You can, thankfully, customise the pre-defined areas quite nicely.
Likewise, every above-ground area – cities, mountains, forests – are all pre-made areas, and every dungeon is randomly generated, so you can’t construct the beautiful, misty thicket of forest paths that you wander in your dreams, or the confusing Escher-esque labyrinth of your players’ nightmares. Hell, as far as I’m aware, you can’t even create NPCs you can converse with, outside of those that are quest-related – and even then, it’s only to accept or decline the quest. As far as I can tell you can’t even create in-depth NPCs with conversation trees, and maybe skill checks for conversation options. You can’t, for instance, carefully recreate The Temple of Elemental Evil. I kept wondering if I’d missed a checkbox enabling Advanced Options or something, because the modules you can build feel a lot like customised Dungeon Crawls, only with linked areas and a thin plot. Here’s the bad thing: module creation is really simple. Here’s the good thing: module creation is really simple. Today, though, I’m going to walk you through what was one of the worst things to grace the internet since that one link that everyone keeps tricking you into looking at. So instead, we did a couple of quick Dungeon Crawls, and we’ll probably write about our experiences with that another time. Standard gameplay is pretty much this: hitting goblins with lightning bolts while the party’s dwarf gets drunk.
The next day, a few hours before we were due to start… the preview code got a 4GB update and my module vanished into the Nine Hells. So, over the course of a few hours, I got the hang of how everything worked and built that module. Then I’d maybe fix the module up a bit to make it slightly less shit, and share it online for anyone who wanted to experience true disappointment. We’d then post up a screenshot-filled article showing off the module’s playthrough and what each of us were doing at any given moment, followed up by me explaining how I built it and what I thought of the module creation tools. I planned to build a module, do a quick randomly-generated Dungeon Crawl with Peter Parrish (PC Invasion’s dungeoneering equivalent of a mine canary) to get the hang of the Dungeon Master controls, and then DM him through my module. Sword Coast Legends is being billed as a sort of follow-up to Neverwinter Nights, in terms of it letting you create modules and even have one player act as a DM, guiding the hapless adventurers through it. In fairness, that’s pretty much my default setting, but in this case I’m particularly annoyed.
Perhaps we'll see a bigger glimpse into Sword Cost Legends this June during E3 2015.Dear readers, I am annoyed. The studio's most recent games include Suits and Swords for iOS and Android, Skylanders: Swap Force for the Nintendo 3DS and Skylanders: Giants for the Nintendo 3DS.Īs for Digital Extremes, the studio is probably best known for its work on the Unreal franchise, Warframe and BioShock.
Currently, n-Space has a wide variety of games in its portfolio including Bug Riders: The Race of Kings and Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas, both for Windows PC. Sword Cost Legends will be an interesting title to watch over the next several months. The second largest bundle, the Digital Deluxe Campaign edition costing $149.99, includes five copies of the game along with the stash of goods offered in the vanilla Digital Deluxe bundle. The biggest bundle, the Limited Edition Collectors Campaign, costs a meaty $349.99 and includes everything in the Digital Deluxe Campaign edition along with several trinkets including a statue of Belaphose (which will have a pose determined by the community), a cloth map of the Sword Coast, headstart access and more.