Solasta: Crown of the Magister (2020)

then this would be the premier D&D video game. It actually does a few things better than Larian. Not having prebuilt party characters means you can experiment a lot more with different builds. I still went with the standard Paladin/Mage/Rogue/Cleric party but I did some alternative builds and played the beginning with those just to see. Solasta also does a better job, IMO, of using height and distance in combat to make you think more strategically. And the level cap with the Palace of Ice DLC is 16 so I was able to get my party to a much stronger position.

The story is good. This is one spot where BG3 does a better job. Solasta's graphics are definitely not as breathtaking as BG3 and the use of premade characters allowed Larian to tell far more personal stories. But Solasta did a pretty good job of world design and creating an epic campaign that brought the party from level 1 to level 16. The base game took me about ~50 hours to complete. The Palace of Ice DLC, which is intended to take place after you beat the base game, was an entire video game of its own in length at about 30 hours. I definitely recommend save scumming the final boss battle in Palace of Ice, though, as its a serious no rest slog.

I played it on PC and my Steam Deck. Steam cloud worked flawlessly. The game's graphics worked well on the Deck.

Anyone who enjoys tabletop, dice-based RPGs with epic fantasy stories will enjoy this game. I could see myself replaying it in 5 years or so when I've forgotten most of everything.

It was a long time since I was so mixed on my feelings towards a game.

Also a bit difficult to review. Do you compare this to other cRPGs? If yes, then do you take the size of the studio into account? If no, then you just have to look at the end product, without considering the d20 ruleset implementation, the funding of the game, the studio size etc. otherwise you are a bit unfair.

I have no real idea how to feel about this game and reviewing it. I know I had a lot of fun, playing it in co-op with my girlfriend. To a point. Sometimes more, sometimes less fun.

I also think that I would never complete the base campaign if I was to play it alone.

I also really appreciate the great campaign editor and community content, but I never really spent much time on it. It is a big part of the game, but it is not "the game". Not sure how much should it be taken into account when reviewing, but it should be taken into account when appreciating the game.

Anyway, here are my thoughts in general, unordered manor:

Story (main campgain and DLCs) nothing to write home about in the main campaign. Just standard fantasy heroic shtick. You start of killing goblins end up saving the world from the big bad. The story in the Lost Valley DLC is more compelling, as it is scaled down, although it lacks direction and possibly cuts of weirdly. Although it is generally better and more interesting. Could be better in terms of choosing factions and tying up loose ends by the end of it. The way they did it requires a lot of playthroughs to get it all, without that much diversity between them.

Combat Just like Baldurs Gate 3 (here I go comparing, team of 12, vs studio with like 5 locations and 600 people or something) the combat is the best part. While bg3 utilizes environment to make combat more like tabletop dnd, the cheaper Solasta focuses on lighting. It also has a great, clean, UI, in comparison to BG3, they did a much better job with it, however, the rules of combat are a bit different. Solasta is more pure DnD, while bg3 is more cRPG DnD, with a lot more stuff made easier, like magic items, backpack items usability etc. This results in a more strategic and tactical combat, while a more modern and bigger cRPG like bg3 has combat with far more options for cheese and weird stuff happening. They both are DnD, but they play out very differently. The biggest flaw of solasta combat is the speed. NPCs are super slow. The bigger fights get pretty tedious after a while.

Presentation The graphics are dated and simplistic. The VFX effects of spells look good, and along with concept are, in the loading screens etc, are the best part of the graphics. Otherwise, everyone looks like made out of playdough. Voice acting is... well... not professional. But that can be pretty funny. At least the maps are very clear, and navigating is pretty easy. This however makes for far more artifical maps than those from bg3, where maps are more like real locations, rather than locations made for rpg adventuring. This is passable due to the studio size and budget, but also hard to be overlooked, when many small studios put out great quality of art design and sound design. The game has some pretty decent tracks in terms of OST, but nothing really stays with you for long.

Other campaign editor is great. People have made great content with it, that can probably supress the main campaign in terms of story complexity etc. I have not used it a lot, but it is very clear, that its just good, very good.

RPG in terms of of mechanics it is a very faithful open ruleset implementation. So if you like DnD, you will like what they did. In terms of role playing, you are out of luck. No meaningful dialogue options, and the writting is often rather cheesy. Character characterization is hold back by graphics. Leveling and mechanical side are great and clear, mostly well explained. But sadly, often held back by technical state.

Technical state Game is buggy. A lot. Whole subclasses do not work (open hand monk). Whole areas would not work. Enemies would bug out mid combat requiring a complete combat restart. I tried reporting some bugs, but was left with no response or help. This is one of the biggest flaws, and ultimately left me and my gf abandoning the completion of the newest and last DLC due to inability to load into the next required area.

Ultimately we got around 100hours of playtime. 70-80 was really fun. The rest was sometimes a bit boring or troublesome.

If you gonna enjoy it, you probably need to be really into DnD combat or set your goals towards the custom, user content, either making it or playing.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister is an RPG in the style of something like Divinity: Original Sin but with a far smaller budget and using a version of DND 5.1 for its combat rather than a total homebrew system. Technically, Solasta is capable of running more than one campaign, including the somewhat recent Palace of Ice expansion, but I only played the Crown of the Magister campaign in a group of 3, each with our own character and a fourth character we designed as a group and traded control of during each of our weekly sessions. While I think Solasta has a cool idea in mind and is doing a lot right, I found the game in a lot of ways rather mediocre and some of the corners cut for lack of budget make the flaws harder to ignore. While I was somewhat positive at the start of the game, my enthusiasm decreased as the game went on. If I were judging based on my perspective at the end of the game, I'd probably give it 2 stars, but given I did enjoy it more for most of the game, I'm going with 3.

So first the good. Solasta does a pretty good job of adapting DND to a digital game. While it's far from my favorite TTRPG system, it's one that's rather familiar to a lot of people and that made the game pretty easy to jump into and understand the mechanics. It's also nice being able to play with that particular system without having to run all the rules through a DM and instead having the computer handle that, significantly speeding up combat a good 2-4X and reducing headaches. There's a lot that the game has to work around such as many niche spells not making a lot of sense just given the confines of a video game that has to have reasonable limitations on actions you can take in the world, but I mostly found it a pretty good attempt. Some spells that wouldn't make sense are merely omitted where others are modified to fit this particular adaptation. Though I did find some spells like Comprehend Languages didn't seem too useful as despite picking languages at character creation, different languages basically never seemed to come up. Still, there's a decent variety of encounters to test your many abilities on throughout the game. Though I do want to caution that unfortunately the game paywalls a lot of character options. Several entire classes and backgrounds and playable species require that you own an expansion or two. They weren't too expensive, but it felt really shitty when we first made characters and only had access to maybe 1/3-1/2 of the options.

The biggest issues with Solasta is just that with its budget design, there's a lot of jank. The game is super buggy, like in ways that are kind of surprising for a game that was able to afford to be fairly long and expansive in other ways. Realistically, it being so long is probably why some things slipped through the cracks, but it's still rather shocking at times. For instance, early in the game there's an important cutscene for when party member decided to take a particular item. When playing in my group, I took the item and on my screen the cutscene showed that, but both of my friends saw a totally different cutscene showing that one of them had taken it, even though the canon going forward was that I did. There's a recurring council chamber with a number of important nobles seated on a semi-circle bench arrangement...except a couple of them aren't sitting, they're standing with their legs clipping through the bench. This was a consistent glitch that happened nearly every time we were in that chamber, which was a lot during the story. It's kind of shocking no one caught that and fixed it. I'm really sad that I apparently accidentally deleted all my screenshots so I can't share these rather hilarious shots, but there were quite a few. Lastly, in the final battle of the campaign, you have to survive several rounds against significant waves of enemies in what was a pretty tough fight, especially after expending resources in the fight just before that. It was really starting to look like we were going to fail and have to start over from the first of this series of battles, which I really didn't want to do since I was getting tired of the game at that point and was hoping to be done that night and it was already late. So I cast Dimension Door and was able to get behind the line we weren't allowed to run past...and neither could the enemies. So cheesy as it was, we beat the final battle by fittingly exploiting how jank the game was and just sitting outside of combat until enough turns passed.

There's also a lot of other things about the game that just feel low-budget, especially with the story. There is a good deal of voice acting, which is welcome in some ways, but honestly the performances are on average pretty bad. Characters state things with weird intonation to the point you're legitimately unsure how they mean some things, if they're being sarcastic, serious, etc. But the script doesn't help this as the lines are some of the driest I've heard. So many conversations feel like just about every line is filler small talk until they pointedly state what the character wants or is going to do. Sometimes jokes are cracked but they're often so bad I can't even tell they're jokes until the characters start, of course, acknowledging that humor has occurred. For a game with a lot of story, this really took me out of it, even if it was often pretty amusing in its own way. That said, the overarching plot I think is okay. It's not outstanding, but it's fairly easy to follow for the most part. It includes some cliches, but it works for what the game is going for.

But the game truthfully isn't all bad, as easy as it is to pick fun at it. In fact, that is part of the fun of it. My group definitely had a lot of laughs at the goofiness of the game, even though it was almost never intentional goofiness we found so funny. Still, part of the point of this game is for those who want even more of a game like Divinity Original Sin and its sequel. While it should be obvious from the above that this one doesn't live up to what I consider one of the best RPGs out there, I can't deny that there is still some fun to the formula of having a computer run a TTRPG campaign for you and your friends. As with Divinity, we even scheduled our sessions like a TTRPG and planned to play it every week at a designated time slot. So Solasta is still good for getting some of that fix. However, especially with Baldur's Gate 3 on the horizon, I have to say that at least from my experience with the Crown of the Magister campaign, it's plenty skippable.