Big changes for D&D Beyond as WotC revealed a development roadmap with plans to rebuild the Game Platform “from the ground up.”
Big changes are in the works over at D&D Beyond, as late last week, Wizards of the Coast and the D&D Beyond team revealed an ambitious development roadmap. While there were many features on the map, including a revamped character builder and better player onboarding, perhaps the biggest item is a rebuild of D&D Beyond’s “game platform” from the ground up.
In a nutshell, this means WotC is rolling out a “true game engine” for D&D Beyond, which seems to have some wide-reaching implications. Not the least of which is a transformation of D&D as WotC moves to make its RPG that lays the golden egg into a “digital-first” product.
D&D Beyond To Be Rebuilt From The Ground Up
Now you might be wondering what exactly WotC means by D&D Beyond getting a true game engine for its “Game Platform.” And why Game Platform is capitalized – that’s probably for documentation purposes. Well, here it is, in the words of Laura Thompson, Software Engineering Manager for the D&D Beyond Game Platform:
“The new platform is an opinionated set of modular, scalable services designed to work together seamlessly. It is fundamentally data-driven, so rules, content, access, search, and messaging can be defined and updated as data rather than hard-coded logic.”
In other words, it’s a change in the way the D&D Beyond toolset interprets the different things you might use it for. Character sheets, rules updates, whether or not you can see a given map, even secret DM info – all seems to fall under the purview of the D&D Beyond Game Platform.
Ostensibly, this means faster load times and smarter searches and “smoother rules validation” but we’ll have to wait a while to see. From the roadmap announcement, it looks like the first place we’re going to see this is in the new Character Builder, rolling out on the new platform later this year.
There are other changes in the works as well. There’s a new suite of DM Tools for D&D Beyond Maps, as well as new DM Prep features to try and make D&D Beyond your one stop shop. And really, I think that’s the heart of the new update.
WotC has tried to compete with other VTTs before – the ill-fated Project Sigil was one such attempt. But now, with Fog of War and plans to use things like rules, lore, and rollable tables, it looks like WotC wants to be its own Roll20. However, VTTs like Roll20 and Foundry offer a lot to users already so D&D Beyond will have some serious catching up to do. All that to say, it’s a sign of the times that all the new hotness for D&D revolves around the digital space instead of books on shelves and pen put to paper.
Personally? I don’t like to play D&D online – there’s just no beating in person. I think that opinion is more popular than we realize. If D&D Beyond remains an easy way to access the rules, people will keep using it. We’ve seen time and again that when people play D&D, they don’t want video games with extra steps; they want to play D&D.
