Tales of the Sword Coast is the sequel to the impressively large but rather flawed Baldur's Gate. Unfortunately, while it does correct a few minor flaws, it has plenty of problems of its own.
The changes it makes to the basic BG engine are minor, but useful, such as highlighting magical items and having buttons for quicksaves. The experience cap is also lifted enough for characters to gain a level, but remains ridiculously low. Even following the game in a straight linear path, it's almost impossible not to hit the limit, which is very frustrating.
There is not much in the way of a plot for the new sections. Basically, go to new places and have adventures. Having said that, there's a reasonably interesting storyline involved in some, especially Durlag's Tower, it's just that it means nothing to the overall plot. The ending remains the same - indeed, if you completed the original game, you must reload at a point prior to that, head off to the TotSC areas and then come back to finish the original game. I'm not sure what would have been a better solution, but this seems rather clumsy.
There are, annoyingly, no new companions in TotSC, so it is carried by the new areas alone. This is where the game falls down.
The original game featured some quite frustrating battles. Unlike a game like Fallout, where luck and strategy play a huge part in battles and even a slightly outmatched party can get through a tough battle in a few tries, I would often have to reload twenty times or more before it could be beaten without any party members falling. BG would be far more enjoyable if it had a "knock-out" system where a character can be simply rendered unconscious rather than be killed every time their HP gets to 0, such as that employed in Realmz.
TotSC is worse in this regard. Here's just one example. In Durlag's Tower, there's an area with four wardens to a door. They each have a riddle you must solve to proceed. The riddles are actually quite interesting, but the method of solving them isn't:
- Wander around a few rooms.
- Save constantly, because your thief doesn't find all the traps, and winds up getting killed.
- Fight a few mildly tough battles.
- Find all the objects that look out of place.
- Move your mouse over everything to find the objects that can be manipulated.
- Use the items and objects in accordance with the sledgehammer hints.
There is, ultimately, no real challenge or thought to the riddles, which makes the attempt at a puzzle element pointless. It's simply a tedious exercise of searching everything.
There's worse to come. The four wardens then attack. Just one of them does around 20 damage per hit, and quickly carves up most characters. Add to that the magic of the others, and you have a horribly frustrating fight. The only way to deal with it is, as with almost all tough BG battles, was to send a single character with Boots of Speed there, then have him run back drawing only one enemy with him. Repeat four times for this battle, and endlessly throughout the new sections. The problem is that this entirely defeats the fun of large-scale battles, and again is quite tedious and frustrating when it doesn't work out.
Even with battles aside, the other attempts at puzzle elements in the Tower (eg. taking items/manipulating objects to open doors) are repetitive and boring.
Without a points cap, this may have been a little better - even one more level for each character could have made things better. At least by going up a few levels, or picked up some wonderful treasure, you'd feel like you achieved something. As it is, the new sections seem an endless blur of save-and-reload - not exactly an enjoyable experience.
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