My Sword Coast Legends First Impressions

I grabbed the head start for the upcoming D&D videogame from n-Space last night (the actual release is this coming week) and played it for an hour or so. Overall, I enjoyed it. My system isn't quite up to it, being 7 years old now, so the experience was a bit jerky, but I coped. I really need to upgrade! So, first impression: this is Neverwinter Nights. It looks like NWN in terms of interface and general view (that familiar 3D isometric view). It sounds like NWN. It feels like NWN. The gameplay and plotting feels like NWN. While playing the single player campaign, I could totally believe I was playing NWN.

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I've only tried the single player campaign stuff so far.

Character creation is D&D-ish, but adapted for the format. That's fine by me. I'd have preferred a more direct conversion of the tabletop rules, but it's not a problem. It's quick - choose race, class, background, allocate ability scores, pick some feat/skill type things. It takes a couple of minutes, plus however long you want to spend customizing appearance and voice. The feats/skills are where it really differs from the tabletop game -- it's a branching tree of abilities you purchase with skill points. I had 3 points to spend, and went for Charge I, Charge II, and Charge III for my fighter character.

The biggest issue I had was that it took me ages to realise you could move the viewpoint via WASD. My guys kept moving to the edge of the screen and I couldn't see any further. Once I realised that, it was easy.

So the game - I woke up in a tavern bedroom in a dream sequence. The tavern was on fire. Brief conversation with some allies who said to meet them downstairs. Wandered around upstairs a bit, found some clothes/armor/weapon, went downstairs. Solves a super-easy problem to open a secret basement entrance, went down there, fought some bad knights, met a demon, fade to black.

Then the game started properly. I was guarding a caravan. Wandered round doing the usual talking to everyone and picking up the expected quests - get some mushrooms for one woman, find this guy's brother, get a bit of backstory from this guy, etc. I always struggle with game dialogues which try to give you info about the plot or region, because it's not usually very interesting.

One mild curiosity was the sheer amount of loot just lying around in crates and bags around the caravan camp. Nobody seemed to mind me helping myself, so I grabbed a pile of potions and other stuff. Plus some better armor, weapon, helm, boots, etc.

That's as far as I got. It was late! Overall, if you like the NWN single player stuff, you'll like this, though it is only a brief first impression. I haven't tried the DM stuff, though I hear a rumour those tools are "robust".

 

[Tyranthraxus]

I played about Half an Hour this morning before going into work. Only single player mind you and I replicated my Human (future Necromancer) that I created for Adventurers League Season 1. Character creation process was okay.

You started off in some hazy dream sequence and everyones voices sounded very.. distorted and Demonic. I had a few battles and found myself tapping pause a lot, got setup with some NPC buddies and met some dude on a bridge. Graphically it seemed okay.. although I noticed when I alt tabbed out a lot of my already open programs were very sluggish and slow and then in the final battle my full screen experience because a windowed experience for some reason.

 

[pukunui]

I impulsively got the basic pre-order with the free access to the Rage of Demons DLC yesterday. Downloaded the game today. Played for about 45 minutes, or so it tells me. Can't say I was particularly impressed. The game was choppy and slow, although that was probably because my PC is old and only just meets the minimum reqs.

The characters are kinda ugly when viewed up close in the character creation sequence - and I felt like there weren't enough options in terms of hair and eye colors, hair styles, and so on.

I wasn't impressed with the dream sequence "tutorial". It didn't really feel like a tutorial. It just felt like a random opening sequence with tooltips. Most of the time I was able to anticipate what I was supposed to do before the tooltip popped up, as well.

I was even less impressed with the UI. Moving the camera around is somewhat unintuitive and clunky. I also don't like the "fade to black" before speaking with an NPC thing. What's up with that?

It's a pity they won't do refunds.

 

[Pssthpok]

I'm glad I held off on buying this. If it's not using the 5E rules, then it's not what was advertised.

 

[Tyranthraxus]

I couldnt work out via the Steam purchase page what the difference was between the Deluxe version and the standard version (which I bought). Can anyone tell me?

 

[psimon85]

I couldnt work out via the Steam purchase page what the difference was between the Deluxe version and the standard version (which I bought). Can anyone tell me?

The deluxe version includes these following items:
Tome of Knowledge, Order of the Burning Dawn Cloak, Armor and Weapons, Beholder (DM use), Lost Mines dungeon tile set (DM use), Wisps (DM use cursors), Hero Forum Badge, DM Forum Badge, Game Soundtrack (Digital)

Hope this helps

 

[Ricochet]

Sorry I can't agree with "take it for what it is" not when they branded it as a D&D game with the 5th ed ruleset. There are too many thing missing for it to be either of those things which were massive selling points!

If they had put out as an independent action game fine, I'd have no issue with that. Infact the game is good and does the action thing well.

They seem to have the lore pretty down, but for me that's as far as the D&D experience goes. As for the 5th ed ruleset...I was hopeful during character creation, then I met the abilities selection. That felt like I had bricks tied to me and thrown in the sea.

It's a shame that it was, imo totally mismarketed as d&d with 5the ed rules. We couldn't the just say action game that WotC helped develop?!

Had a long piece here about how they aren't using the 5e terminology on the website, well... Oops! They actually do call it 5e on the official website. My bad.

I really don't know what people were expecting though. Even NWN was by no means strict 3e off the boat, with its real-time/pseudo-pause system and streamlined feat/combat trees. Only Temple of Elemental Evil was a strict rules conversion since 3e IIRC (a very good adaptation too). I might very well be wrong, mind you, but I just feel that people might be too optimistic-and-subsequently-irritated about this game because of some image that it was never painted as by the developers. Yes, 5e heavily inspired the rules in the form of classes, races and whatnot, and D&D is the setting, but that's as far as this game is D&D and I for one never expected different. Maybe I'm too cynical about these things having reviewed videogames for a decade several years ago.

Anyway, this game looks interesting regardless of the rules it uses in my opinion, and I think we will be seeing numerous expansions to it no matter how the crossover tabletop audience responds because they are ultimately not the bread and butter for this project - even though the crossover potential does seem wasted somewhat by the poor rules adaptation, I will strongly agree.

 

[dracomilan]

I'm usually the DM of my group, so I use CRPGs to play D&D characters in interesting campaigns. This game lacks the first part of the equation (no-D&D ruleset) so it's not for me.
No hard feelings, anyway.

 

[JValeur]

Zaruthustran - I'm fairly certain I've seen far larger numbers than 50.000 for the PHB sales. I think 500.000 would be closer to the real number, and some groups (including my own of 7 people) have only 1 PHB. There's plenty of sales to be made by D&D'ing it up.

Besides, the way they would make money out of SCL (and might still), is to deliver a story mode and a world builder. Then you can expand on the story mode (or the player side of things) with not-so-often DLC's or expansions that bring new classes, races and feats, and expand on the world builder with a more continous stream of micro-transactions or small DLCs. If this game had played closer to a pretty NWN2 with D&D 5E rules, my group would have been all over it, and I would have gladly shelled out 5 bucks once in a while to buy the 'Goblin Hordes' or 'Waterdeep Intrigue' tiles and placeables DLCs. If you make aRPGS you better make them +AAA (like D3) or you should stick to making cRPG to focused groups of players that you KNOW are going to pay out. Like the D&D crowd.

Honestly, if you have that D&D sticker on your game, you're BOUND to make the first 50,000 sales. Anything less on launch day is a failure (which is what we're seeing). They should've catered to the customer group that was delivered to them for virtually zero cost of marketing, made a game that was closer to the rules (as they advertised it) and they would've been loved and successful.

As it is now, this game is getting slaughtered in reviews, and for good reason. They catered to a group of customers with trigger words like 'D&D 5E Rules' and 'Baldur's Gate' and 'tabletop experience' and then delivered this watered down Dragon Age and Diablo abomination.

By the way, Morrus, for the sake of transparency - and not to be crass - are they paying you to advertise the game on the front page? Just curious - there's nothing wrong in paid reviews, but I would like to know if there's any bias.

 

[IgnatiusJ.Reilly]

I played about Half an Hour this morning before going into work. Only single player mind you and I replicated my Human (future Necromancer) that I created for Adventurers League Season 1. Character creation process was okay.

I hate to disappoint you, but the Necromancy 'tree' is not open to PCs. One of the NPC companions has access to the tree however, it replaces the NPC's 'Frost' tree in the wizard class ability trees. They've got an Arcane, Fire, Lightning, Frost, Summoner, and Manipulator tree that you can choose spells from. There's no real sub-classes for PCs actually. The Evoker's Overchannel ability is the only ability from the wizard sub-classes that made it into the game unfortunately.

 

[Reinhart]

They should've catered to the customer group that was delivered to them for virtually zero cost of marketing, made a game that was closer to the rules (as they advertised it) and they would've been loved and successful.

That marketing wasn't zero cost though. Digital Extremes definitely paid Hasbro (through WotC) to license the D&D brand for this game. And Hasbro made that brand prohibitively expensive for many studios to license. Which makes this all the more serious an error. They went out of their way and spent a lot of time and money to court the D&D fans, but set an expectation different from what they were delivering.

And for the other people saying that NWN wasn't that faithful? Compared to SCL, NWN was almost a virtual PHB. If a player learned about D&D from NWN, they could easily recreate their character using the D&D 3.0 table-top rules. They would find they had the same selection of races, same skill bonuses, same saves, similar hit-points, class features, and selection of feats. It certainly adapted, but actually quite conservatively. And where it did differ, as far as skills like Discipline, and Parry? That was because NWN was in development at the same time as D&D 3e and so they were working with an evolving set of rules.

In truth, SCL had a similar problem: It had to begin its development before 5e was released. But it sounds like the license agreement wasn't hammered out until last year. That means it happened after the game was half completed and 5e was about to hit the shelves. They weren't building their game off of 5e, they were paying for permission to use D&D's name and copyrighted IP such as the Forgotten Realms and the various names of D&D spells.

That's all fine and good, if they'd just been up front about what the game really was. I'm not saying they needed to explain that it *wasn't* based on 5e. They just shouldn't have presented it as the "first ever" "most authentic" conversion of the D&D experience to computers since Baldur's Gate. That's why people expected it to be Neverwinter Nights 3 and were disappointed.