Critical Role is celebrating its 10th anniversary next year, and it seems like the next big step for the actual-play podcast is video games.
It wasn’t really a surprise that something like Critical Role, a Dungeons & Dragons podcast featuring some much beloved voice actors, would take off in the way that it did. People love DnD, and who better to take part in a game than a bunch of voice actors? In the years since there’s been all sorts of expansions to the world, all kinds of tie-ins, and in 2022 it even got an animated adaptation. But what’s next? Well, according to a recent profile of the cast in Rolling Stone, video games, apparently! Laura Bailey, who you’ll also have heard in games like Marvel’s Spider-Man, Nier, and the Uncharted series, shared in the profile that the team has been “talking about creating a video game since we first started playing together.”
Fellow cast member Travis Willingham, best known for roles in series like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Sonic the Hedgehog, also noted that he would “say it’s an active pursuit on our end. And hopefully, we’ll have something really exciting to share, maybe around the end of the year, maybe at the beginning of 2025, just in time for our 10-year anniversary. But it’s something we’ve definitely had our minds on.
“Those collaborations we’ve had with various partners have been little toe dips in the pool just to see how it feels. You know, there’s a lot of upheaval in the interactive space right now. And we’ve seen studios sort of bear and weather those strains. It’s trying to become smarter about it and find out how we might fit into that larger ecosystem.”
There’s not much of the year left, but as Willingham said, it could be at the beginning of 2025, and considering the show’s anniversary is in March, they’ve got plenty of time. Whatever kind of game materialises, I’m sure it’ll end up being just as popular as the rest of it.