Baldur's Gate Designer Leaves Bioware To Focus On D&D

TheGamer

By Scott Baird

Published Jul 18, 2018

James Ohlen worked at Bioware for over two decades, designing games including Neverwinter Nights, and is now making his own D&D products.

The goal of any video game developer is to have their name attached to some of the most beloved games of all time.

James Ohlen has achieved this goal throughout his life, as he has spent the more than two decades at Bioware, where he worked on such classic games as Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, which are some of the most acclaimed video games of all time.

James Ohlen has decided that making video games based on Dungeons & Dragons is no longer enough, as he is retiring from the industry in order to run a publishing firm that specializes in creating adventures and sourcebooks for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

The name of Ohlen's company is Arcanum Worlds. He is joined by Jesse Sky, who has extensive experience working on Star Wars: The Old Republic and its expansions. They are joined by a mystery author, whose identity they plan to reveal at a later date.

The people at Arcanum Worlds are currently working on an adventure/sourcebook for Dungeons & Dragons, called Odyssey of the Dragonlords. The Arcanum Worlds website describes the book as being set in a world that is based on Greek mythology, with a war between gods and titans acting as the background to the setting.

The official Arcanum Worlds Twitter page has more information on the project. One of the posts states that Odyssey of the Dragonlords is an adventure that will take players from level one to fifteen and will have a mixture of sandbox elements and story-driven encounters.

The current edition of Dungeons & Dragons is covered by the Open Gaming License, which is a public copyright license that allows third-party developers to release their own sourcebooks that use the rules of the game. This dates back to the third edition of the game, where it became infamous for spawning tons of low-quality adventures and sourcebooks that flooded hobby shops across the world.

A lot of third-party publishers abused the OGL over the years so that they could shovel out cheap books to the marketplace. This hopefully won't be the case with Arcanum Worlds, as the staff possesses an amazing pedigree when it comes to Dungeon & Dragons. The fact that the lead designer of the company also worked on Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights should be more than enough to pique the interest of the gaming public.

There will be a free player's guide for Odyssey of the Dragonlords released later this year to those who subscribe to the Arcanum Worlds newsletter.