Sword Coast

[Saulus]

We just need a philanthropist who plays Sundren and wants to fund a team of artists. LOL.

Games like these are interesting, but I don't ever see a scenario where Sundren would become a mod for another game again. Perhaps it's own stand-alone game one day, but right now I'm focusing on other pursuits.

NWN2 will be as good as it gets for some time I imagine, but it's nice to see people still playing and enjoying what we have been able to do. I just don't have the heart to deal with another bug that may be an 'engine limitation' again.

[Saulus]

http://www.pcgamer.com/sword-coast-l...are-promising/

[Doubtful]

Still all live though, no sign of an actual toolset yet.

[Doubtful]

Well, it's out and the reviews are... Mixed. At best.

Pros seem to be that it's RPG-lite nature means you can enjoy it without needing to invest time or effort.

Cons seem to be an utter lack of depth, duller less fun Diablo 3 esq style combat, total lack of toolset or creation capacity beyond randomly generated dungeons.

Glad I didn't bother pre-ordering, what a waste of cash.

[Kaybrie]

I'm hopeful for Shards if only because if it's successful, other gaming companies may take notice and put efforts into toolsets for their games. Kinda sad cause toolsets were sorta an indie thing that were wildly popular when I was a kid, I know anyone who played Starcraft probably spent a great deal more time online playing custom maps then anything else.

Sad that Neverwinter Nights was basically the first and last I heard of this sort of thing outside of MUDD's.

[Doubtful]

I'm still dubious about Shards, but I'll be happy to have my suspicions overturned.

Toolsets are still around, they're just quite specific (mind you, it's always been that way). Nowadays the availability of entire friendly to use (friendlier than many old toolsets, including NWN2s) engines such as Unreal, Unity and many others has replaced masses of toolsets. The Shards toolset looks just appears to be Unity with some plugins and lua files, as it is for quite a few games these days.

[Cornuto]

Shards

You made me curious and checked it out. Yikes, they didn't spend much on graphics. How'd they manage to make it looks worse than NWN2 in 2015?

[Kaybrie]

Yeah, Shards doesn't look particularly amazing though again, I hope it does well not because I want to play it super-bad, but because I hope that it turns some companies heads to the idea of investing in easy-use games.

Though yeah, Unity is a good place to make stuff, but you need to have talented 3d modelers as well as programmers who can make it from the ground up.

[gamestarmike]

I played sc custom from 99-battlenet shutdown.

Played mostly WW2 europa maps but there was always something to play, I have 5000+sc maps on my external.

I've been looking for something to replace that ever since but nothing comes close to the creative dev community of SC. On the same note SC2 has a pretty decent ww1 custom that i've had fun playing the past couple weeks with the last patch they did before legacy comes out.

[Doubtful]

Visually, Shards is pretty dire. It's one of the things that makes me suspect, there's a lot of talk about how it's all just placeholder, but there's a lot of it with a cohesive style - That sort of time investment is rarely something that'll just be placeholder. We'll see though, perhaps it'll get a massive visual overhaul, though if I were a betting man I'd put money on the overhaul being something similar to the visual updates seen in Wasteland 2 following its port from Unity 4 to 5.

3D artists and Programmers are needed for virtually anything, the entire NWN2 PW thing only works on laterday magic smoke and wishful thinking, with a lot of clever bods tinkering around to get the featureset we see everyday functioning. Much of the cooler areas come from the large amounts of Custom Content the server has had added to it over the years.

Honestly, engines like Unreal and Unity are much, much simpler to use than people give them credit for. Compared to getting Custom stuff into NWN2 Unreal is so easy it's almost hilarious. If you could collect together the people from the NWN1/2 server and CC scene and focus them on one project you could really do something amazing. Flying cat herding might be simpler though. A shame really, in all honesty you could get a basic MMO style server up and running over the course of a long weekend. With a good team and six months development you could be really rocking.

[Kaybrie]

Yeah, there'd be too much division among the NWN2 community of how to best make such an engine, and people walking out if it isn't their preferred method. Too many different styles would suit it, basically someone would need to create a demo, go show it on crowd funding sites, hope for the best, and if they get a decent amount of cash PAY those modders to create a PW engine.

[Doubtful]

Don't need to make an engine, they're being given away.

While Kickstarter is certainly a popular option, it's not one I'd probably choose off the bat. Organizing a project among widely distributed volunteers is hard enough without trying to interview, motivate and maintain paid staff and it's completely unlikely you'd be able to get the amount of money needed to fund the establishing of a new studio. Getting crowd funding without a clear pedigree and a lot of initial work is exceptionally rare and even then you're staggeringly unlikely to get the money needed to setup a studio with enough employees.

A better approach might be to make the project as self funded as possible. Encourage staff and submissions to be of a quality that's suitable for the assets (whatever they be) to be sold on the various engine marketplaces or via 3rd part asset resellers. Outside of that take donations and sell goodies and so on to cover running costs, with any excess funds going into a pool that can be used to hire specific artists for a task or to provide software licences or hardware to contributors that require them.

It'd be important to use the limitations you'd have intelligently. It'd be a fools errand to try and launch with an open world style game with dozens of races, classes and monsters when all you've got are some keen people, a free copy of World Maker Basic (as awesome as it is), Blender, some simple serverside stuff and the default content. Actively using the limited content for game constraints could work, setting the server inside a single facility or even small set of rooms. So long as you're honest and fairly realistic it shouldn't be a massive issue - Develop it with player input and make it fun, even if the first months are spent in a bizarre roboot-mannequin storage facility where near identical robots politically maneuver for power. A half-derelict spacecraft where everyone's woken up in cryo-tubes wearing identical outfits, or innercity Hogwarts on meth where identical uniform is taken seriously.

Then just roll out updates and features as they become available and as more people get interested.

[Masaryk]

I was really disappointed to learn that Sword Coast Legends would not be the "next step" in the line of games from this group and lore category. I was desperately hoping for a "next-level" Sundren, but oh well..

[Doubtful]

n-Space, the folk who developed Sword Coast Legends, are closing down. Seems that they gambled and lost with SCL.

News on MMORPG.com

[Fateful Encounter]

I kinda felt like they were trying to do a little too much with SCL - taking a Forgotten Realms setting, mashing it with diablo-like combat and loot, mixing it up with a competitive player v. DM gameplay setup ... it never sounded like a winner to me.

Sad about the studio closing though.