Sword Coast Legends, the D&D crpg with DM toolset, is dead. N-Space, the developer, has gone out of business and the carcass of the game has been picked up by Digital Extreme.N-Space followed a path to failure that ended up with everyone losing their jobs, let's take a look at how they fucked up this opportunity.
The concept was to market a new toolset based D&D crpg that would take up the legacy of Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 but with the new version of D&D and offering a streamlined and easier to use toolset that would let more people create content. The NWN toolsets were complex and required an investment of time and study to create new content but it wasn't too big a burden, as I recall it took me about a week to read up on the toolset and produce a hack and slash adventure module that I put online and had people playing.
N-Space, however, pretty much stepped on their dick right from the very beginning. First of all they decided that there was a huge market for live DM gaming where, events have shown us, no such demand existed. Following that poor decision they decided that the toolset would not have most of what it takes to produce a game you can play by yourself. Areas could only have one entrance and exit, if you wanted more then a live DM had to teleport the party to any third location. Instead of just handing the DM a library of monsters a content creator was forced to use premade monster sets with monsters that could not really be edited except for their appearance. The idiots at N-Space also wanted to control the DMs so they did not allow them to design magic items or hand them out in any way, all loot was random chest drops. Controlling what the DM did with the SCL toolset was a priority for N-Space, they didn't seem to understand that their job was to create the tools and then shut the fuck up and get out of the way so DMs could create what they wanted. The depths of the design stupidity was summed up when an executive of the company angrily stated that he wanted a toolset easy enough for his 8 year old kid to use. To compound the problem N-Space rounded up a collection of so called gaming journalists who simply lied in their reviews and inflated the capabilities of the toolset so people were expecting something nearly as good as the Aurora toolset from NWN.
The other major screw up was how they handled the rules of the game. SCL was supposed to be based on D&D 5e but instead was a mutant set of rules that really had nothing to do with 5e despite promoting the game as being true to the 5e rules. In my case I didn't care, I thought the game rules they came up with were pretty good and by passed problems that would have popped up if they had gone with a strict interpretation of the rules, such as most of the time your character would have been making auto-attacks with no player input because there would be very few abilities to choose to use. All this aside, it turns out that there were a lot of people who wanted SCL to play as closely to the pen and paper rules as possible. Huge numbers of them, based on the posts I read on various forums. Using the canonical rules was an important part of the game for a lot of people and they were furious at the changes N-Space made.
Once it became clear that the player base was not happy with the game, N-Space did what any group of morons would do when they realized they had fucked up; they lied, they ignored feedback, and they got mad at the players. I'll give one interesting example. While making monsters we noticed that our level 1 creations had around 70-80 HP. The community found this odd, to say the least, and complained and asked what was going on. N-Space leaped into action and hid the HP numbers from the DMs view and then never once addressed the communities concerns or discussed the issue. Never. Not once. It became clear to me at that point that we were dealing with a clown college that had no fucking clue what they were doing.
Some major issues came to light. One, the dialogue editor was linear, there was no ability to set up branching decisions. Two, all dungeon design was random (although to be fair it was a good random design system). Three, encounter locations were hard coded and would only allow certain encounter formations, if you hand placed monsters instead of using the encounter system the monsters had approximately double the HP you would expect (this was something else that the clowns at N-Space would never discuss).
N-Space was working on expanding the toolset to allow branching dialogue and tile by tile dungeon design in an update promised by the end of 2015. That date came and went and no word was released. Finally, several weeks overdue, they announced that they expansion was indefinitely delayed and that they had known for weeks prior to the new year but had not informed the community. Supposedly the toolset expansion was delayed so they could publish the Rage of Demons content expansion.
Now the game is in the hands of Digital Extreme, and in keeping with the policies of N-Space, refuses to tell anyone what they plan to do with the game.
All in all, this tale is a good example of how to fuck up your plan from the very beginning. Make assumptions about who wants to play the game and how they want to play it, make changes to the game rules and lie about it, produce an overly simplistic toolset and lie about it, refuse to tell your community what is going on, and make promises you cannot keep.
We really need a good crpg with a toolset, D&D or some other game, but the idiots at N-Space were not the ones to bring it to us.
The concept was to market a new toolset based D&D crpg that would take up the legacy of Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 but with the new version of D&D and offering a streamlined and easier to use toolset that would let more people create content. The NWN toolsets were complex and required an investment of time and study to create new content but it wasn't too big a burden, as I recall it took me about a week to read up on the toolset and produce a hack and slash adventure module that I put online and had people playing.
N-Space, however, pretty much stepped on their dick right from the very beginning. First of all they decided that there was a huge market for live DM gaming where, events have shown us, no such demand existed. Following that poor decision they decided that the toolset would not have most of what it takes to produce a game you can play by yourself. Areas could only have one entrance and exit, if you wanted more then a live DM had to teleport the party to any third location. Instead of just handing the DM a library of monsters a content creator was forced to use premade monster sets with monsters that could not really be edited except for their appearance. The idiots at N-Space also wanted to control the DMs so they did not allow them to design magic items or hand them out in any way, all loot was random chest drops. Controlling what the DM did with the SCL toolset was a priority for N-Space, they didn't seem to understand that their job was to create the tools and then shut the fuck up and get out of the way so DMs could create what they wanted. The depths of the design stupidity was summed up when an executive of the company angrily stated that he wanted a toolset easy enough for his 8 year old kid to use. To compound the problem N-Space rounded up a collection of so called gaming journalists who simply lied in their reviews and inflated the capabilities of the toolset so people were expecting something nearly as good as the Aurora toolset from NWN.
The other major screw up was how they handled the rules of the game. SCL was supposed to be based on D&D 5e but instead was a mutant set of rules that really had nothing to do with 5e despite promoting the game as being true to the 5e rules. In my case I didn't care, I thought the game rules they came up with were pretty good and by passed problems that would have popped up if they had gone with a strict interpretation of the rules, such as most of the time your character would have been making auto-attacks with no player input because there would be very few abilities to choose to use. All this aside, it turns out that there were a lot of people who wanted SCL to play as closely to the pen and paper rules as possible. Huge numbers of them, based on the posts I read on various forums. Using the canonical rules was an important part of the game for a lot of people and they were furious at the changes N-Space made.
Once it became clear that the player base was not happy with the game, N-Space did what any group of morons would do when they realized they had fucked up; they lied, they ignored feedback, and they got mad at the players. I'll give one interesting example. While making monsters we noticed that our level 1 creations had around 70-80 HP. The community found this odd, to say the least, and complained and asked what was going on. N-Space leaped into action and hid the HP numbers from the DMs view and then never once addressed the communities concerns or discussed the issue. Never. Not once. It became clear to me at that point that we were dealing with a clown college that had no fucking clue what they were doing.
Some major issues came to light. One, the dialogue editor was linear, there was no ability to set up branching decisions. Two, all dungeon design was random (although to be fair it was a good random design system). Three, encounter locations were hard coded and would only allow certain encounter formations, if you hand placed monsters instead of using the encounter system the monsters had approximately double the HP you would expect (this was something else that the clowns at N-Space would never discuss).
N-Space was working on expanding the toolset to allow branching dialogue and tile by tile dungeon design in an update promised by the end of 2015. That date came and went and no word was released. Finally, several weeks overdue, they announced that they expansion was indefinitely delayed and that they had known for weeks prior to the new year but had not informed the community. Supposedly the toolset expansion was delayed so they could publish the Rage of Demons content expansion.
Now the game is in the hands of Digital Extreme, and in keeping with the policies of N-Space, refuses to tell anyone what they plan to do with the game.
All in all, this tale is a good example of how to fuck up your plan from the very beginning. Make assumptions about who wants to play the game and how they want to play it, make changes to the game rules and lie about it, produce an overly simplistic toolset and lie about it, refuse to tell your community what is going on, and make promises you cannot keep.
We really need a good crpg with a toolset, D&D or some other game, but the idiots at N-Space were not the ones to bring it to us.