Guide to Sigil in Dungeon master's Guide 2

You know that's one of the writers of A Player's Primer to the Outlands, Planes of Chaos, Harbinger House, and the original boxed set that wrote that article and is helping to write the DMG2, right?

Edit: Oh, Something Wild and Doors to the Unknown too.  Missed those two.

I don't have so much of a problem with ditching the Great Wheel. My problem is more with the attitude most of the designers seem to have that everything previous to 4E was a horrible, stupid mess.

 That really doesn't mean all that much in my opinion. He's not designing this book for his own benefit or based on his own agenda, he's writing it for WotC. The work he produces will be guided by the expectations and guideliness set forth by Wizards and the current industry.  Planescape was produced under an entirely different context. It was designed with a conscious effort to create a product for the D&D line that could compete with the highly successful, more "mature" and roleplay-intensive games that were coming out by White Wolf (Vampire and such). Right now, D&D has no such competition to be worried about, and an entirely different design philosophy as well.

I'm not saying he cannot do a good job, or that the constraints he has to deal with will necessarily ruin whatever it is he tries to do. He was involved with designing the Eberron Campaign Setting, which is in my opinion one of the best products produced during the 3(.5) edition era, as well as one of the best campaign settings in the entire D&D line.

 I just don't think another rewrite of Sigil has that much potential. It was done in the Planar Handbook and in the Manual of the Planes 4e. It's not going to be Planescape, it's going to be Sigil for the 4th edition. I don't think they're going to butcher it (the other two versions I mentioned are not bad at all, they're pretty faithful, save a few details here and there). But they lack all the flavor that made Sigil so interesting. The Planescape flavor. Unless I'm proven wrong, I believe all we can expect is yet another rewrite of Sigil in a watered down version. There's already a few of those out there.

I guess instead of competing against White Wolf, WotC is now competing against World of Warcraft. So rather than creating a new WoW-like setting (which they might have done in the 2E days), they nerfed the entire multiverse.

IMO, the Points of Light idea could work as a single setting within the greater multiverse. In fact, I even (independently, pre-4E) designed one of my continents around a similar idea.

Now if a GM wants to use pre-4E material in a 4E settign, they have to figure out what works and what doesn't. The changes to the multiverse make this even more difficult than the relatively minor changes between 2E and 3E.

All right, yeah, those are good points.  (And my mistake on his credits; I feel a little embarassed about that now.)  I was being sort of hyperbolic, I just hate all this developer-bashing for 4e products when a good number of those developers have been around since 2e.  I'm not a huge fan of 4e myself, but I can see that not all the developers hate the old stuff, even the new developers.  They might not always hold it in as high a regard as some of us, and some of them probably honestly do dislike the old ways, but that's no reason to paint even a majority of them with such a broad brush.

 I think that's a pretty reasonable assumption and I agree with it. Besides, nothing keeps a developer from having fond memories of a certain product, such as Planescape, while at the same criticizing specific elements of it that they do not consider a good approach. And that can be done with more or less tact.

I think the reason some fans are upset is because some developers did it in rather tactless ways in articles that were released prior to the launch of 4e. I have no clue what their business strategy was, but it certainly didn't do much to keep old time fans around.

I think when a product is genuinely good, there is little to no reason to market it by bashing the competition, even when the competition is a previous incarnation of said product. The marketing can be done solely by focusing on the new product's merits. But I'm probably going against well established marketing theories here, because certain big brands do it all the time. Just not the big brands often associated with having refinement and good taste.

 In the RPG industry, however, this is pretty common practice. I lost count of how many RPG developers presented their game by bashing D&D and saying how different from it theirs are.

I heard the DMG 2 is going to base Sigil around paragon-tier play (above level 10), rather than epic-tier (above level 20)?

Anyway, regardless of how Sigil turns out in that book, we'll still be able to realize a "true-to-spirit" version in the 4E PS project here on Planewalker.