![]() ![]() There’s also drop-in, drop-out multiplayer that works consistently, which helps break the monotony. After trudging through the campaign, I played with the creation tools. I finished in about 25 hours, which felt too long by half. You’ll have plenty to do if you want to finish all of the side-quests and find all sorts of fancy loot, but the core combat isn’t compelling enough to warrant a replay. Hommet, the cordial, sarcastic Necromancer, is a highlight. Plot beats are predictable, but the cast of characters are entertaining enough to keep you going. ![]() Your character is a member of guild that’s been plagued with bad dreams, and you’ll battle monsters and demons across Faerûn and the Underdark. The single-player campaign isn’t especially exciting, but the story is serviceable. ![]() Did we really have to do the “turn off a 3×3 grid of lights” puzzle again? No! No! These are never fun, just time-consuming. Usually you’re just matching runes to open doors, though there are a couple of tricky segments. If you’re really lucky, said puzzle will make you think for fifteen seconds. If you’re lucky, you might have to solve a puzzle. Most dungeons go on like this: your rogue searches ahead for traps and secret doors, you eventually encounter enemies, and you kill them with monotonous MMO-style combat. You can set it up to be a more tactical game by setting up different pause rules (such as pausing after every attack, or when a character dies), but since every enemy seems to have too many hit points, that doesn’t feel much better. I generally don’t mind slower combat but this could have been fairly titled Cooldown: The Game since you never have much more to do than wait for powerful attacks to be ready again. ![]() It falls somewhere in between the turn-based combat of Divinity: Original Sin and the instant gratification of Diablo. These abilities are used in an isometric, real-time combat system that feels like a somersault through tar. Once you get past your race and class, you’ll choose your abilities from skill trees that don’t match up with what you can choose in the pen-and-paper game. For now, upcoming DLC will be free, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see future races and classes for sale. Tieflings are confirmed to be coming soon, but this piecemeal distribution feels seedy. Likewise, only 6 out of 12 character classes are available. This feels even seedier when one of the first NPCs you meet in the single-player campaign is a Tiefling, one of the races that you can’t choose. There are only 5 available races at launch, as opposed to the 9 that are in the Player’s Handbook (12 if we count the races added in the Elemental Evil Player’s Guide). Even as you start creating a character, it feels like half of the game is missing. Instead, there’s an uncomfortable content divide. It would be difficult to achieve, but if traditional D&D and Sword Coast Legends offered even a semblance of parity, people would be willing to forgo the magic of an evening’s revelry with real friends in exchange for the convenience of playing online. This leaves an opportunity for n-Space to both attract new fans and provide old fans with the oft-dreamed of digital stomping ground. Dungeons & Dragons‘ 5th edition came out last year and has remained hugely popular since then. Let’s skip past the initiative roll and go straight to the most baffling decision n-Space made. And you like old cRPG games, right? We’re even going to throw in a single-player campaign to bring back those memories.”Īnd it does bring back those memories! Sword Coast Legends finds every way it can to make you wish to return to those older, better games. “We’re going to translate that into a digital format, so that you can keep your players with you even when their schedules don’t allow. “That 5th edition D&D that you love Dungon Mastering for your players?” n-Space asks, churning the pot with its over-sized ladle. The elevator pitch for Sword Coast Legends was concocted in a cauldron specifically to make the Zack Furnisses of the world greedily salivate. ![]()
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