Virtual Battlemap Reviews

I give this a 9/10. Its EA so I temper my expectations and I've tinkered with it enough to know I'll be using it for all my future map buildings. I typically do all my map hosting via Roll20 and this is great for that very purpose. I am really excited to see what else DLC they introduce and if they'll get workshop implemented so I can see what we can all produce together for tabletop gaming. **Edit** Since having written my review this program has become a much more varied setup! The devs have given us the features we've requested (that can be reasonably done of course) and even if they can't they've got it down for the future to add or whenever Unity wants to try and support a new feature ;D The main thing I love is that the community even has a requests section that was stickied detailing all the types of DLC we want to see in the future and its quite a list. At this point I'm bumping my rating up another point to 9/10, the only thing now keeping me from giving this all my heart and soul is a much needed GUI rework as it can be a little clunky to use right now but they've already stated they're in the works of doing just that.

I'm extremely disappointed. I purchased this software the first day it became available on Steam. As a builder, I was very excited to get my hands on this tool. I went into this purchase knowing full well that this was an Alpha release, that there may be bugs, and that it would be an unfinished product. I accepted that, and looked forward to seeing this software reach completion. So, why am I not recommending this? It would seem Dragom's business practices are a bit on the shady, selfish, and unethical side. Allow me to elucidate: When you pay for a video game which is still in Alpha, do you expect to have to pay more for the content that was intended to be in the final release? No. As an example, I've logged HUNDREDS of hours into Ark: Survival Evolved since its initial release. The have added a plethora of new content to their game at no additional charge. That's how Alpha is intended to work. The initial release of Virtual Battlemap offered a fair amount of (incomplete, IMHO) "classic" dungeon tile sets. Adequate enough to build basic dungeon rooms. By no means were these tiles flawless or even remotely complete. Within a couple of weeks the released their first official DLC pack at HALF THE COST OF THE CORE SOFTWARE!!! Pay DLC for an Alpha product with bugs and incomplete tile sets. If you bother scrutinizing the core tiles you will notice many of the models are incomplete. Walls and other terrain features are often missing a side, making them less useful if you try to creatively manipulate them. So, why should we be paying for what is likely to be more partialy completed assets? I am very sorry to be one of the folks who backed this product for Steam Greenlight. I now regret having given Dragom any of my money. This is not a breakthrough in map building software. There is nothing special about this software that anyone with a modest level of competence could not learn to create with Unity (yes, this uses Unity). It is not unreasonable to want to profit off your time and effort. It is unreasonable to expect people to pay extra to fill in the gaps on your unfinished project. Do not even consider buying this product until it is out of Alpha and is getting daily positive reviews again.

I was really excited when I found this program, as I had been mulling over the idea of using a TV to display environments for my players in our D&D sessions. I had looked into other programs like Campaign Cartographer or Dunjini, but since those programs are about 10 years old, and at least $50+ each for the basic programs, I tried to find alternatives and found this. After I had spent some time with it, however, my optimism quickly faded. The amount of time it took to make anything meaningful was atrocious. In the two hours of play time I had before I asked for a refund, I didn't really have anything to show for it except for a handful of really small rooms, and they weren't even that impressive. All of the tiles in the game had to be placed one at a time, including floors and walls. There wasn't any features akin to clicking and dragging while placing a floor tile to create a 10x10 room, for example. While the effects are neat (like the dust, wind, water, and torchlight), when you export your creations they are no longer animated. On that note, your exports are just a screenshot of the game. If your camera is off center, or not zoomed in or out all the way, what you see is literally what you get. It made for some really low quality pictures when zoomed in on my TV, and since the environments were in 3D, there was a sort of blossoming out effect with the top-down view. The camera was also a pain to maneuver. Lastly, the core game leaves a lot to be desired. The amount of assets included feel minimal, and samey, and with multiple add-ons with an asking price of $15 each bring the "true cost" of this program up to $100. Otherwise, you cannot make anything interior, nature, or cave themed, which are pretty frequent environments players seem to find themselves in, and we all know it.

Really not very pleasant to use. The export options are not great. Scrolling through the menus is bugged and now I can either see the top of the menu or the bottom of the menu but not the middle. This can't be the best option for making dungeons.

This is just another great piece of software I now have in my cartography arsenal. The price was right and frankly the DLC pricing is right too. There are a lot of haters that seem to think that creating graphics for a program like this dirt cheap. That's just not the case. Graphics cost cash and frankly with the sheer number of maps you can make (infinite) with this program, combined with the ability to use them commercially if you get the proper licensing, I just do not understand the negativity. It's a great program, it has great feature, the DEVs are always right there to chime in and answer questions. What more could you ask for? Asking for virtually free content is not something you should ask for. Cheers to the DEVs for this program. It's awesome and I hope the continue to put out more DLC. I'll be there to scoop it up! JSM

It's sad I bought this with the same illusion as the others reviews. It takes a long time to get anything significant and the worst part to me was having to place a tile per time to make a floor and in the end you got yourself the corner of your room. DLCs very expensive... and yes, devs, I've already read your "justification". I do not recommend it since it lacks a lot of content for the price it is. These kind of programs were supposed to make a dungeon master's life easier by speeding up the maps making process, but that's not what this program offers. It had (still has?) a great potencial, but it didn't achieve half of what it could be.

In all honesty, this is one of those products you either have a use for or you don't, so the only questions beyond that are quality and value. Does this product do what it promises to do? Yes it does. I've gotten some very nice results out of it. Suffice it to say, though, it's also one of those propositions where there's not that much you can do with the basic package, and need to splash out on no end of DLC to exploit the product's full potential. Which brings us to the question of value. Here's where the negatives come in. The developers seem hell-bent on only putting the basic product on sale, and even then never for more than 20% off, despite it being released a year ago. The DLC? Never, ever seems to go on sale. I've even commented upon this in forums - something I only rarely do - to which the devs responded with an official party line about their prices being "compatible with the current market", or words to similar effect. This attitude may, unfortunately, have some bearing upon how relatively few reviews of the product have been written, which I can only presume has resulted in similarly disappointing sales. It is, of course, the prerogative of the devs to sell their product at any price they damn well please, but unfortunately this is Steam, which is ultimately a bit of a "sales" culture. Anyone who looks at this Store page right now will see the main product at a sale price, and a whopping great swag of DLC for nothing but full price. Even the DLC which was released almost a year ago. You don't have to be a psychologist to realise that most punters will see this as a good reason to promptly move on, and find something else to buy with their hard-earned sales moolah. Which is a shame, really, because it's a good - if limited - product beyond that. I personally have been hanging out for some DLC goodies for some time now, but always find myself waiting for that elusive 10 or 20% off. And I don't kid myself: I'm not THAT unique, so if I'm doing this, so are others. Maybe I'll crumble some day, or perhaps the devs will crumble first. My advice to those who are still interested is to chuck this in your wishlist, then wait for the prices to come down. Unless you have bucketloads of money, of course, in which case you may as well just buy the whole fucking lot right now. Good for some, eh? Verdict: 7.5/10.

Software does some neat stuff that makes building battle mat's accessible to more people and with lower effort. It could use some improvements in utility like copying and pasting sections (placing many walls is needlessly time consuming). As well as camera controls with auto move the camera into looking down perfectly, if you have the camera at a small angle and take a picture then software like fantasy grounds will have a very hard time indentifying squares due to perspective. The real problem with the software are the business decisions behind it. $30 for the intiial buy in is pretty good. I would have paid $40. However it comes with assets only for the more classic dungeons. Clearly the model is to sell lots of DLC to flesh out the capabilities of the program. The problem here is that the first DLC (published a week into "early-access" mode and before a number of basic functionalities like I mentioned above are incldued), is $15. If you need only the base software to do what you want then this is probably worth the cost. But if you are looking for a map-making software to invest in for the long-haul then Multiply that $15 out by 10-15-20 over time as you buy all the DLC. The cost is high, and the developer response has been to say "tough luck". Ultimately I would say for SURE wait until this software is out of "early access" As it may provide you with a better view of what their DLC roadmap looks like. Right now it's dismaying. I suspect that once it is out of early access it might be worth buying a big pack of DLC if sufficiently discounted, but either way you will have a better idea of what costs your opting into.

I really like the software, but I'm really displease by the 1st week DLC of an early access costing half the price of it. Not only that, since it was Early Access I thought they would update it with more content until release. I might sound harsh but I wouldn't buy it at all had I known that not only the content they had already done would be paid but it would cost half the price of the program. So, the program is good but it really lacks content. With the base stuff all you can do is bland, simple dungeons. I was expecting at least 3 or 4 more types of content (exterior, houses, castles, whatever) for it to feel "complete." But I guess I'd have to pay the double, possibly the triple, of what I paid for the base stuff. I tried refunding but Steam denied. I guess I'm going to wait for steam sales IF the DLC costs at least half the price they cost now. Serves me right for buying Early Access stuff upon release. TLDR; Software is good, but it lacks content and each DLC costs half the price of it. Buy it if you expect investing lots of money for content.

Program works great, although the developer withheld content and released week 1 DLC for half the cost of the original game. Original game, 30 bucks, first week DLC, 15 bucks. Even after the developer answered questions online that he wanted to keep the DLC's cheap and not adding up to be more expensive than the original cost of the game, but this 50% completed program will easily exceed the DLC price ceiling that was claimed to be set. If you want to get the best usage out of this game, you're going to have to dish out more than you'd like to in order to get all the DLC's unless you only ever want to create underground cave/dungeon chamber maps. TL;DR DLC should not be this expensive only 1 week after release - or have included this DLC in the original game. I would consider maybe half the cost as they are now to even warrant a reasonable purchase price.