But instead this appears to be a sub-Diablo brawler with incredibly clumsy combat, dreary presentation, and not a dice roll in sight.Ĭlearly this was only a brief glance, but it wasn't one that has given me any inclination to dig any deeper. During the promotion for the game I had gotten the impression this was going to be a means to run your own D&D campaigns with chums, online. "I was genuinely surprised by its strange, shoddy appearance. They've only played a fraction of what I have, but I think it's valuable to hear the perspective of folk who've purely had an adventure made for them - the apparent true purpose of Sword Coast Legends. The clicky, weightless combat and the 2000s MMO hotbar UI are just the dull grey icing on the bland, dry cake.Īt this point I'm going to open the floor to m'learned colleagues John and Graham, who were on the receiving end of my only slightly confused dungeon-mastering. Yeah, the archetypal high fantasy of the Forgotten Realms setting isn't the most fertile soil for wildness, but neither is it an impediment to it.Īdd to that the more nebulous but inescapable issue of combat feeling mechanical and perfunctory, and SCL's biggest problem isn't really that it doesn't feel sufficiently like an AD&D session - it's that it's simply an unexciting place in which to kill monsters in unexciting ways. It's not actually locked into the notorious greys and browns of 3D games from not so long ago, but it somehow feels like it is. It's neither lo-fi enough for imagination to augment simple sights, or fancy-pants enough to make the simple act of wandering around pleasurable or surprising. It doesn't help that, graphically, SCL falls into whatever the exact opposite of a sweet spot is. It's early days of course, but so far every user-made module I've tried has seemed pretty damned similar to the last one, primarily depending on how fiendish the creator is in terms of monster and trap placement. The trade-off for this is flexibility: I don't doubt that more ingenious modders will find ways to achieve more interesting things, but right now it seems unlikely that we'll get more than go here > kill or collect that with as much flavour text as the DM can be bothered with. I was able to knock together a rudimentary dungeon with a couple of functional quests and a boss in around 20 minutes given a couple of hours I could have gone to town on purple prose and consciously hardcore challenges. Where Neverwinter Nights, SCL's great inspiration, came with a fully-fledged and exceedingly complicated modding toolset, this game has a relatively easy, in-game UI into which you can pretty much just plop whatever you like. In theory, the key to Sword Coast Legends is its dungeon master mode, in which one player can do as much as design an area filled with quests and dungeons from scratch, or as little as teleport additional monsters in on the fly while the others stomp through pre-made challenges.
Part of me thinks I just need to keep fishing for some kernel of do-it-yourself goodness, but a larger part of me thinks that life's just too short. At its worst it's a dreary trudge through meatless fights in samey environments bordered by a sluggish UI. Even so, Sword Coast Legends pays mere lip service to D&D, taking up the Forgotten Realms setting and the foundational concepts of fights and rewards, but discarding the vital sense of chance and choice.Īt its best, it's a functional co-op dungeon-runner in a vaguely Diabloesque vein for one to four players. The world becomes known, inflexible, constrained by the comparatively few possibilities of screenspace and of clicking a button rather than conjuring places and people from words alone. The second that graphics are thrown into the mix, everything changes. The digital D&D dream might just be an impossible one, as the pen 'n' paper RPG is built upon imagination and conversation. The reality of Sword Coast Legends : not that, basically. A cackling dungeon master pulling strings, up to four heroes ganging up on monsters and squabbling over loot, amazing adventures which exist only for you.
The dream: remote D&D for far-flung or time-starved friends.
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