Oh look! Now you can pretend you're playing Falcon's Eye! No, I don't know why that's a good thing at all...
I'm sorry, can you tell I'm not impressed?
Okay, I know that there are D&D players out there who are thinking the whole online D&D aspect of Insider will be great for older gamers who are separated by distance--I can sympathize, I have a weekly Neverwinter Nights game with an old college buddy who now lives in a different time zone... of course, the thing is, that's why we play Neverwinter Nights. It's not like reverting to a pen'n'paper incarnation is faster and smoother than what we can do with the BioWare adaptation. And I know there are those who think Insider will draw MMORPG kids into the old school tabletop--I think those people are... let's call them "naive" to be nice about it.
I'm not tech adverse: the last D&D campaign I ran, I ran from behind my laptop at the table, with eTools and Campaign Cartographer up and running with the Hypertext d20 SRD in a browser. But what is Insider offering that is necessary or useful or (if useful) that third-party vendors weren't doing better before Wizards decided to shut them out?
Virtual minis? I'm just not impressed. I don't want to sound like some of the whinier naysayers out there, though I'm sure I do anyway, but this isn't a product I want to play. I'm not going to knock anyone who wants to. Everyone has their thing, and that's all good. But I don't see anything here I'd want.
Anyway, there it is. Judge for yourself.
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