Payday 3 developer Starbreeze Studios has announced that it is working on a live-service video game set in the Dungeons & Dragons (DnD) universe. Currently codenamed Project Baxter, the game is slated for a 2026 launch.
While no real details about the project are forthcoming, Starbreeze says that the game will be built to the studio’s strengths of co-op gameplay, long-term live-service support, community engagement, and “a larger-than-life experience.” Project Baxter is being developed with Unreal Engine 5 and will be available on all major platforms at the time of its launch with cross-play support.
While 2026 may seem like a long time away, this isn’t the first game we’ve seen with that release window. Pokémon developer Game Freak is also anticipating 2026 for its new IP, codenamed Project Bloom.
“It is hard to imagine a better pairing than Dungeons & Dragons and Starbreeze — both with their foundation in cooperative and community driven experiences, ‘play it your way’ and infinite replayability,” said Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren in a press release. “When looking at prospective IPs for our future projects, Dungeons & Dragons was always at the top of our list and I’m incredibly happy to announce this license. I want to thank Wizards of the Coast for being such a great partner.”
The announcement comes on the back of a great year for the DnD license, with Baldur’s Gate III becoming one of the most popular and talked about games of 2023 and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves being something of a critical darling. And Project Baxter isn’t the only upcoming video game in the works based on the IP; internal Wizards of the Coast studio Invoke is also working on a multiplayer game set in the universe.
Meanwhile Starbreeze released Payday 3 a few months ago, though the launch was marred by server woes. Here’s hoping the DnD live-service game fares better.
