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

[Grunker]

I would like to see the level 6 party that has to rest after clearing 1 pack of dire wolves, 1 pack of tiger drakes and 4 packs of vampire spawn (encounters outside Master's Fortress). Maaaaaaybe I'd believe it in a party of 4 wizards for obvious reasons. Or maybe if you got critted eight times in a row.

 

[Grunker]

What a rip-off that Spellblade's don't get Shield but most Paladins do :D

Come to think of it, they don't get Blur either. Pretty weak class overall compared to Paladins who are as good as ever

 

[Lacrymas]

I like how people are just now catching on to stuff I've been saying since the demo or at least early access. If you want a turn-based RPG which is challenging, go play Trials of Fire.

 

[Parabalus]

BG2's mage-, lich- or dragon-fights are WAY harder than anything on Solasta even without SCS

Maybe if larping with self-imposed rules.

IWD2 puts more pressure on your resources early than most RPGs out there

You mean the bridge time limit?

 

[copebot]

Yeah the Green Dragon fight in Solasta is way harder than any unmodded BG2 dragon fight. I can get having rose colored glasses -- Firkrag was really tough for me the first time I fought him at age 14. But he is pretty easy to shut down in a few rounds. The Solasta dragon is pretty hard to shut down because of its incredible movement speed, its legendary actions, and its legendary saves. You have to have some meta foreknowledge to counteract some of the aspects of the encounter, particularly the MMO style puzzle with the lightning pulses.

It's not like BG2 is a lost artifact that you can't check, either. Load it up and fight Kangaxx with your current meta knowledge. Nigga dies in three seconds and none of his abilities do anything if you cast a few important buffs ahead of time.

The criticism of Solasta that it veers between trivial encounters and tough, tricky ones is an accurate one. There are only some areas in which there is any attrition-centric encounter design, like the second lava forest in which the placed rest fire is at the end of the zone and is otherwise inaccessible. To rest scum that area you would have to retreat off the map, rest, and come back. In a lot of other areas they plop out a long rest zone in a central location or after every major encounter.

IMO allowing rest any time is fine in certain campaign circumstances, like when the party is exploring. It gives the players the opportunity to explore their characters, try things out, and get more resources. The issue of not having more pressure time periods is one of campaign/quest design. There are tons of scenarios in which time pressure or resource pressure make sense and are natural to the fiction of said scenario. This is also an issue in which some scenarios are only interesting if you do not hand wave away logistical mechanics. Planning an expedition into the desert to raid tombs is easy if you have hand-waived away the rules about water or the material components of spells that allow you to create it. If there is no such thing as hiring workers to drive wagons into the wilderness that you will have to defend from monsters, then your 'expedition' is just moving your party of tokens who do not eat or drink 200 miles to get some 'loot' to give you math bonuses in combat resolution. All of these management sim type gameplay elements are more interesting RPG challenges than """story""" stuff that always ends up being disappointing. These types of human issues also underly many superb stories in literature, but they tend to be ignored by game developers as being 'boring.'

Solasta's travel system is more interesting than a lot of other similar games, but it's overly abstracted and too easy to overcome. Once you get 'Create Food," it's all over as something that requires a little planning in advance. I would have happily traded all the dialogue in the entire game (except for the line about orcs being like "dwarves, but worse") for a better random encounter system and more in depth adventure mechanics. Dialogue and story are plagues on the genre. If just half of storyfags learned what a 'book' was, developers would no longer feel the need to cater to their stupid and unfulfillable wishes.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I can't think of an easier D&D game. ... And if we're talking BG2 or IWD2 you're off your rocks. BG2's mage-, lich- or dragon-fights are WAY harder than anything on Solasta even without SCS, and IWD2 puts more pressure on your resources early than most RPGs out there.

Couldn't agree more.

 

[Saravan]

The criticism of Solasta that it veers between trivial encounters and tough, tricky ones is an accurate one. There are only some areas in which there is any attrition-centric encounter design, like the second lava forest in which the placed rest fire is at the end of the zone and is otherwise inaccessible. To rest scum that area you would have to retreat off the map, rest, and come back. In a lot of other areas they plop out a long rest zone in a central location or after every major encounter.

Aksha and the Green Dragon were two memorable and fun fights in the game. Other encounters were decent up until you reached around level 6-7 then they became a bit boring due how easy it became and the final battle was a huge disappointment. Still I prefer this over ridiculous stat bloat that just encourages save scumming. A certain game comes to mind but mentioning it will summon the peak autist so I rather not.

 

[mediocrepoet]

If just half of storyfags learned what a 'book' was, developers would no longer feel the need to cater to their stupid and unfulfillable wishes.

I... am going to borrow this for my sig.

 

[Thac0]

Also is it just me or is this game the easiest D&D game ever made? I'm starting to love most of the game to bits, but fighting 4 zombies with 4 level 5 characters is getting really silly. Even in a "boss fight" I had 2 cantrip-spamming mages who missed all the time, one caster that spawned directly on top of my melees for easy execution and then 6 zombies who died to one Turn Undead. I think I took 5 damage that fight. And it's not exactly like I have an optimized party, my main fighter has a measly 16 strength because I looked at the belt of hill giant strength and went "given how easy this is already that seems dumb"

I am propagating my own version of the difficulty, give the enemies 1,5x damage and +3 to hit in the options. Those are only the offensive upgrades from cataclysm difficulty, not the defensive upgrades of +100% health and +3 to saves as those make the game grindy.
It will not make the game terribly difficult, but it at least puts some spice back into it. Also enable the stronger AI settings.

 

[copebot]

Aksha and the Green Dragon were two memorable and fun fights in the game. Other encounters were decent up until you reached around level 6-7 then they became a bit boring due how easy it became and the final battle was a huge disappointment. Still I prefer this over ridiculous stat bloat that just encourages save scumming. A certain game comes to mind but mentioning it will summon the peak autist so I rather not.

Yes. Unfortunately they recycled the Aksha boss fight with the optional encounter against the other vampire, except after you have learned all the vampire gimmicks and have a couple extra levels in you. They clearly put in a lot of custom environmental work along with gimmicks to make those big boss encounters different from most of the other fights. It would have been nice to see more challenging environments and tough encounters that were not boss fights.

I'm sure it required a lot of development and animation work to make wall-crawling work, but that was also one of the only gimmicks that made some non-boss fights a little bit tricky. There are lots of other little "Tucker's Kobolds" style encounter design tricks that do not require entirely separate sets of animations that are nonetheless almost entirely absent from the game. Another issue with said wall crawling is that player spider climb is often kind of glitchy, with it often being impossible to move to a specific tile even if it would make sense for you to be able to with spider climb active. I think the devs should be proud that they implemented mechanics like flight and spider climb into the game despite having a small team, but the shortcuts they took to make it work undermines that achievement in some respects.

I... am going to borrow this for my sig.

Nice. If just one storyfag learns about books or even libraries, my mission will have been accomplished.

 

[Grunker]

The criticism of Solasta that it veers between trivial encounters and tough, tricky ones is an accurate one.

What are these tricky fights?

Load it up and fight Kangaxx with your current meta knowledge

What is my metaknowledge of Solasta? I have none. Zip. Nada. Zilch. I rolled a very suboptimal party (my main frontline strength-based damage dealer has 16 strength on level 7 because I refuse to use the overpowered belts, my Wizard has trash spells and none of the hard hitters like Scorching Ray) and am playing the game completely blind, yet I did the entirety of Master's Fortress *both outside and inside* in one straight go, never resting and never reloading a single time.

And Mortmal's strawman that I'm posturing is hilariously dumb. I am really not that great at these games. Dungeon of Naheulbeuk must have broken my personal reload-record. I only ever beat Llengrath once on Path of the Damned and the fight ended with all my characters down except Aloth on one (*1*) hp. I still have yet to complete X-COM on higher difficulties.

Obviously despite our best efforts this debate is going to be based alot on experience. And my lack of reloading is key here, it's the fundamental reason I'm wondering whether Solasta might be the easiest RPG I've ever played. I always play games on high difficulties, but since I'm fairly shit and don't read many guides, what ends up happening is I reload alot.

I can't remember reloading once since level 2 in Solasta. Not a single time. The vampire in the castle downed my fighter three times during the fight primarily because I messed around dealing with the Darkness spell for far too long, but since the player still has so many advantages I still won the fight. Since then I haven't had anyone go down.

That's crazy.

I'm not fully done with the game yet. Maybe I'll reload a fight later. But no matter what I'm fairly certain I've never tried a cRPG that seems to demand so little.

I would have happily traded all the dialogue in the entire game (except for the line about orcs being like "dwarves, but worse") for a better random encounter system and more in depth adventure mechanics. Dialogue and story are plagues on the genre. If just half of storyfags learned what a 'book' was, developers would no longer feel the need to cater to their stupid and unfulfillable wishes.

I may disagree with your opinion on Solasta's difficulty - but you, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman

 

[Vault Dweller]

I'm not fully done with the game yet. Maybe I'll reload a fight later.

I doubt it. The hardest fight was with that vampire, the rest is a steady trip downhill in terms of difficulty and encounter design.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeap. Once you kill Aksha, there's no point in continuing. I haven't and have no desire to. I don't feel the need to replay it up to Aksha because the encounters before her are all same-y and auto-attack fodder. Again, this game needs an encounter and difficulty overhaul. The PCs being ridiculously overpowered from the start is also a 5E issue, but it can be more or less overcome if you know what you are doing.

 

[Kaivokz]

Came here to make a post after finishing the game and found most of it was already being said. Bland story, bland encounter design, gimmicky/half-functional verticality, awful side-quests (the Philosopher quest is hands down some of the worst writing and storytelling I have ever seen in a video game). A few nice areas with multiple entry points, but obviously hampered by budget/time and feeling half-finished.

I’m convinced the only reason I enjoyed it as lukewarmly as I did is because of the dearth of RPGs with full party creation. Made a crusading band of dwarven paladins and priests, which meant even the undead encounters were trivial, unfortunately. The only time someone died was when they were shoved off of a bridge by an earth elemental, which is fair enough.

 

[Spectacle]

Regarding difficulty, the sad fact is that most gamers are about as tactically competent as General George Custer, and the encounters on normal difficulty in Solasta provides them with an appropriate challenge. These fights will naturally be a cakewalk for players with experience in turn-based combat and/or good understanding of D&D rules.

 

[Arthandas]

Is anyone planning to review this shit?

 

[Infinitron]

Is anyone planning to review this shit?

Possibly Grunker.

 

[Grunker]

Nah man. Don't like it enough. I love all of the game's systems but actually playing it is pretty mediocre. Someone should though. It's a tragedy that this game isn't better. The fixes to make that happen seem so easy.

 

[Lacrymas]

Hopefully it sells well enough they continue supporting it at least until the difficulty issues are addressed.

 

[Grunker]

In fact this game is the quintessential example of your "content is king"-argument, Infinitron. You should play it if only to have the reference handy :D

 

[Shrimp]

Hopefully it sells well enough they continue supporting it at least until the difficulty issues are addressed.

Once they add Sorcerer they'll probably stop working on improvements to the game and start looking towards new projects.
Funny how their representative(?) coincidentally stopped posting here to shill the game the moment it released.

 

[jackofshadows]

Hopefully it sells well enough they continue supporting it at least until the difficulty issues are addressed.

If it sells well, something tells me they will address anything but the difficulty issues. Who cares about few neckbeards that moaning about the game being too easy? They will probably work on better character models, voice-over, graphics in general, controller support and of course inclusiveness for their next game. After all, they did implement custom difficulty so they could always wave away difficulty talk with that.

 

[Grunker]

I love that codexers are actually cynical enough to think projects like Solasta are made with profit as the primary motivation. They wouldn't have made fucking Solasta were that the case lol

 

[Grunker]

As an addendum, I once did an interview with the Expeditions-developers (Logic Artists) about why they cared about such a niche-site as the Codex. They said a pretty significant portion of their sales came from sites like this, and the Codex specifically was a big part of it. And it makes sense, doesn't it - if you're such a superfucking nerd you actually buy games like Solasta and Expeditions, odds are you also hang out on sites like the Codex.

EDIT: Maybe Vault Dweller can support or undermine this point

 

[Parabalus]

The party banter and interactions are pretty good, don't get all the hate directed at them. The story doesn't take itself too seriously, so it fits quite well.