There’s another thread that goes into more detail about it, but the short version is that WotC has decided to end the large scale development of Sigil here, so most of the team that was brought on to create Sigil was let go because their contracts were now at an end.
I feel like it's really disrespectful to the staff to pretend they were just "contracts" when the guy who broke the news of these firings was a 15-year veteran on D&D.
This is a bit dishonest. He worked for WotC for 14 years ending in 2010. Then 14 years later he hired on to work on Project Sigil.
It is also a bit dishonest to insinuate this was the expected end to those contracts. I'd wager the contracts could be terminated at anytime, but this was not the expected time for them to conclude.
If we’re going to make this a whole thing, it’s also dishonest to insinuate they just got booted out the door when there’s been a statement they got severance pay and other benefits.
At this point, it's not cancelled, but what you've got now is substantially the final product and they don't seem to be inclined to do much further dev work on it later.
At this point, it's not cancelled, but what you've got now is substantially the final product and they don't seem to be inclined to do much further dev work on it later.
I don't have it lol. But thank you. How do I actually get project sigil? (Please also let me know its size in GB)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A Fools Errand will fail. A Foolish Errand has a chance to succeed.
At this point, it's not cancelled, but what you've got now is substantially the final product and they don't seem to be inclined to do much further dev work on it later.
I don't have it lol. But thank you. How do I actually get project sigil? (Please also let me know its size in GB)
It's being transitioned to a DnDbeyond feature, it can be found in the tools section, think it's around 1.2gb in size.
At this point, it's not cancelled, but what you've got now is substantially the final product and they don't seem to be inclined to do much further dev work on it later.
I don't have it lol. But thank you. How do I actually get project sigil? (Please also let me know its size in GB)
It's being transitioned to a DnDbeyond feature, it can be found in the tools section, think it's around 1.2gb in size.
kk thank you
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A Fools Errand will fail. A Foolish Errand has a chance to succeed.
This is a bit dishonest. He worked for WotC for 14 years ending in 2010. Then 14 years later he hired on to work on Project Sigil.
And it's not dishonest to be saying the time for his contract was most definitely up as if you could possibly know this?
The leaked internal memo and what that particular developer has said suggests it came as somewhat of a surprise to them the project was to go no further and they were being laid off so soon.
If we’re going to make this a whole thing, it’s also dishonest to insinuate they just got booted out the door when there’s been a statement they got severance pay and other benefits.
That's standard practice in accordance with labour laws.
It doesn't make it any less terrible for Wizards to have overpromised and then just said Nah you're out of here. Every defense of Wizards in this regard reads like something someone over at the Daily Wire would say where capitalism and the decisions made by private enterprise are defended ad nauseam.
It's no consolation to the developers or their dependents that they are now out of work but were given what they are owed by law when people can't even show the most basic human empathy it takes to sympathize with those who aren't themselves.
If we’re going to make this a whole thing, it’s also dishonest to insinuate they just got booted out the door when there’s been a statement they got severance pay and other benefits.
That's standard practice in accordance with labour laws.
It doesn't make it any less terrible for Wizards to have overpromised and then just said Nah you're out of here. Every defense of Wizards in this regard reads like something someone over at the Daily Wire would say where capitalism and the decisions made by private enterprise are defended ad nauseam.
It's no consolation to the developers or their dependents that they are now out of work but were given what they are owed by law when people can't even show the most basic human empathy it takes to sympathize with those who aren't themselves.
And you know Wizards overpromised them how? A project was attempted. A project fell through. Welcome to reality, the brochures are on your left. Pretty sure anyone who has made a career of doing contracted software development like this knows to keep a buffer in case things fall through, and whether it's industry standard or not the fact that they got end of contract benefits means it's not like they're going from working on Sigil to the breadlines. I'd be more ready to sympathize if something actively bad actually happened to them, as opposed to a normal part of a contractor's work cycle.
From what I understand is the team spent three years on it, and delt with higher ups constantly making things difficult. I saw DnD Shots' video on it a day or so ago. From what he said that makes it a problem. Will look at the older posts and more videos before I have a concrete idea. But just using Shorts as a source:
Limits Who can use it.
This comes in 2 main ways.
Its Windows only so Mac users can’t use it as of yet.
While not mentioned here, I also wonder in Linux also would be outside of this. Most people use Windows machines, so potentially the vast majority of customers are able to use it in theory (see point B later). However this still denies potential PAYING customers from using their product.
The other problem is it apparently a beast to run.
DND shorts says it needs so much graphical power, D&D youtuber Pact Tactics, who has over 100k subscriber, could not run it. And the level of power needed is comparable to what is needed to play some of the more intense games on the market like God of War: Ragnarök or Final Fantasy Rebirth.
This limits potential players, and more importantly their cold hard cash, which is against the whole point of having your own DTT. Back in the COVID days, I had fun playing Pathfinder with people literally across the globe (one session I was gaming with someone in Finland and another in Australia). And when I lived in Idaho for 3 years, I joined a few online campaigns with some of the people I met up there in D&D as they were playing with friends in different time zones. I do this still every other week with my cousins right now.
But the availability of things of things like Roll 20, or using Discord and Google Slides, or some of the other DTTs that came up since then was the low barrier to entry. Same thing with D&D when you think about it: just need an imagination, some dice, 3 books, and something small enough to be your character. Everything else is gravy. Sigil is asking for people, who may not have a desire to have a high powered gaming computer, and one that needs to taken to the max, to do just that when Google slide and Discored are around the corner.
Playing is a pain in the neck.
It has problems importing charecters and everything it can do. So far it can only do the 2024 rules, which I think is fine for now. Updates can allow others, lets focus on this for potential new players. This said, if you are using a species, feat, class, subclass, or gear outside of this then it might not bring it into the game.
Even if it does, it might not get any of your actual information In Short’s case, he couldn’t edit the formation of Initiative when one of his characters had the Alert Feat, or if someone had advantage on it. Sigil didn’t register that his monk could use dexterity on monk weapons instead of strength, the rouge could use any of the options available for cunning action, no unarmored strike, didn’t factor in Unarmored Defence, and so on and so on.
I can see players using Barbarians and a Pact of Blade Warlock also having issues.
While spells look awesome, they either have incomplete information, namly what components are needed (and therefore do you need a hand free to work them). Some did not do everything they can do in the real world ( the example he used was firebolt currently only works on creatures and not objects).
Loading between maps took over 2 minutes, which wouldn’t be bad if I am playing Skyrim after a few hours in or Loading in a Total War game. But this is a digital Table top. With all the problems we have with Roll 20, this is not one of the issues, and he was using only 3 maps. Compare this with the average campaign and you could potentially have dozzens of different maps, with dozens of NPC’s and 3 to 6 PC’s (or more, some people are dangerously bold like that).
Visuals were another issue. While many looked awesome, every once in a while if you had multiple enemies one or more might have grey lines over them like the printer was running out of ink.
It was difficult to see where your characters are in some maps.
Character creation, I am not so judgmental on. Yes, it’s the thing we all spend 30 hours in character creation in a video game, but I can’t really make a bard look like Missy Elliot when she had her first few hits on Hero Forge either, but it seems your options seem to be with Sigil Skinny and slight chub; male and female.
I am not sure what they did over three years, but if its true that the powers to be kept hamstringing them, it shows. It was not ready for showcasing. It was not ready for release. The Emperor has no cloths, and we are not afraid to talk about it.
From what I understand is the team spent three years on it, and delt with higher ups constantly making things difficult.
That makes actually working unpleasant, but will generally make the layoffs less of a surprise. The rest of the points you mention are basically why the project got cancelled; it's much more of a surprise when a project that is going well and making good progress gets cancelled than when a project that's clearly struggling gets cancelled.
This is a bit dishonest. He worked for WotC for 14 years ending in 2010. Then 14 years later he hired on to work on Project Sigil.
And it's not dishonest to be saying the time for his contract was most definitely up as if you could possibly know this?
The leaked internal memo and what that particular developer has said suggests it came as somewhat of a surprise to them the project was to go no further and they were being laid off so soon.
The specifics of any contract between WotC and Mr. Collins are unknown, however his work history is available and can be verified. I am only correcting verifiably false information.
From what I understand is the team spent three years on it, and delt with higher ups constantly making things difficult. I saw DnD Shots' video on it a day or so ago. From what he said that makes it a problem. Will look at the older posts and more videos before I have a concrete idea. But just using Shorts as a source:
highly recommend trying it out yourself rather then going of youtube shorts.
Its Windows only so Mac users can’t use it as of yet. While not mentioned here, I also wonder in Linux also would be outside of this. Most people use Windows machines, so potentially the vast majority of customers are able to use it in theory (see point B later). However this still denies potential PAYING customers from using their product.
theres no real paying customer as it currently is - unless you include the master tier subscription that most DMs already have, which allows the following:
The other problem is it apparently a beast to run. DND shorts says it needs so much graphical power, D&D youtuber Pact Tactics, who has over 100k subscriber, could not run it. And the level of power needed is comparable to what is needed to play some of the more intense games on the market like God of War: Ragnarök or Final Fantasy Rebirth.
But the availability of things of things like Roll 20, or using Discord and Google Slides, or some of the other DTTs that came up since then was the low barrier to entry. Same thing with D&D when you think about it: just need an imagination, some dice, 3 books, and something small enough to be your character. Everything else is gravy. Sigil is asking for people, who may not have a desire to have a high powered gaming computer, and one that needs to taken to the max, to do just that when Google slide and Discored are around the corner.
there will always be alternatives and competition to sigil (and all other VTTs) out there, it just comes down to the individual as to which one they choose to familiarise themselves with and which one meets their needs
these are the minimum and recommended specs required: personally consider them to be quite average computer specs for todays computers, also think there was talk of the specs being lowered as things got optimised (unsure if thats still the case with it becoming a feature, not sure how that path differs)
Playing is a pain in the neck. It has problems importing charecters and everything it can do. So far it can only do the 2024 rules, which I think is fine for now. Updates can allow others, lets focus on this for potential new players. This said, if you are using a species, feat, class, subclass, or gear outside of this then it might not bring it into the game.
Even if it does, it might not get any of your actual information In Short’s case, he couldn’t edit the formation of Initiative when one of his characters had the Alert Feat, or if someone had advantage on it. Sigil didn’t register that his monk could use dexterity on monk weapons instead of strength, the rouge could use any of the options available for cunning action, no unarmored strike, didn’t factor in Unarmored Defence, and so on and so on.
I can see players using Barbarians and a Pact of Blade Warlock also having issues.
While spells look awesome, they either have incomplete information, namly what components are needed (and therefore do you need a hand free to work them). Some did not do everything they can do in the real world ( the example he used was firebolt currently only works on creatures and not objects).
Loading between maps took over 2 minutes, which wouldn’t be bad if I am playing Skyrim after a few hours in or Loading in a Total War game. But this is a digital Table top. With all the problems we have with Roll 20, this is not one of the issues, and he was using only 3 maps. Compare this with the average campaign and you could potentially have dozzens of different maps, with dozens of NPC’s and 3 to 6 PC’s (or more, some people are dangerously bold like that).
Visuals were another issue. While many looked awesome, every once in a while if you had multiple enemies one or more might have grey lines over them like the printer was running out of ink.
It was difficult to see where your characters are in some maps.
havent mucked around with the importing character sheets parts of sigil yet, so personally unsure where the issues are in that area - but suspect its probably similar with current character combination issues, no clue on the initiative or monk stuff either
EDIT: just quickly checked the encounter mode within sigil - where it rolled initiative for each mini, after which it rearranged the order of the minis to match along the top bar
for spell descriptions you can hold down the ALT key and it will show some additional information like so:
personally it roughly takes my computer: (with some optimisation it would likely be less, also would depend on your computer hard drive type where your operating system is installed and how full it is)
5secs - to open
7secs - to login
10-15secs - to load my tables
20secs - to load my room/created map
as for the lines through the mini - that is due to the mini being hidden and can easy be remedied by right clicking on the mini in question and clicking "Reveal" like so
before
After
unsure what you mean by "hard to see", believe that would come down to how cluttered the map in question is and your screen. personally find the minis stick out quite well due to the red lined base, being able to rotate map, zoom in and out and the overhead or normal view available - believe there is also a way to ping characters but havent looked into yet, maybe once i make bigger maps :) also sorry about the image quality and/or sizes, used paint and imgur
EDIT: you can also click on the minis portrait at the top of the screen and it will take you to the selected minis location
so yea highly recommend having a muck around with it yourself to see if it potentially meets your needs and what issues/disagreements you might have with it
some people got hired to do a job - apparently only 33 or so (if 30 is 90% of team) $20-30million got spent on the project over 3 years - atleast thats what im lead to believe people were unhappy with result - assumption based of public posts and the change in direction people were fired with benefits - severance and all that jazz sigil gets transitioned towards a dndbeyond feature for people to use - unsure what that process actually entails
what more is there to consider on that matter when the end results were fair??
why not focus on sigil....
does sigil work for you??
what do you like about sigil??
what do you dislike about sigil??
what improvements would you of liked to of seen for sigil if continued or revisited at a later date??
'The_Ace_of_Rogues' is very much suggesting he just knows their contracts were naturally up.
I am a bit confused why he thinks there were contracts (beyond general employment contracts) at all -- from the released letter, it sounds like they were salaried employees, and they were laid off because that's what you can do.
some people got hired to do a job - apparently only 33 or so (if 30 is 90% of team) $20-30million got spent on the project over 3 years - atleast thats what im lead to believe people were unhappy with result - assumption based of public posts and the change in direction people were fired with benefits - severance and all that jazz sigil gets transitioned towards a dndbeyond feature for people to use - unsure what that process actually entails
what more is there to consider on that matter when the end results were fair??
why not focus on sigil....
does sigil work for you??
what do you like about sigil??
what do you dislike about sigil??
what improvements would you of liked to of seen for sigil if continued or revisited at a later date??
Do you feel Sigil is a finished product from your hands on experience with it? Is it as usable as the encounter or map tools?
I do not have a pc capable of running it, nor do I have a master sub even if I did have a a pc capable of running it.
'The_Ace_of_Rogues' is very much suggesting he just knows their contracts were naturally up.
I am a bit confused why he thinks there were contracts (beyond general employment contracts) at all -- from the released letter, it sounds like they were salaried employees, and they were laid off because that's what you can do.
Because WotC doesn't have a consistent output of software like this and so would have no reason to keep a permanent full-time staff of such devs. They dabble from time to time, but it's never been a staple product. Ergo, logically when they do start one of these projects in-house they bring in a team for the duration and then let all or most of them go once it's finished.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I don't think there will be any 'new' news. It's dead Jim.
This is a bit dishonest. He worked for WotC for 14 years ending in 2010. Then 14 years later he hired on to work on Project Sigil.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
It is also a bit dishonest to insinuate this was the expected end to those contracts. I'd wager the contracts could be terminated at anytime, but this was not the expected time for them to conclude.
If we’re going to make this a whole thing, it’s also dishonest to insinuate they just got booted out the door when there’s been a statement they got severance pay and other benefits.
Wait, is Sigil Cancelled?
A Fools Errand will fail. A Foolish Errand has a chance to succeed.
At this point, it's not cancelled, but what you've got now is substantially the final product and they don't seem to be inclined to do much further dev work on it later.
I don't have it lol. But thank you. How do I actually get project sigil? (Please also let me know its size in GB)
A Fools Errand will fail. A Foolish Errand has a chance to succeed.
It's being transitioned to a DnDbeyond feature, it can be found in the tools section, think it's around 1.2gb in size.
kk thank you
A Fools Errand will fail. A Foolish Errand has a chance to succeed.
And it's not dishonest to be saying the time for his contract was most definitely up as if you could possibly know this?
The leaked internal memo and what that particular developer has said suggests it came as somewhat of a surprise to them the project was to go no further and they were being laid off so soon.
That's standard practice in accordance with labour laws.
It doesn't make it any less terrible for Wizards to have overpromised and then just said Nah you're out of here. Every defense of Wizards in this regard reads like something someone over at the Daily Wire would say where capitalism and the decisions made by private enterprise are defended ad nauseam.
It's no consolation to the developers or their dependents that they are now out of work but were given what they are owed by law when people can't even show the most basic human empathy it takes to sympathize with those who aren't themselves.
And you know Wizards overpromised them how? A project was attempted. A project fell through. Welcome to reality, the brochures are on your left. Pretty sure anyone who has made a career of doing contracted software development like this knows to keep a buffer in case things fall through, and whether it's industry standard or not the fact that they got end of contract benefits means it's not like they're going from working on Sigil to the breadlines. I'd be more ready to sympathize if something actively bad actually happened to them, as opposed to a normal part of a contractor's work cycle.
From what I understand is the team spent three years on it, and delt with higher ups constantly making things difficult. I saw DnD Shots' video on it a day or so ago. From what he said that makes it a problem. Will look at the older posts and more videos before I have a concrete idea. But just using Shorts as a source:
This comes in 2 main ways.
While not mentioned here, I also wonder in Linux also would be outside of this. Most people use Windows machines, so potentially the vast majority of customers are able to use it in theory (see point B later). However this still denies potential PAYING customers from using their product.
DND shorts says it needs so much graphical power, D&D youtuber Pact Tactics, who has over 100k subscriber, could not run it. And the level of power needed is comparable to what is needed to play some of the more intense games on the market like God of War: Ragnarök or Final Fantasy Rebirth.
This limits potential players, and more importantly their cold hard cash, which is against the whole point of having your own DTT. Back in the COVID days, I had fun playing Pathfinder with people literally across the globe (one session I was gaming with someone in Finland and another in Australia). And when I lived in Idaho for 3 years, I joined a few online campaigns with some of the people I met up there in D&D as they were playing with friends in different time zones. I do this still every other week with my cousins right now.
But the availability of things of things like Roll 20, or using Discord and Google Slides, or some of the other DTTs that came up since then was the low barrier to entry. Same thing with D&D when you think about it: just need an imagination, some dice, 3 books, and something small enough to be your character. Everything else is gravy. Sigil is asking for people, who may not have a desire to have a high powered gaming computer, and one that needs to taken to the max, to do just that when Google slide and Discored are around the corner.
It has problems importing charecters and everything it can do. So far it can only do the 2024 rules, which I think is fine for now. Updates can allow others, lets focus on this for potential new players. This said, if you are using a species, feat, class, subclass, or gear outside of this then it might not bring it into the game.
Even if it does, it might not get any of your actual information In Short’s case, he couldn’t edit the formation of Initiative when one of his characters had the Alert Feat, or if someone had advantage on it. Sigil didn’t register that his monk could use dexterity on monk weapons instead of strength, the rouge could use any of the options available for cunning action, no unarmored strike, didn’t factor in Unarmored Defence, and so on and so on.
I can see players using Barbarians and a Pact of Blade Warlock also having issues.
While spells look awesome, they either have incomplete information, namly what components are needed (and therefore do you need a hand free to work them). Some did not do everything they can do in the real world ( the example he used was firebolt currently only works on creatures and not objects).
Loading between maps took over 2 minutes, which wouldn’t be bad if I am playing Skyrim after a few hours in or Loading in a Total War game. But this is a digital Table top. With all the problems we have with Roll 20, this is not one of the issues, and he was using only 3 maps. Compare this with the average campaign and you could potentially have dozzens of different maps, with dozens of NPC’s and 3 to 6 PC’s (or more, some people are dangerously bold like that).
Visuals were another issue. While many looked awesome, every once in a while if you had multiple enemies one or more might have grey lines over them like the printer was running out of ink.
It was difficult to see where your characters are in some maps.
Character creation, I am not so judgmental on. Yes, it’s the thing we all spend 30 hours in character creation in a video game, but I can’t really make a bard look like Missy Elliot when she had her first few hits on Hero Forge either, but it seems your options seem to be with Sigil Skinny and slight chub; male and female.
I am not sure what they did over three years, but if its true that the powers to be kept hamstringing them, it shows. It was not ready for showcasing. It was not ready for release. The Emperor has no cloths, and we are not afraid to talk about it.
That makes actually working unpleasant, but will generally make the layoffs less of a surprise. The rest of the points you mention are basically why the project got cancelled; it's much more of a surprise when a project that is going well and making good progress gets cancelled than when a project that's clearly struggling gets cancelled.
The specifics of any contract between WotC and Mr. Collins are unknown, however his work history is available and can be verified. I am only correcting verifiably false information.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
highly recommend trying it out yourself rather then going of youtube shorts.
theres no real paying customer as it currently is - unless you include the master tier subscription that most DMs already have, which allows the following:
there will always be alternatives and competition to sigil (and all other VTTs) out there, it just comes down to the individual as to which one they choose to familiarise themselves with and which one meets their needs
these are the minimum and recommended specs required: personally consider them to be quite average computer specs for todays computers, also think there was talk of the specs being lowered as things got optimised (unsure if thats still the case with it becoming a feature, not sure how that path differs)
havent mucked around with the importing character sheets parts of sigil yet, so personally unsure where the issues are in that area - but suspect its probably similar with current character combination issues, no clue on the initiative or monk stuff either
EDIT: just quickly checked the encounter mode within sigil - where it rolled initiative for each mini, after which it rearranged the order of the minis to match along the top bar
for spell descriptions you can hold down the ALT key and it will show some additional information like so:
personally it roughly takes my computer: (with some optimisation it would likely be less, also would depend on your computer hard drive type where your operating system is installed and how full it is)
as for the lines through the mini - that is due to the mini being hidden and can easy be remedied by right clicking on the mini in question and clicking "Reveal" like so
before
After
unsure what you mean by "hard to see", believe that would come down to how cluttered the map in question is and your screen.
personally find the minis stick out quite well due to the red lined base, being able to rotate map, zoom in and out and the overhead or normal view available - believe there is also a way to ping characters but havent looked into yet, maybe once i make bigger maps :)
also sorry about the image quality and/or sizes, used paint and imgur
EDIT: you can also click on the minis portrait at the top of the screen and it will take you to the selected minis location
so yea highly recommend having a muck around with it yourself to see if it potentially meets your needs and what issues/disagreements you might have with it
personally how i see it
some people got hired to do a job - apparently only 33 or so (if 30 is 90% of team)
$20-30million got spent on the project over 3 years - atleast thats what im lead to believe
people were unhappy with result - assumption based of public posts and the change in direction
people were fired with benefits - severance and all that jazz
sigil gets transitioned towards a dndbeyond feature for people to use - unsure what that process actually entails
what more is there to consider on that matter when the end results were fair??
why not focus on sigil....
I am a bit confused why he thinks there were contracts (beyond general employment contracts) at all -- from the released letter, it sounds like they were salaried employees, and they were laid off because that's what you can do.
Do you feel Sigil is a finished product from your hands on experience with it? Is it as usable as the encounter or map tools?
I do not have a pc capable of running it, nor do I have a master sub even if I did have a a pc capable of running it.
Because WotC doesn't have a consistent output of software like this and so would have no reason to keep a permanent full-time staff of such devs. They dabble from time to time, but it's never been a staple product. Ergo, logically when they do start one of these projects in-house they bring in a team for the duration and then let all or most of them go once it's finished.