Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today we're reviewing sword coast legends sword coast legends which I'm abbreviating to scl is a newly released dnd see RPG that has entrenched itself deeply within Wizards of the coast territory all the way down to adoption of the 5th edition core rule set of Dungeons and Dragons the tabletop game for those who haven't yet dug their way out of insurmountable piles of 3.5 books like I haven't the rule set may be unfamiliar but it's still D&D and the game looks similar in some regard to older ddc RPG titles like baldur's gate but strays in a few critical ways that will discuss in this video notably we're still on the Sword Coast within Forgotten Realms content of faeren and forgotten realms is a fantasy universe with an extensive population of real world's books and authors probably the most famous of whom is RA Salvatore II for his drizz Deward in series and he also has contributed to the video games world so you may know him from there as well there are iconic cities in the Forgotten Realms universe like water deep baldur's gate and neverwinter which should probably be familiar to many of you if your experience with RPGs and then there are other known regions like icewind dale which has had its own game series and the spine of the world and shadow of em and things like that scl allows up to four players cooperatively playing in a party with an optional fifth player as the DM or dungeon master who plays non competitively with the players there are two primary modes of play you're either playing a dungeon crawl or a campaign mode the latter of which would include the game's built-in story and player made modules and campaigns alongside developer made modules all available for free through downloads in the in-game menus there's a DM tool kit that allows players to build their own campaigns complete with dialogue stories quests and mob placement and we're focusing on that today with the objective of tearing down into the really detailed insides of the DM toolkit I spend about eight hours building my own DM style playthrough with a DM required for my group and my group of players is from the tabletop games that I've played in my 9 year history of 3.5 fourth edition and savage worlds of tabletop RPGs so we've got quite a bit of history and experience together and that does mean we were able to have some more fun with Sword Coast legends than perhaps a random drop in and play group a good D&D campaign requires unique locations colorful NPC party members and companions loot and story and we're going to go through STL's ability to enable the DM to add each of these items to their custom campaign with in scl the M mode allows players to create locations within Ferrin and the underdark each using a set of prepackaged thumb attic tiles for the maps generation and when I say tiles I mean that it's similar to the tile sets you can buy for miniature gaming but basically you're not placing tiles tiles is just a word that means a theme for the dungeon or area for example bandit caves or under dark so we can create bandit caves cavernous under dark passages cities for the dark dwarves or the doer gar human cities and similar environments upon creating a location the game rolls the dice to randomly generate rooms and passages within a DM spec and the DMS specification is limited to just two items size and complexity ranging from small to large and from simple to complex this approach allows for rapid deployment of dungeons and leaves some room for the DM to manually position prefab objects which can include custom text assignable quests and discoverability basically if a player searches will they find the item or the items action text like if you had an engraving on a statue you might see the statue but you need to succeed a search or spot equivalent check which I believe might just be called perception these days in order to find it sadly the DM has no means to manually carve dungeon pathing or rooms out of solid bedrock so we're contained within the con vines of the games random number generator as far as the map creation goes maps can be managed to a very limited extent by blocking off undesired rooms with impossible to find secret doors but that's about the extent of our dungeon layout management so thankfully through workarounds that we found if you really don't like how a dungeon is potentially sending players to the boss room before they find the rest of the dungeon then you can set the bathrooms door to be a secret door set its search DC to impossible and then just pretend through narrative that they find a key or some means to access that door later and we'll talk about that in a moment there is no way to place freeform buildings in cities and no way to add or remove dungeon rooms or pathways so you are bound to your abilities to utilize the prefab objects like vendor carts statues chests tents and so forth to get as far as as they'll allow you these can get us pretty far in terms of amping up a dungeons design but you're still assuming that your player group actually likes inspecting things reading flavor text and stuff like that because prefab objects are no replacement for actual customization or design or City design or things like that the restriction feels survivable we can get by without the ability to customize our dungeons and cities but it demands more pre-configured locations to adequately sate DM creativity otherwise you're just putting the DM in a box and really strictly limiting creativity at present only eight dungeons and eight open area tile sets are available with several dungeons feeling overly similar they're more of the same just with a slightly tuned lighting effect and maybe some different moss versus dungeon tile things like that I would be more forgiving of the lack of location customization where more locales available but it just feels like something we won't see until maybe DLC at this point overlooking this restriction we then turn to party members the backbone of a good campaign in my experience and tabletop and in video games for the matter is a strong cast of NPCs who support the party sometimes they're needed to level the difficulty if you want to create a harder encounter but still allow the player party to defeat the encounter sometimes a good for comic relief they're good for story most of the time and that's critical to any RPG where you are building some sort of world for players to explore and this is true of Neverwinter as well in scl there's no DM mode option to add new party members so you're stuck with the same 5 NPCs from story mode all with their progression saved from previous games the best we can do is add a friendly character who's controlled by the DM so basically a DM PC has it is called and that's certainly not ideal the DM pc won't automatically spawn on level loads so it won't follow the party from zone to zone as they encounter loading screens and the only way to get it to spawn there is to pre place it as the DM or place it live during play the DMP see also won't automatically follow the party unless it is DM controlled the DM can possess the NPC which requires some level of threat the DM currency for placing objects and the MPC also won't gain experience in levels it has limited dialogue to whatever you set for it through a cumbersome quest menu and it's really ultimately an extra layer of work for the DM to manage then it's worth when adding a DM PC to the game because you can't just add it to the players party and allow them to control it which would certainly be ideal this seems like a tremendous oversight to me for a game that offers custom modules and a campaign mode but it feeds into our forthcoming conclusion which is that sword coast Legends is unnecessarily obsessed with game balance this is best represented by the restrictions placed on party loot dm's can't create custom items or plant specific items in chests or as quest rewards all quest rewards are restricted to quote random weapon random armor and random trinket with an immutable option to quote reward gold you don't have an amount you can define it's just reward gold and then the game will sort out what it thinks a balanced amount of gold's reward chaste Alou is random and without control and further there is a restriction placed on how many chests are allowed within a level that's pretty annoying at times and this severely challenges creative minds who want to figure out means of narrative and conveyance through traditional pathways like items whether their weapons armor or just books and things of that nature that you might find and this challenge makes for difficulty with what would otherwise require interesting and fun items to progress story the best solution my group of friends found was a lot of shoehorned narration by the DM and that's fine it's certainly something we're used to but at that point you really might as well just play the tabletop game or play with a tabletop simulator like roll20 or something like that assuming you are an actual DM or tabletop RPG player and not just coming for the PC aspect of Sword Coast Legends Sword Coast Legends is so grossly concerned with keeping the party balanced that it hamstrings itself significantly it removes its own ability to offer a design tool kit for online DMS want to really bring their gaming to the next level when it comes to a PC RPG by creating a fun interesting and challenging experience for their friends the game has to appeal to an online audience and that online audience may want random drop in and play of course so that's a big consideration for the developers make and that's where the obsession with balance comes in unfortunately it does limit the game's actual potential to be something truly great and unique and it's just generally good practice to sacrifice some control as a developer in exchange for more fun as a player anyway and that's definitely something that reigns true here where we're not in a player versus player environment so there's really not as much of a demand for game balance even if someone wanted to challenge me on all this is if one of the developers came to me and said you know I disagree that we're being too limiting here we are being limiting for these reasons and these reasons make sense even in that instance non-mechanical restrictions are equally heavy for instance we can't just add on click speech to idle city-dwellers to provide some background and flavor on the setting you have to go through a series of somewhat difficult to navigate menus with a lot of clicks in between to create quests and NPCs and things of that nature that are not just the normal probable monsters which you can set to neutral and ideally would be able to allow them to talk to the players have clicked on for example if I wanted the town's folk to talk about the big bad evil guy when clicked on to build some suspense before the adventure for instance the only way to really do that well is through a sort of haphazard work around that I discovered you create a custom quest you name the quest dialogue or something like that assign it no rewards and then assign that quest to all relevant NBC's and then type their text this has the contingency that the PCs have the quote unquote accept the quest which you can certainly tell them to do and it's very cumbersome it immediately flags all npcs with quest icons just for basic dialogue which you don't want because you don't want to sidetrack the player characters into thinking that every one of these npcs is critical to talk to they're not it just adds flavor and background and to further limit this sort of cumbersome option the dialog has a restricted length and it's actually pretty restrictive so that's another creative cage for the DM you can't have multiple pages of dialogue it's just whatever fits in that premade box that's what you can type and if you want more you have to either create more quests and get creative with a lengthy series of quest updates and progression for really doing nothing or you have to create multiple MVC's to talk through the same thing action text can be assigned to objects though so that's some help I often opted for the talking statues trope rather than navigating through menus and workarounds just to get an NPC talking triggers would have been a phenomenal addition to the SEL editor there's a period about 14 years ago where I avidly built complex RPG maps in of all things a gem to which is an RTS but I had a powerful map editor and it had triggers it was possible to build these RPGs and aoe2 because of the trigger cause and effect editors and I was tremendously disappointed to see that scl doesn't afford dm's the option to add triggered events as a proper rpg-like effect instantiated dialogue or threshold triggers for too easy examples here's an easy and stereotypical example that I could create an AoE 2's editor or several other editors in about five minutes our heroes step into an empty foreboding room filled with nothing but prefab spiderwebs and eggs the door closes behind them once past the threshold trigger and to ensure no players locked out we could say that the lock is open a bowl with a lockpick action and a 30-second timer begins once that threshold is stepped into and the door is closed so in this order our players enter the room they step onto a red square which is only read to the DM as a threshold but not to the players it's invisible that threshold has tied to an effect called 30-second timer will say 30 seconds starts counting down during this time players can interact with interim objects foreshadowing text and if they figure out what's going to happen they'll ready themselves appropriately making for some fun strategy for the game the timer then expires and an encounter spawns you can guess what that is probably spiders on the parameter of the room in order to do this in the current system and it is possible you'd have to manually place the enemies in game that's fine it's doable I guess but it's clunky and won't have quite the same impact as just spawning all of these monsters at a set time at the same instant so if you manually spawn them you're clicking and placing them around the room it can take several seconds to a minute to really properly configure the encounter and that removes a lot of the impact and the surprise factor this also means that a DM is now required to play the encounter properly so that further mitigates the game's viability as a single player or unguided co-op adventure platformer this is a big deal it's very important and cannot be understated triggers would allow the game to persist without a DM and still have complex and counters so that I could go in as a DM create an adventure for myself and a friend and then we can travel through it without Adams direct guidance in order to cause these events this is a totally non sequitur throwin but I was sort of reminded by it by the locking door aspect i talked about it'd be fantastic to have keys in SEL there's no way to plant keys right now and there's no way to associate an object with something like a door or a chest which is really a weird absence for an RPG so if you wanted to plant say forget the keys you want to plant a book that we can just pretend through narrative has a spell in it that opens a door so you can't tie that book to the door you can't plant a key because they don't exist and tie that to the door to open it it's got to be done by just setting the door to locked with an impossible DC or die check and then as a DM you you sort of fudge numbers until the players do whatever you want them to do and then open the door there's also an issue with challenge rating which as I understand it has been largely done away with in more recent D&D editions admittedly I have not played fifth edition so you know but still that's fine for tabletop but it's difficult to gauge encounter difficulty without manually testing every encounter when playing in scl in a self-created module that probably should be done anyway if you really want it to be a good encountered but being that testing all encounters is effectively required for a good build it makes sense to at least give dm's access to a drop in play test button imagine if you will a giant play button in the top right corner of this interface then I can click it as a DM and it just drops me wherever I have a player object indicator its bonds me there player spawn and I can test to me it make more sense to have this droppable player character object and hit play to begin testing at the location dropped then to play through the module in its entirety every time you want to test one encounter you can save throughout the the progression to be fair test developers but that is another cumbersome interface problem of which we've already mentioned several this is a serious oversight that places dm's in a hard position of do I spend hours play testing every encounter or do I cut corners in which case I might have to adjust encounter difficulty on the fly that is one thing done very well within Sword Coast Legends though on the fly diem tools though still lacking are powerful enough to fudge die rolls and ease up or strength and encounters we can place objects and monsters on the fly or remove them if it's too hard we can increase or decrease their health depending upon difficulty and challenge and we've even got the ability to plant last-minute vendors neutral parties with quests assigned like collection and kill and defeat the boss quests and friendlies who will temporarily aid in fights the toolkit also makes a provision of some high quality prefab objects replacement and levels like statues and furniture and relevant duraguard city ruins things like that each with assignable action text and discoverability to reward players for search checks creatures and encounters are limited to just two creature types / dungeon for example demon cultists and under dark dwellers but the wide range of interesting enemy types and high quality models within those two creature types / dungeon is generally an ample allowance you've got enough to work with to make for a fun set of mobs our means to differentiate and amp up encounters is augmented by a monster creator tool for handcrafted mob generation so if you wanted to take a floating flaming skeleton and apply it to your only humans set of enemies you could do that through the monster creator you know sign custom abilities change the attributes do a level offset all that stuff to make it more interesting in terms of the variety of enemies my group also liked that DMS can ask players to use an rng or random number generator to roll dice in the chat window so you can roll d6 d8 t20 things like that though it is a bit limited right now and it's limited in some weird ways the logic isn't present to add relevant modifiers rolls so if you wanted to do a knowledge check and I can't remember if knowledge checks or wisdom or intelligence I've taught my head to work with me here but if you want to do a knowledge check and say add a wisdom modifier let's say I have a 14 wisdom so I get a plus 2 on that roll right now that has to be sort of ham-fisted or you do it manually basically so if I roll I type / rel1 d20 and then I tell the DM okay got 14 but I have plus 2 wisdom so it's really a 16 I have to do that manually or the DM has to make up numbers as they go which is certainly ok but not ideal ideally with some level of logic in the system you'd be able to type / roll 1d 20 plus 2 or even better / roll 1d 20 plus Wiz or some identifiers that fetches your wisdom modifier and applies it to your d20 roll something like that look at the end of the day there's an endless amount of stuff you could ask for in any game especially a game that has not only a player option but a DM or creation option I can sit here and write a huge list of things and there's a very good chance that ninety percent of it was already discussed in design meetings by developers some of it may have even been in the pipes and was removed but there's a reason these things don't make it in its normally in the industry described as either time or money or both and that's normal in the world of game development some of these decisions though were actively made to ensure balance and accommodation of pick up and play parties which kills the DM toolkits potential and is really not the way that SEL is best utilized in my opinion without custom party members without triggers without more fine-tuned bat management or at least more tilesets relax with a glorified dungeon crawler using the dnd rule set with an optional add of someone else to drop in more monsters as challenge dictates which is really not as fun as it could be that's ultimately what the tool kit comes down to trying to build challenging and counters for your playgroup but it for go is the very important aspect of trying to build interesting and story driven encounters you can add text but it's limited you can add quests but you can't add normal dialogue for just clicking on a random neutral party in the dungeon it's a good way to have fun mechanically through the DM toolkit but mechanical found only gets you so far before you burn out and that puts scl more in the category of a Diablo style dungeon crawler which it's not trying to be I mean it is in some ways but it's got so much more potential to be more than that with a DM toolkit with the story-driven narratives that it wants to form and it's just lacking in important aspects there has to be some way to make new and interesting encounters and I don't just mean combat I mean encountering items and objects and modules otherwise players grow accustomed to the reality of the games minimize toolset you pick it up you realize I have seen everything there is to see and you move on as a player and that's sad to me because Sword Coast legends has huge potential but now that the game is released it's sort of a matter of what's tapped into through DLC and expansion packs and maybe patches if they feel like it but the fact that matters the frameworks out there and it's done so who knows how many of these things will be taken into consideration going forward as it stands the game feels like a thirty-dollar crawler that's got maybe about 20 hours of gameplay in it I do have fun when playing with my old school dandy group when we can't get together to play tabletop but that fun is still going to be limited I know that there's a shelf life to my play time in the game before I get bored of it that's true with any game but it's especially true here where I can sense it coming and that makes it less fun so all I've really got to say here is I'm disappointed in the DM oh I wish it were expanded more plain as a player as a player with a DM as a group it's fun you'll get places but if you don't have that already if you don't have an established group of friends this game is really going to be a glorified dungeon crawler and if you do have the group of friends just expect to be frustrated by the DM toolkit expect that you will be able to make it work and have fun but it takes a lot of extra effort time and you have to make sacrifices and then compensate for those sacrifices by filling in your own narrative vocally over whatever voice chat you're using so that is all for this look at Sword Coast legends please check the website for more information and if you like this kind of content hit the patreon link in the post roll video helps us out a lot we're trying to do more of these really in-depth discussions on things like game reviews and stuff like that and patreon helps us do those so thank you all for watching I will see you all next time you