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Break out your funerary best and prepare the Hearse, because it appears that D&D Sigil is dead – or the original pitch is, anyway.
It was recently announced that 90% of the team working on Dungeons & Dragons' 3D virtual tabletop, Sigil, have been laid off. Former design lead Andy Collins noted via a LinkedIn post that "approximately 30 talented developers" were let go by D&D maker Wizards of the Coast on March 18, including him, and this in itself feels like a death knell. Yes, a skeleton crew remains to oversee what's left of this project. The program and its controversial subscription system are still in place too. But the original idea – that Sigil would be a grand, 3D playground for one of the best tabletop RPGs – will go unrealized.
If you haven't kept up with Sigil over the past year or so, it was supposed to be a fully three-dimensional map maker and virtual tabletop combined with bespoke miniatures along with all your characters' attacks, spells, or abilities in a Baldur's Gate-style taskbar. We were promised premade modules (presumably cribbed from the best D&D books) too alongside a wealth of different assets to use in homebrew adventures. However, Collins admitted in his announcement to being "disappointed that we didn't get to continue working toward the full experience that we imagined."
In addition, Polygon revealed an internal email that laid Sigil's future out more clearly. To be precise, senior vice president for Dungeons & Dragons and Hasbro Direct Dan Rawson noted how "we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a large, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. As such, we cannot maintain a large development effort and most of the Sigil team will be separated from the company this week... To that end, we will transition Sigil to a [D&D Beyond] feature. We will maintain a small team to sustain Sigil and release products already developed at no additional cost to users."
In other words, the bright future it promised will always be a pipe dream.
I'll admit that I haven't been overcome with praise for Sigil since its unexpected release earlier this month. Indeed, the D&D Sigil virtual tabletop isn't for me just yet despite being a Dungeon Master who's always looking for new ways to bring my games to life. I'm not alone, either; other publications weighed in with similar opinions. Yet my gripe was with the execution, not the idea. Usability oversights and a lack of material made it feel like a beta launch – an incomplete proof-of-concept. Its foundations showed promise, though. The player character dashboard is fantastic for newcomers and veterans alike, it was devastatingly beautiful, and it had options for importing 2D maps with flat, puck-like tokens if you didn't fancy building a 3D environment yourself. It felt like a levelled-up version of D&D Beyond's Map feature that would fly once the rough edges were sanded off.
Being cut off at the knees is heartbreaking as a result. Sigil had a long way to go to compete with other 3D map makers, but it could have eclipsed them all thanks to its bold ideas and integration with D&D Beyond. Honestly, I'm not even that sad to see those 3D vistas go away – it's the player interface during combat I'll miss. D&D Beyond's character sheets can be a pain to navigate for your available actions, so a clearer, more jazzed-up version with a video game-esque UI is appealing. I'm hoping Wizards of the Coast can implement something like this into the existing Map software, because it'd be a shame to lose that.
Here's to what Sigil could have been.
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