KickStarter Solasta: Crown of the Magister Thread - now with Palace of Ice sequel DLC

[Parabalus]

Exactly. There's a great fight over a pillared pit in one of the first dungeons that really takes advantages of the games systems by placing ranged enemies out of reach and then spiders in a position to surround the party as they try to get to those enemies. The fact that most encounters subsequently just puts you on a map with enemies running towards you without any caveats or interesting, tactical conundrums is the problem here.

That's why Parabalus' harping on about difficulty makes no sense. Those settings don't change or have anything to do with the problems we're discussing.

Blackguards and Naheulbeuk wouldn't be interesting at all if they also weren't difficult.

 

[V_K]

Exactly. There's a great fight over a pillared pit in one of the first dungeons that really takes advantages of the games systems by placing ranged enemies out of reach and then spiders in a position to surround the party as they try to get to those enemies. The fact that most encounters subsequently just puts you on a map with enemies running towards you without any caveats or interesting, tactical conundrums is the problem here.

That's why Parabalus' harping on about difficulty makes no sense. Those settings don't change or have anything to do with the problems we're discussing.

Blackguards and Naheulbeuk wouldn't be interesting at all if they also weren't difficult.

Is Naheulbeuk difficult though? Granted, I didn't play it on very high difficulty because I suck at combat, but for all my sucking I found it quite easy.

 

[Grunker]

Exactly. There's a great fight over a pillared pit in one of the first dungeons that really takes advantages of the games systems by placing ranged enemies out of reach and then spiders in a position to surround the party as they try to get to those enemies. The fact that most encounters subsequently just puts you on a map with enemies running towards you without any caveats or interesting, tactical conundrums is the problem here.

That's why Parabalus' harping on about difficulty makes no sense. Those settings don't change or have anything to do with the problems we're discussing.

Blackguards and Naheulbeuk wouldn't be interesting at all if they also weren't difficult.

Is Naheulbeuk difficult though? Granted, I didn't play it on very high difficulty because I suck at combat, but for all my sucking I found it quite easy.

I played it on the highest difficulty and found the difficulty uneven but generally very satisfying. And it's certainly exponentially more difficult than something like Solasta:

Cocking up the curve

A final note must be spent on Dungeon of Naheulbeuk’s difficulty curve and subsidiarily on its encounter design, because while I must praise the game's systems design, no trees grow into Heaven. And while actually playing Dungeon of Naheulbeuk is a pleasant experience at most times, it is a somewhat... uneven experience in actual execution.

First of all, keep in mind that this reviewer played the game on its highest difficulty – 'Gzor’s Nightmare' – and highly encourages every aspiring dungeoneer to do the same, since, much like Pillars of Eternity’s Path of the Damned difficulty, the difficulty allows the game’s mechanics to shine and all its systems to assume the relevance they were meant to have. Keep Iron Man off, however, this game was clearly not meant for it. As well, you should turn off the “Retain random seed” option – for some reason, the game doesn’t change its seed on reload by default, meaning you could potentially end up in a fight where your party critically miss their first 5 efforts while your opponents critically hit theirs and be locked in it forever. I can only envision the frustration this must have caused before the option for new seeds on reload was added.

That being said, the difficulty curve is a strange one. The game places your party in a tower – the titular Dungeon of Naheulbeuk – and the first couple of fights are manageable and fairly basic. Once the game thinks you have a handle on things it cranks hard on the vice it has your nuts placed in. The old RPG formula applies here: low levels mean your characters have fewer options. This coupled with a combat system that places great importance on accuracy and good positioning (the latter of which you don’t have many tools to ensure yet) means margins for error are small and gameplay is punishing. The game is capital H Hard at this point.

This also means that the hardest (but also best!) fight of the entire game will face you very early on, while another early fight sadistically takes you from one fight directly into the next – which can be a very frustrating experience if you survived the first of these two fights by the skin of your teeth and are low on healing potions.



As the game moves on however and your party attains a level around 4, the game becomes more manageable and something approaching a “healthy” difficulty sets in - certainly harder than most RPGs, yet firmly in the "manageable"-camp. Then around level 7, things start to become too easy, and the game completes the traditional difficulty curve of an RPG: hard beginning with a fresh party, piss easy final part as you stomp the world with your overpowered gear and abilities.

But here, Dungeon of Naheulbeuk becomes a bit weird. After the initial ease of the later levels, difficulty starts going all over the place. Some fights are very easy, some somewhere in between, and some are almost as hard as the game’s first act (for instance, this is the case for one of the game's last bosses, whose mechanics are more trying and have much better design than the final boss himself). This odd rupture of the difficulty curve isn't a bad experience, though, because unlike the previous three points on the curve, at least it makes fights more unpredictable.

Unfortunately, the game also runs out of tricks at this point, and the sheer abundance of “stuff” the developers put into the game, impressive as it may be, is starting to get old. The fights of the final act are a far cry from even the basic-but-efficient ideas of earlier acts. They rehash old mechanics, and both the last boss and the game's “secret boss” have identical “burst down the only relevant enemy” gimmicks that deprive them of any joy and fun decision-making - dead is the natural flow of earlier stages. It doesn’t help that both of these bosses have a very limited toolkit or that the final boss attempts to introduce a creative mechanic which doesn’t end up affecting how you play the fight much. In fact, the most interesting part of both of these fights is how they attempt to use their “trash” mobs. Even if these mobs are basic enemies, their toolkits really gum up the gimmicks of the boss fights in ways that highlight that the game is best when it relies on the strength of its systems to carry it.

 

[Parabalus]

Exactly. There's a great fight over a pillared pit in one of the first dungeons that really takes advantages of the games systems by placing ranged enemies out of reach and then spiders in a position to surround the party as they try to get to those enemies. The fact that most encounters subsequently just puts you on a map with enemies running towards you without any caveats or interesting, tactical conundrums is the problem here.

That's why Parabalus' harping on about difficulty makes no sense. Those settings don't change or have anything to do with the problems we're discussing.

Blackguards and Naheulbeuk wouldn't be interesting at all if they also weren't difficult.

Is Naheulbeuk difficult though? Granted, I didn't play it on very high difficulty because I suck at combat, but for all my sucking I found it quite easy.

The beginning on the highest difficulty is brutal, especially if you are stingy with consumables.

Later on it's a mix of steamroll and very difficult fights, which is an extremely satisfying progression.

 

[Grunker]

Exactly. There's a great fight over a pillared pit in one of the first dungeons that really takes advantages of the games systems by placing ranged enemies out of reach and then spiders in a position to surround the party as they try to get to those enemies. The fact that most encounters subsequently just puts you on a map with enemies running towards you without any caveats or interesting, tactical conundrums is the problem here.

That's why Parabalus' harping on about difficulty makes no sense. Those settings don't change or have anything to do with the problems we're discussing.

Blackguards and Naheulbeuk wouldn't be interesting at all if they also weren't difficult.

That's true. But even if you give all Solasta monsters 1000HP, it doesn't change the encounter design. Blackguards and Naheulbeuk are both difficult AND have varied and interesting encounter design. And even though they both make liberal use of encounter-specific mechanics, neither of the games rely on them, especially not Naheulbeuk. It has plenty of encounters that basically vanilla but where the monsters or area design make a massive difference - like the book/library encounter where monster abilities teleport your around an awkward pseudo-maze of bookcases, or the goblin-focused fight that starts with two golems very close to the party, which is only protected by destructible terrain. So you want to nuke the gobbos because they're easier targets defense-wise but it's very hard to kite the golems properly to get to them and just as hard to burst them down or CC them.

 

[Humbaba]

It all just looks like exactly what I expected, namely a gross misplacement of priorities.

 

[vazha]

I'm not saying our encounter design is flawless. There are quite a few fights that would benefit from being reviewed and tweaked

Understatement of the decade right here, ladies and gentlemen.

Myzzrym
May I ask what your argument would be for, how to put it diplomatically, pitiful excuse of a story that Solasta has? Newer folks dont mind dumb stories? ))

 

[Infinitron]

Finished the game.

Re: encounter design, I just want to say this - I think it's very possible for somebody reading this thread who hasn't played the game to get the impression that Solasta is some sort of repetitive trash mob fest. But it really isn't. Altogether, the game does not really have that much combat. There were many moments when I was going through a dungeon and thought to myself "Some other game would totally have plonked down a filler encounter here".

 

[rusty_shackleford]

This game isn't even comparable to Blackguards or Naheulbeuk, idk why it's being compared to it.

What's next, we compare Planescape Torment to Battle Brothers?

 

[Infinitron]

More thoughts:

Hardest battle in the game for me was the Crimson Spiders treetop ambush in the Lava Forest. The Lava Forest in general is the game's most PTSD-inducing area (the mind maze itself is better, though).

When the Sorak assassins who ambushed your party at night don't realize your wizard just learned the Sunbeam spell:

We never did catch that bastard Halman Summer, though! Maybe in the sequel?

 

[Whisper]

Game is OK. Not perfect. But you see it had limited budget. Could have been better if had more money, but oh well. Still OK enough to play once (i wouldnt recommend playing 2nd time, not enough variation, it is railroaded). Combat is uneven, start is harder, ending is easier, but it is same with most games. Compared to most games release in 2020-2021 this game is recommended to play (though it is not masterpiece).

 

[NJClaw]

Still OK enough to play once (i wouldnt recommend playing 2nd time, not enough variation, it is railroaded).

The main campaign is extremely linear, so there is no real reason to go through it more than once unless you really enjoy the combat system. Most of the background quests are a joke, with the Wanderer's one being the biggest outlier. You could try different party compositions, but... you can do that while also experiencing semi-new content in a custom campaign. Tactical Adventures release two high-quality modules that can be played one after the other (Caer Falcarn and Dun Cuin, they're already installed if you keep the game updated). Dun Cuin isn't as good as the first one, but still enjoyable.

Dragonstone Saga, the module that won third place in the dungeon maker contest, is great. It's fairly short (less than 10 encounters), but all fights are fun and pit you against large groups of monsters in a claustrophobic environment that lets you take advantage of your Aoe Spells. I had a lot of fun with Wall of Fire, Hypnotic Pattern, Insect Plague, and Spirit Guardians. There's even an encounter that manages to pull off a unique gimmick, which is surprising considering the limited functionalities available. There is no reason not to try it for anyone who enjoyed Solasta. The other modules mentioned in the contest aren't nearly as good.

Temple of Evil on Witch Mountain is another great adventure with a couple of very tough, but manageable, encounters. You can export your characters and keep leveling them up in Secret of the Black Flame and Halls of the Ogre Lord, but they don't feel as "refined" as the first module.

Now I'm trying Ruins of Ilthismar, which looks promising.

 

[Lacrymas]

Re: encounter design, I just want to say this - I think it's very possible for somebody reading this thread who hasn't played the game to get the impression that Solasta is some sort of repetitive trash mob fest. But it really isn't.

But it really is, though. The handcrafted encounters are few and far between, most of them as uninspired as the encounters preceding them. It's not worth it slogging through the game to experience the 3-4 good encounters. I couldn't force myself to continue after killing Aksha at release (I made it past her in EA, so I know what comes next). The crux of the matter is there are much better combatfag games out there to struggle to like Solasta. I might try fan-made content sometime in the future though, if they don't heed my advice and improve the encounters in base game.

 

[Infinitron]

Compare Solasta with Dungeon Rats, for instance. A typical scenario like the fire ant tunnels will have you encounter three ants, then four ants, then even more ants, and finally the final battle against the ant queen. A pretty typical encounter progression scheme in an RPG.

In Solasta, there are often only two encounters in this sort of scenario. The goblins outside Caer Lem and the goblins in the cave. The spiders over the pillars and the spider queen.

Or take an elaborate dungeon like the Manacalon Ruin, a pivotal location in the story where your party obtains the game's titular MacGuffin, which has only three battles in it (and the first one vs the cultists outside is a quick cake walk).

Or how about the Cradle of Fire, Solasta's "orc caves" where you don't actually fight all that many orcs. There are exceptions that are more typical like the zombie and ghoul-infested Dark Castle, but I think the devs did make an effort to do things differently here.

 

[Parabalus]

Re: encounter design, I just want to say this - I think it's very possible for somebody reading this thread who hasn't played the game to get the impression that Solasta is some sort of repetitive trash mob fest. But it really isn't.

But it really is, though. The handcrafted encounters are few and far between, most of them as uninspired as the encounters preceding them. It's not worth it slogging through the game to experience the 3-4 good encounters. I couldn't force myself to continue after killing Aksha at release (I made it past her in EA, so I know what comes next). The crux of the matter is there are much better combatfag games out there to struggle to like Solasta. I might try fan-made content sometime in the future though, if they don't heed my advice and improve the encounters in base game.

From the top of my head:

• Spider lava forest encounter
• 2nd Razan encounter
• Zhoron

 

[vazha]

• Zhoron

What on earth is that? beat the game recently, dont remember fighting it

 

[Infinitron]

You probably remember him as the green dragon.

 

[Grunker]

You are not speaking about the same thing.

me and Lacry: encounters are all that is, and the vast majority are completely uninteresting and undesigned.

infinitron: there aren’t as many encounters in each dungeon as you’d typically find

The two points don’t relate to each other at all and it’s anyone’s guess how Infinitron’s relates to anything at all

 

[Lacrymas]

Re: encounter design, I just want to say this - I think it's very possible for somebody reading this thread who hasn't played the game to get the impression that Solasta is some sort of repetitive trash mob fest. But it really isn't.

But it really is, though. The handcrafted encounters are few and far between, most of them as uninspired as the encounters preceding them. It's not worth it slogging through the game to experience the 3-4 good encounters. I couldn't force myself to continue after killing Aksha at release (I made it past her in EA, so I know what comes next). The crux of the matter is there are much better combatfag games out there to struggle to like Solasta. I might try fan-made content sometime in the future though, if they don't heed my advice and improve the encounters in base game.

From the top of my head:

• Spider lava forest encounter
• 2nd Razan encounter
• Zhoron

Let's add one more to complete my 3-4 good encounters set - Aksha. Great track record there.

 

[Infinitron]

me and Lacry: encounters are all that is, and the vast majority are completely uninteresting and undesigned.

That's what you're saying, but not sure about Lacrymas:

Re: encounter design, I just want to say this - I think it's very possible for somebody reading this thread who hasn't played the game to get the impression that Solasta is some sort of repetitive trash mob fest. But it really isn't.

But it really is, though.

 

[Grunker]

Think you didn’t understand my point, Infi. That there are less encounters than typical for a dungeon and that these encounters are repetitive trash fights aren’t mutually exclusive.

(on a tangent, calling Solasta’s monster locations “Dungeons” is very merciful)

 

[Infinitron]

Think you didn’t understand my point, Infi. That there are less encounters than typical for a dungeon and that these encounters are repetitive trash fights aren’t mutually exclusive.

(on a tangent, calling Solasta’s monster locations “Dungeons” is very merciful)

I understand your point just fine. But Lacrymas replied to my post, hence I assumed he was responding to my point (about the absolute quantity of battles), not yours!

 

[Grunker]

Think you didn’t understand my point, Infi. That there are less encounters than typical for a dungeon and that these encounters are repetitive trash fights aren’t mutually exclusive.

(on a tangent, calling Solasta’s monster locations “Dungeons” is very merciful)

I understand your point just fine. But Lacrymas replied to my post, hence I assumed he was responding to my point (about the absolute quantity of battles), not yours!

He WAS replying to your point. What I'm point out is that your own argument is a fallacy: that there is a contradiction between the game being full of repetitive trash fights and there being few fights in each location.

 

[Infinitron]

That's not my argument. What I said in my original post was that people reading your posts about the game's encounter design might mistakenly interpret them as such (that the game's problem is the sheer quantity of battles).

 

[Lacrymas]

Literally nobody has said that, though.