Last week, Wizards finally declared Project Sigil officially dead. But what was it supposed to be in the first place? The now shuttered online D&D platform was neither owl nor bear. A shared online space built in Unreal Engine 5 in which friends could play Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, it was too closely modeled on the fifth edition ruleset to be considered a pure Virtual Tabletop, yet lacked the scripting or AI systems you'd need to call it a full D&D videogame. It was a poor, misbegotten creature - and one whose sad fate seems to me closely linked with Wizards of the Coast's most infamous misadventure of recent years: the Tale of The OGL.
Some history. The Open Gaming License, or OGL, is the document that permits third parties to create content using the D&D rules without negotiating a specific deal with Wizards of the Coast or paying them any money, provided they stay away from copyrighted elements of the IP. Since it was added in D&D 3rd edition, it's generally been regarded as mutually beneficial, giving creators scope to make money, offering fans a wider range of options, and ensuring D&D remains the common language for tabletop RPGs.
In January 2023, a draft of a revised 1.1 version of the OGL leaked onto the internet, revealing that WotC was considering charging royalty payments for OGL licensed products that earned above a certain threshold, and explicitly banning D&D rules from being used in anything other than old-fashioned RPG products. Gallons of ink have been spilled about the resulting fan firestorm already, and I needn't re-tread it here. Suffice it to say, Wizards made a series of embarrassing backtracks, and, by the end of January 2023, finally announced it would place the entire D&D 5e System Reference Document (the rules without any copyrighted IP) into the Creative Commons, forever.
So, what's this got to do with Project Sigil? Well, soon after that, D&D's then executive producer Kyle Brink went on a publicity tour attempting to reopen dialogue with the fandom. In this YouTube interview with Bob World Builder from February 2023, Brink says one of the reasons WotC wanted to amend the OGL was concerns about "a deep pocketed outside actor coming into D&D and changing the face of D&D… like a multi-billion dollar conglomerate or media concern to come in and create, for example, a virtual reality space where you could play D&D…"
That last reference to a VR playspace seems a weirdly specific example to bring up off the cuff - unless it was something that really was being discussed inside Wizards. I personally suspect the OGL changes were at least partially motivated by Wizards' (understandable) desire to stop a potential third party from creating a full-on, 3D digital multiplayer version of D&D, before it could have a go itself.
D&D watchers noted that angle at the time, too. Changes in the leaked draft of the OGL 1.1 would have restricted the open licence to cover only "roleplaying games and supplements in printed media and static electronic file formats" - creating significant doubt about whether Virtual Tabletop software, videogames, and other media such as actual play shows that used the 5th edition D&D rules would be able to proceed without securing paid-for licenses from WotC.
We can't know for sure, of course, but I'm inclined to believe that fear of someone else making a full dive VR experience running on the DnD 5e rules was at play in WotC's confusing decision to create Sigil. It's one of the few ways I can make sense of this ill starred hybrid - a hugely ambitious project that Wizards announced in 2022, the same year that the proposed changes to the OGL were in development at the company.
With the benefit of hindsight, Sigil seems like a product that was always doomed to fail. It was like a mad-lib of things that make money - D&D, sandbox multiplayer, high-end PC gaming, virtual hangout space - but shaken up in a way that guaranteed it couldn't make enough money to justify its development costs.
Similar to a Virtual Tabletop, it let you run D&D games online with friends - but it needed a high-end PC to run, making it far less accessible. Like the old PC game Neverwinter Nights, you could build your own adventure modules and share them online - but there was no AI, no animation, no single player campaign to get PC gamers through the door in the first place. Like Arma Reforger, VR Chat, or Fortnite, it offered a full roleplaying environment rendered in a virtual space, but the D&D 5e ruleset lacks the immediate feedback of a physics engine or motion tracking that make those systems so immersive.
Sigil had many incredibly cool features, but they didn't cohere into a coherent product offer, and instead it ended up a mediocre map builder that came out - as our Editor Alex argued a while back - 5 years too late to change the world. So why did it get made this way, and why then?
Well, I don't know, but I can make an intelligent guess. I think that, if the idea that a multiplayer game-as-service running the D&D 5e ruleset could also be worth an unfathomable amount of money got into WotC's decision making loop, it would explain both why WotC started development on Project Sigil, and why it walked headlong into the garden rake that was the OGL debacle. This isn't based on any insider information - it's just the best hypothetical explanation I can think of for two bad business decisions that were apparently made at roughly the same time.
I tend to view companies as large, insensible entities that contain humans but which don't make decisions like a human. Internal processes mediate ideas and decisions through so many decision makers, each modifying their own behaviour to game those processes and second-guess one another's intentions, that the result is inherently irrational. Sometimes, the problem isn't that someone has had a terrible idea - it's that a terrible idea happens, and no-one can stop it.
It's worth remembering that in 2022 people still thought that the Metaverse was going to happen, despite the obvious evidence that VR headsets have very narrow applications, and going into a virtual shop to order sandwiches is a dumb as dirt idea because the internet already exists. The transformation of Fortnite from game as service into media platform hosting 'live' concerts provided some evidence that large audiences were engaging with digital spaces in new ways - and large companies were hungry for ways to get their product into the bustling, vibrant 3D virtual marketplaces they were promised would, one day, exist.
Businesses were evaluating their strategic positions against a future in which a badly defined virtual space might supplement or replace other platforms for commerce, socialization, work, or play, in ways that couldn't be quantified (because, it turns out, it was a shit idea). If you want a brief retrospective on how much clout the Metaverse had, and why it popped like a sad balloon, I recommend this great video by Folding Ideas:
Then there was a knot of little facts that together could have looked like pieces of a single puzzle. COVID lockdowns had recently halted in-person D&D play, but interest in D&D had only grown. D&D's official VTT offering was years behind third party options, but excitement was growing for the highly technical Baldur's Gate 3. Online multiplayer videogames were more profitable than ever. Shake those ideas up in a corporate decision matrix, let facts separate from crucial contextual information, perhaps sprinkle in some motivated reasoning, sunk cost fallacy, and circular justification…
As I say - this is pure speculation. My commiserations to everyone who worked on Project Sigil. It genuinely looked pretty awesome. Much like those thirty layer sandwiches that Scooby Doo eats, it was just too beautiful to exist.
What do you think? Could Project Sigil have worked? Might there be a role for super high-end VTTs in the future? Share your thoughts in the official Wargamer Discord community.