Game News Solasta: Crown of the Magister Released

[AshenNedra]

This game is not fucking woke. It's French. We don't really give a shit yet about pronouns

I brofisted your post but I want it on record that I don't condone being French in any way or form.

I know we have been sucking hard the last...30 years or so. I don't blame you.

 

[Darkzone]

Eh given that this is the garbage thread anyway:

Norse are primitive, Anglo-Saxons are civilised.
Woke agenda sees the superior actor in civilisation and technology always as the malicious one, and the inferior one as virtous. It is the American mindset of always root for the underdog made an ideology. The British Empire is insanely powerfull, so it must be insanely evil.
Now the Norse weren't really all that primitive judging by their metallurgy, and they weren't all that weak judging by how much trouble they gave the entire upper continent with their raids, but in popular culture they are the underdog. The barbarian. The noble one.
Put on top that they are pagans warring against Christians, and wokoids hate Christianity beyond belief, and you got a stew going!
Also the loose (and idealised) Thane social structure is a lot closer to anarchistic dreams than a proper monarchy, which is associated with evil aswell.
The cherry on top is that the Norse Saga's contain the valkyries, giving birth to the mythos of the shield maiden. Female warriors in history are absurdly rare, and pushing a myth of an equality of female and male physical strength is a core tenant of wokeness. The shieldmaiden is practically made for this.

Add all the bits together, and the only thing that does not appeal to a modern audience about the vikangz is the skin colour. At least about their romanticised idea of Norse raiders.

The noble savage is a myth from the hippy drug induced 1960s-70s (see: A Man Called Horse.). But to be fair it is based in the real treatment of the native americans by the US government. As in the famous speach by Tatanka Iyotake:

Spoiler

"What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept ? Not one.
When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land .... Where are our lands ? Who owns them? What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money ? Yet, they say I am a thief .... What law have I broken ?' Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red?"

And we have to acknowledge that if you are powerful (ability to accomplish things) you are capable to of doing great good and great evil. And if you are weak you can do only little good and little evil. But power does not make you inherently evil and weakness inherently good.
Therefore the saying "Power Corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is wrong on this basis. Great Britain is an example of doing good by the application of power (military and monetary) to abolish slavery throughout the world.
The woke hate christianity, because christianity is diametrically opposed to their ideology based in envy, greed and laziness. And they fail to recognise that it was the christianity that spread equality under the law and the believe in natural "god given" personal freedoms.
We can count the capable female warriors in history on both hands and feet and spreading this therefore a nonsense since none of them meet one very good male opponent. And truly capable was only the japanese women samurais -bushi, like Tomoe Gozen.
The female warrior trope has spread in the fantasy genre as a sexy trope of a slender but athletic female warrior like Red Sonja. But in the age of fat acceptance and the opposition to sexualisation of females and the male gaze, this trope is not going to be so sexy and attractive anymore. And therefore with much hope it will soon disappear.

Edit:
Btw.: Be ready for Afrofuturism, because the Euro-Medivalisation of Africans is the first step. The earliest and therefore the oldest chainmail armor example was found in the balkans (800 BC). While many sudanese chainmail armor were dated to the late 19th century. So we can surely say that the Sudanese Sultanate of Sennar ( up to Khartun ) has received Chainmail armor from the Mamluk Sultans or the Ottomans between 14-17th century. I would guess that this was in the Portuguese-Mamluk wars or after the defeat of the Mamluks by the Ottomans in 1515.

 

[Anonona]

This game is not fucking woke. It's French. We don't really give a shit yet about pronouns and fucking gender stuff, except for some fringe/far-left elements.There is such a thing as being too obsessed with politics.

I don't know man, there are already 2 quest with interracial romances. One is the Lawkeeper quest where a black guy called Corporal Dan or such is revealed to be in a relationship with an unnamed white woman, and it seems a black elf called Blackroot has something going on with the veteran white deputy (can't remember his name, sorry). Just these two cases in isolation aren't really that significative, but together with the pronouns shenanigans I think is clear where they lean. There aren't many overt things, but some other small moments as one specific and important character calling "misguided" the old elven empire for being slavers and the orcs quest does end up forming a picture or where they believes may rest.

It is not so bad as other cases but is clear where their disposition lies (unless they are faking it). But what I find questionable is the fact that they seem to had waited for release to add such an, quite honestly, inconsequential thing as the pronouns box. Like, look at PF:WoTR, they do have a lot of "diversity and representation" kind of content in the game (which is understandable as they are adapting quite a woke module), but they don't seem to be trying to pull any sneaky shit like that. May have been coincidence, but quite honestly to me it feels like quite a sneaky maneuver to gain support during development and then gain some "good boy" points at release.

 

[Saark]

I don't know man, there are already 2 quest with interracial romances. One is the Lawkeeper quest where a black guy called Corporal Dan or such is revealed to be in a relationship with an unnamed white woman, and it seems a black elf called Blackroot has something going on with the veteran white deputy (can't remember his name, sorry). Just these two cases in isolation aren't really that significative, but together with the pronouns shenanigans I think is clear where they lean. There aren't many overt things, but some other small moments as one specific and important character calling "misguided" the old elven empire for being slavers and the orcs quest does end up forming a picture or where they believes may rest.

It is not so bad as other cases but is clear where their disposition lies (unless they are faking it). But what I find questionable is the fact that they seem to had waited for release to add such an, quite honestly, inconsequential thing as the pronouns box. Like, look at PF:WoTR, they do have a lot of "diversity and representation" kind of content in the game (which is understandable as they are adapting quite a woke module), but they don't seem to be trying to pull any sneaky shit like that. May have been coincidence, but quite honestly to me it feels like quite a sneaky maneuver to gain support during development and then gain some "good boy" points at release.

I think the main problem with both points is that its very easy to read far too much into in, when there may very well be totally harmless and less polarizing explanations.

Yeah, they could be devious masterminds that tried to manipulate their backers by sneaking in the pronoun choice shortly before release. Or maybe they just decided that focusing on the actual game is of more importance and they added the box when they applied the finishing touches close to release when the game was feature complete. Seeing how it has no bearing on the game itself, I tend to lean towards the latter option.

Complaining about interracial romances in games today is the highest form hypocrisy, seeing how most RPGs offer one or multiple romance choices that are literally of a different race, and not just a different culture. BG2 had 3 non-humans as the only romancing options for male PCs, and if the very same game would've released today, a bunch of retards would be foaming at their mouths about the virtue signalling. Clearly it doesn't take pressure from the still fairly recent SJW movement to lead to games that push interracial relationships. Why would asian/caucasian be any different than elves/humans? Technically the latter should be worse, as it is actual racemixing.

While there are certainly quite a few devs these days that bend the knee to public movements by aligning their narrative with political/cultural agendas, that does not automatically equate to every gay or interracial relationship being a sign of the dev fully supporting said movement. Avoiding these topics altogether to not "accidentally" trigger either side is a thing of impossibility, as weaving socio-political or cultural talking points into the the plot is pretty much unavoidable.

 

[AshenNedra]

This game is not fucking woke. It's French. We don't really give a shit yet about pronouns and fucking gender stuff, except for some fringe/far-left elements.There is such a thing as being too obsessed with politics.

I don't know man, there are already 2 quest with interracial romances. One is the Lawkeeper quest where a black guy called Corporal Dan or such is revealed to be in a relationship with an unnamed white woman, and it seems a black elf called Blackroot has something going on with the veteran white deputy (can't remember his name, sorry). Just these two cases in isolation aren't really that significative, but together with the pronouns shenanigans I think is clear where they lean. There aren't many overt things, but some other small moments as one specific and important character calling "misguided" the old elven empire for being slavers and the orcs quest does end up forming a picture or where they believes may rest.

It is not so bad as other cases but is clear where their disposition lies (unless they are faking it). But what I find questionable is the fact that they seem to had waited for release to add such an, quite honestly, inconsequential thing as the pronouns box. Like, look at PF:WoTR, they do have a lot of "diversity and representation" kind of content in the game (which is understandable as they are adapting quite a woke module), but they don't seem to be trying to pull any sneaky shit like that. May have been coincidence, but quite honestly to me it feels like quite a sneaky maneuver to gain support during development and then gain some "good boy" points at release.

Yeah, we could say that Solasta does the bare minimum of wokism expected in a work of fiction these days.

None of my chars has Lawkeeper as a background. Frankly, I didn't even notice the pronoun box and the character model of the elf ranger is so ugly that I really didn't notice the skin color.

I guess that's the thing: if you don't notice wokism when you play, if it's not done in your face Dragon Age Inquisition style: "Look-at-me-I'm-gay-and-did-I-mention-I-was-transgender-and-it's-the -single-defining-fact-of-my-life",then can you really say it's wokism?

You can't expect every game designer to be Dan Vavra and to tell the woke crowd prevalent in game design and fantasy stuff to go fuck themselves.

Most of them wants to stay clear of such nonsense. So, I guess I think they are "faking it" as you put it. They offer a token of wokism/progressism and they are left alone.

 

[Anonona]

Complaining about interracial romances in games today is the highest form hypocrisy, seeing how most RPGs offer one or multiple romance choices that are literally of a different race, and not just a different culture. BG2 had 3 non-humans as the only romancing options for male PCs, and if the very same game would've released today, a bunch of retards would be foaming at their mouths about the virtue signalling. Clearly it doesn't take pressure from the still fairly recent SJW movement to lead to games that push interracial relationships. Why would asian/caucasian be any different than elves/humans? Technically the latter should be worse, as it is actual racemixing.

While there are certainly quite a few devs these days that bend the knee to public movements by aligning their narrative with political/cultural agendas, that does not automatically equate to every gay or interracial relationship being a sign of the dev fully supporting said movement. Avoiding these topics altogether to not "accidentally" trigger either side is a thing of impossibility, as weaving socio-political or cultural talking points into the the plot is pretty much unavoidable.

Sure, in isolation those things aren't so strange, but putting all of them together is what raises eyebrowns. Furthermore, is both the fact that Solasta's cultures are pretty much a melting pot of races and that they precisely went with black and white skins, which is the most used pairing when promoting progressive ideals that does seems to be promoting more modern ideas.

Also their position is quite clear anyway. They support the identity of transexual people, instead of considering that body dysmorphia a real sickness that must be treated instead of enabled. I of course disagree vehemently with that notion and considering how many people suffer from misinformation and horrible practices like sex change operations, I find it quite reprehensible to support.

I will say though, I don't think they are doing it out of malice, but out of ignorance. They probably don't know much about these topics and just do it out of a vague notion of moral righteousness.

...well, not entirely. They are doing for the same reason all companies do it. They believe it will help them sell, so they do it.

 

[Anonona]

So, I guess I think they are "faking it" as you put it.

While I'm not sure if they are faking it or not, the fact that they put "they" as a pronoun for trans may be a hint that it may be fake in fact, just because I would find it strange for a trans person to want to be called they. Isn't it something more like a non-binary thing or something? I'm sure they are left leaning in their believes but I don't think they may necessarily want to in doctrine so much as to sell as much as posible

 

[AshenNedra]

So, I guess I think they are "faking it" as you put it.

While I'm not sure if they are faking it or not, the fact that they put "they" as a pronoun for trans may be a hint that it may be fake in fact, just because I would find it strange for a trans person to want to be called they. Isn't it something more like a non-binary thing or something? I'm sure they are left leaning in their believes but I don't think they may necessarily want to in doctrine so much as to sell as much as posible

It's just business in my opinion. And the fact that they didn't advertise their stance on the matter of gender and transsexualism one way or the other except for the pronoun box is a relief to be frank. I'm getting sick and tired of hearing about other people genitalia.

 

[Saark]

...well, not entirely. They are doing for the same reason all companies do it. They believe it will help them sell, so they do it.

Which is probably the most important reason. Moral highground doesnt pay the rent, catering to the customer does. Adding the bare minimum of what is considered "inclusive" these days into the game to appease the crowd that can most certainly ruin years of development through social media outcries and cancel culture, and it is no surprise that you will find signs of woke~ism in pretty much every game that isn't made by people who don't rely on the money and/or hail from cultures where they can justifiably claim to be too ignorant to have known about any of these things (i.e. eastern europe/asia).

If you're a western developer and don't over-represent minorities in your game, someone somewhere will call you out on it and it'll spread like wildfire that you're a bigot and a racist. We saw that with Rimworld where even though the dev dis his due dilligence and used actual data from multiple studies to accurately represent certain minorities, and somehow that was still considered too offensive and discriminating.

 

[Darkzone]

Mortmal don't be a retard, because this is not medieval. This is armor from the 19th century and the Mahdist Warriors were uprising in 1881-1899. And this is the only shit they had (besides recently bought rifles), while they had a border with the Ottomans since 1517 and were even subjects of the Ottomans since 1821-1885 ; conquered by Muhammad Ali Pasha.

 

[ikarinokami]

I'm not sure where the woke narrative is coming from, I didnt recall any wokeness in the game .

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The noble savage is a myth from the hippy drug induced 1960s-70s (see: A Man Called Horse.).

The "noble savage" is a myth spawned by the 18th century French Enlightenment, particularly associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Consider, for example, Bougainville's visit to Tahiti in 1768 and the resulting commentary upon his return to France as confirming Rousseau's ideas.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

I'm not sure where the woke narrative is coming from, I didnt recall any wokeness in the game .

You can choose pronouns in the character creator. You wouldn't notice it if you make a party with pre-made characters.

 

[ikarinokami]

I'm not sure where the woke narrative is coming from, I didnt recall any wokeness in the game .

You can choose pronouns in the character creator. You wouldn't notice it if you make a party with pre-made characters.

I did notice that, but that's just catering to the widest audience of your game. the actual narrative of the game. and storyline is pretty much woke free.

 

[gurugeorge]

...well, not entirely. They are doing for the same reason all companies do it. They believe it will help them sell, so they do it.

Which is probably the most important reason. Moral highground doesnt pay the rent, catering to the customer does. Adding the bare minimum of what is considered "inclusive" these days into the game to appease the crowd that can most certainly ruin years of development through social media outcries and cancel culture, and it is no surprise that you will find signs of woke~ism in pretty much every game that isn't made by people who don't rely on the money and/or hail from cultures where they can justifiably claim to be too ignorant to have known about any of these things (i.e. eastern europe/asia).

If you're a western developer and don't over-represent minorities in your game, someone somewhere will call you out on it and it'll spread like wildfire that you're a bigot and a racist. We saw that with Rimworld where even though the dev dis his due dilligence and used actual data from multiple studies to accurately represent certain minorities, and somehow that was still considered too offensive and discriminating.

It's not even that it helps them sell too, that was an earlier (Noughties) phase, where you had soyboys running around to companies lattes in hand, trying to convince them that being "more inclusive" would net them a bigger market. All lies of course, in fact most of the time the opposite is true - they lose custom by falling in line with the Narrative (while "get woke bo broke" is a bit of an exaggeration, there's definitely some impact). But by now it's too late - and nobody even pretends any more. It's just something companies have to do in order to avoid being flayed alive by bad publicity.

But the Narrative must be promoted, even at the cost of losing a bit of money - the people behind this have vast reserves and are willing to pour endless sums into pushing it.

 

[Volourn]

The issue is a lot of the 'Wokers' who whine about 'inclusivity' don't give a shit about games - espicially RPGs - so when you pander them you ain't getting *any* new players. But, you are pissing others off for no reason, and I'm not just talking about silly check boxes or happening to have random 'mixed colour' couples either.

D&D has never been about black vs white. Its race issues has been about dwarf vs elf vs orc. But, now there is a lame push into trying to pretend that the different fantasy races are just real world human varieties and so we drag 'racism'.

Dwarves don't hate orcs because they are of a different colour. They hate orcs because they make a habit of attacking them, and stealing their land. Elves and dwarves have different views of what makes a 'good life' and therefore they clash. The surface world doesn't hate drow because they have dark skin. Afterall, the surface world has no issues with deep gnomes despite having gray skin. WHY? Because deep gnomes don't go around committing murder and other shit. Nor do they worship a mad goddess who has a fukkin' creepy spider fetish. LMAO

Then you got the idea that 'ugly' people (like me) should be represented. Hellt he fukk no. And, now they've taken it a step further. There is only one body type in the game - flat cutout board. Women have no breasts, men have no muscles (or vice versa). That is not woek. That is bullshitz.

Just make the game. Have a dwarf fukkin' an elf if you want, but don't try to make it a 'real life issue'. HOLY FUKK NUTZ.

 

[jac8awol]

Damn this game is starting to show its jank now. When you get to that second town with the dwarves it's just walk from one auto-generated cutscene to another until you fight 1 lame battle. They don't even give you the illusion of control for you to click to initiate dialogue hahaha.
Waste of a town really.

Must say the scenery is beautiful in all the locations so far. Designers did really well there.
And what's wrong with racism? Let the races hate each other simply because of skin colour difference. It's a natural reaction in the war for resources. The only series that got it right was the witcher in the original source material. That's real race relations.

Actually these woketards didn't go far enough in their propaganda. To really get it right, they should have made all humans brown, because of their successful race-mixing on the old world. Then you have to play an elf, if you want to be white. Because the elves are the evil white racists who enslaved the other races (already in-game lore).

 

[jackofshadows]

It is not so bad as other cases but is clear where their disposition lies (unless they are faking it). But what I find questionable is the fact that they seem to had waited for release to add such an, quite honestly, inconsequential thing as the pronouns box. Like, look at PF:WoTR, they do have a lot of "diversity and representation" kind of content in the game (which is understandable as they are adapting quite a woke module), but they don't seem to be trying to pull any sneaky shit like that. May have been coincidence, but quite honestly to me it feels like quite a sneaky maneuver to gain support during development and then gain some "good boy" points at release.

My guess is that just few woke-infested people took over somewhere along the dev process. Just look at the art changes - it's bigger than it seems given their limited resources.

Even woke-unrelated, the rest/travel system was clearly dumbed down like someone decided to not over-complicate things. Several camp spots have ultra-convenient stash of 4 rations just few meters nearby, it doesn't look like author of the system would place that to neglect it.

Yeah, we could say that Solasta does the bare minimum of wokism expected in a work of fiction these days.

Expected, right. Why it's far from expected that Colony Ship or Underrail Infusion will have any of that?

I did notice that, but that's just catering to the widest audience of your game. the actual narrative of the game. and storyline is pretty much woke free.

That shit isn't glaring like, say The Parvati but it's still there. Thankfully, this is not a narrative-heavy game we're talking about.

 

[Darkzone]

The noble savage is a myth from the hippy drug induced 1960s-70s (see: A Man Called Horse.).

The "noble savage" is a myth spawned by the 18th century French Enlightenment, particularly associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Consider, for example, Bougainville's visit to Tahiti in 1768 and the resulting commentary upon his return to France as confirming Rousseau's ideas.

Spoiler

This is rather a proto-communist stance since, since it only is about the product and wars for resources (food) and not about the moral values: ... the fruits of the earth belong to us all... What a retard he was, as if the earth itself would produce cultivated plants.
Yes if you say as much as Rousseau did, then the probability becomes really high that you might say something very stupid. And dont worry i have a lot of beef with many of the french philosophers and much with the copycat Rousseau, but this is not a point.
Tahiti had already an established culture before Louis Antoine de Bougainville landed and he was lucky that he didn't land on any of the cannibal islands in the pacific. And yes wars were also quite common in Tahiti, but no clan has established there a dominance.
Overall yes Rousseau was one of the first stupid to speak (predated by Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce) about a Noble Savage and a ideal natural state of mankind in his "Discours sur l’inégalité" while contemplating about Aristotle's human nature. But it lead to nowhere, because people with contacts to the savages described exactly what is going on.
And if someone writes shit on the wall but nobody references it and spreads it, then it is just a footnote in the history like some attempts of proto communism societies in the antique.
It was only in 1960s with the protests against Vietnam war and the broken contracts with the native americans that has lead to the widespread of the distorted picture of the noble savage, since the knowledge about this "cultures" was already lost due to the witness's deaths. Overall you have to look at how our western cultural perception changes after the 1960-70s by looking at wild west films from before this time and after this time.

 

[Gay-Lussac]

I'm three pages in on the thread and I all I can tell about the game is that one of the NPCs is a black woman and there is an option to choose your pronouns. I skip to the last post and the expression "proto-communist stance" jumps out at me. What the fuck.

Can a non-sperglord codexer (oxymoron) comment if the combat/encounter design in the game is worth the purchase or not?

 

[Volourn]

The encounter design is fine enough. Certainly better than other games. Solasta is certainly not the best D&D game ever but it certainly not the worst. I'm still debating if it is slightly better or slightly worse than TOEE. It is aroundthere. I heard it gets 'worse'. According to the game I'm 40% through (though I'm at level 6).

The worst part of the game is character models though. They all ahve the same figure. There are literally no b00bs in the game. LMAO

 

[gurugeorge]

I'm three pages in on the thread and I all I can tell about the game is that one of the NPCs is a black woman and there is an option to choose your pronouns. I skip to the last post and the expression "proto-communist stance" jumps out at me. What the fuck.

Can a non-sperglord codexer (oxymoron) comment if the combat/encounter design in the game is worth the purchase or not?

lol - all that good stuff was in the other thread re. the early access. The consensus is that it's a good game and does what it set out to do in presenting (in a very playable way) a fuller and more detailed CRPG representation of D&D rules than most of these types of games usually do. Story is standard for these things, nothing innovative but ok. You have a choice of personalities at CC, which leads to your team having little confabs before action that can be quite characterful.

Mainly though, the gameplay is slick, flows really well, is addictive, and seems to show off the more streamlined 5e rules quite nicely. Encounter design in the bit I played in EA is very good, haven't played further yet so don't know about that. It's not a very deep game for builders though (comparing and contrasting with say Pathfinder).

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Can a non-sperglord codexer (oxymoron) comment if the combat/encounter design in the game is worth the purchase or not?

Yes, but don't expect much else from the game. Exploration barely exists, certainly much less so than in last year's Dungeon of Naheulbeuk which was similarly focused on turn-based tactical battles, due to the dungeons being quite small and linear, while there's hardly any logistics and no puzzles. Party size is limited to just four (though you do occasionally have an NPC or two assisting), and the character classes available are just the basic four plus paladin and ranger, so you're fairly limited in party customization as well. Meanwhile, the overarching storyline is rather barebones (and shamelessly rips off Dragonlance), and the writing is fairly poor, though occasionally there's an amusing line of dialogue spouted by one of your characters that might be determined by personality trait selection at character creation.

However, it does manage a competent, though not exceptional, execution of its core focus on tactical combat. As others have mentioned in the main Solasta thread, it's probably too easy on normal difficulty, and the two higher difficulty settings just add hit points (doubling them on the highest difficulty) and a few other mechanical advantages to the enemies, rather than adding more enemies or otherwise adjusting encounter design.

 

[Bastion]

Had a look at Soylasta's twitter and they're officially paying twitch thots to shill their faggot game.

That girl barely has any views.

If you're gonna hire thots to promote your game atleast do it with some big shots like Amouranth.

Good Lord, so you folks started with "how dare they put an optional they pronoun" followed by "I see a higher-up black character, my pitchfork trembles" and now into calling someone a thot because? Looking at Bunny's twitter, yeah, it's soft-porn, but Cola is a thot too because?

 

[Anonona]

but Cola is a thot too because?