For me, it was never about the game table, it was about duplicity and/or lack of follow-through. But if I had my choice right now between Game Table and most other software options, I'd pick something else.
Why? Because I don't see our D&D group suddenly changing to "Everyone bring your laptops! We're going to do this virtually!" In that, I could be wrong. The ability to play with my family and friends across the country would definitely be cool. But I'm more interested in enhancing what we
currently do. The game table wouldn't necessarily.
The Visualizer would.
#1. I want to know how my character(s) look.
For our last campaign, I played a bard. I scoured the internet for pictures of a middle-age guy at a renaissance fair with a light scruff and a mischievous smile. I found one, but it was cheesy as hell and the group laughed at me. As well they might.
Another method I tried was creating a Sim from The Sims 2, screenshot, crop, import. The clothing was wrong, of course, and today I might try The Sims 3 or a free MMO with excellent character creation options like Perfect World International.
None of these options will have quite the flavor that D&D has UNTIL D&D has its OWN avatar creation interface. I'm sick of seeing a blank white box for "character portrait", and I'm sick to death of the standard avatars of the pictures from the rulebooks.
Not every Wizard looks like Mialee. Why should our character sheet?
#2. I'm not a visual artist.
Most of us aren't. For those who can draw your characters, fantastic. I can't. Nobody in my group can. None of us are digital artists or 3D renderers either.
Point of fact, it drives me mad that I can use the Spore creature creator and create a brand new monster from SCRATCH in about two minutes and see what it looks like and even animate it, but there is no easy way for me to customize the portrait of an elf wizard to make him look older or younger.
Which should be more common in the world of tabletop gaming:
An entirely NEW monster customized to MY personal campaign?
Or a staple class and race recognized by everyone?
#3. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Describe this picture to a friend without showing him the picture. Then show someone else the picture. Which one takes longer?
#4. The technology exists.
Leaving aside obvious RPG-style games like MMOs and NWN, millions of games let you customize your own custom characters in SOME fashion, from Madden NFL to Rock Band.
Plus this is one aspect of DDI that would require no rules arbitration whatsoever, no database of modifiers, etc.
Is it really that hard?
#5. Simply speaking, people have fun designing avatars.
Miis. X-Box player profile. SSX characters. Rock Band rock stars. Soul Calibur outfits and weapons. How much time have most of us spent obsessing over whether this avatar looks better with a goatee or without, with the ponytail or without, with the leather pants or the faded jeans?
People like designing avatars for themselves. AND they like imagining how their D&D character would look. If we could put the two together in a meaningful way, it would be the perfect synthesis.
I'm sick of seeing a blank white box for "character portrait", and I'm sick to death of the standard avatars of the pictures from the rulebooks.
Rightclick then select delete. Problem solved.
I'm not sure what I'd use the gametable for.
The Visualizer during hte previews back when they were hoping to get it out, looked great if you were using the racial-specific armors with their intended race, and wanted one of the few races they had available.
That's where the biggest problem with the visualizer comes in: customization. They need to make art/models/textures for every piece of gear and all the races (adding a few every year), plus each gender for those races. Also to be fully customizable they'd need to make those models with lots of morph options that don't make things look silly (look at SecondLife and how bizarre an avatar can look if you try to make them overweight or overly skinny and they also cheat by making the males just a female mesh with bigger scaling for height and flattened breasts), plus make every piece of gear fit every different race without lots of clipping which means lots of morphs for that as well.
All that takes a lot of resources and time. Something WotC has a very limited amount of, and most of what they have is 2D artists and programmers, not 3D modelers.
This of course doesn't cover the programming aspects to make avatar creation/customization user friendly, or the functionality to create a virutal mini out of it. Making a character portrait from the avatar is of course easier since it's just a 2D snapshot of your screen saved as an image file.
But since it was meant to work in terms of the game table, I can understand them not working on it at this time.
That's where the biggest problem with the visualizer comes in: customization. They need to make art/models/textures for every piece of gear and all the races (adding a few every year), plus each gender for those races.
This is totally unnecessary to me, and to many of those who would love to have a way to artistically render our characters.
Every piece of gear? Heck no.
Every BASIC piece of gear? Fine. Give a texture or overlay for plate, one for chain, one for leather, and so forth. Design a halberd, a bastard sword, a short sword, bow, crossbow, and so forth.
I do NOT need a separate digital model for "Crossbow of Flaming Bolts +9". However, if some generic effects were included, like "make weapon flaming", "make weapon icy", "make weapon glow" (with a color wheel), that'd be great.
Some pull-tabs for personal customization -- WITHOUT having WOTC to design every variation -- the way the Spore creators work would be awesome. A couple of maneuverable handles on the model, and suddenly hundreds of player-created crossbows emerge, no two alike, especially if you add some BASIC paints and colors.
Designing a model for every piece of gear would be a colossal waste of time. Only those in the PHB need to be represented.
As to races and genders? I truly don't understand the complication here, either. Does the leather armor for a human female and the leather armor for an elf female really need to be two models designed from scratch? That's silly.
Yes, you may not have "one size fits all" for these, but one for S and one for M sized creatures, and then if ABSOLUTELY necessary, different models for men and women.
This of course doesn't cover the programming aspects to make avatar creation/customization user friendly, or the functionality to create a virutal mini out of it. Making a character portrait from the avatar is of course easier since it's just a 2D snapshot of your screen saved as an image file.
Forget the minis. Give the interface a "snapshot" feature in a cropped box as desired, and there's your avatar. No need for the software to render it, just have the player select what he wants captured.
If these are the "problems" and "challenges" facing Wizards preventing them from giving us these options, they should seriously Mu. Unthink. Step outside the box.
Let the PLAYERS do most of the designing. Just provide basic tools.
Soul Calibur 4 lets you choose from hundreds of outfit options. Are they comprehensive? No. But they sure are fun. If you slapped some Spore-creator style handles to even further customize, the possibilities would literally be infinite.
Spore is full of literally MILLIONS of unique creatures designed by other players. Did the creators of Spore try to manually reproduce each possibility in advance to represent the totality of options?
No, they gave some tools and let the players do the designing.
I'm not even asking to animate these visualized characters. That should be a programming cakewalk by comparison to SC4 and Spore and Perfect World International and The Sims 3.
I see what everyones talking about. The excuses about how hard it would be are just that: excuses. WotC brings in enough money to hire as many programmers and artists as they would need to create top notch software. They simply choose not to do it. I also think a character visualizer would indeed be a great tool for just about everyone (except of course players that care for numbers only). It could easily be done, but WotC is simply choosing not to do it. No more excuses WotC get on the ball or sell D&D IP to someone who will do it right.