Sword Coast Legends is not D&D

[Rya.Reisender]

Anything other than a turn based game that asked basically every player before and after every action or reaction or interrupt if they want to use their interrupt or reaction

Exactly that. That works much better in a video game than in Pen&Paper.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hmmh, Pillars of Eternity for the BG experience, but does it offer NWN-like building as well?

Not as far as I know.

 

[Raloc]

I think the biggest problem right now is the hyper-limited Campaign Toolset. That said, N-Space has said they plan to update it with branching dialogue and larger text limits (right now you can only add text to an NPC via a "quest action - give, update, complete", and only 3-5 lines).

As for the mechanics, it plays more like D&D than Diablo by far - I suspect people who are saying it's "Diablo-like" haven't played Diablo in ages, and are misremembering how it worked. For one thing, you don't have click-per-attack like in Diablo and other ARPGs. Secondly, you can pause and even auto-pause every round, in multiplayer (and it works fine).

If they fix the toolset up some, I think it will be good fun for dungeon crawling and some medium-complexity campaigns. No, it won't be like having a v-tabletop with a rules engine, but I don't think that was ever on offer anyway.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

I'd say none of the video games are like real D&D. Even Baldur's Gate... the battle system alone makes it feels so much less like normal D&D. A real D&D game should be turn-based.

Temple of elemental Evil, and Pools of Radiance ~ Myth Drannor ARE turn based D&D CRPGs

and, of course, the Gold Box games

 

[Jester David]

I don't expect 100% accuracy. But they're really pitching it as the successor to Baldur's Gate and NWN, which did follow all the rules of D&D and *were* successful. BG1 helped make BioWare an industry name. That's certainly a proven market for that type of game. And SCL is a small game, it's not a AAA blockbuster that has to play safe. It can go niche.
And BG2/NWN came out after Diablo.

You can do a fun D&D hack-and-slash game. The two Dark Alliance games were a blast. I'd buy that... but that's not how they're selling the game.

It's certainly disappointing to hear that it's a Diablo clone with a veneer of D&D. It takes more than familiar names to make a game into a D&D game. That was pretty obvious from the Arena of War mobile game.

 

[ZickZak]

There is no pen-and-paper D&D for me because there is no one around here who plays it. In fact the last time I've got to play D&D was like twenty years ago with AD&D 2ed. Since then I haven't found anyone, so video games are my only valve of scape for my D&D cravings.

You can start your own game. Or a club with younger people, perhaps even kids. There are online "pen & paper" games held by many people over TeamSpeak / Skype.

 

[ppaladin123]

Yeah, this thing is MUCH less faithful to the ruleset than Baldur's Gate and NWN I &II were. We are not talking changes to make a turn-based PNP game work for a real time video game...those changes would be understandable. We are talking skill trees like old WoW. Wizards buy spells with skill points and then invest points in them to make them more powerful (no spell books). Clerics don't have domains or turn undead. There are no spell slots. Everything is an encounter style power with a cool down. It is only d&d in the sense that there are fantasy races and fantasy "classes" and it takes place in the FR. That doesn't mean it is bad, but it is not an adaptation of the 5e rules at all.

I expect people are going to have a similar reaction to the one fans of World War Z had when the movie came out...it's calling it D&D that will upset people, not the content per se.

 

[Dargrimm]

You can start your own game. Or a club with younger people, perhaps even kids. There are online "pen & paper" games held by many people over TeamSpeak / Skype.

Yes, I know. The problems is that I live in Japan and most of those games are with people from the USA or Canada. That makes joining one of those games quite difficult because we are in very different time zones...

Still I'd love to try someday.

 

[RedSiegfried]

But wasn't it proven by folks going through the game code that even the BG and NW games actually use a completely different random number calculation than an actual 1 to 20 for to-hit and saves, invalidating any claim the games were using the D&D rulesets?

I don't know about BG since that was 2E IIRC, but Neverwinter Nights definitely uses the d20 system - you can clearly see what the results of all your rolls are and see the game math at the bottom of the screen, though some argued that the random number generator was not as random as it could be, and as a result IIRC you had the ability to specify an alternative algorithm be used in the config file. Anyway, Neverwinter Nights fairly close to the 3.0 rules for a realtime game.

Now, if you were talking about Neverwinter, the MMORPG, I've played that a grand total of three times so I have no idea.

 

[RedSiegfried]

As far as this game goes though, I appreciate the ability to DM far more than was given in Neverwinter, but I would prefer it to be much closer to D&D rules. I still think that Neverwinter Nights is the best multiplayer D&D computer game experience out there when you factor in multiplayer capability, modability, and the full-featured DM client.

I'm not too interested in Sword Coast at this time. If I want to play multiplayer computer based D&D (and oh yeah, I can play with more than four other people) I'll just go back to 3.0 and play NWN.

In my dreams, for the perfect turn based experience, I'd love it if someone worked out a way to make Temple of Elemental Evil fully multiplayer. You'd have to rewrite the entire game almost from scratch though - even though there is some MP code in it, it was never meant to actually be used with the rest of the game engine.