We had the great luck to test the Dungeons & Dragons game Sword Coast Legends. Digital Extremes and N-Space wanted to release a great RPG which includes classic Fantasy-Elements like Elves, dwarves, and a lot of magic. In addition to that they wanted to create a game that offers a lot of group tactics. This game includes a campaign and a mode in which you have a Dungeon Master. It is worth to enter the dungeons and to create your own adventures? Let’s find out.

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Sword Coast Legends starts like a classic RPG game: create your own character by choosing one of the many well known races and choose some of the known Dungeons & Dragons skills. After you chosen and configured your character you can start to play.

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We think that the game look great but the Art Design reminds us on a solid Online-RPG. What we like is that even if they did not have the best Artdesign it is possible to see clearly poison on blades or waving capes and the changes of weapons or equipment are displayed immediately. The level-design and the look of them are really great. We also love that it is possible to rotate them and zoom into the map. We also like that they included in this game a weather system and a day and night switch.

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Unfortunately, this game has not a really deep story that entertained us the whole time. The story is about the Burning Dawn, which has to which to protect a caravan on the way to Luskan. But the story starts with a nightmare which is also the game’s tutorial. After that the adventure starts.

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Unfortunately, we noticed that this campaign is built more as a Diablo than a Baldur’s Gate. The adventure looks after a few hours so predictable that we were afraid that this game will become boring quickly.

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On the one hand you will meet in this game some stereotypical characters, on the other hand you will get some companions that are very uninteresting and we could not get a connection to them.  You can get some informations about them by taking a look on their biography but you can not talk to them and get more details about who they are. We quickly get the feeling that this party event is more constrained than chooseable. We miss really interesting characters that has more influence on the game and are a more interesting level-tree. We miss the connection to our companions especially in moments in which they get killed.

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We hoped that Sword Coast Legends would offset the deficiencies in the story with the gameplay and the tactical opportunities. Players can choose between three difficulty levels. We also like that you can pause the fight to give explicit commands. We think that this pause function is not is necessary at the normal level, because almost everything almost is running automatically and enemies get burned and killed after another by clicking again and again on the skills and magic until the cooldown unlock it again. We noticed that unfortunately that the enemies awareness is not the best one. That makes it easy to attack them from a longer distance with to get any damage. We also noticed that you get so many potions, scrolls and other stuff that it is not hard to get through the game. We also think that unfortunately it is not necessary to change your position tactically if you get in trouble. It is enough to pause the game and choose as many magics and skills as you can. That means that you do not have to cat very clever.

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Each character has two weapons sets that you can activate as easy as your skills. That is the reason we see many flying heads and blood like in an arcade game and the game gets much too easy if you combinate your attacks. It is also possible to switch off the group-tactics. Unfortunately, it is not possible to give them comments like ‘take a healing potion’ known from games like Neverwinter Nights. That means that you have to be sure that every group member do the write thing.

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Unfortunately, you have to deactivate the group-tactic to move every companion individually. Every interactive thing in this game is marked in blue. We also think that you should use often the flair for traps or locks, to alleviate and to open them. Unfortunately, in the most time it is more important plunder as fast as possible rather than to explore everything carefully.

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If you do not like the game’s campaign you have the opportunity to get your hands dirty by your own and become the Dungeon Master. But we think that this game should offer more opportunities. Everybody who played Neverwinter Nights will remember that it was also possible to create your own adventures in this game that has been released in 2002. In Sword Coast Legends you get the opportunity to create your own modules or choose randomly generated dungeons. That all sounds great at the first moment. It is possible to play this dungeons in co-op with other players. What we like is that you just only need 30 minutes to create a great own scenario.

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If you choose to create your own adventure you have to choose places, characters, quests and enemies by clicking in the menu. The big thing is, that we got some bad news: there are no Dragons in this construction kit. What we like is that after you have choose the region you can configure the weather like rain or snow, choose the time of the day, placing small objects like caves, forts to mines or sewers which are ordered and set quickly some decorations. Unfortunately it is not possible to change the Dungeon, set new roads or built whole cities. And there is unfortunately more. It is not possible to choose more that the following three quests: bossfight, collect and collect. There are also no tools to include more or new dialogs. That all means that if you would like to built a Dungeon for you friends quickly, it is possible. But real Pen & Paper-RPG-fans will not be happy that this game allows not such freedom as they know.

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All-in-all we have to say that this game has so much potentials that it is really sad that they did not used them. There are a lot of games like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights or Icewind Dale that could be used as role model. This games offers different races, classes, skills, magic and a combat system that can be paused but we did not had this WOW moments in this game. We did not get any connection to our companions because the characters are not very interesting. The games looks really good and the levels are built very lovely but we missed the flair of the Forgotten Realms. We like the opportunity that we can play this game with friends but we think that the gameplay reminds us to much on Diablo and the game is much too easy. For us is the Editor the best part of the game and we had a lot of fun to built Dungeons for our friends. It is easy and quickly to built them and and it very interesting to become the role of the Dungeon Master in a digital world. We think that the developers should release as much new items, enemies, traps and other stuff for this editor as they can, so that the player get more opportunities to get more freedom by building dungeons. Like we said before, this game has so much potentials to become a really great game. What we like is that it has a solid base and we hope that the developers will release new stuff soon.

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