebreaker.)

Demeo aimed to recreate the co-op experience of an RPG-ish board game like HeroQuest or Gloomhaven with fully 3D virtual environments, virtual dice and support to let VR users and everyday PC players play together - even if that itself didn’t necessarily solve the forever problem of actually scheduling a D&D group. Demeo was followed by a competitive spin-off in Demeo Battles, both of which can be played in VR or just a standard PC display.

Given their tabletop-adjacent heritage and Demeo’s open debt to Dungeons & Dragons, Resolution make perfect sense to be helming a full game set in the Forgotten Realms universe recently explored by Baldur’s Gate 3.

“As anyone who’s played Demeo can guess, we’re incredibly huge fans of tabletop roleplaying games,” confirmed founder and CEO Tommy Palm. “They have an unparalleled power to bring people together to create shared experiences, and that’s something we’ve tried to capture, too, with nearly every release in our library.

“Dungeons & Dragons offers one of the richest fantasy worlds that has ever been created, and it only gets bigger with every new sourcebook and adventure. We’re beyond humbled to have the opportunity to work with such an incredible IP and look forward to sharing the first details of this new project in the future.”

What D&D’s first VR game will look like, exactly, we don’t know yet. Both Resolution and D&D makers Wizards of the Coast are staying quiet on details for now, saying only that more information will be shared in the future ahead of an unannounced release date. Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, are working on their own official virtual tabletop for Dungeons & Dragons, which is due to release sometime later this year around the RPG’s 50th anniversary and the launch of its latest rules update.