Even with all of that being true, I think there will end up being a huge difference in the experience of playing pre-made modules and homebrew adventures. A much, much bigger difference than what you get now.A lot of whether or not WOTC's VTT works comes down to design goals and implementation. Which, I know, duh. But a lot of the biggest hassle of drawing maps was adding in the "extras" like lighting, line of site, integrating with DDB, creating icons for monsters and so on.
But imagine if a lot of the work is done for you? They have a catalogue of scenes you can choose from, blocking line of sight is as simple as dropping in a wall, integration with DDB and all the animation you want is right there. When you drop a light source, it just works, you don't have to futz around with finding the right icon and then adding light parameters. Want a city street? Would that be the city Waterdeep or the village of Barovia? Maybe there's an add-on-pack for an Eberron train and of course there' plenty of ancient tombs and abandoned structures as well.
Some of the features will be dreaded "micro transactions" aka buying pre-built scenes, which honestly I would have been okay with. But they have an advantage of sorts. They don't have to support every genre or game under the sun, they just have to support D&D. Start with scenes that they're building for modules and let me buy just specific buildings would be awesome.
One last comment on the "THE VTT IS DOOMED!" video. I didn't bother watching the whole thing but one of the things that they pushed was that you will absolutely need a high end PC with a graphics card because they're required for AAA video games. I think that's bunk. They don't need to support anything near the graphical responsiveness you need with a video game. You aren't going to have anything near the amount of simultaneous calculations and the constant responses to movement that you need for a video game. Beyond the occasional fire or spell effect, this is going to be a pretty static isometric view (likely with the option to change view), which will require a fraction of what any modern video game has. You could also have downgrades in textures and models for lower end machines.
All of this is speculation of course. I just think the conjecture that it's automatically guaranteed to fail is premature.
I think procedurally/AI generated stuff will be key here. If you can say "it's a big cavern full of tree sized mushrooms with different elevations" and get a reasonable result immediately, people will embrace that pretty easily.if you have to craft everything, it will lead to stagnation.Even with all of that being true, I think there will end up being a huge difference in the experience of playing pre-made modules and homebrew adventures. A much, much bigger difference than what you get now.
I have no idea what the business ramifications of that may be.
In my experience, it works like this: whatever’s on the map is what’s there. No more, no less.I could not agree less. The idea that VTTs take away imagination is absurd to me.
Even with all of that being true, I think there will end up being a huge difference in the experience of playing pre-made modules and homebrew adventures. A much, much bigger difference than what you get now.
I have no idea what the business ramifications of that may be.
Except I can take any decent top-down battlemap that I find on the internet, plop some simple tokens to it and call it a day with a 2D VTT. I don't always do complicated spell animations or dynamic lighting.
But you can't have the equivalent of "just plop a .jpg from /r/battlemaps" with a 3D VTT. You either get a premade map that perfectly includes everything (which would be pretty good for APs, admittedly), or you need to design the whole 3D space from scratch, essentially becoming a level designer.
Random musing: 5e doesn't really have enough forced movement to either really need a battlemap or to take full advantage of a 3d VTT. It's just bling. But if people really can make use of it easily good for them and another tool for DMs is good even if I'll probably never use it.
Not to mention cliffs, rooftops, balconies, etc.Depends.
I have a flying pc in my game. 3d is a big deal.