Gather Your Party: 10 Minutes Of Sword Coast Legends
Wizards!
Luskan! City of... of... well, mostly pirates as far as I know. But also, as evidenced in this new gameplay footage from Sword Coast Legends [official site], city of thieves, skeletons, zombies and other stock D&D nasties.
There's also a zombie ogre in there, as if regular ogres weren't already possessed of disgustingly low standards of hygiene.
Sword Coast Legends was only announced last month but it's already looking to be in a fairly playable state. One might almost suspect that development was begun soon after the Torment: Tides of Numenera and Pillars of Eternity crowdfunding campaigns proved to be enormous successes! Or that could be baseless supposition, which it is.
Developers n-Space don't have much in the way of institutional prior when it comes to D&D or CRPGs, although top dog Dan Tudge was the director of the rather good Dragon Age: Origins. Regardless, what's in that video looks to be pretty close to what one would expect from a D&D CRPG right down to the archetypal character classes: "Scottish" dwarfs, reedy wizards, and the other two who don't talk much.
That sounds like I'm being down on this game. I'm not, really, even if the voice acting isn't for me. I've loved every minute I've spent questing around the Sword Coast over the years, and a lot of what's in this video has chipped sparks of nostalgia from my stony heart.
We're promised a second video next week that will show off the game's Dungeon Crawl mode. Said mode allows a player to act as a Dungeon Master for a friend or group of friends, directing campaigns as they unfold and building new ones as they wish. This sounds like an area where Sword Coast Legends could really stand out, so I'm keen to see how it will play.