Decline Sword Coast Legends Pre-Release Thread

[Irenaeus II]

Are you playing?

 

[Bubbles]

Still betting on the off-chance of getting a review copy. Waste not, want not.

 

[Bubbles]

Release has been postponed to 5 PM EDT (99 minutes from now) to implement numerous additional features and improvements.

 

[Irenaeus II]

They have 92 minutes to implement 5e rules. And counting.

 

[Bubbles]

It's not impossible, there's a lot of people on the team.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

The few remaining faithful are getting restless. I'm thinking of posting some soothing comments there about the sheer incline that's about to hit, it's worth keeping things in perspective

I really love the communication style of this company so far. Instead of a community manager posting on the forums or twitter they all sly like change the time on some burried page on their website. Pretty messed up.

Ever since we found out how limited the DM tools were my faith in N-Space has been shaky. Stunts like this are a very slippery slope for them.

It's not about the delay, it's how they've handled everything recently including no responses for over a week about anything..

not to pile on here but I was on the steam community trying to sooth the savages there and then to have the link I posted to that community changed without notice left me with eggs on my face for trying to stop misinformation from being spread. Nice job gang, I apprecaiate the lesson and it was learned.

 

[Mustawd]

They have 92 minutes to implement 5e rules. And counting.

 

[Bubbles]

Story mode - all secrets revealed:

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Watched a cutscene with some fake choices. He chose no but was then forced down the yes path anyway. VD for the review please.

Some people are moaning that all the modules they've been working on have disappeared. In other news, one can start the "story" with characters of any level (some people have built up superpowered chars using dungeon crawls and modules).

I thought story mode would force me to use a 1st level character but it doesn't. I realize the game scales but is it recommend to start at level 1? Any thoughts? Thanks.

It's really up to what you want -- one of the positives of scaling is that it doesn't force you to start from scratch if you don't want to. But you certainly can if you'd like to see the full progression. I've done both (obviously ;p ) and I'm not sure which I like better. It's super fun to have a wider array of abilities, but there is something really awesome about starting out as a fresh-faced young adventurer, learning as you go. So... basically, I'm totally not being helpful.

Do what you think will be fun!

We've played multiple times with the same PC. The idea was to make sure the game had maximum replayability. Give it a shot and see how the gameplay feels before you dismiss it.

 

[Zdzisiu]

Story mode - all secrets revealed:

Ahahaha I started to watch the stream and the streaming pile of human excrements was already making excuses for the paid Beholders by saying that "Games stayed the same price for years, and the budgets got bigger, so they need to earn money somehow and Im ok with it".

Thats who is buying this kind of shitty games, and they are swallowing everything and asking for more.

 

[Xenich]

Saw this one coming a long time ago.

 

[prodigydancer]

paid Beholders

Wait, so they cut a staple DnD monster and made it a paid DLC or something? Gotta admire these guys - they're way ahead of the curve. EA, ActiBLizz and Ubisoft could learn from them.

Seriously though, everything about this game is most deliciously hilarious. From fanboys/shills on their forums to MMO-style UI and gfx from 10 years ago.

 

[Sacibengala]

Somebody wake me up when the pirates gets to the sword coast with my free copy, please.

 

[pippin]

In ten years, kobolds will be behind a paywall. FFS, men.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Looks like Bubbles will be doing his review playthrough in English:

Dont switch to german in headstart
If you switch to german in game Settings it will delete the game and you wont be able to start
if you switch back to english the game will be redownloaded

 

[vmar]

Tried the campaign for about 20 minutes, all the quests in the first area are generic boring fetch quests. Not really sure what I was expecting tbh

 

[ArchAngel]

Ahahaha I started to watch the stream and the streaming pile of human excrements was already making excuses for the paid Beholders by saying that "Games stayed the same price for years, and the budgets got bigger, so they need to earn money somehow and Im ok with it".

Thats who is buying this kind of shitty games, and they are swallowing everything and asking for more.

That was me complaining in chat about Beholders being behind a shitty paywall :D

 

[Bubbles]

The stream informed me that you can choose a [CHA] persuade option and then get a bad response because your skill was too low. Let's see if Fallout 4 offers that!

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

The stream informed me that you can choose a [CHA] persuade option and then get a bad response because your skill was too low. Let's see if Fallout 4 offers that!

Meh. Better than PoE or SR games. I guess that's something.

 

[Reinhardt]

Meh. Better than PoE or SR games. I guess that's something.

In PoE you can choose to save hostage with athletics 1 and fail, because it needs to be 2 at least for success. So nothing new here.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

No, I wasn't implying fail states to skill checks were something new for the genre (very obviously not the case), I was simply being snarky, but I don't remember PoE having them. Guess they just didn't make an impression there.

 

[Shin]

Some guy with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder shoved this shit into my hands so don't judge me.

I started a new single player adventure and got ready to spend 50 minutes rolling dice (ok i didnt). Character creation gives you the choice between 6 classes and 5 races, I chose a human wizard and chose some shit that gave me +1 int as background. Slid some sliders left and right to make a retarded looking bearded man, put difficulty on hard and started out. Game drops you off in some guild hall which is under attack by unknown assailants, you have to gather your friends and gtfo so it's kinda like NWN2 in that regard. The fog of war animation looks fucking annoying, first I thought my character was in some kind of dream/trance state, screenshots don't do it justice because it keeps fucking shimmering. Also couldn't find a way to get my mouse to scroll when getting to the edge of the screen so I had to use keys to scroll around.

Got outside the first area, found some scrolls (Melfs Acid Arrow), can't fucking put 'em in my spellbook. Guess I don't even have a spellbook. Fuck. Story so far is full of tropes and cliches, every other npc wants you to help him find their daughter/save their dog/talk to some asshole etc. Sexy elf girl is there, grumpy scottish dwarf is there. The main character is having nightmares of demons and blabla, you're also part of a mystic order from ancient times blabla. Dialog is also very... dull but usually quite brief as well (especially after playing the shit outta AoD), the voice acting is of made-in-slovakia-indie game studio quality (except for the dwarf who sounds like every other dwarf in history of dwarf voice acting).

Playing some more and holy shit you get 3 ability points when you level up. Not that it really matter cause fuck me are the spells bland. I put my shit into mage armor and conjure animal because the rest of the spells were mainly single target damage spells and I already had the highest level magic missile (4) chosen at character creation (I know wtf right, some spells do have lvl restrictions, not sure why MM doesnt have it, it does have a whooping 30 second CDR). Normally I'd consider taking a point in a weapon proficiency, but since you can select some spells as a 'regular' attack (its called 'cantrip') this seems a waste. I'm currently shooting firebolts like it aint no thang, my cleric can do 'divine strike' as cantrip. I'm not sure why I'm playing this and am going to do something else.

TL;DR - it's about as bad as you think it is. As far as I could tell from the short hour I played, it's like they took a checklist of D&D tropes, looked at some RTwP games, watered it down so anyone who ever played World of Warcraft could understand it properly and called it a day. The lack of personality is my biggest non-mechanical gripe so far. The story/type of characters is kinda similar to NWN2 (which was also very bland imho) but at least there the dialogues were better written. Character system is totally butchered and cooldown-based spell system is fucking horrible.

 

[Night Goat]

Story so far is full of tropes and cliches, every other npc wants you to help him find their daughter/save their dog/talk to some asshole etc.

Literally every story is full of tropes, they're the building blocks that stories are made out of. Seems like a weird thing to complain about.

 

[Shin]

Literally every story is full of tropes, they're the building blocks that stories are made out of. Seems like a weird thing to complain about.

That probably my shitty english. Guess I meant just cliches. Just in the sense that there's so far everything story/setting wise has been seen a gazillion times before in other games/media products. It's like when I was a kid I read 'the Belgariad' books and thought they were the most epic piece of literature ever conceived by mankind, fast forward some years and I realize that was only because I hadn't read that much books. This might be the perfect game to introduce RTwP games to ones 11 year old nephew.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Every now and then an innovative game comes along which challenges our assumptions and refreshes a tired genre. We're used to seeing complaints about trash mobs of orcs and kobolds in DnD games. So why not get rid of them entirely?

https://forums.swordcoast.com/index.php?/topic/6311-no-orks-or-kobolds-seriously/

I get the feeling that the testing for the DM toolkit scenery and mobs is well behind schedule and the whole spoiler excuse was merely that... an excuse.

No orcs and kobolds is pretty pathetic really. N-Space we've been pretty patient and fervent fanbois, but your absentee method of communication is getting the better of your brand..