What the hell is this? Where did this come from?
By VincentAvatar 19 Comments
This Week’s Game: Sword Coast Legends
Here’s something new for this space: I’m going to talk about a game that hasn’t released yet, isn’t in early access, and I only just stumbled across yesterday. A game that totally caught me off guard, and one that I might venture to say will owe a great debt to Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera if it succeeds. Why is that, you say? Well, I would submit that the aforementioned wildly successful Kickstarted games demonstrated that there is a healthy demand for what people seem to like calling “old school RPGs,” by which they mean Western RPGs, by which they mean “games that remind me of Baldur’s Gate.”
I’m talking, of course, about Sword Coast Legends. You all obviously know what I’m talking about, because the wiki page was created last Friday, so clearly we’ve all been in the know about this game and its development from its inception. Me, I know exactly as much information as is posted on their website, because I’ve not read a scrap of press about the game anywhere else. Even the forums have barely 1,000 messages – not topics, mind you, but topics and replies combined.
Apparently, a few well-seasoned industry veterans got together and made themselves an isometric-view RPG using the 5th Edition ruleset and based along the Sword Coast, a.k.a. that place that Baldur’s Gate expansion was set in. Have they pushed all your nostalgia buttons yet? The director of Dragon Age: Origins is attached, for what that’s worth. I don’t know what that’s worth, because my grasp of how much power a director has over the development of a game as monolithic as DA:O is tenuous at best. It seems pretty cool, though. There’s just not a whole lot of details in the wild about this game, which I usually interpret as “this game is going to be a budget title trainwreck that they’ll charge full price for.” On the other hand, I did enjoy the little time I spent farting around in the F2P MMO Neverwinter, so I could be convinced to hold out some hope for this game as well.
So this is the part where I mention the Dungeon Master Mode and how that intrigues me more than the rest of the game. It looks like – and please, remember that I’m guessing wildly here because there isn’t much to go on – a party of four can team up with a party of one who can edit the campaign on the fly by adding elements or changing around dungeons or… something? If it is a hyper-easy-to-use version of the Neverwinter Nights campaign building tools that can be edited in real-time, then I am pretty intrigued. I am also only too aware of my disastrous history with campaign editors (I’m really bad at them and I never take the time to learn the tools).
Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how this game fares, and if it continues to fly under the radar after release. It’d be nice to see someone give it a shot, maybe post some impressions or – dare I hope for such a thing? – a Quick Look of it.
Hey, you’ve been a great audience, did I mention I do a podcast? Well, I do, and you can listen to it every week (mostly). Shameless plug’s out of the way, so uh… hopefully I’ll write something for next week, maybe even about a game that I know stuff about!
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