I'll prob hold on buying it until a year from now with the "Game of the year" edition that will include all the other races and classes that are in 5e. If reviews come out that the story is fantastic I'll pick it up before then. For now though it seems this s focused on the DM mode and not story. Hopefully I am proven wrong.
I like that it's already on Steam. I'm very interested now, and this will be going onto my Steam wishlist. Darn, with Pillars of Eternity, Tides of Numenera, Heroes of Might and Magic 7, and now Sword Coast Legends all coming out this year, we have an embarrassment of riches. It's going to be hard to find enough time to get to it all.
edit: because to me it sounds "oh rules. yeah no, we're going to give you a half-XXX, watered down version of a rule system because accessibility"
To be honest, almost every game that has come out has had to provide "A version" of the game. If you compare even the mighty BG against the PnP rules, it will come up significantly wanting.
I suspect that they will make every effort to get as close as they 'Reasonably' can given the constraints of the PC and timing and in an attempt to make it the most fun. Beyond that, if they go all "Dark Alliance" on the community, I think they will kill the franchise which nobody wants.
@jaysl659 Oh, I did not know that. The only exposure I have had to NWN was a Let's Play by Tord, (aka "Mynameisnotlily") who incidentally is the best Let's Player I've come across. He played the entire game in first person mode, even when he controlled his Charname's familiar, he did from the familiar's first person perspective. Well I stand corrected.
I don't like his cynical and creepy ''evil is cool and good is dumb'' mentality though.
Also, Sword Coast Legends will feature Drizzt Do’Urden.
"Sword Coast Legends brings in Drizzt after launch. Its story already brings players to the Underdark, and according to a Wizards of the Coast spokesperson, the drow joins in as the campaign “continues well after launch.”
This is due to the release of Rage of Demon (the latest D&D story arc) later this year.
Dark Alliance wasn't a TERRIBLE game, but it was by no means a RPG game of any description. If you compare it to something like BG (which due to the name "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance", how can you not?), it was severely lacking. But even as an overly dumbed down hack and slash 'Consoler', there was some fun to be had.
Not that I am an elitist or anything, I own 4 consoles myself. Just that you got to choose from 4 playable pre-made characters of the flavor of 'Fighter', 'rogue', 'wizard' and 'archer' (I think, it's been a while) and you got stock abilities on level up. Imagine Diablo, only a lot simpler. Which for consoles of the day it was pretty much standard.
September 29 release date for 39.99 USD. Not to bad as current releases go. I will probably pick up a copy or two for the wife and I. Really need to make some friends to play this with! :P
Dark Alliance wasn't a TERRIBLE game, but it was by no means a RPG game of any description. If you compare it to something like BG (which due to the name "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance", how can you not?), it was severely lacking. But even as an overly dumbed down hack and slash 'Consoler', there was some fun to be had.
Not that I am an elitist or anything, I own 4 consoles myself. Just that you got to choose from 4 playable pre-made characters of the flavor of 'Fighter', 'rogue', 'wizard' and 'archer' (I think, it's been a while) and you got stock abilities on level up. Imagine Diablo, only a lot simpler. Which for consoles of the day it was pretty much standard.
I have to agree with you there. We had some fun with it but it was much more a casual type thing. Just for a little fun after a long day type thing. It didn't require and awful lot of effort nor was there really any character customization really. Kinda disappointing but at the same time about what I expected.
September 29 release date for 39.99 USD. Not to bad as current releases go. I will probably pick up a copy or two for the wife and I. Really need to make some friends to play this with!
I bet you can pick up a few playing buddies from this thread. We'll have to get some kind of group going after launch.
Thank Mystra, Sword Coast Legends will launch in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and WILL be adding Russian and Japanese post release. YEAH!!!
Lots of people care, especially those who cannot understand or speak English. Or the ones like me who would like to enjoy the game in their own language.
Lots of people care, especially those who cannot understand or speak English. Or the ones like me who would like to enjoy the game in their own language.
This is true to a point. But someone with an education should speak and understand english. This coming from a person that doesn't speak english as their native language. Of course there are a lot of poor countries that don't have a proper schooling system, and it's understandable that those people don't speak english. But any person around EU, and some other countries, should speak english.
But this is digressing into complete off-topic, and I'm seeing name-calling, so let's blow the whistle and cut this out now, before it gets any worse.
Why English? Why not Mandarin? There are more Mandarin speakers in the world than English speakers.
I speak English. I come from England. I ONLY speak English. Does that make me better or worse educated than someone who speaks four languages, none of which are English?
Anyway, I do not understand why people need to debate about localizations. If you want to play SCL in English, you can. If you want to play SCL in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian and Japanese, you can. We should avoid pointless discussions like this and speak about the game itself or other important topics. I will give you a hint:
Why English? Why not Mandarin? There are more Mandarin speakers in the world than English speakers.
I speak English. I come from England. I ONLY speak English. Does that make me better or worse educated than someone who speaks four languages, none of which are English?
In my country, everybody speaks atleast 3 languages, so I wouldn't know. It's not a big deal here. Even 4 is pretty common, I myself do. You have to speak like 6 or 7 languages here to somehow distinguish yourself. (that reminds me that I should start reading up on the spanish portion of this forum..)
Why not mandarin? Because it's the hardest language on earth to learn, that's why. You will NEVER learn to speak proper mandarin, no matter how much you try.
I like that it's already on Steam. I'm very interested now, and this will be going onto my Steam wishlist. Darn, with Pillars of Eternity, Tides of Numenera, Heroes of Might and Magic 7, and now Sword Coast Legends all coming out this year, we have an embarrassment of riches. It's going to be hard to find enough time to get to it all.
I like that it's already on Steam. I'm very interested now, and this will be going onto my Steam wishlist. Darn, with Pillars of Eternity, Tides of Numenera, Heroes of Might and Magic 7, and now Sword Coast Legends all coming out this year, we have an embarrassment of riches. It's going to be hard to find enough time to get to it all.
What a happy year for fantasy gamers!
Don't forget Bard's Tale IV.
Speaking of that, should I pick up the original Bard's Tale Trilogy so I can have a grasp of what the series is about?
I like that it's already on Steam. I'm very interested now, and this will be going onto my Steam wishlist. Darn, with Pillars of Eternity, Tides of Numenera, Heroes of Might and Magic 7, and now Sword Coast Legends all coming out this year, we have an embarrassment of riches. It's going to be hard to find enough time to get to it all.
What a happy year for fantasy gamers!
Don't forget Bard's Tale IV.
Speaking of that, should I pick up the original Bard's Tale Trilogy so I can have a grasp of what the series is about?
Yes. Its kinda like Wizardry. Also try the pseudo-reboot from 2004 if you want jerkass main character.
This is an rpgcodex.net report from Gamescom 2015 about SCL:
"This was one of our most anticipated presentations of the trade fair, simply because the game had been so controversial on the Codex. Half of our community had been vehemently opposed to the game's shoehorning of the D&D 5th edition rules into a cooldown-based combat system, while the other half were eager to get hyped for absolutely anything with a D&D license attached to it. We were thus under an enormous amount of pressure to do right by our audience, and to provide a fair and balanced look at the game.
We were greeted by n-Space's Tim Schwalk, the game's design director, and Ash Sevilla of Nerd Appropriate fame, who was also working part-time as SCL's Community Manager. Together with three other journalists, we were herded into a small hands-on booth. Our gracious hosts positioned themselves in the middle of the room, gave us a hearty welcome, and announced that we had a special guest: n-Space's CEO Dan O'Leary himself had taken the time to observe our presentation! In response, we heard a grunt coming from the entrance door. O'Leary was a large man with a big bushy beard, and he was in a foul mood. The man's breathing was slow and laboured, and his belt was at least two sizes too tight. His beard was an unkempt mess of brown and grey, with a few dark red strands twirling around his mouth. I studied his savage features; his gaze met mine. In that instant, I knew that Dan O'Leary hated me, that he hated Jarl (that part didn't shock me so much), that he hated the Codex, and that he knew about everything that we had done and all that we were about to do. I averted my gaze and took a seat at one of the hands-on PCs. The screen was showing a wizard holding a fancy wooden staff. A wizard! How cool was that?! I'd always loved wizards. This was going to be a totally mellow presentation. Nothing was wrong.
The two presenters raised their voices and declared that today was a day for glorious co-op fun. Indeed, if you had hoped for any information about SCL's single player mode, its DLC model, or even a single Drizzt name drop, you would have been severely disappointed: the version of Sword Coast Legends we saw that day was a pure multiplayer experience, with a minor focus on the world editor. Tim began by starting up the editing tools and showing off the variety of environmental objects one could place in the world. There were small bookshelves and tall bookshelves, there were candles and candelabras, there were large rectangular red rugs and small quadratic green rugs. I liked the pretty colours. Dan switched to the character generation interface and showed us how to make pink ogres. I counted 40 possible colours. The presenters also demonstrated how to assign quest triggers with a simple, console friendly list interface: click on an NPC, click “Quest”, then “Quest Action”, then “Find X” [in this case, “Find Aston”], and then “On Speak.” This all happened on the fly, while Ash had a party of characters standing right next to the NPC. After Dan was finished with the edits, the party spoke to the NPC, and their journal got updated with the “Find Aston” objective. The simplicity was intriguing; the editor looked very easy to work with. Tim showed off how we could swiftly write our own dialogues and quest descriptors, and then switched to an outdoor scene. It was a sunny, calm day; all was right in the world. Ash's party was enjoying the weather. They looked happy. Then, Dan opened the Weather interface (another text-based list) and clicked on “rainstorm”. Suddenly, the light faded from the scene and everybody got drenched. Dan placed a dead horse on the nearby road and started to play around with it. I hadn't written down one bad thing in my notes yet. Content with the general state of the world, I leaned back, looked towards the ceiling, and once more came face to face with Dan O'Leary. I did not know how long he had been standing behind me, but now I was starting to be concerned for my well being.
Of course, the whole presentation also had a secret secondary purpose: to prepare one hapless journalist for taking over the role of dungeon master himself in the hands-on session. They would be writing quests on the fly, plonking down chests and traps, hiding and locking doors, and hand-tweaking enemy encounters to adjust their difficulty to the prowess of the group of players they'd been burdened with. Currently, the DM seat was occupied by a female journo, who had grown more and more worried as the presentation had progressed. Now, she was sweating bullets. “I… don't think I can do this.” she muttered. Worried, the presenters asked for a volunteer to take her seat. I had done my fair share of DMing back in the late 90s (using the vastly superior Dark Eye system), but normally I wasn't eager to waste my time trying to improvise a session for a bunch of Dorito munching nobodies. Now, however, I had a possibly very dangerous man hovering behind my back whom I was quite eager to get away from. I raised my hand and said “I'll be DM!” The poor woman sighed in misguided relief and switched seats with me.
What followed now was genuinely the most exhilarating half hour of my time at Gamescom. With the two presenters standing by my side, I embarked on a journey of on-the-fly dungeon redesign (mind you, the room layout itself is still not changeable by the player), laying down traps, hiding doors behind fake walls, promoting trash mobs to elite monsters in the middle of battle, and generally having a hell of a time. I had forgotten how much fun it was just to screw with people. At the urging of our hosts, I made a zombie merchant to sell my poor party some weapons; then I promoted him and turned him hostile just when the fighter was about to buy a cool axe. I took control of the dungeon's Beholder boss and charmed the most dangerous party members; then I dropped a Master Vampire just out of sight and starting saving up Threat points to promote him into a mini-boss while the Beholder battle was still going on. The DM Threat system is fairly simple; for every "success" of the party, from defeating enemies to disarming traps, the DM is awarded points to buy cool stuff with. You could buy anything from cheap, harmless traps to outrageously expensive super-monsters. The presenters were in awe of my point-saving prowess, remarking that virtually every other DM at Gamescom had just been splurging their points on the cheapest trash mobs as soon as they became available. I don't know if they were just sweet talking me, but saving up points was definitely a winning formula if you wanted to have fun; hearing the reactions of the party when the Master Vampire wandered into the Beholder fight made me feel like I had made all the right choices in my life.
When the party was about to wipe, I demoted the Vampire in mid-combat. You see, in SCL you lose Threat points for letting the party suffer a defeat; and if the DM has no points, the game becomes much easier for the party. Thus, you have to play a careful balancing act by trying to keep battles tough enough to be fun, but never so hard as to make the party pay the ultimate price – unless you want to say “screw the points” and just send the lousy fuckers to hell, of course. I, however, was in a magnificent mood, and thus I made sure that the last player would be able to finish off the Vampire with about 15% of their health remaining. Was that gamey and completely unrealistic? Absolutely. Did that bother me? It did not. After the run was over, the presenters were all smiles and praise for my exceptional DM performance, and slipped me their business cards the same way a middle-aged banker would slip his room number to a high class escort at the Sheraton bar. Even O'Leary appeared to be vaguely pleased with the goings on, his beard seeming more vibrant and less spiky than just minutes before. His power over me had vanished completely. Of course, I was not in the least bit swayed by all the adulation: I already had over four thousand brofists on the Codex, and I knew my worth very well.
Overall, I can honestly say that I had a good time with Sword Coast Legends, even though I certainly hadn't expected to have one. The fun simply crept up on me. The sheer amount of choices I had just for placing traps and chests, changing the difficulty check on locked and hidden doors to delay the party, and tweaking combat encounters on-the-fly kept me fully occupied throughout the hands-on. Thus, I never had a chance to write a neat side quest or, for example, give the zombie merchant some clever bit of dialogue to explain why he would go hostile. However, I certainly could have done that if I'd had a bit more experience with the UI and known exactly what was possible. I don't know if being a DM and torturing newbies will still be fun after 10 or 50 hours of gameplay, but for this brief 30 minute excursion, it was good enough to make me recommend the game. Mind you, this is not an endorsement of the single player campaign: the few snippets of the campaign's writing and area design that I've seen on the net have looked abjectly terrible. I wouldn't be surprised if n-Space's current focus on multiplayer presentations were based on a smart PR reaction to internal feedback; Sword Coast Legends in singleplayer really holds no appeal whatsoever, but Sword Coast Legends in multiplayer is truly, honestly, fun.
Or at least it's fun for the DM. Hey Jarl, what was your take on all this? If I remember correctly, you played a cleric.
----
Jarl: To my shame I have to admit that I hadn't followed the discussion about this game here on the Codex, or anywhere else, really, so I went into this session of co-op dungeon crawling as a "blind" player. I knew this was a D&D game, I knew this was supposed to be the next Neverwinter Nights, and I knew this was based on the 5E ruleset. It all began with a presentation on the multiplayer part of the game – the single player was only mentioned, but didn't get any attention during this presentation. They showed off the DM tools, how easily you can add NPCs, give them quests, re-arrange the furniture, drop quest-relevant items and props into the landscape, and do pretty much anything you want unless what you want is changing the actual level architecture. Seeing all this "placing objects on a pre-generated dungeon map" foolery, I asked whether it's possible to add new rooms, or to change the layout of the place. Nope, you can't. They might add that later in a patch or DLC because this feature has been heavily requested by fans, but right now they're focusing on perfecting the DM tools as they are, without adding new features. Well, no powerful mod tools that allow the creation of modules rivalling those made for the Neverwinter Nights games, then.
After the presentation, we could play a hands-on dungeon crawl with one of the journalists DMing and the others playing as pre-generated characters. Before the presentation had started, they already hinted that someone will be able to play as DM. But now, when it actually came to taking that position, nobody came forward to do it. The journalists were afraid this was beyond their capabilities. So, of course, the Codex jumped in and offered its experience in being horribly unfair: Bubbles sat down in front of the designated Dungeon Master's computer and prepared to give us hell. It took a while to familiarize ourselves with our characters' abilities, and Bubbles used that time to place traps for us to stumble into. After a minute of getting to know our abilities, which were cooldown-based – a very liberal implementation of D&D rules – we set out to face whatever challenges Bubbles prepared for us. At first, it was a walk in the park. Have our rogue disarm the traps we found, kill a couple of zombies, I didn't even have to heal anyone.
Then, when Bubbles had familiarized himself with the DM tools as much as we had familiarized ourselves with our characters, shit hit the fan. The monsters became tougher, in the next room there suddenly was a big boss monster way stronger than we had expected, and it was even supported by not-shitty henchcorpses. It was the first of many challenging fights, and I used my cleric abilities to keep my bros alive throughout this. We even had to pull back and regroup when our health got too low, but we managed to defeat the creature without dying. It was a fun, challenging fight that showed us the importance of teamwork in a game like this. We took a breather for a few moments, glad about our survival. At least the worst was over now, right?
Wrong. As soon as we stepped into the next room, we were beheld by a beholder that promptly attacked us. A hard fight ensued where everyone frantically tried to not die, while I tried to help them as well as I could with my clerical healing abilities. Abilities with a cooldown that lasted way too long. As if it wasn't bad enough, the beholder was soon joined by a vampire. Many exclamations of "What!?", "Oh God!" and "Holy shit!" were uttered by the desperate players, who pulled away before they died. Well, one of them did – the others died, including me. This was the point where the devs explained to us how resurrection potions work. It's not over when you die – you have items that can resurrect you. There's only a limited amount of these, though, so death didn't come without consequence. We resurrected ourselves, regrouped, and went back into the fray, this time with more preparation and coordination. When we killed the beholder and the vampire without being killed ourselves, the feeling of triumph was palpable: you could feel the atmosphere of "HAH! We showed you, you nasty old Dungeon Master!" in the air. Bubbles was the kind of nasty DM that throws big challenges at you, and that's what made this session fun. That feeling of triumph when you prevail after an almost-full-party wipe is what makes dungeon crawls so great.
I hadn't expected much from this, but I had a lot of fun with this session of co-op dungeon crawling, which was mostly due to Bubbles' style of DM'ing. He threw varied challenges at us, from traps to overpowered boss monsters, and forced us to play as a team to prevail. The only bad thing about this: a tiny little glowing light moving through the level alerted us to his whereabouts, so we always knew when he was directly involving himself in a combat to make it harder. Rather than wondering what lurks around the next corner, we always knew trouble was coming when that little sprite of light flitted about on our screens. "Oh shit, there's the DM again! He's probably putting traps down, let's go into search mode!" I think it would be even more intense when you couldn't see where your DM was putting his attention. This way, the surprise is often ruined because you know your DM is up to something nasty when he's hovering over your party.
I couldn't help but think that this might be even more fun if it were turn based, like an accurate translation of D&D rules to the computer, but the RTwP of this game is one of the better RTwP systems I've played. Maybe even on par with the IE games. I have no idea whether the single player campaign will be any good, or whether there'll be an editor that allows the community to create modding masterpieces like "A Dance With Rogues" for NWN, but the multiplayer dungeon crawling has the potential to be fun – as long as the DM knows what he's doing. If we had been facing tons of trash mobs rather than challenging enemies that almost managed to wipe us, it would've been a boring slog. The game seems to offer enough tools for the DM to make it fun, though, so this is the kind of game you want to play with your friends, or at least with a group of people who know how to go about a classic dungeon crawl adventure.
Bubbles: I was a little surprised by the fact that me and Jarl had both enjoyed Sword Coast Legends. Could this really be the best game we'd see on Wednesday? But we had more interview coming up, and it was sure to be a great one."
So wait. Resurrection potions? How exactly does THAT work? LOL.
Seriously, that was a wall of text. I skimmed and it looked like both commentators had fun. But I don't know that there's a lot of information about the game there. Am I wrong?
Comments
I wonder, if this topic is one of the most mergeable on these boards...
Not that I am an elitist or anything, I own 4 consoles myself. Just that you got to choose from 4 playable pre-made characters of the flavor of 'Fighter', 'rogue', 'wizard' and 'archer' (I think, it's been a while) and you got stock abilities on level up. Imagine Diablo, only a lot simpler. Which for consoles of the day it was pretty much standard.
https://forums.swordcoast.com/index.php?/topic/2189-sword-coast-legends-localization/
But this is digressing into complete off-topic, and I'm seeing name-calling, so let's blow the whistle and cut this out now, before it gets any worse.
I speak English. I come from England. I ONLY speak English. Does that make me better or worse educated than someone who speaks four languages, none of which are English?
Anyway, I do not understand why people need to debate about localizations.
If you want to play SCL in English, you can.
If you want to play SCL in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian and Japanese, you can.
We should avoid pointless discussions like this and speak about the game itself or other important topics. I will give you a hint:
[SPOILER]Trent Oster's arms[/SPOILER]
Why not mandarin? Because it's the hardest language on earth to learn, that's why. You will NEVER learn to speak proper mandarin, no matter how much you try.
"This was one of our most anticipated presentations of the trade fair, simply because the game had been so controversial on the Codex. Half of our community had been vehemently opposed to the game's shoehorning of the D&D 5th edition rules into a cooldown-based combat system, while the other half were eager to get hyped for absolutely anything with a D&D license attached to it. We were thus under an enormous amount of pressure to do right by our audience, and to provide a fair and balanced look at the game.
We were greeted by n-Space's Tim Schwalk, the game's design director, and Ash Sevilla of Nerd Appropriate fame, who was also working part-time as SCL's Community Manager. Together with three other journalists, we were herded into a small hands-on booth. Our gracious hosts positioned themselves in the middle of the room, gave us a hearty welcome, and announced that we had a special guest: n-Space's CEO Dan O'Leary himself had taken the time to observe our presentation! In response, we heard a grunt coming from the entrance door. O'Leary was a large man with a big bushy beard, and he was in a foul mood. The man's breathing was slow and laboured, and his belt was at least two sizes too tight. His beard was an unkempt mess of brown and grey, with a few dark red strands twirling around his mouth. I studied his savage features; his gaze met mine. In that instant, I knew that Dan O'Leary hated me, that he hated Jarl (that part didn't shock me so much), that he hated the Codex, and that he knew about everything that we had done and all that we were about to do. I averted my gaze and took a seat at one of the hands-on PCs. The screen was showing a wizard holding a fancy wooden staff. A wizard! How cool was that?! I'd always loved wizards. This was going to be a totally mellow presentation. Nothing was wrong.
The two presenters raised their voices and declared that today was a day for glorious co-op fun. Indeed, if you had hoped for any information about SCL's single player mode, its DLC model, or even a single Drizzt name drop, you would have been severely disappointed: the version of Sword Coast Legends we saw that day was a pure multiplayer experience, with a minor focus on the world editor. Tim began by starting up the editing tools and showing off the variety of environmental objects one could place in the world. There were small bookshelves and tall bookshelves, there were candles and candelabras, there were large rectangular red rugs and small quadratic green rugs. I liked the pretty colours. Dan switched to the character generation interface and showed us how to make pink ogres. I counted 40 possible colours. The presenters also demonstrated how to assign quest triggers with a simple, console friendly list interface: click on an NPC, click “Quest”, then “Quest Action”, then “Find X” [in this case, “Find Aston”], and then “On Speak.” This all happened on the fly, while Ash had a party of characters standing right next to the NPC. After Dan was finished with the edits, the party spoke to the NPC, and their journal got updated with the “Find Aston” objective. The simplicity was intriguing; the editor looked very easy to work with. Tim showed off how we could swiftly write our own dialogues and quest descriptors, and then switched to an outdoor scene. It was a sunny, calm day; all was right in the world. Ash's party was enjoying the weather. They looked happy. Then, Dan opened the Weather interface (another text-based list) and clicked on “rainstorm”. Suddenly, the light faded from the scene and everybody got drenched. Dan placed a dead horse on the nearby road and started to play around with it. I hadn't written down one bad thing in my notes yet. Content with the general state of the world, I leaned back, looked towards the ceiling, and once more came face to face with Dan O'Leary. I did not know how long he had been standing behind me, but now I was starting to be concerned for my well being.
Of course, the whole presentation also had a secret secondary purpose: to prepare one hapless journalist for taking over the role of dungeon master himself in the hands-on session. They would be writing quests on the fly, plonking down chests and traps, hiding and locking doors, and hand-tweaking enemy encounters to adjust their difficulty to the prowess of the group of players they'd been burdened with. Currently, the DM seat was occupied by a female journo, who had grown more and more worried as the presentation had progressed. Now, she was sweating bullets. “I… don't think I can do this.” she muttered. Worried, the presenters asked for a volunteer to take her seat. I had done my fair share of DMing back in the late 90s (using the vastly superior Dark Eye system), but normally I wasn't eager to waste my time trying to improvise a session for a bunch of Dorito munching nobodies. Now, however, I had a possibly very dangerous man hovering behind my back whom I was quite eager to get away from. I raised my hand and said “I'll be DM!” The poor woman sighed in misguided relief and switched seats with me.
What followed now was genuinely the most exhilarating half hour of my time at Gamescom. With the two presenters standing by my side, I embarked on a journey of on-the-fly dungeon redesign (mind you, the room layout itself is still not changeable by the player), laying down traps, hiding doors behind fake walls, promoting trash mobs to elite monsters in the middle of battle, and generally having a hell of a time. I had forgotten how much fun it was just to screw with people. At the urging of our hosts, I made a zombie merchant to sell my poor party some weapons; then I promoted him and turned him hostile just when the fighter was about to buy a cool axe. I took control of the dungeon's Beholder boss and charmed the most dangerous party members; then I dropped a Master Vampire just out of sight and starting saving up Threat points to promote him into a mini-boss while the Beholder battle was still going on. The DM Threat system is fairly simple; for every "success" of the party, from defeating enemies to disarming traps, the DM is awarded points to buy cool stuff with. You could buy anything from cheap, harmless traps to outrageously expensive super-monsters. The presenters were in awe of my point-saving prowess, remarking that virtually every other DM at Gamescom had just been splurging their points on the cheapest trash mobs as soon as they became available. I don't know if they were just sweet talking me, but saving up points was definitely a winning formula if you wanted to have fun; hearing the reactions of the party when the Master Vampire wandered into the Beholder fight made me feel like I had made all the right choices in my life.
When the party was about to wipe, I demoted the Vampire in mid-combat. You see, in SCL you lose Threat points for letting the party suffer a defeat; and if the DM has no points, the game becomes much easier for the party. Thus, you have to play a careful balancing act by trying to keep battles tough enough to be fun, but never so hard as to make the party pay the ultimate price – unless you want to say “screw the points” and just send the lousy fuckers to hell, of course. I, however, was in a magnificent mood, and thus I made sure that the last player would be able to finish off the Vampire with about 15% of their health remaining. Was that gamey and completely unrealistic? Absolutely. Did that bother me? It did not. After the run was over, the presenters were all smiles and praise for my exceptional DM performance, and slipped me their business cards the same way a middle-aged banker would slip his room number to a high class escort at the Sheraton bar. Even O'Leary appeared to be vaguely pleased with the goings on, his beard seeming more vibrant and less spiky than just minutes before. His power over me had vanished completely. Of course, I was not in the least bit swayed by all the adulation: I already had over four thousand brofists on the Codex, and I knew my worth very well.
Overall, I can honestly say that I had a good time with Sword Coast Legends, even though I certainly hadn't expected to have one. The fun simply crept up on me. The sheer amount of choices I had just for placing traps and chests, changing the difficulty check on locked and hidden doors to delay the party, and tweaking combat encounters on-the-fly kept me fully occupied throughout the hands-on. Thus, I never had a chance to write a neat side quest or, for example, give the zombie merchant some clever bit of dialogue to explain why he would go hostile. However, I certainly could have done that if I'd had a bit more experience with the UI and known exactly what was possible. I don't know if being a DM and torturing newbies will still be fun after 10 or 50 hours of gameplay, but for this brief 30 minute excursion, it was good enough to make me recommend the game. Mind you, this is not an endorsement of the single player campaign: the few snippets of the campaign's writing and area design that I've seen on the net have looked abjectly terrible. I wouldn't be surprised if n-Space's current focus on multiplayer presentations were based on a smart PR reaction to internal feedback; Sword Coast Legends in singleplayer really holds no appeal whatsoever, but Sword Coast Legends in multiplayer is truly, honestly, fun.
Or at least it's fun for the DM. Hey Jarl, what was your take on all this? If I remember correctly, you played a cleric.
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Jarl: To my shame I have to admit that I hadn't followed the discussion about this game here on the Codex, or anywhere else, really, so I went into this session of co-op dungeon crawling as a "blind" player. I knew this was a D&D game, I knew this was supposed to be the next Neverwinter Nights, and I knew this was based on the 5E ruleset. It all began with a presentation on the multiplayer part of the game – the single player was only mentioned, but didn't get any attention during this presentation. They showed off the DM tools, how easily you can add NPCs, give them quests, re-arrange the furniture, drop quest-relevant items and props into the landscape, and do pretty much anything you want unless what you want is changing the actual level architecture. Seeing all this "placing objects on a pre-generated dungeon map" foolery, I asked whether it's possible to add new rooms, or to change the layout of the place. Nope, you can't. They might add that later in a patch or DLC because this feature has been heavily requested by fans, but right now they're focusing on perfecting the DM tools as they are, without adding new features. Well, no powerful mod tools that allow the creation of modules rivalling those made for the Neverwinter Nights games, then.
After the presentation, we could play a hands-on dungeon crawl with one of the journalists DMing and the others playing as pre-generated characters. Before the presentation had started, they already hinted that someone will be able to play as DM. But now, when it actually came to taking that position, nobody came forward to do it. The journalists were afraid this was beyond their capabilities. So, of course, the Codex jumped in and offered its experience in being horribly unfair: Bubbles sat down in front of the designated Dungeon Master's computer and prepared to give us hell. It took a while to familiarize ourselves with our characters' abilities, and Bubbles used that time to place traps for us to stumble into. After a minute of getting to know our abilities, which were cooldown-based – a very liberal implementation of D&D rules – we set out to face whatever challenges Bubbles prepared for us. At first, it was a walk in the park. Have our rogue disarm the traps we found, kill a couple of zombies, I didn't even have to heal anyone.
Then, when Bubbles had familiarized himself with the DM tools as much as we had familiarized ourselves with our characters, shit hit the fan. The monsters became tougher, in the next room there suddenly was a big boss monster way stronger than we had expected, and it was even supported by not-shitty henchcorpses. It was the first of many challenging fights, and I used my cleric abilities to keep my bros alive throughout this. We even had to pull back and regroup when our health got too low, but we managed to defeat the creature without dying. It was a fun, challenging fight that showed us the importance of teamwork in a game like this. We took a breather for a few moments, glad about our survival. At least the worst was over now, right?
Wrong. As soon as we stepped into the next room, we were beheld by a beholder that promptly attacked us. A hard fight ensued where everyone frantically tried to not die, while I tried to help them as well as I could with my clerical healing abilities. Abilities with a cooldown that lasted way too long. As if it wasn't bad enough, the beholder was soon joined by a vampire. Many exclamations of "What!?", "Oh God!" and "Holy shit!" were uttered by the desperate players, who pulled away before they died. Well, one of them did – the others died, including me. This was the point where the devs explained to us how resurrection potions work. It's not over when you die – you have items that can resurrect you. There's only a limited amount of these, though, so death didn't come without consequence. We resurrected ourselves, regrouped, and went back into the fray, this time with more preparation and coordination. When we killed the beholder and the vampire without being killed ourselves, the feeling of triumph was palpable: you could feel the atmosphere of "HAH! We showed you, you nasty old Dungeon Master!" in the air. Bubbles was the kind of nasty DM that throws big challenges at you, and that's what made this session fun. That feeling of triumph when you prevail after an almost-full-party wipe is what makes dungeon crawls so great.
I hadn't expected much from this, but I had a lot of fun with this session of co-op dungeon crawling, which was mostly due to Bubbles' style of DM'ing. He threw varied challenges at us, from traps to overpowered boss monsters, and forced us to play as a team to prevail. The only bad thing about this: a tiny little glowing light moving through the level alerted us to his whereabouts, so we always knew when he was directly involving himself in a combat to make it harder. Rather than wondering what lurks around the next corner, we always knew trouble was coming when that little sprite of light flitted about on our screens. "Oh shit, there's the DM again! He's probably putting traps down, let's go into search mode!" I think it would be even more intense when you couldn't see where your DM was putting his attention. This way, the surprise is often ruined because you know your DM is up to something nasty when he's hovering over your party.
I couldn't help but think that this might be even more fun if it were turn based, like an accurate translation of D&D rules to the computer, but the RTwP of this game is one of the better RTwP systems I've played. Maybe even on par with the IE games. I have no idea whether the single player campaign will be any good, or whether there'll be an editor that allows the community to create modding masterpieces like "A Dance With Rogues" for NWN, but the multiplayer dungeon crawling has the potential to be fun – as long as the DM knows what he's doing. If we had been facing tons of trash mobs rather than challenging enemies that almost managed to wipe us, it would've been a boring slog. The game seems to offer enough tools for the DM to make it fun, though, so this is the kind of game you want to play with your friends, or at least with a group of people who know how to go about a classic dungeon crawl adventure.
Bubbles: I was a little surprised by the fact that me and Jarl had both enjoyed Sword Coast Legends. Could this really be the best game we'd see on Wednesday? But we had more interview coming up, and it was sure to be a great one."
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10056
Seriously, that was a wall of text. I skimmed and it looked like both commentators had fun. But I don't know that there's a lot of information about the game there. Am I wrong?