Ampersand: Looking Ahead
by Bill Slavicsek
In this edition of "&," we’re going to imagine what 2009 might bring as far as D&D is concerned, and we’ll get a sneak peek at a project in the works, namely E1: Death’s Reach.
Talk about this article here.
* - Probably should be 371.
$60 for my year to D&DI... and character visualizer, game table and etc. are dead when you translate business speak. Not surprising considering the entire digital division is gone now, but disheartening all the same
That said, character builder has exceeded my expectations.
-Sutro
...
Read what he said - yes, there's the potentially negative statement "we'll see where we are" and comments about not overpromising.
However this is immediately followed with the rest of the paragraph, where Bill states they're going to discuss what they work on next, and further states he can't wait until the "whole grand plan comes together".
Those aren't words of doom and gloom - its him publicly stating what we've been seeing since they missed the 4E launch release. No more promises of deadlines, because they don't want to dissappoint (and, if I were to guess, they've learned from the launch of the Character Builder just how long these things take now).
What I take away from those comments are:
1) The CB is coming very soon
2) We don't know for sure which part is next
3) We still plan to finish all the softwares
4) This is all taking longer than we expected.
I don't see the "we're killing off the rest of DDI" you guys are seeing.
The Character Builder, Compendium and Magazine will be good enough for the $60 if the Magazines hold that standard and December & January are just slip ups.
However that said, I hope they do not ditch the projects they have online. Of those the Character Visualiser simply doesn't interest me until after the Game Table exists. The art quality of the visualiser would have to be far, far superior to what we have seen so far for it to matter before the Game Table exists.
For me the future development of the promised things would look like:
First the Dungeon Builder - The Character Builder is a Player ap, the Dungeon Builder should be to DMs as the Character Builder is to players. It needs to have all the currently produced tilesets at the time of its release. It doesn't have to have any monster etc models. It can add back catalog tilesets (ie the ones that are out of print) after release. I should be able to craft a dungeon, print the encounters, buy the physical tilesets if I want, and play the adventure.
Second - The Game Table - Firstly this doesn't have to have ultra-high resolution omg I need the latest wiz bang graphics card models. It needs to have functional models that are recognizable as what they represent, without depending on bleeding edge tech. The more widely tech enabled it is the more people that can access it... learn this from WoW (no I don't want that cartoony look). But this needs to be the second priority, because its base is the Dungeon Builder. If DMs cannot build meaningful adventures for this easily it will be pointless. So get the dungeon builder right, then look at this, which is really the love child of the Dungeon Builder, the Character Builder and the Internet (scary thought that is). Another thing to learn about this is that Version 1.0 probably doesn't need to be 3D, cool as that is...
Thirdly the Character Visualiser - the last thing, because in truth it only matters once people are using the Game Table and you have the Game Table working smoothly and (mostly) bug free. Its not like we cannot scour the numerous image galleries on the internet (DeviantArt, Epilogue, heck WotC's own galleries) for character portraits in the mean time. The pay off for this one is the ability to have "your character" on the Game Table, and without the Game Table the "your character" thing is just not as important.
Using myself as an example, I am not reliant on the GT for game play, I have a group. But I was extremely excited for it to come out. It didn't happen and at this point if they released say, tomorrow, I might give it a whirl but the product has already lost much of my interest. On those rare days I think about GT I find there are already free products available to the public which do what GT is planned to do, maybe not as fancy but they fit the bill. Give it another year and I am not going to give GT much of a look at all. The only thing that may get me to look at it is the fact that I have DDI and GT comes with that.
Now I am just one guy, one lonely voice but I am not alone. Take everyone who was excited for GT in the beginning. Cut out those who went nuts when it didn't release with 4E. Cut those who expected the product to fail based on experience with TSR/WOTC and software, but were hoping anyway. Cut those who have waited only to be able to use a partial CB, thus far. Cut those who will see this message and interpret it how two of us already did. Give it another year of development time and imagine who else will NOT be waiting for this product anymore. Whoever is left after that point is the crowd WOTC will be developing GT for and then they have to ask themselves, "Will there be enough support in the end for the development costs?"
Who knows what answer they will come to but as a sound business they will be asking those questions. Bill is a smart guy and he knows they will be asking that exact question and that is a small part about why he made the statement he did. He knows, as much as none of us want to acknowledge it, that maybe GT just won't happen in the end. Personally, I don't want to get my hopes up again. Thus far we have been par for the course. We're finally getting a CB which is what they accomplished with 3E after so many years and help from a 3rd party.
In the end, we have a great game to play and that is all I am going to rely on. Lingering hopes of GT have faded with this public statement and I am not going to disillusion myself anymore. That will only lead to further frustration which is completely, completely unnecessary. I'm just going to enjoy what I have because it really is a great, great product.
WotC should make the virtual game table an open source project, and free to use by everyone. The company should provide resources (like hosting expenses), and pay a lead developer to run the project. Someone who is experienced with this.
I'm sure there are going to be some enthusiastic coders out there who will make it happen. WotC can offer rewards like facebook, apple and google do for excelling developers. All this is cheaper and more effective than hiring a bunch of coders in-house. We'd have true open beta testings, not the kind we've seen with the character builder, where the information flow is scarce and mostly guesswork. Right now, bugs are not collected and published properly, and there is no system like sourceforge.net where everybody can track the progress on fixing those bugs and submitting suggestions.
The character builder remains paid content for subscribers only because of the copyright implications.
All this is much more exciting than the depressing outlook in Ampersand.
Guys: In the age of World of Warcraft, Wikipedia, facebook and iphone apps: Why do you still try to make software like it's 1983?
Current products out or soon to be out
I am including in this category Dragon, Dungeon, the Compendium and the Character Builder. All in all, I think that Bill is right. The quality of the magazines has, in my opinion, been top notch. Some errors in the articles, but not enough, in my opinion, to downgrade the quality or make them not worthwhile. The monthly updates to the Compendium have been going well, and have been on time. The Character Builder is, well, very, very good. Has it taken longer than expected for WotC to start producing other parts of DDI, yes. I have said it numerous times, as has WotC. But, as can be seen by the character builder, it is really, really good. The devs that use the full version have said that they really like it, and prefer using it to doing it by hand. Will it be everything to everyone, no, but I think that it is realistic to expect that. Can it be a lot of things to a lot of people, yes, and I think that is what WotC is aiming for and what they have hit.
Future plans
WotC screwed up. They have said so before, and here they are saying it again. While I would liked to have gotten an idea what they are planning on working on next [1], I can fully understand why they aren't saying anything. They are in very much a "darned if you do, darned if you don't" position. If they give dates, they get crucified if they miss dates (and not unreasonably). If they don't give dates, you end up with a situation where people are starved for information.
It looks, to me, like they are trying to bridge the gap and balance between the two, giving rough dates, and then firming it up as the product gets closer to release. Keeping in mind that predicting when a large piece of complicated software will be ready for release is much more an art than a science, I think that WotC is doing a good job. The more experience they get with this, the better information we will get.
Also interesting is the promise of "new campaign worlds", separate from the FR and Eberron CS that have been/are going to be released.
1
I can say that the dungeon Builder is fairly close to beta, but still requires the capability to be updated, and we have been working on the character builder updater with the intent to use it for the other applications. So we have some integration steps to do for the Dungeon Builder to be shippable.
The Game Table and the Character Visualizer are in Alpha stage. If it was up to me only, I would have the Dungeon Builder released next, then the Game Table, then the Character Visualizer last, provided we can do this without endangering our monthly updates for the already released applications. I am giving you here my personal opinion, and you can believe I will support it internally.
Still no mention of the new versions of D20 Modern or D20 Future...
The character builder is great, and the mags are acceptable, so it's not a complete charlie-foxtrot if that's where it stops. If the Dungeon Builder and Game Table never make it out of alpha - well, there are things to replace them out there already. It would be nice to see them, but the earth will not crash into the sun if they never appear.
If you can't get all 30 levels out in time, at least give us a few more to keep us tided over! Given the release date of the Beta version, I'm sure ours ins't the only group passing the 3-level threshold right now.
Just an update:
We are looking good to release the full level 1-30 version of the program to subscribers before the end of [January].
[...]
Each month we will fix bugs and make improvements as well as adding all the new content from that month.
Some of the changes we designed didn't make it in (like our new shopping UI which makes it much clearer) but we figured our fans wanted the full program sooner rather than later and that part of the UI can be tweaked a month after release.
Maybe this would make you happy:
That does make me happy indeed! See, this proves it ->
But is that a recent quote? There was talk in November and December of a target release in January, but I'm concerned that there'll be slippage.