Project Sigil (Hasbro VTT) playtest

Post by **J1M** » February 20th, 2025, 03:02

A wave of Project Sigil invites went out today. And people who were selected were sent 6 keys.

Rules say that we can't share visuals of the repeatedly delayed Unreal Engine 5 official D&D VTT, but they don't say anything about describing the experience or discussing it.

I'm expecting a lot of commentary about how poorly this thing ends up running on mobile devices and tablets... even though that's a primary reason for picking Unreal. I typed this post while waiting for the loading screen.

I will add my impressions in a separate post once I've had a chance to tinker with it more. For now, I'm putting out a call to see if anyone would like one of my extra keys in order to DM. Also willing to trade them for a future adventurer's guild vote of my choice.

► Show Spoiler

Post by **J1M** » February 20th, 2025, 03:30

First impressions:

Loading times are awful. Unclear what assets are being loaded to justify this. Perhaps they are conditioning people to wait for the entire catalog of DLC cosmetics to load so they can be purchased on-the-fly.
You can't create a character in the VTT. You have to use the D&D Beyond app and paste a URL into the VTT.
My videocard, which handled Cyberpunk just fine, sounds like a hairdryer. There are half a dozen figures on the screen with no animation.
You can add any random texture to the floor by providing a URL. I'm guessing this is a standard VTT feature but I thought it was a good feature.
As someone who is unfamiliar with the VTT landscape, I was expecting rule enforcement. Maybe there is more of this if you are a 'player', but even during encounters there appeared no limit or warning for things like using extra actions or movement. The only things that seemed to be handled automatically were turn order via initiative and really basic rolls that don't interact with character traits (plus ability modifier, advantage for flanking). One of the provided pre-gen characters had a cheat-death ability that activated at zero hit points. I assumed that would work since it is part of what they wanted to show off so I tried attacking that character to get it to activate, but nothing happened when it hit zero hp.
There are no graphics options. No way to turn off the film grain filter and whatever TAA and upscaling nonsense is making the visuals so ugly.
Assuming they open up a third party marketplace, someone is going to make a lot of money selling set pieces because the current tooling was not designed to make it easy to create spaces. You have to build things one tile at a time with no tiling support and you can't even rotate props that you place.

TLDR: It will help you roll dice, but everything else seems like it will be horribly inefficient and there's no world in which I see them opening up a wider market with this tool because it requires you to deeply understand the rules in order to make use of it. I can't see them hooking up a competent AI DM to this tool at any point soon because they appear to be incapable of making software.

Post by **rusty_shackleford** » February 20th, 2025, 04:59

Somewhat expected them to use a modified BG3 engine for this.

gerey · Post by **gerey** » February 20th, 2025, 07:41

rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ February 20th, 2025, 04:59
Somewhat expected them to use a modified BG3 engine for this.

It's quite possible the break with Larian was nastier than reported, to the point they refuse to use their toolset, or Larian refuses to share/help them with it.

It's funny to think there's people that are saying the BioWare ***** was hired by WotC to work on a Baldur's Gate 4, when the company isn't even able to make something like this functional. Also, **** programmers.

Post by **J1M** » February 20th, 2025, 13:46

rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ February 20th, 2025, 04:59
Somewhat expected them to use a modified BG3 engine for this.

This VTT project definitely predates the BG3 success and I'm sure most of the coding effort has gone into a storefront system in order to sell people different colored dragons, but I agree the path of maximum profit would have been to buy out or license Larion's engine and then make the 2024 rules update just be transcribing any quirks of implementation in BG3 into the official ruleset.

At least then they'd be starting from a point where the combat and calculations all worked. They'd just need to add a DM mode and their predatory shop.

fkirenicus · Post by **fkirenicus** » February 20th, 2025, 16:53

Not.A.Dime.More.In.The.Pockets.Of.WotC.
(or Hasbro)
Not from me at least.

Acrux · Post by **Acrux** » March 18th, 2025, 23:29

I heard earlier today this is getting cancelled. @J1M - any news on that?

Post by **J1M** » March 18th, 2025, 23:40

Acrux wrote: ↑ March 18th, 2025, 23:29
I heard earlier today this is getting cancelled. @J1M - any news on that?

Is the reason once again being blamed on a murder-suicide?

Post by **Rand** » March 19th, 2025, 16:33

Post by **logincrash** » March 19th, 2025, 16:44

>unreal engine 5
Yeah, no ******* **** it's an unoptimized piece of garbage.