Dull combat and a weak dungeon creator spoil the fun of the latest D&D CRPG.
By Leif Johnson
Tacking a loaded word like “legends” on the title of any game is a risky prospect, but Sword Coast Legends really shot itself in the foot. After all, it’s set in the renowned Forgotten Realms universe of Dungeons & Dragons, the same one that spawned near-legendary cRPGs like Baldur’s Gate II and Neverwinter Nights. And that’s why it’s such a letdown. It clearly knows the lore and it sprinkles its roughly 30-hour campaign with a cascade of in-jokes, but squanders that legacy on unfulfilling combat and a weak dungeon master mode.
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I can’t deny I enjoyed the overarching story, which follows a guild of adventurers as they try to find out why everyone’s out to kill them. The voice acting, while serviceable, occasionally leaves an aftertaste reminiscent of a daytime soap opera with its unpolished delivery, and the repetitive kill ‘n’ fetch quests venture too frequently into cliché, but I nevertheless admired the way Sword Coast Legends sprinkles a bit of humor into its proceedings in stark contrast to the dour musings of a game like Pillars of Eternity.
…avoids real choice and the need for careful decisions at almost every turn.
In its best moments, even with the inevitable over-familiarity that comes with the Forgotten Realms’ now-generic setting, it pulls the right strings. I laughed early on when I learned that an angry halfling ally had slaughtered an entire den of bad guys ahead of the main party; I winced a little when I saw the end that brashness led him to. Little nuggets of appeal gleam from the rough elsewhere, as in the case of the loyalty quests for adventurers you pick up along the way.
It’s often a wonder aesthetically as well, as in Dragon Age and Fallout composer Inon Zur’s haunting score, or in the beautifully rendered maps that strike a nice balance between nostalgia and contemporary tastes. On the flip side, character models often look awful.
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The trouble with Sword Coast Legends’ story — as with so many other things about it — lies in how it’s handled. It avoids real choice and the need for careful decisions at almost every turn. It features conversation trees, but they usually only provide more lore or alternate means of accomplishing the exact same tasks if you have an abundance of a particular stat like Charisma or Strength, instead of accessing any new content. Likewise, I initially admired the way Sword Coast Legends lets you communicate with the characters you have to leave out of your four-man parties with the help of a speaking stone of sorts, until I realized that this, too, robs it of some of the tension of deciding whom to bring along for fear of losing their insights.
All of this might have been acceptable disappointment had the combat filled in some of the blanks left by the campaign. That’s where Sword Coast Legends’ greatest hope for longevity was, as it features four-player drop-in, drop-out Dungeon Crawls and a Dungeon Master mode that theoretically lets you craft your own campaigns. In practice, it falls even shorter. The rules at play here technically derive from D&D’s fifth edition, but Sword Coast Legends makes massive departures from that legacy by implementing enemy scaling and ditching D&D standbys like resting and skill books for mage classes, out of what appears to be an overemphasis on accessibility. In action, it plays something like a halfway point between the frantic action of Diablo III and the pause-heavy tactics of Pillars of Eternity.
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As it turns out, that’s not a good place to be. You can pause (unless disabled in multiplayer Dungeon Crawls, as it is by default), but the strategies you find in Sword Coast Legends are so simple that it’s only necessary in tight spots. Abilities are few and chosen from short skill trees (with most of the branches merely amounting to more powerful versions of previous spells), and cooldowns are many. In the field, that leads to big spurts of violence from two or three abilities, followed by sloggy waits while the hero doles out tedious autoattacks in preparation for the next cooldown to finish. Sometimes the enemy’s already dead by the time that happens. It’s a setup that grows boring fast, and it doesn’t help that some enemies have massive health pools that get even deeper on higher difficulties. In frustration, I eventually just cranked it down to Easy mode — not because it was hard, but because it was boring and I wanted it to end sooner.
I eventually just cranked it down to Easy mode — not because it was hard, but because it was boring.
Hard mode isn’t so much as challenging as it is annoying. Every single battle eventually devolves into simple hack ‘n’ slash attrition, and considering that every class has easy access to powerful self-heals, it’s not always necessary to bring along the classic balanced team of tank, healers, and damage dealers. I admire the focus on action — it’s such a break from the careful, plodding progression of Pillars — but barely an hour went by before I started wondering if developer n_Space shouldn’t have just gone whole-hog and mimicked Diablo.
I’m not alone. I found I had far more fun in Sword Coast Legends’ drop-in, drop-out multiplayer Dungeon Crawl mode than in the campaign as far as combat goes, but even there I noticed other players had a tendency to set their sessions to Easy or Normal as well.
A robust Dungeon Master mode for user-generated content possibly could have alleviated these concerns, but Sword Coast Legends fails at this, too. On the one hand, its editor is certainly a model of intuitive simplicity. I’m one of those people who was intimidated by Neverwinter Nights’ popular module creator back in 2002, but I could see my younger self using Sword Coast Legends’ creator to make a serviceable dungeon in a matter of minutes.
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I’m having trouble remembering Sword Coast Legends’ dungeons a mere eight hours after playing one.
The problem here is that there’s not much you can do with it besides generate the same boring kill-and-fetch quests that make up the campaign. You can customize the look and actions of certain monsters, but it’s always stuff you would have seen in the campaign proper. As a result, all the currently listed player-created dungeons have an unfortunate samey flavor. It’s a problem that player-generated dungeons in Cryptic’s D&D MMORPG Neverwinter struggle with as well, but at least there the missions have the benefit of fun combat and more customizable zones. I still remember some of Neverwinter’s player dungeons fondly; I’m having trouble remembering specific details of those from Sword Coast Legends a mere eight hours after I last played one.
Other annoyances include a default but changeable setting that makes characters constantly yell out things like “Okay!” with every movement, and occasional overlaps of on-screen interface elements that make it difficult to click on loot acceptance menus.
On the whole, Sword Coast Legends usually works, but that’s all I can say for it. There’s an obvious love for the lore on display, but there are no Minscs or Boos here; no thrilling battles where victory springs as much from brains as endurance. The great tragedy of Sword Coast Legends is that the last couple of years have all but paved the way for it to emerge as the best of the cRPG renaissance, but its dull cooldown-based combat, linear quests, and cookie-cutter user-made content ensure that it’s likely to be among the first to be forgotten.
