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

[vazha]

I ll post my review as well once I am done. Having a blast so far (Forsaken Isle), just wish there was more to it story-wise, some factional mutually exclusive quests and some C & c would have absolutely elevated the mod to even loftier heights. Sewers in particular felt like a missed opportunity quest-wise, whats with bandits, an ogre and gobbo camps primed for some threeways confrontation. Still a superb module, mind you, far better than anything the original has to offer. Looking forward to Morrows Deep as its purportedly better?

 

[vazha]

P.s. some of the Unfinished Business subclasses are bonkers fun. Just shows you that fun (not necessarily op) > balance. The Raven and that dual-wielding barb subclass are an absolute joy to play.

Cant get the hang of the deadmaster though - description says once undead summons are upcasted they dont require concentration. I upcast the spell and the game still asks me whether I want to break concentration on the spell I ve already got going (haste in this case). Anybody s got any expert advice on that?

 

[Artyoan]

P.s. some of the Unfinished Business subclasses are bonkers fun. Just shows you that fun (not necessarily op) > balance. The Raven and that dual-wielding barb subclass are an absolute joy to play.

Cant get the hang of the deadmaster though - description says once undead summons are upcasted they dont require concentration. I upcast the spell and the game still asks me whether I want to break concentration on the spell I ve already got going (haste in this case). Anybody s got any expert advice on that?

The story in all of my modules tends to get more cohesive in the latter half since thats when I'm more sure of where I'm actually going with it during creation. Morrows Deep is more involved in terms of dialogue and side quests. Still a ton of combat and thats the real meat but there are more sides to go with it.

Unfinished Business has been great with all the subclasses and feats. Some of them are pretty broken but in the end its all about what you want to use. I did try deadmaster once but I don't remember if it broke concentration like that. I'd guess thats either a bug or something they can't implement into the code without doing so.

 

[Artyoan]

still no custom portraits mod?

Looks like they are whipping that feature up pretty damn fast.

 

[Fedora Master]

Hey it's the first step on the long road to FIXING THE FACES

 

[Reinhardt]

still no custom portraits mod?

Looks like they are whipping that feature up pretty damn fast.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

FIXING THE FACES

Give it up Fritz them faces are here to stay.

 

[std::namespace]

I also like that for a game that is supposed to be combat- focus, Solasta throw way less trash mobs at you compared to Pathfinder games, at least from what I play so far.

I sign this statement. It also has better AI. Kingmaker is shit.

 

[Artyoan]

They patched it in today on UB. I made this real quick. Found a pic off pinterest and then put the background on transparent with gimp. Pretty easy process. I like it a lot.

 

[Artyoan]

https://mod.io/g/solasta/m/solasta-portrait-pack

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

This was on my list to play after I finished WotR. I'm quite amazed by how high the initial character rolls are. All of my pregen characters have +2 or better in every stat. The only trouble is, the game becomes totally unstable once I start the campaign. I'm running Solus 4 OS (linux). Whether I use WINE or Proton doesn't seem to make a difference for stability, though it seems to launch better under WINE. Is anyone else running this on Linux?

 

[Artyoan]

The stretch of the portrait on the action bar was fixed as of the latest UB patch. New sample pic:

 

[Reinhardt]

 

[Sacibengala]

put the background on transparent with gimp.

How do you do that? Is there a tutorial or something?

 

[Reinhardt]

put the background on transparent with gimp.

How do you do that? Is there a tutorial or something?

it's not that hard. i remember doing it when making portraits for my party in elminage gothic years ago.

 

[Artyoan]

put the background on transparent with gimp.

How do you do that? Is there a tutorial or something?

What I do since I'm not an expert on GIMP but I know enough to do this stuff:
-Place the image in GIMP
-Select a section of the image to crop and then resize the cropped result to 256x384 px
-You can try to use the fuzzy select tool to select the background and Edit > Clear it out but I've found that to be not that great for complicated portraits. Or I'm just using it poorly.
-Instead of fuzzy select I use Add Layer Mask to the layer. Then I use paintbrush in black on the background. Adjust the brush sizes to get all around the image background.
-Then export as png
-If I didn't get all the spots off or something bothers me I just do it again with the layer mask and brush off the background. Black will make it transparent. White will act as an eraser to put the image back as it was. So you can fine tune it like you want. Export again.

 

[Sacibengala]

put the background on transparent with gimp.

How do you do that? Is there a tutorial or something?

What I do since I'm not an expert on GIMP but I know enough to do this stuff:
-Place the image in GIMP
-Select a section of the image to crop and then resize the cropped result to 256x384 px
-You can try to use the fuzzy select tool to select the background and Edit > Clear it out but I've found that to be not that great for complicated portraits. Or I'm just using it poorly.
-Instead of fuzzy select I use Add Layer Mask to the layer. Then I use paintbrush in black on the background. Adjust the brush sizes to get all around the image background.
-Then export as png
-If I didn't get all the spots off or something bothers me I just do it again with the layer mask and brush off the background. Black will make it transparent. White will act as an eraser to put the image back as it was. So you can fine tune it like you want. Export again.

I found this app that cut it out with AI. It's pretty good, but it is limited to 3 saves a day for not paying accounts.

 

[mediocrepoet]

put the background on transparent with gimp.

How do you do that? Is there a tutorial or something?

What I do since I'm not an expert on GIMP but I know enough to do this stuff:
-Place the image in GIMP
-Select a section of the image to crop and then resize the cropped result to 256x384 px
-You can try to use the fuzzy select tool to select the background and Edit > Clear it out but I've found that to be not that great for complicated portraits. Or I'm just using it poorly.
-Instead of fuzzy select I use Add Layer Mask to the layer. Then I use paintbrush in black on the background. Adjust the brush sizes to get all around the image background.
-Then export as png
-If I didn't get all the spots off or something bothers me I just do it again with the layer mask and brush off the background. Black will make it transparent. White will act as an eraser to put the image back as it was. So you can fine tune it like you want. Export again.

I found this app that cut it out with AI. It's pretty good, but it is limited to 3 saves a day for not paying accounts.

What's it called or where is it?

 

[Sacibengala]

What's it called or where is it?

I could swear that I linked it here. Anyway, it's Pixlr from https://pixlr.com

 

[Calthaer]

Just picked this up on some super-cheap sale. Had been playing Baldur's Gate 3 with a few friends and this Solasta game is clearly "BG3 if you ordered it on Wish.com." A shame - there's genuinely a decent game hidden in here, but BG3 outshines it in almost every way - better story, better character interactions, more vibrant world. On the one hand, I appreciate Solasta's "auto-loot" option where you don't have to lug junk back to town...on the other hand, BG3 really rewards people who explore every inch of a room and I find it fun that you can rummage through the bottles on a shelf and find potions hidden in there. And the world-building...I just didn't care about whatever was happening in Solasta's world. Felt like a generic MMORPG fetch-quest setup; even the voice actors felt like they were phoning in their lines. At least it was less than $20 for the game plus a few expansions.

 

[HoboForEternity]

This game is more like neverwinter nights instead of baldurs gate. Completely different interpretation of tabletop gameplay. Solasta is more of a dungeon crawler number crunching style GM while baldurs gate 3 is story / friends having fun style of tabletop.

There are apparently few good modules on solasta already but i haven't tried them personally

 

[NJClaw]

even the voice actors felt like they were phoning in their lines

 

[gurugeorge]

Just picked this up on some super-cheap sale. Had been playing Baldur's Gate 3 with a few friends and this Solasta game is clearly "BG3 if you ordered it on Wish.com." A shame - there's genuinely a decent game hidden in here, but BG3 outshines it in almost every way - better story, better character interactions, more vibrant world. On the one hand, I appreciate Solasta's "auto-loot" option where you don't have to lug junk back to town...on the other hand, BG3 really rewards people who explore every inch of a room and I find it fun that you can rummage through the bottles on a shelf and find potions hidden in there. And the world-building...I just didn't care about whatever was happening in Solasta's world. Felt like a generic MMORPG fetch-quest setup; even the voice actors felt like they were phoning in their lines. At least it was less than $20 for the game plus a few expansions.

That's hardly a fair comparison is it? You can't expect an indie studio to make something with the scope and polish that an AAA product like BG3 has. The relevant question is: how well have they done within the bounds of what's possible to them? I (and a lot of us here) think they did pretty well in that sense, on the whole. I certainly had a lot of fun with the game, and it's even got a bit of afterlife what with all the quest modding, etc.

 

[Mortmal]

Just picked this up on some super-cheap sale. Had been playing Baldur's Gate 3 with a few friends and this Solasta game is clearly "BG3 if you ordered it on Wish.com." A shame - there's genuinely a decent game hidden in here, but BG3 outshines it in almost every way - better story, better character interactions, more vibrant world. On the one hand, I appreciate Solasta's "auto-loot" option where you don't have to lug junk back to town...on the other hand, BG3 really rewards people who explore every inch of a room and I find it fun that you can rummage through the bottles on a shelf and find potions hidden in there. And the world-building...I just didn't care about whatever was happening in Solasta's world. Felt like a generic MMORPG fetch-quest setup; even the voice actors felt like they were phoning in their lines. At least it was less than $20 for the game plus a few expansions.

It's true, but we are comparing games in completely different leagues. Given the same budget, they could create something close to BG3. As the game stands today, it's still a better CRPG than anything else published recently, even in the 1990s and 2000s. We won't see anything else like BG3 for a very long time, especially considering it's only possible coming from Larian, as they don't have any competition. The best the Japanese can produce might be something like Dragon's Dogma 2.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

This game is more like neverwinter nights instead of baldurs gate. Completely different interpretation of tabletop gameplay. Solasta is more of a dungeon crawler number crunching style GM while baldurs gate 3 is story / friends having fun style of tabletop.

Solasta is another example of the resurgence of good, squad-based tactics games in the last few years. The developer did not make much of an attempt to emulate D&D exploration, either in the dungeon or the wilderness, so the encounter zones are largely linear, as is the overall structure of the game. Also, since it's based on "D&D 5th Edition", the party size is a mere four player-characters, among other mechanical deficiencies. Those are the chief limitations of the game, but it is reasonably good at what it focuses on, namely turn-based tactical combat, though certainly no Troubleshooter.