Sword Coast Legends - Reviews

Myrthos

Myrthos

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A negative review of Sword Coast Legends can be found at PCGamer (55/100) as has been mentioned on our forums.

I was prepared to give it some licence to recycle fantasy clichés—if Dungeons & Dragons didn’t invent them, it’s certainly responsible for mashing them together into game format. In many ways, however, Sword Coast Legends is a step back from its pen-and-paper inspirations. A good dungeon master is able to react to any action you can think up so long as it’s within the rules, while a dungeon is not only a gauntlet but a puzzle to be solved. Though Legends opens up in its second act (the Bioware-brand companion loyalty quests are a highlight), whatever quest you pursue gives you no leeway to improvise.

Contrast this with Divinity: Original Sin, a game which gives you a high-level objective and just leaves you to it, allowing you to smash through doors, break chests and interact with everything to solve the riddle. Two years ago, Sword Coast Legends would have been part of the vanguard for the resurgent cRPG, but we’re past that now. This is once more a competitive genre that demands new ideas.
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Who also doesn't like it is GameWatcher (4/10).

Sword Coast Legends fails to deliver on its promises both as a solid RPG in it's own right and as a digital Dungeon Master toolset. The limited options available to creators are unlikely to yield anything memorable and the single player story section is marred by poor pathfinding, limited scope and shoddy writing. Overall an immense disappointment.
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However Escapist thinks its better than that with 3.5/5.

Overall, Sword Coast Legends offers a fun romp through the D&D world of Faerun once again. D&D fans should love the narrative. Unfortunately, the combat and often repetitive feel of other aspects of the game, and the generally restrictive DM tools, keep it from being the critical hit and genre-changer it could have been.
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RPS isn't too positive either.

It’s definitely best to think of Sword Coast Legends not as Dungeons & Dragons (let alone AD&D) and more as a sort of low-key DIY Diablo. Even then, the core combat is too forgettable, and the DM mode too limited, to make a solid case for playing this instead of co-op Diablo or Torchlight or Titan Quest or Path of Exile if monster-bothering with chums is what you’re after. It’s not impossible that later updates will make fighting feel less underwhelming or expand the potential of dungeon-building, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it.

It’s absolutely true to say that you get out of Sword Coast Legends what you put in, but right now there just aren’t enough reasons to put much in.
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Sword Coast Legends fails to deliver on its promises both as a solid RPG in it’s own right and as a digital Dungeon Master toolset. The limited options available to creators are unlikely to yield anything memorable and the single player story section is marred by poor pathfinding, limited scope and shoddy writing. Overall an immense disappointment. - See more at: http://www.gamewatcher.com/reviews/sword-coast-legends-review/12375#sthash.1KDsaa0x.dpuf
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More information.
 
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Hmm...I'm still on the fence of buying this. It seems fine if you go in with low expectations and more for the fun like DS III, perhaps.
 
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Easy to tell from 6 months out game would be crap after interviews with devs.
 
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These reviews seem more aligned with my general gaming sensibilities, so I am glad I held off clicking 'buy' right now since I don't have time anyway :) I'll grab it once it drops below $20.
 
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Multiplayer does make it look like a bad Diablo clone.
Single-player it compares to Pillars of Eternity (and I think this is better.)
 
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I've finished the game this week-end (in around 50 hours in normal mode) and I liked this game. It's really not a bad game, but it's not a great game neither because it has some defaults (especialy the way the map works and some lack of details in some quests which make you lose time running around trying to find where you have to go). Personnaly I would give it 65 or 70/100. But I really don't regret to have bought it, although it's current price seems a bit too high. I would say it's correct price should be no more than 25.
 
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As it got buried in the other thread's JesusGate I'm posting the current results of the poll in SCL forums again:

Interim results (n = 142):
  1. How do you rate SCL as a whole on a scale of 1-10?
    1. mean: 5.9
    2. median: 6
  2. How do you rate SCL single-player experience (story campaign) on a scale of 1-10?
    1. ​mean: 7.1
    2. median: 8
  3. How do you rate SCL multi-player experience (including DM tools) on a scale of 1-10?
    1. ​mean: 4.9
    2. median: 5
Note that the single-player experience is rated a lot better than multi-player.
 
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That poll means little as it is from their own forums and it will be more biased towards the positive.
 
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Archangel said:
That poll means little as it is from their own forums and it will be more biased towards the positive.
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But I think the fact that the SP experience is ~7/10 even in a presumably friendly environment DOES have some meaning.
 
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Archangel said:
That poll means little as it is from their own forums and it will be more biased towards the positive.
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Hard to say.
Consider that in these forums there's the crows of D&D fans having hoped this game to be the NWN 3 with a true D&D 5ed ruleset and a powerful campaign editor. So there's a lot of disappointment over there. You can read it all over the forums.

And in fact the 5.9 average score comes quite close to the 57% positive reviews in Steam.
But we have - and that was my intention of the poll - a separate peer rating of the single-player experience, which is significantly better the the multiplayer-experience.

Btw. I'd love to have a Watcher reviewing the single-player part. Is there anything planned?
I bought the game (good deal on GMG) but I'm still not sure if I really should start playing.
 
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