More on SWORD COAST LEGENDS: Campaign Tools & Starting Races

Some more information about Sword Coast Legends has emerged. MMORPG.com interviewed D&D's brand director, Nathan Stewart, and Dan Tudge, the president of n-Space (the video game company behind the upcoming game). They mention that the Neverwinter Nights comparisons are warranted and discuss DM tools, starting races, and other tidbits. (thanks to Jeremy for the scoop!)

One interesting quote from Tudge on the campaign tools is this: "The DM is fully capable of customizing experiences and significantly altering a player's adventure by changing encounters, placing traps, spawning monsters, creating quest NPCs, generating secret areas, locking doors -- all in real-time. We also have deep campaign tools that enable DMs to build near limitless campaigns for their players (more on that later!)." It's the last part that's really interesting.

Also of interest is Stewart's confirmation that "The Forgotten Realms is the universe that we at Wizards of the Coast are focusing our storytelling in for the foreseeable future", which may disappoint some hoping for adventures set elsewhere after Princes of the Apocalypse comes out.

Regarding the video game's content, Tudge says that "At launch, SCL features Dwarf, Elf, Half-Elf, Halfling, and Human races. Again, this decision comes down to our focus on quality and our team discipline with regard to scope. We are planning to release more races post-launch. I know I want to play a Half-Orc, my sons want to play Dragonborn and my wife a Teifling - so we can probably expect to see the Teifling soon after launch!"

You can read the full interview here, which includes some fascinating stuff about how "n-Space and Wizards of the Coast are very well aligned strategically". That's the more unusual, little known definition of "fascinating", of course.

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It's funny, all these years later and the 100 year time jump and slaughtering of NPCs still bothers me.

I maintain a smidge hope for a retcon or reboot one day.
 



I wonder how useful the creation kit will be for creating campaigns. Are we talking NWN/SR:R-scale toolkit? I hope so, but made easier for any gamer to wrap his head around. I don't know about you, but I'd like to see some persistent servers up and running like the old NWN days.
 

This bit has me apprehensive.
I've only played Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, but I know those games would have been massively better if they didn't use the D&D rules as literally as they did. Without a DM to enforce consequences, everything came down to nova-rest-nova-rest. Spellcasters were annoying and overpowered, fighters were boring and weak, and you had to quicksave before every single room because a vampire would jump out and level-drain your cleric, and there was no way to continue. I don't want to play a game like that ever again.

More evidence that this game will be a linear dungeon crawler and not a RPG many people expect it to be.
Unless there is a huge surprise with the "deep campaign tools" the DM will be limited to placing objects on already preexisting maps.
They say you can recreate the entire Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure with locations and NPCs, so it must be pretty deep.
 

In regards to keeping in the spirit of 5e, I hope they include concentration. It goes a long way in reducing the overpowering effect of spellcasters.
 


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