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Game News Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a 5E OGL RPG with a focus on verticality and dynamic environments

Infinitron

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Tags: Mathieu Girard; Solasta: Crown of the Magister; Tactical Adventures

It seems like every RPG developer these days is interested in making games that replicate what they see as the authentic experience of tabletop roleplaying. The latest developer to join this group is Amplitude Studios co-founder Mathieu Girard, who announced that he'd founded a new RPG studio called Tactical Adventures in an interview with VentureBeat back in November. Tactical Adventures' first game was finally revealed yesterday as Solasta: Crown of the Magister, a turn-based tactical RPG based on the 5th Edition OGL ruleset with a special focus on verticality, light & darkness and other dynamic environmental elements. The studio has produced a light-hearted animated trailer and a longer dev diary video to explain what they're trying to achieve with this game. I'll post those here along with the obligatory press release:



PARIS, FRANCE – June 25, 2019 – French independent developer Tactical Adventures announced today its latest project, tactical role-playing game Solasta: Crown of the Magister, is coming to Steam. Solasta: Crown of the Magister embraces the ruleset of the world’s greatest role-playing game where a player’s choice dynamically changes the adventure. The journey begins with creating a team of four explorers, selecting their race, class, background story, abilities and roll for abilities and personal stats. Players will journey through the mystical realms of Solasta, unravelling a story that spans multiple worlds.

The dynamic and mysterious world of Solasta features brand new elements of verticality, allowing players to use their surroundings as an element of strategy. Position ranged characters on high vantage points or send your thief down into shafts and caverns to scope out what’s ahead. Utilize light as a tool to explore the depths and hollows of dungeons or use it as a weapon against the creatures of the dark. Solasta is a unique team-based adventure where each character plays a critical role in the campaign and can be a hero. Players must take advantage of each character’s strengths and weaknesses if they are to succeed.

Players will have the opportunity to get in on the adventure before it even starts when Tactical Adventures launches its Kickstarter campaign at the end of summer. Players will be able to back Solasta: Crown of the Magister on Kickstarter and link arms with the developers, joining the Solasta community and being rewarded for doing so!

“Tactical Adventures is a small team comprised of Tabletop gamers, many of whom have been playing pen and paper games as well as D&D videogames for over 30 years,” says Mathieu Girard, founder of Tactical Adventures and Creative Director of the game. “We have always dreamed of creating our own game, so we set out to create Solasta, taking the best elements of our favourite games and enhancing and building upon them. Additionally, we have added new features such as light, verticality, team-based adventure, dice rolls, etc. We are using the actual rulesets from Tabletop games to finally bridge the gap between Pen and Paper and videogames.”

Solasta: Crown of the Magister Features:
  • Verticality: Solasta is a three-dimensional world rather than a series of flat maps. Locations can be explored by climbing walls, flying, teleporting, crawling through tunnels, finding secret passages, or falling through unstable ground, and allow the player to use the environment to take on encounters in multiple different ways.
  • Team Based Adventure: Players will have many options to choose races, classes, backgrounds, and can even roll for stats as they create their party. All members are essential - together you will adventure through Solasta as a group, where you must work together in pursuit of your quest.
  • Tactical CRPG: Each encounter can be handled in multiple ways. Will you use the high ground to strike your enemies from above as a Darkweaver Rogue, or shove your enemies into deep chasms as a Mountaineer Fighter? Your choices alone will determine the destiny of your party.
  • Light: Light will not only help to see your surroundings as you explore deep underground or in a dungeon. It can also be used as a weapon against dragons and creatures you encounter along your journey. Careful, though - light can also give away your position.
  • Created by Tabletop Players: Tactical Adventures is a team of highly experienced Tabletop players and veteran game developers who are passionate about the genre, striving to create the best Tactical RPG videogame.
  • Kickstarter: Tactical Adventures is giving players the opportunity to be heard by joining the community and backing Solasta on Kickstarter. The campaign will feature an amazing tiered reward system and the team is already working on a demo of the game.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister will be available to support and back on Kickstarter soon. Media interested in learning more about Tactical Adventures and Solasta: Crown of the Magister should email Premier Communications (TacticalAdventures@premiercomms.com).

As the press release mentions, Solasta is coming to Kickstarter at the end of summer. There are more details about the game on the official website and it's got a Steam page too. I'd say it has promise, although I hope it plans to be more than a game about traversing brown-colored vertical dungeons.
 

Mortmal

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Ah finally some good news, this is almost coming from nowhere and unexpected. Almost , as this is the project from those guys who worked on endless space right ? One thing i like about the trailer is their English is very understandable for french people like me.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
The Endless series of games all feature interesting ideas. This game will be worth keeping an eye on.
 

Gregz

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It's great to see a new studio doing this, but focusing on verticality is a waste of resources. I've never been in a PnP session were vertical mobility was a keystone feature.

Fun gameplay doesn't involve micromanaging your players up and down ladders, ropes, and ledges.
 
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Kaivokz

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Fun gameplay doesn't involve micromanaging your players up and down ladders, ropes, and ledges.

Agreed, this seems like the weirdest thing to push as a feature.
I'm tentatively looking forward to more info, but it does sound stupid. "Tactical CRPG: Each encounter can be handled in multiple ways. Will you use the high ground to strike your enemies from above as a Darkweaver Rogue, or shove your enemies into deep chasms as a Mountaineer Fighter? Your choices alone will determine the destiny of your party."
So my options are push people into a hole or shoot them from a raised platform? Hopefully this is just a weird thing they decided to market and not actually a focus of their gameplay, since it's basically like saying "You can move your units left... OR RIGHT!!" It has very little influence on whether the combat will be fun and varied or not.

edit- and pushing people into chasms determines the destiny of my party?!
 

Agame

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So my options are push people into a hole or shoot them from a raised platform? Hopefully this is just a weird thing they decided to market and not actually a focus of their gameplay, since it's basically like saying "You can move your units left... OR RIGHT!!" It has very little influence on whether the combat will be fun and varied or not.

Yea really bizarre, would make a lot more sense if the setting for the game was modern day/sci fi tacticool shooting ala Jagged Alliance. Then cover and height suddenly becomes very relevant. But medieval/fantasy setting, eh? I too hope this is just a marketing gimmick they are using to get a head above the crowd.
 

LESS T_T

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There's playable demo coming along with Kickstarter. Probably we can see if there's any meat in it soon.
 

ERYFKRAD

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Ah finally some good news, this is almost coming from nowhere and unexpected. Almost , as this is the project from those guys who worked on endless space right ? One thing i like about the trailer is their English is very understandable for french people like me.
A Frenchman understanding another Frenchman speaking English, well I never.
 

Galdred

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
edit- and pushing people into chasms determines the destiny of my party?!

You can be known as a "shooter" or a "pusher". It's all up to you.
Pushing people into a chasm will shift your alignment towards "down"
Firing from aboce will shift it towards "up".
But it is more complex than your standard Chaotic/Lawful, Good/Evil alignment, because it may also shift your alignment towards Left or Right, and Front or Back, depending on your relative position.

Maybe they took some inspiration from this comic, and you improve the "up" and "down" skill by doing:

donjon-crepuscule-t-104-le-dojo-du-lagon.jpg


(In Dungeon, The main character kills so many goblins that he gets an insane level in the "killing green opponents" skill, but he struggles against opponents of a different color).
 
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ERYFKRAD

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edit- and pushing people into chasms determines the destiny of my party?!

You can be known as a "shooter" or a "pusher". It's all up to you.
Pushing people into a chasm will shift your alignment towards "down"
Firing from aboce will shift it towards "up".
But it is more complex than your standard Chaotic/Lawful, Good/Evil alignment, because it may also shift your alignment towards Left or Right, and Front or Back, depending on your relative position.
The 6 DOF alignment. Nice.
 

luj1

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Cute presentation but going by their core ideas they're not likely to produce notable impact in the ultra-saturated isometric CRPG market... Would have had more success with a rotoscoped animated series actually, they even have the right style
 
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Dorateen

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How fortuitous of this project to surface at this time. You can tell just from watching these guys, similar to Pierre Begue or Ceres Games, they have a knowledge, passion and love for Dungeons & Dragons role-playing as well as respect for influential computer titles like Temple of Elemental Evil or Dark Sun.

Such a glaring contrast to fake industry developers who have no clue what they are talking about. They babble on about how missing isn't fun, and "D&D can't translate to a video game!". Meanwhile, Tactical Adventures say:

We are using the actual rulesets from Tabletop games to finally bridge the gap between Pen and Paper and videogames.
 

Mortmal

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Ah finally some good news, this is almost coming from nowhere and unexpected. Almost , as this is the project from those guys who worked on endless space right ? One thing i like about the trailer is their English is very understandable for french people like me.
A Frenchman understanding another Frenchman speaking English, well I never.
"
Come on its the codex should i write /S like on reddit for people to understand its sarcasm or over use one of those filthy ";)".
 

daveyd

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They're saying all the right things. I want to get hyped but I'll wait for the demo.

Will it be better than BG3?

At least it won't have Larian's shitty middle school campy slapstick humor. Also it's pure turn-based as any tabletop based CRPG should be; not some sort of RTwP / hybrid / toggle that BG3 will likely have to be to appease BG fan. So yeah, Solasta FTW.
 

ERYFKRAD

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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Ah finally some good news, this is almost coming from nowhere and unexpected. Almost , as this is the project from those guys who worked on endless space right ? One thing i like about the trailer is their English is very understandable for french people like me.
A Frenchman understanding another Frenchman speaking English, well I never.
"
Come on its the codex should i write /S like on reddit for people to understand its sarcasm or over use one of those filthy ";)".
I will if you will.
 

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