Sword Coast Legends Interview
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The editors at GamesBeat have alerted us to the fact that they've published an interview with Dungeons & Dragons brand manager Nathan Stewart and N-Space president Dan Tudge about their forthcoming Forgotten Realms-based CRPG, Sword Coast Legends. A bit of what to expect:
GamesBeat: Why has it taken so long for us to have a party-based D&D game for the PC? The last real one was in 2008.
Nathan Stewart: The obvious answer is because it took Dan Tudge this long to pitch an awesome game to me. I could blame it on him.
The fact of the matter is that for a long time, we had our video game publishing rights in a long-term agreement with Atari. Its publishing strategy for D&D games didn't match my strategy exactly, but I've only been on the brand for three years. They brought me in at Wizards to run D&D, primarily because of my video game experience in the past. Right before I came on, they had ended their agreement, their relationship with Atari and said, we want to take the rights back. We want to manage this. We want to make the great D&D games we know our fans want. We don't think that having someone else control our rights is the right way to do it.
We didn't think Atari was doing the best job, so we were able to end that.
I say that all nice and fuzzy because I wasn't in the middle of it, but the fact of the matter is there was litigation over the deal. This wasn't the best ending of a relationship. But we got the rights back because we care about what the consumer experience is. What that means is that you have to be selective. You have to be picky about finding the right company, the right people at that company, the right concept. All those things have to marry together to bring this to fruition.
I hope this is OK to say, Dan I don't think this is crazy but Dan can confirm that when they showed us the project and they were talking about this, Dan was just kind of coming on board with N-Space. I talked to him and said, look, I love this. I think this is awesome. But you're a big part of it, Dan. I need to know that you're not just jumping on or partially here. If I'm signing up for this, I'm signing up the full team. It has to be you as part of the equation. He said, yeah, that's what we're doing.
Dan Tudge: I agree wholeheartedly. There's a lot to be said for these ideas brewing for quite a long time. Really, the timing was right for both parties to come together. What we really wanted to make was Sword Coast Legends. What Wizards really wanted to return to came into alignment a couple of years ago. To Nathan's point, my answer was clear. This is a title that's very dear to my heart. I definitely want to be part of it all the way through.
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GamesBeat: For the campaign edition of Sword Coast Legends, will it work like the LAN and the multiplayer play you have in the Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, but with an additional person running everything as the dungeon master?
Tudge: You'll have one to four players in the party. Those players can meet up with other real players or characters you've met in the game. You can still play by yourself with three additional A.I. party members. Then the DM joins in as a real-time DM.
Right from the get-go, we wanted to make sure that, having been a DM there's a lot of work involved in preparing and having a campaign ready. We wanted to give people the opportunity to immediately jump in and start playing as a DM. We focused heavily on the real-time aspect of that. We have offline campaign tools that allow DMs to create very lengthy, almost limitless campaigns. But we're not talking a lot about that right now.
We're focusing more on the real-time interaction. They can change encounters, lay traps, change doors, make secret doors, spawn monsters, control monsters, promote them, demote them, you name it, all in real time to cater the adventure to the players.
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GamesBeat: Are these going to be easier to use than the tools from the Neverwinter Nights games?
Tudge: I'm happy to say, absolutely yes. For me, the promise of what Neverwinter Nights offered was really exciting as a fan of D&D and a person who enjoys being a DM. Even before I worked at BioWare, I got in there and started working with those. I was a little disappointed. I come from an art background. I got in there and learned it, but I was a little I was looking forward to something far more accessible, something that could get me creating adventures much quicker.
Right from the start, we've talked and made sure that is the case, that you can get together at 7 on a Friday night with your friends for a session and you can start in the lobby at the same time as the players and be DMing right away. You don't have to spend a week preparing for the adventure. You certainly don't have to be writing any complex scripting.
Stewart: Another point, you remember months ago now, you guys came out and we set up stations here at Wizards. We let everybody at Wizards who wanted to come in and play, whether they worked on Magic or Duel Masters or D&D, whether or not they were a DM. People who knew D&D but were not big video game people, definitely not any kind of technical people, jumped on and were DMing and having fun in five minutes. The whole team here was so impressed at how cool it was to be a DM, but also how you could really DM on the fly without having to have all kinds of crazy knowledge from the outside world.
Tudge: It was interesting, because initially, when you volunteer when you have a group you're demoing with and you let them play, nobody volunteers to be DM. Almost every time, one of the dev team ends up DMing. There's this immediate intimidation. DMing has to be really complex, right? It has to be a lot of work. But I don't even think the first dungeon run is even done before everyone is fighting over who gets to DM.
