Sword Coast Legends - New Interview

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Hillsfar was ok. It was a fun way to gain a few levels in-between PoR and CotAB

It was a pretty unique… Experiement, shall we say? But its combat system was awful! It was just the towns arena too, yeah? I hated having the time limit when you were inside houses and stuff. Even just removing that design flaw would have made it more fun. Keep the adventure side of things and the silly horse riding and throw in proper ADND turn based combat and it might have been fun.

Originally Posted by Fluent
Can't wait to hear more about this one. I hope the devs contact me soon so I can do a preview for the 'Watch!

I hope they get back to you too! If they do can you find out more about the DM mode and how powerful the adventure/map editor is?

Originally Posted by crpgnut
When he talked about the actual game he mentioned playing with friends and DM mode. If those are the focus, the game loses me completely. If Baldur's Gate and NWN are the focus, then I stand in line. That is what I need to know. Hybrids rarely work. Show me.

There's only been a tiny handful of news and somehow you missed the fact it has a singleplayer experience? Should you be commenting if you're not even interested enough to read the news?
It's being both BG and NWN. You seem to be unaware that NWN was a "hybrid' and had a DM mode and it was playing with friends, its campaign editor and online persistent worlds which kept the game alive well beyond its years. In fact, I think there are still NWN servers online today. Hell, the main campaign was rubbish. It was the user made content which took up 99% of my play time with that old classic. If you didn't play any user made campaigns then you didn't play NWN!!

Same with BG, BG2, IWD, IWD2, these games ALL had multiplayer co-op modes. D&D itself has its roots as a multiplayer tabletop game! Every "modern" replay of these games I've done has been because there's nothing better to play co-op with friends.

Originally Posted by Fluent
And was that Pool of Radiance game really that bad? Seems like an interesting one to me. I like games that most people say are trash. Gives me a real thrill and a silly smile comes across my face when I realize the hype wasn't true and the game is worth playing.

It was pretty bad.

Ah! Do you understand the word focus, Jimmy? NWN and BG are both single-player games with multi-player as a bonus. The focus was the single player experience. Hold your hands in front of your face. Count the lines on one hand. As you're counting, you can still see your other hand in the periphery but your focus is on the lines. If the lines are the single-player experience, I'm in. Simple enough for ya?

It was a pretty unique… Experiement, shall we say? But its combat system was awful! It was just the towns arena too, yeah? I hated having the time limit when you were inside houses and stuff. Even just removing that design flaw would have made it more fun. Keep the adventure side of things and the silly horse riding and throw in proper ADND turn based combat and it might have been fun.

Well, ok, my nostalgia probably helps in giving it a pass.

The more I think about it, the more I recall thinking it was pretty bland - but not entirely without merit.

I think my problem, at that time, was that I'd just played Pool of Radiance - and I expected something similar. Clearly, Hillsfar is not that

More than likely, it was a quick cash-grab. But I pirated everything back then, so I never noticed I wasn't getting my money's worth

I don't think that a split focus between multiplayer DM mode and single player is necessarily a problem. So long as the AI does a good job of handling those roles, you should never need to know that they could be handled manually. I think D&D is well suited to this type of flexibility.

I suppose the biggest drawback to single player is that NPCs on your team are unlikely to written with lots of personality and personal quests, if the intention is for them to be controlled by other players. This is not necessarily a huge problem, though - if all the other NPCs in the game are interesting, having AI team members that have to be fleshed out with your own imagination wouldn't bother me.

Originally Posted by Ripper
I don't think that a split focus between multiplayer DM mode and single player is necessarily a problem. So long as the AI does a good job of handling those roles, you should never need to know that they could be handled manually. I think D&D is well suited to this type of flexibility.

I suppose the biggest drawback to single player is that NPCs on your team are unlikely to written with lots of personality and personal quests, if the intention is for them to be controlled by other players. This is not necessarily a huge problem, though - if all the other NPCs in the game are interesting, having AI team members that have to be fleshed out with your own imagination wouldn't bother me.

That is what we thought when NWN1 was coming out and it resulted in a turd of a SP campaign.
Hopefully these exBioware guys make a better game than NWN.

Originally Posted by Archangel
That is what we thought when NWN1 was coming out and it resulted in a turd of a SP campaign.
Hopefully these exBioware guys make a better game than NWN.

Sure - I said it's not necessarily problem. They could certainly screw it up, of course.

Well, generally it is always a problem if you have limited resources, which is ever the case.
You have to give resources to coop development, so the SP parts suffer.

But if you have more resources with coop than you would have without coop (investors increase budget) SP parts my even benefit, depending on the resources distribution.

Originally Posted by Morrandir
Well, generally it is always a problem if you have limited resources, which is ever the case.
You have to give resources to coop development, so the SP parts suffer

But that's not necessarily a significant problem when MP and SP do not need to be entirely separate entities; where the entire campaign can be built for multiplayer, with AI that can take over to allow an SP experience.

Technically, the entire BG campaign was built for multiplayer, but you'd never know it if you played solo with party AI.

NWN was more of a toolkit, with a campaign included as an extra. If that's the case here, then that's certainly a problem.

Originally Posted by Morrandir
Well, generally it is always a problem if you have limited resources, which is ever the case.
You have to give resources to coop development, so the SP parts suffer.

But if you have more resources with coop than you would have without coop (investors increase budget) SP parts my even benefit, depending on the resources distribution.

It's true that limited resources CAN be a problem, but it's not true that they ARE a problem.

If you plan well and you incorporate features in a realistic fashion, your project will reflect that.

There's no such thing as unlimited resources, anyway.

You can have 10 times the resources available to these guys and yet you could end up making a horrible singleplayer only game.

In that same way, you could have a billion dollars - and still end up eating unhealthy food, living a boring life and being in a bad relationship with a horrible partner.

It's all about what you do with what you have.

So this standard argument against cooperative gameplay is weak and - by itself - it can never logically support that singleplayer will be "bad" or "overlooked" at all.

You could take any one of your favorite singleplayer games and argue that it would have been better with more resources, but it's still a favorite. Do you know for a fact that these guys have less resources available for the singleplayer portion than the developers of a favorite game had? No, you don't know that.

Again, the argument is weak without more insight.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Again, the argument is weak without more insight.

I don't know if you wanted to claim that, but this argument was never mine.
As I've said, having coop might even increase SP quality.

Originally Posted by Morrandir
I don't know if you wanted to claim that, but this argument was never mine.
As I've said, having coop might even increase SP quality.

I'm talking about the argument, not the people making it