I’ve been thinking a lot about DnD’s Project Sigil recently – playing around with the current version of Wizards’ shiny new, Unreal 5-based 3D virtual tabletop, building dungeon scenes, testing the integration with D&D Beyond – and, as a sucker for pretty graphics and physics toyboxes, it has me enthralled. Teething problems aside, it’s an impressive tool, and I’m looking forward to using the full version in my games – but I can’t help but feel it’s missed its window of opportunity by five years.
‘Well, obviously,’ I hear you cry – ‘a tool for remote play would have been more useful in covid lockdown, that’s news to nobody’. And you’re right. ‘Wish we’d had this during covid’ might be a common refrain these days, but it doesn’t mean much on its own.
We can debate whether or not worldwide governments could have planned for the pandemic sooner, but blaming a tabletop game publisher for not readying new DnD digital products, in anticipation of half the planet staying at home for a year, is probably a little harsh.
But hold your horses, because I think the issue goes deeper than just that, and it has repercussions for how Sigil may land when it launches in full – especially concerning where it’ll sit in the wider market of DnD virtual tabletops.
Up top, I should clarify that Project Sigil – in its current form – is distinctly unfinished. In my snatched hours of tinkering, I’ve experienced numerous raggedy bits that need fixing, from clumsy item placement, to disappearing scenery, to rather finicky interactions with your DnD character sheet, which still lives separately on DnD Beyond.
As other sites including Polygon have argued, it’s not yet ready for use except as a gorgeously lit fantasy construction toy that, unlike the best Lego sets, requires a decent graphics card. But, on the whole, I’m pretty impressed with its potential, especially having come in with low expectations. I fully expect it to mature into a functional VTT, and when it does it’ll immediately be the most visually stunning, videogame-like one there is. For some folks (including me) that’s an enticing prospect.
But there’s a problem here, and it has little to do with how technically impressive Sigil is, or even its current functionality (which is sure to improve, given the effort WotC has already put into developing the platform). Instead, it’s about what the tech industry would call an ‘install base’ – and about the fact that virtual tabletops just aren’t as good as playing the best tabletop RPGs in real life.
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not suggesting that Sigil failing to surpass in-person play would be, in itself, any sort of failure. Of course Wizards isn’t presenting Sigil as a replacement for the classic, social, pen and paper game, so the obvious fact that it won’t be one isn’t a defeat.
What I’m getting at is that there was a magic window when millions of TTRPG fans were suddenly forced to adopt a VTT, warts and all. When many more millions of non TTRPG fans were suddenly stuck at home with no access to friends, a surfeit of leisure time, and an unprecedented appetite for new hobbies. When a sexy, official, noob-friendly, computerized version of Dungeons and Dragons might have easily steamrolled the competition and taken the world by storm – even if not everything worked quite right to begin with. And that window was 2020.
You could have had everything
I get it, it’s a meaningless hypothetical. That was then and this is now – and in any case, like most parts of the tabletop game industry that didn’t require urgent shipments from China, Dungeons and Dragons did very nicely from the pandemic times, thank you very much. But it’s still an interesting thought experiment, in my opinion.
Cast your mind back to the first covid lockdowns. If you’re like me, you were cooped up indoors, teaching your tech-illiterate parents to use Zoom, buying more Warhammer 40k armies than you could paint, and desperately ordering board games off Amazon – both for the dopamine hit, and in hopes of using a global health crisis as a pretext to get your girlfriend to play Star Wars: Imperial Assault. It was a desperate time. For Christ’s sake, we ended up playing fucking Wordle, and then talking to each other about it afterwards.
Imagine, if you will, what a splash Sigil would have made in those waters – given the right marketing and dev support. It would have had the largest captive market of any tabletop RPG product ever. Interested, but wavering friends could have been so easily swayed to the dice-rolling side, if their only alternative was yet another Zoom quiz with Gram-Gram and Aunt June. Mainstream gamers curious about the ‘DnD experience’ didn’t yet have Baldur’s Gate 3 to give them easier, ahem, solo gratification.
Other VTTs existed, of course – Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds prime among them – but, then as now, I think these platforms are better set up for versatility and reliability than for the kind of accessibility and flashy visuals that could ensnare a wider, casual nerd audience. A fully operational Sigil, with the might of the Wizards of the Coast marketing machine behind it, would have swept the board.
It could have gobbled up a huge user base very quickly, and used the resulting huge pile of cash to add more features that might have kept fans playing online, even after they were released from state-imposed house arrest. Snazzy, pre-built adventures from old DnD books, custom digital minis and dice – you name it, they could’ve sold it. In 2020, with the right following wind, Sigil could have been Dungeons and Dragons’ Pokémon Go! moment.
What now for Sigil?
Today, years after that unique window of opportunity closed, I suspect Sigil will be a much more limited success. Given time, bug fixes, and improvements, the finished product will likely be, at the very least, an extremely cool way to play set-piece combat encounters, where aesthetics and a cinematic atmosphere really can elevate the game.
But when I ask myself who Sigil is for, in 2025 and beyond – not as a passing curiosity but as a product for serious, regular use – the list of groups I come up with isn’t long. For now, remote players like me, with a decent gaming PC, who love messing about with map builders – not a tiny contingent, but not a huge one either. In a few canny updates’ time, maybe a new cadre of videogamers. A lot of other player groups who might once have got into Sigil, though, may have simply moved on already.
The issue is that VTTs – be they 2D or 3D; beautiful or ugly; free or paid; client or browser based – are a necessary but inferior stand-in for the ‘real thing’. They’re the best we can do when friends are far away, but even the most popular ones are temperamental, jerry-rigged beasts that take Dungeon Masters a lot of work and practise to get used to using regularly.
In 2025, RPG groups that prefer to play in person – whether in the theater of the mind, or with fun props, meticulously painted DnD minis, and plush, physical DnD maps to push them around on – have now settled back into doing just that. They held their nose and played on VTTs while they had to, but now they’ve put the ersatz mouse-dragging, clunky character sheet imports, and microphone malfunctions of on-screen play behind them.
RPG groups (like mine, incidentally) who can only play remotely remain reliant on VTTs – but forever GMs and players alike have now, generally speaking, picked an existing platform and settled in. For many online playgroups, switching to a new platform – especially one locked behind the most expensive DnD Beyond subscription level, as Sigil is – would require an extraordinary offering. For in person groups who’ve long since reinstated their weekly table booking at the local game store, it would take a miracle.
I’ve always felt D&D’s official tools for digital play have been surprisingly behind the times. Roll20 came out in 2012; D&D Beyond didn’t launch until 2017, three years after Fifth Edition came out. It didn’t have a proper, in-app dice roller until 2021. Project Sigil – Wizards’ second attempt at a 3D D&D platform – is an ambitious and superb-looking program, but I fear it’s missed its appointment with greatness by half a decade.
While we wait to find out how wrong I am, I feel like playing the last digital, multiplayer D&D experience that captured my heart – BioWare’s 2002 masterpiece Neverwinter Nights, possibly the most undervalued title on our list of the best DnD games ever made. I just need to work out how to stop Tomi Undergallows’ voice lines playing; that guy is more annoying than any Sigil glitch could ever be.
Not swayed by the Digital D&D revolution, and prefer to follow the Old Ways? We can still help out with full guides to all DnD classes and DnD races for your character – plus an up to date DnD release schedule of the upcoming books in 2025.
Source: Wargamer
