Legends of Dawn Review

Not indie, just amateur 

“I have a great idea for a video game!” is a dangerous phrase, often coming from someone who's played enough games to know what he or she likes, and thinks that combining enough of those components might make for an even better game. Thanks to the wonderful world of Kickstarter and crowdfunding, lists of great-sounding features can be funded to become games. But just because they sound like a pile of good ideas doesn't mean they'll coalesce into a great whole. Exhibit A: Legends Of Dawn, a role-playing game advertised as having the sorts of “great ideas” that RPGs are supposed to have, like a huge open world with freedom to explore and develop your character in whatever direction you see fit. Legends Of Dawn does deliver on both of these goals. It's just terrible at them.

Dat draw distance.

It fails in two critical manners. On the technical level, it's a mess. This is, quite simply, not a game that's in a release-ready state. Despite a successful Kickstarter six months ago claiming that Legends was almost finished, today it's anything but. The first clue I noticed is that the draw distance for the barely detailed grass tufts is about 10 yards away from my character. Since the perspective limits the view to 15 to 20 yards anyway, the net effect is a halo of ugly grass that sprouts everywhere you walk. There are many, many more, but my personal favorite might be a particularly awful bug where my character’s magic points wouldn't regenerate above a certain point after level gains – they stayed at 28/XX.
That's ridiculous enough, but it pales in comparison to the instability of Legends Of Dawn. A not-insignificant percentage of the time I clicked on either the Save or Load button,

it crashed. As I investigated my problems, I found that some unlucky folks were suffering overheated processors and had their PCs shut down for several minutes. There is no reason that a game with these issues should be available for purchase without a giant alpha or beta label on it. It's an embarrassment to Steam and GamersGate that they would sell it without one. Legends Of Dawn happened to be the bare minimum of playable for me, but it’s filled with technical issues and design annoyances (sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart) that constantly interrupted anything close to enjoyment. For example, items in my character's inventory could stack, but they don't automatically do so. Worse, when I tried to stack the same items manually, sometimes they refused to do so for no reason that I could see.
Meanwhile, half of the quests and dialogue fire without context. At one point I went to go talk to the first town's lord, and he told me I needed to return to a fort I'd never been to, then casually mentioned that my character's father wasn't the first person to die in that fort... despite the fact that nothing I’d seen previously had indicated that my father was dead. Almost every piece of quest dialogue has something like this wrong with it. Even the music, which would be one of the few genuinely good things about Legends Of Dawn, jarringly jumped from track to track when I stepped into a new zone or night shifted to day.

The stalagtites on the ceiling are bad, yes, but they're a blessing compared to when it tries to show the ceiling.

Even putting on my imagination cap and picturing Legends Of Dawn without all of these crippling problems, it would still suffer from a paucity of vision. It's obviously inspired by older role-playing games, but doesn't seem to understand what made them worth emulating in the first place. Perhaps most symbolic of its problems is an introduction movie, which says little more than “This is a fantasy world with a powerful magical artifact that's been shattered, but now a hero needs to find the pieces” is perhaps the most insipid storyline in video games, and yet here that story is, stinking up yet another game.
The fetishization of older games twists Legends Of Dawn into something annoying, not nostalgic. “Read the manual!” it demands, but why? Why did the developers take the time to type a manual for a digital-only game, while choosing not to include actual effects of items as tooltips in said game? The classic Ultima games are some of my all-time favorite RPGs, but Legends Of Dawn seems to be under the impression that what made them great was not conversation, morality, or exploration, but instead having to figure out what each color potion's effects were.
Likewise, lockpicking is one of Legends Of Dawn's few (only?) clever systems, where you collect runes and connect them to open chests. Yet it has no introduction in-game, and the description in the manual only mentioned half of what I needed to make it work, ignoring essential information about how the color of the runes fits in. The Kickstarter for Legends Of Dawn antagonistically declares that it's a hardcore game and not for casuals, but withholding critical information isn't hardcore. It's annoying.

Racial sensitivity!

In fact, there's nothing “hardcore” about Legends Of Dawn at all, other than how difficult it was to motivate myself to play it. Its systems (other than lockpicking) are all incredibly simple and generic. There are all manner of different things to craft, and nothing at all interesting about the crafting process – put points in a skill at level-up, and then click on items from an available-anywhere menu to craft or cook the item. It's as if a crafting system filled with hundreds of items exists only because RPGs are supposed to have crafting systems, not because it actually adds any depth.
Combat may be the worst system of all, or perhaps it just feels that way because Legends Of Dawn, like many RPGs, is filled with fighting. You click on enemies to attack them, slowly and repeatedly. That's it. There are no special moves or skills outside of magic, and the combat is too slow to be anywhere near comparable to a Diablo, even though it looks like it should be. When it's over and you need to recuperate, chowing down food or potions could help, but those ran out quickly. Health automatically regenerates with time, but there's no rest button, so I found that the often best thing to do in Legends Of Dawn is standing still. Yes, this is a game where doing nothing is often literally the most efficient way to “play.”