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Yes. People have been comparing the game to Icewind Dale, but I think ToEE is a better comparison. Both games feel like a test for a new engine, lets hope that this time we will get the engine used for a new games and not abandoned as was the case with ToEE.
I consider Solasta a promising first game from a new developer, but there are a few obvious improvements that would enable their next game to greatly surpass the original:
Larger party size, at minimum 6 PCs versus the current 4, to boost diversity of party composition and increase replayability
Wilderness exploration, rather than merely selecting a destination on a map
Proper dungeons with non-linearity and puzzles, rather than a mostly linear sequence of fights
More logistics and other effects to improve exploration
Decent cosmetic aspects in the character creator (cf. Dragon's Dogma) with vastly improved faces
Yeah, it's a nice base for a potential sequel but they need to cut back on trying to be "cinematic" in order prioritize on more important things. The fact that they added the ability to click on a merchant's tent to engage in the trading screen right away without have to talk to them shows the flaws of making all conversation with any npcs into a cutscene. This could of been avoided if they only spoke in a textbox. It's not like the merchants have any personality in the first place. None of the cutscenes look great, time and resources should be focused in other areas to improve gameplay. If everything wasn't voice acted, we could of had more conversations with characters.
We could of learned more about the world and the people in it. That dwarven mining town in the game had nothing to do in it after the main story bit was done. You can't even talk to barely anyone because talking requires voice acting and making a cutscene. In the end, you barely know anything about the world besides SORAKS.
Until they are cut back on the voice acting and cinematics, they will be limited on what they can do. They don't have the budget to make something like Dragon Age for mainstream audiences, just focus on what the people who would actually play these type of games would want.
Seeing your party express themselves in cutscenes is a huge part of what I like about the game and find charming. If it was just textboxes a la Icewind Dale it would lose a lot of its uniqueness for me.
Seeing your party express themselves in cutscenes is a huge part of what I like about the game and find charming. If it was just textboxes a la Icewind Dale it would lose a lot of its uniqueness for me.
Repeatable cutscenes are pointless in any game. I only meant quest stuff and the like. To me it's like Wizardry 8 but more advanced, watching your little created band of heroes come alive with their personalities.
Repeatable cutscenes are pointless in any game. I only meant quest stuff and the like. To me it's like Wizardry 8 but more advanced, watching your little created band of heroes come alive with their personalities.
That was not in response to you. I should have made that clear. It's a running argument here primarily because they are the two 5th edition games out right now.
I agree with you about the party interaction cutscenes, though I could have done with a bit less of it.
Finished Solasta. Final rating: s'ok. Started off strong but petered off quite a lot as the game went on. I think the peak of the game was the dark castle, still had some trash fights but the boss(es) were enjoyable and as a whole "Adventure area" it was solid, but a lot of the later dungeons just had me spinning my wheels. Final encounter was pretty damn sad too, despite having a freakishly underequipped party (Most slots bare on most characters, fighter still using +1 battle axe, etc). The dialog got noticeably clunkier as the game went on too, early game I was enjoying the party bantz but as the game progressed the "Personalities" of the party members didn't come through nearly as much. Already bitched about the lack of non-combat skills but I'll reiterate, even though it's a combatfag game the non-combat skills should give little pieces of fluff/lore and/or extra loot, but you rarely even get checks on skills later on and when you do it's often of the "I use my magic to spread freedom throughout the wasteland" "ARCANE: (Success) So you're saying you use your magic to spread freedom throughout the wasteland?" sort.
Hopefully it did well enough that they can make a more fleshed out game with the engine later, but I'm sure as hell in no rush to replay Solasta after knocking it on the head. Also fuck ruins floating in ethereal voids. Absolutely hate that shit in RPGs, give me rats in a fucking sewer and goblins in a fucking cave any day of the week over random-ass ruins floating in a nether-realm. Sewer rats and cave goblins have a proud tradition in RPGs and you can enjoy seeing someone else's take on them, floating buildings in space seem to show up all the goddamn time and they bore me to death.
For a different generation, but I'm an old man so I'm obliged to bitch about them until I eventually die off and the younguns can fondly reminisce about all the stone ruins floating in voids they explored in various games.
tl;dr: It's a a modern Gold Box game, like I said before. Therefore, it's worth buying and playing. Use the point buy system to create your party in order not to make things too easy.
I actually did play the Pools series for the first time recently, completing the Secret of the Silver Blades and then stopping due to fatigue. So I think it's an apt comparison. The plot, story, quests and characters are bare bones here, but that can be excused since we are here for the combat and the game delivers on that front. I like 5th edition DnD rules better than Pathfinders actually. They are simple enough to limit the amount of clicks you need to kill the enemy, but offer enough variety in spell composition and bonus actions to make for good tactical options. I also prefer low level campaigns.
Party banter is a really nice addition to the standard formula. I was sceptical of it before, but I will readily admit that I was wrong. It adds a alot of flavour to the combatfest and, for my party at least, the personalities were logical.
I have to say, though, that for combat fags the game is clearly inferior to IWD games, which are simply better on all fronts. However, I don't think anyone of us expected Solasta to overtake them there. This is not even an AA game, and we will have to accept that. The devs chose their angle, pooled their resources and delivered pretty much what they promised. I enjoyed the game overall more than Kingmaker, which for me peaked at the Stag Lord fight and then slowly and steadily became more and more obscene.
I can't however help to feel that devs didn't really get all the mileage they could have from lighting and environmental interraction systems. You have to deal with flying enemies, which is nice, and of course you can fly your mage to evade enemies etc so it's all good. You can shove enemies over ledges (which I never did because I could kill them nonetheless). However, dealing with darkness is pretty much an afterthought and most enemies die just by hacking and slashing anyway. The one exception is the Aksha fight, which required some creative thinking. I wish there were more fights like that in the game.
I did roll the stats for my party which proved out to be a mistake, because I couldn't resist creating overpowered characters. Consequently, the game became way too easy. No need for potions, poisons, special arrows, etc, ever. I'm going to try another playthrough soon with point buy system to check whether the game is better=harder that way.
Also the story and quests are a massive missed opportunity. I'm not revealing a secret when I say that the baddies are shapeshifters. This, however, matters very little for actual gameplay purposes. No paranoia, no darkness, no tension not knowing who's traitor and who is not. In fact in one side quest
I was supposed to find a traitor. This progressed in the following way: I talk to a guy, I talk to another guy, go to the traitor, he confesses, and I kill him
Vizima Confidential this is not. And in terms of writing, I can't help but to make a comparison to Baldur's Gate, which did doppelgangers completely right. They were so memorable, even though they were not even the main focus.
Finally, I haven't tried to dungeon maker yet, but I expect there to be a lot of untapped potential. AFAIK you can't script things yet, so people can't make real modules, but jesus christ if you could. The combat system is there, so all you have to do is to let people make their own campaigns. If the devs can't release good tools for this game for some reason, then they should do so for Solasta 2.
This is a point of contention. The "standard" or assumed party size in 5E is 4 people. Not only because basically all pre-written modules are balanced for 4-5 players, but also because the challenge rating assumes a 4 person party. The problem, as we've come to painfully realize, is that CR is not well conceptualized and it doesn't even calculate an appropriate difficulty for your party's level. First of all, CR only governs resource expenditure, but that's too abstract and dependent on resting restrictions. What does it mean to "spend a few resources" on a medium encounter exactly? How does that translate to a rising tension curve? Theoretically, you know how, but practically it doesn't work out. Can you say Solasta has a good tension curve? I wouldn't, especially because you can rest whenever, so the tension is flat or at best a very wonky sinusoidal wave. But even if you don't rest, those copy-pasted ghoul encounters can be auto-attacked through, so they don't even serve the abstract purpose of resource attrition. I suspect this is due to a religious adherence to the challenge rating. The only good-adjacent encounter in the whole game is Aksha and that's because she breaks the CR rules.
Second of all, the more people you have in a party the wonkier the challenge becomes because you can't depend on the CR to do it for you (and as we've established, CR doesn't even do that properly). Even adding a single additional party member decreases the challenge dramatically due to how powerful the characters are. Not only because you bring more damage and health to the table, but also due to the large toolbox every character has at their disposal (this goes double for casters). At one point, the only way to challenge a party is to either bring on adult dragons or similar against 5th level characters or simply do a party vs party encounter where both sides have equal opportunities and power. That can't last forever obviously and doesn't do well in anything other than very, very short campaigns or one-shots.
While you can adjust things on the fly as a DM in a tabletop session, these things are still a problem, and they are an even bigger, almost insurmountable, problem in video game form where you have to take into consideration extremely variable parties and party compositions, especially in terms of power. Simply giving flat bonuses to monsters and bloating their HP and damage doesn't work, as exemplified by Solasta's Cataclysm mode. It not only feels cheap, but also grindy due to the abysmal encounter design of copy-pasted ghouls. The difficulty levels must be adjusted according to the min-max anality of a party in addition to improving AI, adding more mobs, and in the worst case scenario giving them higher stats and bonuses. If I were to revamp Cataclysm mode, I'd lock that decision from the start and force the point buy character creation model. Myzzrym, you should hire me to revamp your Cataclysm mode, this is a one-man job imo.
Bonus third thing - Solasta's parties feel one-dimensional and people might feel the need to add more party members because not only are half the classes missing but also because the actual build porn of 5E is missing, i.e. multi-classing.
Yeah, no. Imaging rebalancing every encounter in this game for starters in order to keep the challenge. You couldn't just give flat bonuses because bloat ridiculous as is, you would want to add much more enemies instead. Which in turn would require different, not these tiny linear dungeouns and the game itself would have to work much more smooth overall, otherwise it would take forever to complete.
Besides, what kind of diversity are you talking about with this class roster? Stacking classes? :D Personally I dont mind it by the way but I think I'm in minority regarding that.
I think the worst offender here is the fact they left intravision in for elfs and dwarfs. This can trivialize/half trivialize the whole system for many parties.
They need to ditch full voice acting it is cancer and limits creativity. You never going to get epic stories with over 100 characters like the suikoden games with full voice acting.
Yes voice acting for this game (or for the next) is just throwing away money. But I also want you to consider that the high-pitched dwarf wouldn't have happened without the B-grade voice acting in this game.
I think the worst offender here is the fact they left intravision in for elfs and dwarfs. This can trivialize/half trivialize the whole system for many parties.
No, they should've re-balance race bonuses somehow that non-dark vision ones were a better choice in a usual, non-darkness scenarios since base module have plenty of dark areas.
Still, light has its purpose even when the whole party have dark-vision: to damage undead, give them disadvantages etc.
I think the worst offender here is the fact they left intravision in for elfs and dwarfs. This can trivialize/half trivialize the whole system for many parties.
This certainly gimbs you characters, so not really.
Design that rewards outright avoidance of a main gameplay mechanic is not good. Solasta devs were too occupied with faithfully copying DnD rules so they haven't considered the context of their game.
