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 5^th 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!

A 5e version of Neverwinter Nights sounds awesome. I'll keep my eye on this.

Yeah, this seems really interesting. I'll have to pay more attention when this gets an actual release date instead of just saying it's coming out in 2015.

I know. This came right out of no where. If the game provides modding tools like Neverwinter Nights did (Not Neverwinter Online), it'll be pretty big. I mean, take Neverwinter Nights and give it better graphics and updated D&D rules. How can you go wrong? Oh yeah. Neverwinter Nights 2...

Still, I'm quite curious about this game.

I just wish they could put out a D&D game that committed to turn based in the same way that the latest Divinity did. Although the original Baldur's Gate games were in theory based on turn based, I just didn't feel the same sort of tactical flow that I have in turn based stuff. The way combat has seemed structured since 4e seems like such an easy thing to implement and yet it looks like this won't be the game to do it.

I remain skeptical of this game, and will continue to remain skeptical until long after its release. We don't live in a world where this comes out and it's good--I don't remember the last good D&D licensed CRPG (Temple of Elemental Evil, maybe? Was that before or after Neverwinter Nights?), but I'm sure there have been several lousy ones released since whenever it was.

One of the things that I'll never understand was the complete lack of a well-received D&D game for the entirety of 4th Edition, which was basically the D&D: MMO ruleset. I guess Neverwinter has done pretty well for itself, but the fact that there's no XCom-like combat for a D&D game using 4th Ed is still just the weirdest thing.

I hope that this new one is basically Baldur's Gate with 5th Ed rules, because while I have a pretty good handle on 4th and 5th Edition, I never quite got my head around AD&D's ruleset.

Wait, these guys have the D&D rights? Awesome! Will check it out. Totally out of the loop when it comes to this game.

I hope its more story and character driven like Baldurs Gate. Though it looks and sounds more like Icewind Dale.

@ford_dent: TOEE was after NVN but before any of the expansions. Dark Alliance 2 and NVN2 were both pretty good and they came out after TOEE.

I love the original NWN so much. So much.

For some reason, NWN2 never did it for me. It was probably @rorie's fault.

My interest is piqued, but I remain unconvinced.

I'm down for some top-down old school CRPGs.

This looks promising , thanks for bringing this up!

Not to take anything away from the game or people who are excited for it, but Sword Coast Legends is perhaps one of the worst names for a game I have ever heard.

It is very generic, at the very least.

That said, I'm intrigued. From the trailer it looks they're aiming for the kind of experience Neverwinter Nights was going for with the DM and stuff. Could be really fun! Looking forward to more information.

@ajamafalous: I don't know how many times I had to go back and look up the name to this game while I was in the middle of writing this. It is the sort of title that doesn't stick in one's head at all. I kept calling it Tales of the Sword Coast.

Huh, that looks neat! I do miss casting Mordenkainen's Sword in BGII and Icewind Dale.

Well you know Pillars of Eternity comes out in like a month and a week right? Why don't we get excited for that instead ;p? Just saying.

@karkarov: Son, you know I backed the hell out of that game. I'm keeping on TOP of it.

*pushes glasses up nose* actually the sword coast is where the entirety of the original Bladur's Gate took place, not just the expansion.

(I'm so sorry)

I've been wanting to try a D&D based video game so this might be right up my alley if it turns out

I'm not going to hold my breath. WotC hasn't exactly had a stellar record for recent D&D video game products.