New Real Time With Pause Dungeons & Dragons RPG - SWORD COAST LEGENDS

[Gfted1]

Cool video. The game looks good visually and Im thrilled to see that the combat pace is more my speed. The home page says six classes, what are the other two? (Please be paladin, please be paladin)

 

The "autoplay" type gameplay does concern me a little but maybe he was playing on Easy or something?

[archangel979]

Cool video. The game looks good visually and Im thrilled to see that the combat pace is more my speed. The home page says six classes, what are the other two? (Please be paladin, please be paladin)

 

The "autoplay" type gameplay does concern me a little but maybe he was playing on Easy or something?

Even if he was playing on easy each character has like 5 abilities and they used most of them. It is not like you have more choices that you need to use manually when playing on harder difficulty. And cooldown system is just terrible for a D&D game, it just means you use all abilities each combat (because why not) and it all turns into a chore. 

At least in BG for easy combat you didn't even need to use anything but autoattack but if you ran into something more challenging you could go Nova. Here you don't get that option. 

 

Also after combat everyone went to full hp fast. Autohealing+cooldowns means no resting. Frack a D&D game without resting, that is Dark Alliance, not BG/NWN inspired. 

Edited March 19, 2015 by archangel979

[Mamoulian War]

Disappointed

[Tartantyco]

It just looks so... soulless.

[Stun]

it looks like Diablo meets NWN, it is not classic DnD, but might be fun to play

Yep. Or mid level DA:O.

 

Do we really need another game like this?

 

I wish I had a dollar for every indie studio that name-drops Baldurs Gate to get people to pay attention to their generic creations. I imagine I'd have enough money to create my own.

[archangel979]

 

it looks like Diablo meets NWN, it is not classic DnD, but might be fun to play

Yep. Or mid level DA:O.

 

Do we really need another game like this?

 

I wish I had a dollar for every indie studio that name-drops Baldurs Gate to get people to pay attention to their generic creations. I imagine I'd have enough money to create my own.

 

I don't mind more DA:O type games, but not when they are supposed to be a D&D game. At this point they only seem to use D&D to get more people to buy their game without actually making the game similar to playing D&D.

Edited March 19, 2015 by archangel979

[Gfted1]

Even if he was playing on easy each character has like 5 abilities and they used most of them. It is not like you have more choices that you need to use manually when playing on harder difficulty.

I don't know a lot of the details. Are you saying you cant manually choose different spells / abilities?  

 

Also after combat everyone went to full hp fast. Autohealing+cooldowns means no resting.

Eh, works for me.

[rjshae]

The vid. demo seemed all right to me. The scenery and party banter seemed pretty decent.

 

There have been many RTwP RPGs where you can just let the party fight; you wouldn't always get the best tactics though. Perhaps in this demo the party was overpowered for the battles, so you could just let the AI run it?

[Darkpriest]

The vid. demo seemed all right to me. The scenery and party banter seemed pretty decent.

 

There have been many RTwP RPGs where you can just let the party fight; you wouldn't always get the best tactics though. Perhaps in this demo the party was overpowered for the battles, so you could just let the AI run it?

 

i agree that demos often have overleveled characters to show off some cool stuff (the PoE demos also had this) so I see no problem with it, I am not fun of cooldowns though, charges per battle/encounter and day would be better IMO, they would mimic DnD mechanics better than what is implemented now

[Orchomene]

Cool video. The game looks good visually and Im thrilled to see that the combat pace is more my speed. The home page says six classes, what are the other two? (Please be paladin, please be paladin)

 

Paladin and ranger.

[lobotomy42]

I agree that this seems much more Dragon Age: Origins than Baldur's Gate, but I'm okay with that.  Or I would be, if it looked like the tone or story were anything similar to DA:O, which this definitely isn't.  It seems like they're sticking with DnD's somewhat light-hearted tone, but probably not matching the humor and charm of BG.  And that voice acting was atrocious - they were doing that thing, present in so many RPGs, where the actor clearly hadn't read the dialogue of the character he was responding to, and therefore got the intonation of what he was supposed to be saying completely wrong. And the dialogue itself didn't seem particularly special either.

 

Ugh ugh ugh I had high hopes for this project, but it's moved down my list quite a bit after this.

[ShadySands]

I'm still hyped for this but I can see how someone married to the D&D rules would not be. Resting and per day/encounter stuff was what I liked the least about D&D and while I can't say I'm a fan of the HP bloat I can understand that they don't want the fights to be over in a couple seconds.

 

I remain cautiously optimistic

[Darkpriest]

Hmm i did not notice any misses or blocks, does it have no -to hit- roll mechanics in the back and you just have to go through some arbitrary defense and hp values?

[Tigranes]

Meh. It's basically what an unlicensed, slightly cheaper and worse clone would look like if NWN1 sold like hotcakes and people wanted to clone it. Everything it changes from D&D or from older D&D CRPGs, it makes worse. Shall I narrate the ways? 

 

(1) Wizards don't have D&D magic. They don't have casting time, they don't have memorisation, they automatically cast lower level spells over and over again, spells 'level up' (Magic Missile II, III...). This has nothing to do with D&D magic except some spell names and damage specs are copied. What that means is your wizard isn't substantially different from your archer with special abilities in terms of how they play.

 

(2) As Darkpriest points out, there may not be any to-hit rolls. Combined with 1, this makes the game play like an MMO, and not like a D&D game. In a D&D game, you are constantly fighting AC / THACO / etc to make sure you can land a hit on your enemy and not get hit yourself; getting hit becomes a pretty big deal. Meanwhile your wizard becomes a glass cannon, meaning even if there was the problem that fighters are relatively boring, you, as a party controller, always had a decision to make every round. If everyone hits each other more consistently and wizards are the way they are, all those decisions go out the window; the very nature of the combat changes. It becomes DPS calculation and a matter of setting up an equilibrium where you do more damage than they do. The wizard can also be left on autopilot. The decisions about spells to use diminishes if some spells repeat and other spells are on a cooldown so they can also be used again. 

 

This results in situations like that boss fight, which is very similar to how boss fights in DA:O work - you find a combination where your DPS is higher than their regen/heal and their DPS is lower than your regen/heal, then you just sit there and rinse/repeat ad nauseum until you inevitably win.

 

(3) Given the way people ice-skate all over the place all over the video, there won't be much in the way of tactical positioning going on, except at the beginning of the battle. This is of course endemic to the 3D era, but Pillars attempts to address it with engagement, and in any case, other games like NWN2 and DAO weren't this bad with the skating. This reduces the importance of space, and once again, makes combat fairly same-same and repetitive.

 

(4) The town looks nice enough but generally low textures abound, artistic style is super-generic (check the item icons or the models in the inventory window, as opposed to the beautiful paper dolls and item graphics in BG2 or even the ones in Pillars). It looks like dialogue will be kept to the very basics with the Biowarian Three Choices, but the dialogue probably lower quality than Bioware. 

 

It can still turn out to be a decently fun game, especially if you liked DA:O, especially if you like MMOs. A D&D game it is not. Is it worth buying? Well, I liked DA:O, but this probably will be a lesser clone, and not as good as DA:O. I also don't like the dishonest and frankly stupid way they came into the room shouting OMG D&D IS BACK GUYS when it is hardly the case. I doubt this is worth more than $10.

[BruceVC]

Meh. It's basically what an unlicensed, slightly cheaper and worse clone would look like if NWN1 sold like hotcakes and people wanted to clone it. Everything it changes from D&D or from older D&D CRPGs, it makes worse. Shall I narrate the ways? 

 

(1) Wizards don't have D&D magic. They don't have casting time, they don't have memorisation, they automatically cast lower level spells over and over again, spells 'level up' (Magic Missile II, III...). This has nothing to do with D&D magic except some spell names and damage specs are copied. What that means is your wizard isn't substantially different from your archer with special abilities in terms of how they play.

 

(2) As Darkpriest points out, there may not be any to-hit rolls. Combined with 1, this makes the game play like an MMO, and not like a D&D game. In a D&D game, you are constantly fighting AC / THACO / etc to make sure you can land a hit on your enemy and not get hit yourself; getting hit becomes a pretty big deal. Meanwhile your wizard becomes a glass cannon, meaning even if there was the problem that fighters are relatively boring, you, as a party controller, always had a decision to make every round. If everyone hits each other more consistently and wizards are the way they are, all those decisions go out the window; the very nature of the combat changes. It becomes DPS calculation and a matter of setting up an equilibrium where you do more damage than they do. The wizard can also be left on autopilot. The decisions about spells to use diminishes if some spells repeat and other spells are on a cooldown so they can also be used again. 

 

This results in situations like that boss fight, which is very similar to how boss fights in DA:O work - you find a combination where your DPS is higher than their regen/heal and their DPS is lower than your regen/heal, then you just sit there and rinse/repeat ad nauseum until you inevitably win.

 

(3) Given the way people ice-skate all over the place all over the video, there won't be much in the way of tactical positioning going on, except at the beginning of the battle. This is of course endemic to the 3D era, but Pillars attempts to address it with engagement, and in any case, other games like NWN2 and DAO weren't this bad with the skating. This reduces the importance of space, and once again, makes combat fairly same-same and repetitive.

 

(4) The town looks nice enough but generally low textures abound, artistic style is super-generic (check the item icons or the models in the inventory window, as opposed to the beautiful paper dolls and item graphics in BG2 or even the ones in Pillars). It looks like dialogue will be kept to the very basics with the Biowarian Three Choices, but the dialogue probably lower quality than Bioware. 

 

It can still turn out to be a decently fun game, especially if you liked DA:O, especially if you like MMOs. A D&D game it is not. Is it worth buying? Well, I liked DA:O, but this probably will be a lesser clone, and not as good as DA:O. I also don't like the dishonest and frankly stupid way they came into the room shouting OMG D&D IS BACK GUYS when it is hardly the case. I doubt this is worth more than $10.

 

Gee you must be the life of a party...when we ask for honesty about a game we don't expect it to be so brutal and unforgiving 

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

it looks like Diablo meets NWN, it is not classic DnD, but might be fun to play

If you look at it more closely the game plays itself. You can see the guy not pause except at start of battle and other 3 characters use all their abilities themselves and switch to new targets. He barely had to do anything and nobody was close to being knocked out. 

 

I love D3 and I absolute adore the NWNs, so I really dig the look of this. It also looks like D:OS, which is a pretty fantastic game as well.

Still, I must admit, from what I've seen of PoE, that Pillars of Eternity has a more realistic style that appeal even more to me. It's just gorgeous! 

 

 

The vid. demo seemed all right to me. The scenery and party banter seemed pretty decent.

 

There have been many RTwP RPGs where you can just let the party fight; you wouldn't always get the best tactics though. Perhaps in this demo the party was overpowered for the battles, so you could just let the AI run it?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure they were over-levelled. As for the banter, the reverb on those VOs was a bit stark, to say the least, and as has already been pointed out - they don't respond to each other's lines - still, looking back, many VOs were dorky in the IE and the NWNs as well - still great fun, though.

 

I'm still hyped for this but I can see how someone married to the D&D rules would not be. Resting and per day/encounter stuff was what I liked the least about D&D and while I can't say I'm a fan of the HP bloat I can understand that they don't want the fights to be over in a couple seconds.

 

I thoroughly enjoy Forgotten Realms, first and foremost, and many of the basic concepts of D&D, but like you, I don't find the resting and the Vancian stuff sacred by any means.

 

Overall, I like the fast-paced combat and rather light-hearted atmosphere. I'm one of those rather few non-pausers in NWN1 and NWN2 (with exceptions of a few tricky fights, of course). Having played them games for thousands of hours (unhealthy amounts), I love the possibility of dealing with encounters quicker and more on-the-fly.

 

EDIT: Story-wise and quest-wise, It still seems to be a pretty generic sp campaign, however, more like NWN1, I guess, and in part NWN2 OC.

Edited March 20, 2015 by IndiraLightfoot

[Tigranes]

Gee you must be the life of a party...when we ask for honesty about a game we don't expect it to be so brutal and unforgiving 

 

It's very simple. Do you like the tactical decision-making offered in classic D&D CRPGs? Do you expect a highly polished, graphically powerful, AAA title? Either way, don't bother with this game. 

 

On the other hand, do you enjoy MMO combat? Or, as Indira says, do you enjoy fairly tactically light combat where you don't have to pause so often and just let things fly? Did the party banter in that video seem enjoyable? If so, go for it.

[ManifestedISO]

Geez, a man's GPU quits on him and suddenly he berates any old lady just for having blue hair. 

 

Game looks pretty fun to my wizened, dim eyesight. 

[BruceVC]

Geez, a man's GPU quits on him and suddenly he berates any old lady just for having blue hair. 

 

Game looks pretty fun to my wizened, dim eyesight. 

 You funny

[archangel979]

 

 

it looks like Diablo meets NWN, it is not classic DnD, but might be fun to play

If you look at it more closely the game plays itself. You can see the guy not pause except at start of battle and other 3 characters use all their abilities themselves and switch to new targets. He barely had to do anything and nobody was close to being knocked out.

 

I love D3 and I absolute adore the NWNs, so I really dig the look of this. It also looks like D:OS, which is a pretty fantastic game as well.

Still, I must admit, from what I've seen of PoE, that Pillars of Eternity has a more realistic style that appeal even more to me. It's just gorgeous!

 

He and I were not talking about the looks but gameplay. The gameplay is barely D&D like.

It played more like a aRPG where you spam all your abilities in each combat because "Why the **** not?" as they are all on cooldowns.

At least Dragon Age had mana and you had to manage your mana during and outside of combat, this is pure ****.

[Gfted1]

Paladin and ranger.

 

[HoonDing]

Looks good, but at this point I'd rather play an Aarklash 2.

[Guard Dog]

Not liking everything I'm seeing (or reading on their board). The comment about making it accessible to non hardcore RPG players was a definite turn off. Still nothing about any kind of toolset too. I think I want my money back. Too late I know.

[ShadySands]

It does seem a little "Dungeon Siege-y" but I still have hope

[Darkpriest]

Not liking everything I'm seeing (or reading on their board). The comment about making it accessible to non hardcore RPG players was a definite turn off. Still nothing about any kind of toolset too. I think I want my money back. Too late I know.

 

that's why you do not pre-order something from a barely known studio....