less down hill more from flatland to the bottom of the mariana trench
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KickStarter Solasta: Crown of the Magister Thread - now with Palace of Ice sequel DLC
- Thread starter whydoibother
- Start date
less down hill more from flatland to the bottom of the mariana trench
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How much of your complaints with this game be eliminated by the right usermade campaign? Or do you find the underlying systems inadequate?
I love everything about this game except the encounter design/content (and maybe the rough assets like some of the UI but I don't really care about that). Unfortunately the game is almost nothing but encounters so that sucking makes the entire game suck
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2013
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- 4,507
Whoever is responsible for the arcane library location should be executed for his sins against pc gamers. It's not even a real puzzle, it is just an exercise in torturing you with the user interface.
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Arcane Library is extra frustrating because it’s one of the game’s best examples of an ultra cool location and the potential of the verticality, which is, of course, squandered
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- Jan 28, 2011
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tacticaladventures/solasta-crown-of-the-magister/posts/3406373
January 2022 - Dev Stream Recap & Goodies Shipping Update
Hey there folks!
Thank you all for joining our Dev Stream yesterday, it's been a real blast chatting with you - we should definitely do this more often (as soon as we have more time)! For those who could unfortunately not be there, here is a VOD link for you: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1263120461
Additionally, thanks to a brave soul named Mastani, we have a recap of all questions & answers in text form as well! So if you don't feel like sitting through 2h of me going off tangents, here is all the juicy info in a bite-sized format. But before that, let's first give you a quick update on the Physical Goods!
Physical Goods Update
For our EU residents:
For our US residents:
- The Sourcebooks have arrived to the warehouse
- The Adventure Boxes have arrived to port and are currently being cleared by Customs
- ETA: We expect that EU Shipping should start around end of January - the exception being UK, which might take some additional time as Brexit complexified quite a few things
For people living outside EU / US:
- The Sourcebooks are still in transit (by boat), planned to arrive to port by early February
- The Adventure Boxes should have arrived to port and should be getting cleared by Customs
- ETA: We expect that US Shipping should start around mid-end of February
- Packages will be shipped from the US, so shipping should start around mid-end of February as well (although it may take longer to reach you).
About Tactical Adventures
Q: Are you hiring?
A: As our current studio’s philosophy is to stay relatively small, we're not hiring at the moment. Also keep in mind that we are a French studio, so you would need live in France & speak French fluently to join us^^ That said we do have English partners so you could end up working with us on Solasta or one of our future projects!
Q: Will there be future opportunity for voice acting?
A: There will be new voiced lines in the next DLC, but we work with an audio partner when it comes to Voice Acting - so we rarely pick up specific voice actors ourselves (mostly due to logistical reasons).
Q: Will you do a crossover with Amplitude to do an Endless Dungeon?
A: I don’t think so, though we never know what the future holds.
Q: Do you have any stats about the most/least popular classes/subclasses?
A: I don't believe we have those statistics. Unity is fairly limited in what we can collect
Q: Will the setting book that was part of the Kickstarter be available in the future?
A: As much as we would love to, we currently can't for legal reasons. That said if it ever changes in the future, we will make an announcement.
Q: Would you be open to community collaborations to improve translations?
A: We are aware of certain translation issues (in Russian for example) but due to potential complications with French laws regarding free labor we'd need to check that up first.
About Solasta's upcoming content
Q: What will be in the DLC?
A: Although we don't want to reveal too much about it for now, here is some information:
• A full new adventure in the world of Solasta. The previous DLC focused on new classes. The goal this time is to offer more content.
• The story will take place somewhere different than Crown of the Magister.
Q: When is the DLC coming out?
A: Hopefully in a few months, stay tuned to social media for the announcement.
Q: Will we be able to create quests in the dungeon maker?
A: It is something we are working on (quests, dialogues…), we hope to release it at the same time as the DLC.
Q: Will there be new races or classes in the new DLC?
A: No, there won’t be any new classes / races in the next DLC - as stated above, we focused our efforts on making a new adventure this time. That said there will be additions on the gameplay side in the character creator...
Q: Do you have plans on increasing the level cap?
A: Not for the next DLC. Just like adding new classes, adding new levels is very time consuming. We have 9 classes (all with sub classes) and it would require for each to add new effects, new features…
Q: Is there a chance we can get some more magical weapons?
A: There will be some more magical weapons coming with the DLC, but ideally we'd like to make some more if we ever get some time to do that.
Q: Can you consider adding random magic item drops from monsters?
A: Although it isn’t impossible, it’s very hard to balance between not enough and too much - remember that RNG also plays a large role in each player's experience. For the moment, we don’t plan on tweaking the main campaign (Crown of the Magister) because any small change can have cascading effects.
Q: Any information about multiplayer (possibly in the DLC)?
A: We won’t be speaking about multiplayer today. If there is anything regarding Multiplayer, it would be in an official announcement.
Q: Do you have plans to add an option to stop your travel and turn back once starting a travel and / or the option to modify our equipment when we travel?
A: For inventory, it should work, as for turning around it has been asked for a lot but would require reworking the whole system. We thought about it but as it added a risk of breaking the campaign, we preferred to avoid it.
Q: Are you still considering working on some UI QoL features, like showing attack/spell success odds when AC/stats are unlocked in bestiary?
A: That actually is more than just QoL, it would be a design choice. On tabletop you do not have percentage displayed when rolling against a goblin, if you know it has 11 AC - so adding percentage would make it more "video-gamey" (although there is nothing inherently wrong with that).
Q: Are you planning to get the custom background displayed on Inspection panel?
A: We have talked about it; I’ll have to check where it’s at.
Q: Will multi-classing be a thing?
A: No, as it would create too many complications and would be too hard for Q&A. It will stay in the domain of mods.
Q: Any update on props/weathers/FX in the DM creator?
A: No, we don’t have active weather effects in game, the ones you can see (for example in the Dark Castle) are baked into the level. It might be possible for smoke to be added as a prop, but not rain on a whole level.
Q: Are there plans to bring more accessibility to the game like larger tooltips and UI scaling?
A: Would like to but it may require us to revamp part of the system. It's not a quick addition, but it is being discussed.
Q: Is there a plan for Apple M1 optimization in the future?
A: For anything Mac related, we had partners work on it so please send us a mail with as much details and information as possible so it can be transferred to Q&A.
Q: Will there be new voice acting for the playable characters in the DLC?
A: No, as it would require the new voice actors to record all the lines of the Crown of the Magister campaign as well - and that's very expensive!
About Solasta
Recap on the Dungeon maker module and future upgrades:
The dungeon maker started as just one map with multiple rooms. To make full campaigns and avoid the players having to download all the individual maps, the campaign tool was developed to allow the linking of maps. Coming up in the future is the ability to add custom monsters, NPCs, merchants and items. The goal is to add custom dialogues and texts but the goal is to keep the tool simple to allow the maximum of people to use it. The fear of making something too complex is that too few people will use it.
Q: Is it possible to add a way to create custom classes or races?
A: Might already be possible via mods, we don't plan to create such a tool ourselves.
Q: Why do you limit to tile set in the dungeon maker instead of allowing a mix and mash of everything?
A: The short answer is: optimization. The more assets you put, the longer the map will take to load. There are mods which allow you to that but as devs we have to ensure the game is stable and doesn’t lag out for people with the minimum configuration settings.
Q: Some spell requirements are tricky; would it be possible to add notes about them?
A: The problem for us was to strike a balance between giving the players the necessary knowledge in the tutorials without overloading them with tooltips and such. Also, D&D rules hard
Q: Have you thought about making the game more re-playable?
A: It’s a problem with RPGs, even if you make several branching paths and endings, few players will actually replay the game to see them all. Supergiant had this issue with Pyre when starting to work on their next game (the fantastic indie that is Hades). That is why roguelite games are huge right now, they are made with replayability in mind (instead of simply encouraging it).
Q: Why was the bright blue (aqua?) hair color removed when the game left early access?
A: The easy answer: it could have been removed by mistake. The other might be that our art director did a check before 1.0 and determined that it didn’t fit with the characters (remember things can change a lot while the game is in EA)
Q: Would a native Linux version be possible (or PS/Switch/…)?
A: Adding another version to maintain is extremely consuming (and more so with the multiple Linux OS). At some point the company has to make a business call between spending time to maintain the version and working on content.
Q: Would it be possible to add more verticality in the dungeon maker tool?
A: Yes, under the form of assets, but not in a “free build” mode as past experimentations revealed that it's fairly easy to “break” the camera. It still is a thing we watch out for when designing future content.
Q: Why did you design your dragons as they are in game?
A: We didn’t want to copy paste the dragons from the monster’s manual because our license technically doesn’t include that manual so we had to design our own.
Q: Would it be possible to add a world map maker in the campaign creator?
A: We are thinking about it but we haven’t decided to work on that yet.
Q: Why did you choose Unity over Unreal?
A: Unreal is much harder to work with and it isn’t necessarily adapted for the same things. While it would be possible to do Solasta in Unreal, it may not be worth the effort.
Q: Could we have a manual dice roll feature?
A: It would require too much effort for too few people.
Q: Could you add animals like bears or horses to be NPC in the campaign?
A: We currently can’t add monsters as NPCs but we're looking at it. As for horses, I don’t think we even have them in-game so... no.
Q: Can we have feature where NPCs can turn hostile?
A: Currently no, the reason being that that NPCs aren’t monsters (they don’t even have stats as far as I know), so even if they turned hostile they wouldn’t be able to do anything. We're trying to homogenize that.
Q: Any chance the enemy AI can be updated to handle stealth better?
A: To make stealth work better (and less “cheesy”), we would have to overhaul the stealth system and that would cost us too much time… only for players to find new exploits, which would bring us back to square one. Most game with stealth can be cheesed if you look hard enough!
tl;dr The next DLC is a new standalone adventure, no new classes or races.
Larianshill
Arbiter
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- Feb 16, 2021
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- 2,098
Oh God damn it.
Shrimp
Liturgist
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2019
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- 1,065
A couple of months ago there was a survey about what sort of post-launch content players would be interested in. I remember something similar to small scale or one-off adventures being among the options so I assume this decision is based on the most popular votes in the survey.
Mortmal
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2009
- Messages
- 9,496
They dont have the licenses for the other classes i think , only thing i would change about the game is the number of rests between encounters, else everything is good and extremely faithful to 5E . Codex double standards, solasata release was pristine with barely a few bugs , everything playable fromt he begginign to the end , every quests done . I dont see anyone complainign about wotr encounters while there's no tactical depth ever besides the character building .
Bought this on a GoG Christmas sale recently. Haven't been able to get it working on Linux yet though. Very disappointed by that. Really want to play this.
Lacrymas
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2015
- Messages
- 18,732
They don't need licenses for classes, all the classes are included in the SRD/OGL. Solasta's encounters are a problem because they are ridiculously samey and the difficulty modes are stat bloat. There is also the problem the content on offer is ...pretty bad and/or terminally uninteresting.
Mortmal
Arcane
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- Jun 15, 2009
- Messages
- 9,496
The best ones are in official books , like tasha's , the new monk subclass or the wizard bladedancer for exemple .SDR/OGL doesnt cover enough. I am not for stats bloat either as dififculty mode,it should rather be higher cr with more monsters, but again why is there complaints about it here and i read none in the wotr thread. The content is a good as any official modules on the market from wotc or paizo , nothing more or less. Wont be in the top tier like curse of strahd but decent enough
Lacrymas
Arcane
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- Sep 23, 2015
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- 18,732
There isn't a single official pre-written adventure that is so bereft of stuff for the players to do and with so many copy-pasted encounters. Even the very worst of them, i.e. Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat, are not this uneventful and samey.
Cryomancer
Arcane
IMO the best ones are third party, like this class > https://www.5esrd.com/classes/3rd-p...nment/the-pale-master/#Creating_a_Pale_Master
And this is not only for 5E. PF1e has third party stuff like this > https://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/other-races/featured-races/arg-dhampir/cruoromancer-wizard-dhampir/
Sadly many DMs don't allow you to play with this type of stuff.
I wish there was a digital version of Tomb of Annihilation. Such a great module
The game has almost 90% positive reviews on Steam, so I'd say the answer has to be yes. Putting the underwhelming encounter design aside, what this game offers is unique. The adaptation of the system is faithful almost to a fault, the interface functions perfectly, and the most important thing: combat feels great. Considering this, I don't find it strange for people to want more content in the form of new adventures/modules.
When you say "so many classes are still missing", I don't even know what you mean. Out of the 12 base classes, the only missing ones are Bard, Monk, and Warlock (and monks are borderline useless in this edition). I mean, there are more classes in this game than in your PnP setting
. I'd love to see the full roster, but more playable content seems far more important right now, considering that the base campaign isn't exactly infinitely replayable.
Mortmal
Arcane
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- Jun 15, 2009
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Dont find it so great, very sketchy,and not as profesionnal as paizo modules . It's missing ton of maps you have to draw or download them yourself, especially in ormu, there's not even an arena for the feathered trex fight. You better buy the tortle package too and above all : the cellar of death as introduction . Some things are completely unfair to players, the crocodile temple at the beginning for exemple, no one can possibly figures it . Then if you dont and proceed in you instant die by the traps at such low level.
End game, the tomb in itself is full of save or instant die stuff, a character grinder nothing more. You enter the room ? it rotates, no warning , nothing to anticipate this , you are stuck. No teleportation ? you die. Teleportation? to the void room without air, likely you die too if you miss the perception rolls.
If an adventure doesn't have at least a room where you can die for no reason whatsoever, is it really D&D?
Mortmal
Arcane
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- Jun 15, 2009
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It's a good thing character can die, when they do something stupid they certainly should. But when they made no mistake and just instant die its unfair.
My players did. And I don't see the "missing" maps as a weakness. You don't need them - but they're very easy to make if you want to. And that's what I need from modules: a fantastic framework for my own games. The sandbox is really good and it's got a lot of great themes and encounters.
I also love the final dungeon, feels genuinely oldschool. No holds barred with the traps etc.
Cryomancer
Arcane
Tomb of Annihilation + ability to savescum = izi
High verticality + repealing blast seems interesting.
Mortmal
Arcane
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- Jun 15, 2009
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Sure i can do it myself , but the point of getting official modules is to have it easy and lazy cause you paid someone else to do it , its missing far too much stuff . As for the temple the 190 IQ mensa registered girlfriend couldnt figure it either...
You can be lazy with ToA. It just has a good amount of places you can easily expand if you want to.
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