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Mod author: CúChoinneach (EE version by Solaufein and Red Carnelian)

Version used for review: 4.2

Dark Side of the Sword Coast is lauded as, at least by its original creator and multiple sources, the first Baldur’s Gate mod ever made. It was made and released for the original Baldur’s Gate engine but has received a wealth of updates and improvements, with a version available for BG:EE and EET.

Prior to this review, I had never played Dark Side before, and I had very few expectations going in. There are obviously some concessions to be made given the circumstances of its creation — it’s hard to hold this mod to the same standard as those that are being released in the current year, but even still, I have many thoughts.

The mod is incredibly impressive and frustrating in equal measure. The adventure — and I use that term lightly — begins in Chapter 5, wherein upon returning to the Friendly Arm Inn, a new character named Jet’laya will approach you and ask for your help finding her sister. Jet’laya is one of the many recruitable companions that Dark Side introduces, and for the most part it’s a relatively good first impression.

Jet’laya informs you that her sister has been missing for a full six months after having gone mad after her beloved left her for another woman, and she has finally tracked her down to the woods east of Peldvale.

This quest takes you to three new areas, though really, it’s one new area and two reused ones from wilderness areas on the other side of the map. These two areas have even less content than the already sparse encounters found in the world. This is a theme that will come up again in this review.

The one actual new area that this quest involves is just another wilderness zone, but it fits in well and its implementation is better than a mod like, say, Stone of Askavar‘s. The experience would have been better, though, if Jet’laya’s content across the three maps had been put into the new one.

When you do find Jet’laya’s sister, she has seemingly turned into a banshee. Note, my party was Level 4 when this encounter happened, so I wasn’t quite prepared for the three consecutive Level 9 “Wail of the Banshee” spells to hit my party and force a reload. This was when I decided that I would be playing this mod on Story Mode. Some people might balk at that, given that this is largely a tactics-based encounter mod, but I’m here to review the game design, writing, and play experience, not suffer because I don’t want to power-game in order to finish a 25-year-old mod.

Once you kill Jet’laya’s sister, Jet’laya herself doesn’t utter a single word about it to you nor her father, which isn’t terribly surprising given the time it was made in, but it’s still frustrating and basically informs the player that these characters are merely statblocks with voices. I imagine that this felt less out of place back in 2000 when talkative companions in Baldur’s Gate were simply not a thing yet, but even the original cast of BG1 does a better job with the few lines they do have.

I had to follow a walkthrough for the entire mod because some of the necessary content is incredibly obtuse. For example, I went to Beregost to speak to a man whose holy symbol was stolen by a dragon to the east of Nashkel, and a commoner outside told me that there was a dragon in Nashkel.

Naturally, I went to the east of Nashkel, only to find that there was nothing there. It turns out that I had to go to Nashkel first, get told that the dragon was actually to the east of Nashkel, agree to kill it (again), and then I could go and confront it.

That’s a real, full dragon, by the way. The priest tells the player that it’s “only young” so I was expecting a wyrmling, or something, but nope! It’s just a straight-up green dragon in a reused area from Throne of Bhaal. I actually don’t know how a player that has not removed the experience cap of the game could complete this quest.

Once you’re done killing this dragon, there’s a man standing outside the cave who exists only to tell you that there’s something up with the mayor! This is one of Dark Side’s methods to get you to move to the next location for its content. The other method is by giving you a quest to deliver something utterly unimportant without the option to refuse it and then having a new, unrelated quest NPC standing around waiting for you.

Dark Side and its content are exceptionally linear. You must complete almost every quest in order, starting with Jet’laya’s, and very, very few of these quests are related in any way shape or form. It’s rather unsubtle about it, too — once you complete one quest, an NPC will immediately come up to you, say “Hey, you’re CHARNAME, right? I’ve got something for you to do,” then you’re vaguely directed where to go next.

The recycling of areas only accelerates in the last two quests. In one, you must save the mayor’s baby, who was kidnapped. You are given a whopping total of zero leads to go on save for the walkthrough in the readme. This quest takes you to a near copy of Durlag’s Tower with an extensive catacomb of reused areas, wherein you fight two vampires. The areas that this quest reuses are massive, and there is barely anything to do except fight occasional hordes of seemingly randomly placed enemies.

The finale drags you into what it calls the “Underdark,” which in practice is seventeen oversized maps stitched together from other dungeons you’ve already cleared, some of which are recycled multiple times in the same linear dungeon-crawl. It’s a gauntlet of attrition with nothing but waves of enemies littered across copy-pasted terrain. There’s almost no story to carry you through, just a thread about the Iron Throne making deals with the drow and a nod to Jarlaxle at the end.

I found a majority of these quests, in a word, boring. It’s almost entirely just walking and fighting, then checking the walkthrough on what to do when you get stuck. The fights themselves are wildly difficult to the point of absurdity for a BG1 party. The best battles in Baldur’s Gate aren’t with incredibly overleveled spellcasters or dragons, in my opinion, but fights that are varied and specially crafted — the battle with Drasus and his party, or the battle at the top of the Iron Throne.

So, it’s hard for me to recommend Dark Side of the Sword Coast for the quality of its quests in writing or design, but there are a few aspects that I rather enjoyed.

The mod introduces a number of new spells and items into the game. Many of these items are spread throughout the game’s world unrelated to Dark Side’s content, and not all of them are hits, but for the most part I found them to be enjoyable additions to the game.

Additionally, all of the new companions have beautiful custom-made portraits created by Isandir, and they have quality voicesets, so long as you’re not too distracted by the fact that they are taken from other games. They don’t necessarily fill niches in the party roster, but a few of them feel quite at home in the game despite not having any banters with each other nor the player character.

A majority of them come with their own personal items but nothing about them is particularly overpowered. Perhaps if they were, this mod questline wouldn’t be so difficult to complete.

The author, CúChoinneach himself, appears as a companion. That’s just Gaelic for Kenneth. He’s a cool, mysterious elven ranger with loyal wolf companion and a grudge against a vampire. Once you kill that vampire, he’s out of there, so I appreciate the brevity of this Kenneth-Drizzt amalgamation. Hey, no judgement — it was the early 2000s.

Many of the descriptions for these items are well-written and fit right into Baldur’s Gate. They may honestly be the best written thing in the mod itself, and I don’t have any issues with the item balancing either, even if overall they do bloat the game somewhat, though I would argue that this is offset by the amount of content added.

…But the amount of content added is my main issue with the mod. There are just so many areas, and none of them are made interesting or new by anything that you find in them. It is, both for the time and now, an impressive accomplishment to create such a sprawling mod, though, and a lot of great work has been put into maintaining it by members of the community.

As a fun tidbit, the author somewhat recently wrote a post on Medium about Dark Side of the Sword Coast. Maybe “wrote” is putting it too strongly — it contains the supposed ruminations of ChatGPT recounting a conversation that it had with one Ken Henderson. It’s an… interesting read, if not particularly illuminating.

Despite my criticisms of this mod, it can’t be denied that it was fundamental to many of the things we take for granted in the community today. I can only imagine the hard work and frustration that went into a project like this, and the many hours put into updating it by its current maintainers.

So, even if I found myself laughing at the absurdity of the combat encounters or groaning at the fourth time I’d walked through the same area, thanks, Dark Side of the Sword Coast, and to late 90’s Ken Henderson.

Thanks for reading.