The Verdict
What you get out of Sword Coast Legends entirely depends on what you expect from it. Hardcore D&D fans have been longing for the perfect digital realm to lay down the creations they have playing on pen and paper, and in that regard Sword Coast Legends (at least for now) falls short. Personally, I enjoyed the single player campaign, and getting to know the companions I was travelling with, but for some, the narrative and the characters may come off as cliched and “been done already”.
I can’t necessarily recommend Sword Coast Legends over the likes of Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin or Dragon Age: Origins, but you shouldn’t avoid the game either. Sword Coast Legends functions more as a second tier cRPG that scratches the itch, but doesn’t do anything to push the genre forward. At $39.99, this can seem a bit steep, but keep in mind that the game offers three major features as opposed to one or two.
The developers appear intent upon supporting the DM Maker mode post-launch, so it’s premature to say that the feature is a complete bust. If we’ve learned anything from the quality of community driven content, there’s bound to be some really good stuff in the near future.
The Positives
Pretty good character creator. D&D enthusiasts will probably bemoan a few missing classes and races, but you can get into the nitty gritty details of your character’s appearance. Eye color, brow depth, nose position; you know, all the things that you’ll probably never actually see, but the important thing is that you know they are there.
Sword Coast Legends does a great job of making your character(s) feel important to the overall experience since you can take them into any of the three modes, and carry over all the rewards that you earn from each one.
I really enjoyed the pause and plan mechanics, though admittedly this isn’t something new to the genre. I just felt that it made the combat engrossing enough to keep me wanting to find that next dungeon to loot.
All of the characters in the single player campaign are very well written. Though they have a few lines of cliched “empowering” dialog, namely in combat scenarios (IE: “They never learn, do they?!”), I was authentically intrigued by their backstories, and when their personal quests came around in Act II, they were some of the best in the entire game.
Piggy-backing off of the point above, I really enjoyed seeing the parallels between Sword Coast Legends and BioWare RPG design philosophy. In between major quests, you will find yourself at a secluded campsite that gives you the opportunity to really get to know the people you’re travelling with, by asking about their backgrounds or asking their opinions on tactics. Even while you’re on quests, your party members will occasionally banter with each other, which gives them an even greater sense of character.
Despite the fact that the game is very text-heavy, it never feels like it bogs down the experience, if anything it adds to it. It’s common knowledge that isometric RPGs have limitations when it comes to presentation but there’s just something special about getting those intimate details about an NPC’s demeanor or the thoughts that one of your characters has about an ancient relic that you just can’t get with games that rely purely on visual cues.
The Negatives
The DM maker is better on paper than it is in practice. You’re pretty much forced to use the pre-made assets that already exist in the main game, so what you create can end up looking and feeling very similar to content you’ve already experienced. The developers have said that they will continue to support the game post-launch, particularly the DM mode, but as it stands, the community is going to have to get really creative working within the module’s limitations.
I also found it pretty tough to test what I made without having other people to run through the dungeon with me. I kept wishing for a way to be able to run through my creation quickly with either an invincible or OP character just to see how my pacing was. Instead, I was left with a lone character against a horde of enemies that wound up killing me and sending me back to the beginning. It should be noted that the DM maker is meant to work with other people, but it would still be nice to be able to do it on your own.
The auto-save function can be hit or miss in the campaign. Granted an easy work around is simply to Quick Save, but it’s easy to get swept up in what you’re doing and if you die at any point, you can find yourself losing 15-20 minutes worth of progress at a time. Not a huge gripe, but something to keep in mind.
Your character’s background doesn’t seem to have an effect on anything in the narrative. Nobody acknowledges you for what you are, and dialog choices are only altered by your character’s innate statistics. So for example, I gave my character the background of a Gladiator and emphasized strength and charisma in his base stats, which were derived from the class I chose (Fighter). I would occasionally get added dialog options based upon these strengths, but nothing more than that. This isn’t something that completely breaks the experience but in thinking back to Dragon Age: Origins and how NPC’s would sometimes react to you based on your race or heritage, this is a bit of a letdown.
Pathfinding on your AI teammates can be a bit frustrating, particularly on ranged characters. On more than one occasion my wizard and ranger companions decided to charge into the middle of a cluster of melee enemies, and suffice it to say, they did not last long. This doesn’t happen in every encounter, and you can work around it by taking control of these companions, but not being able to trust them fully definitely can definitely throw a monkey wrench into your strategy.
Some of the quest design is not 100% straightforward. There was one occasion where I was exploring a crypt and I had to find 4 items in order to open a portal to the next area. As I traveled through the dungeon I gradually found some of the items, so naturally I assumed that if I found one in this dungeon, I would find them all. This did not end up being the case. As it turns out, I had to purchase one of the items from an NPC located in the area outside of the dungeon. It’s not that this particular quest was testing my mental capacity to its fullest, it’s more that it felt like the game was extending the time it took to complete the quest for no good reason.
When I first laid eyes on Sword Coast Legends, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. As someone who hasn’t dabbled much in Dungeons and Dragons, I had zero expectations for what the game would offer me. But now that I’ve had a chance to play it for quite some time, I think expectations are what will make or break this game for anybody who plays Sword Coast Legends.
Sword Coast Legends is a PC exclusive RPG set in Dungeons and Dragons’ world of Forgotten Realms and aims to deliver on a trio of features, a 30-40 hour Single Player quest, 1-4 player co-op dungeon crawling and a Dungeon Module Creator. It does two-thirds of this pretty well outside of a few annoyances, but the Dungeon Module Creator still seems to be a work-in-progress. The campaign features some good writing with believably flawed characters and the story is interesting enough, even if it is cliched, to keep you going.
You begin by creating a character from a number of typical classes (Fighter, Ranger, Wizard), races (Human, Elf, Dwarf) and backgrounds (Gladiator, Noble). Battles plays out as real-time turn-based combat encounters with pause and plan mechanics that feel very reminiscent of the PC version of Dragon Age: Origins. This makes sense given the fact that Dan Tudge, the Director on Dragon Age: Origins took on the same role for Sword Coast Legends, and there are a number of parallels to BioWare’s methodology in RPG Design.
Now we'll take a look at the positives and negatives of Sword Coast Legends.
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