Solasta: Crown of the Magister

"Disarm the swordsman or punch like Bruce
Sunder or bull rush or trip 'em
Grapple or pin or maybe seduce
It's all in the way that you grip 'em
Get more advantage from AoOs
Take a feat called combat reflexes
Only one blow on each of your foes
How many? Depends what your DEX is"

 

Mary Crowell - Opportunity Tango

 

 

After buying Solasta, I gradually remembered perusing its Kickstarter page several years ago and finally deciding against it. Yet another gaggle of starry-eyed fans aspiring to creators, thought I, with more enthusiasm than talent or expertise, who'll just pocket my money and slink off into the sunset. I guess I was... partly wrong-ish... about this one? The not entirely hostile yet still tepid release made me put off buying it even then. Certainly Solasta screams "low budget" from the surprisingly <not> algorithmically generated music to the stilted animations surprisingly <not> having been churned through the old Aurora engine, limited original campaign, limited models. Skim the credits. Note the main team features exactly one name in every category, with the rest outsourced to disinterested third parties. Still, despite its weaknesses, Solasta actually shows the most potential of recent tactical RPGs, and it's worth discussing from several angles.

Compounding the problem, this is my first exposure to DnD 5e rules, and I'm constantly struggling not to blame Tactical Adventures for the limitations inherent in the system they unwisely chose to adapt instead of the more complex 3.5e / Pathfinder. (Hint: complexity is good.) But, it's not like their own creative input drips with creativity. If the basic "thing of the stuff" title didn't tip you off, expect a standard "Tolkien with more explosions" high fantasy world. Once upon a time there was a magnificent empire but then magic(k?)(a?) done explodered all over, so now the usual humanoid kingdoms are picking through millennial rubble for ancient mystical artifacts, one of which (the aforementioned Crown of the aforementioned Magister) your rag-tag quartet of misfits trips over near the start of your adventure. Also, insidious shapeshifting reptiloids from beyond the moon!

Forced to single-class with no prestige options, I might as well opt for a flexible Sylvan Elf Druid (of the Land) Philosopher, with personality traits Cynicism, Pragmatism, Egoism and Cynicism again... because duh, it's me. Proficiencies Nature and Arcana - (edit: turned out to be a must-have for crafting)

EndGame Me

Decided to run with it: a whole party of heavily cynical wood elves.

- My Jungian Shadow, a Stealth/Acrobatics focused Rogue (Shadowcaster) -  (edit: enemies use very little AoE, so just as in Wasteland 3 where my Shadow had 55% evasion and nobody bothered targeting her, here with 20DEX, Blur, Shield and Uncanny Dodge she became my most resilient character)

- Quiver, a Ranger (Marksman) (no point in a wood elf team without archery) with Animal Handling in case I can't pick it up on my druid later on. (edit: not that I ever got to use it; 0 checks)

- Sway, a Barbarian (Magebane) with 13 starting Charisma. Face it, teh chixz0rz always dig a bare-chested prettyboy beating up nerds. (edit: but I only encountered one Intimidate check)

Even if my beastmastery went almost completely unused (landed two control spells of four or five attempts the entire campaign) the team's aptitude for stealthed ranged opening volleys served me quite well indeed. As probably its greatest fundamental selling point, Solasta makes a big show of implementing tabletop mechanics normally ignored by D&D computer adaptations, like spell foci taking actual equipment slots, keeping a hand free for spells with somatic components, or knocking enemies back/prone. Surprise rounds are fully enforced including the barbarian ability to rage free. Climbing or jumping ability facilitates three-dimensionality across heavily fragmented battlefields consisting of many platforms, towers, pits and towering forests. There's a lot to be said for brawling with nimble pillar-clambering goblins while slowed by a rushing river atop a waterfall, or summoning a flying snake and turning into an eagle to bumrush spiders spitting venom at you from the treetops.

 

But while a couple of the more interesting puzzles make you think three-dimensionally, and fighting wall-climbing enemies throws a welcome wrinkle into your tactics, 3D mechanics are hard hit by the developers' limitations.

Lack of special animations makes wall-climbing look plain stupid, you'll reload quite a few times due to inconsistencies in what can or cannot be climbed/jumped due to arbitrary restrictions to retain the "fly" spell's utility, and even good gimmicks get overused: "OK, platforms mean an ambush crawling dramatically toward me up from the fiery deeps" and yup, there it is right on cue like those patches of different-colored wall in old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

The Crown of the Magister campaign just falls short of its aspirations in too many individually minor but collectively rankling ways.

- Skin tones look like they came out of a crayon box. Some gear suffers from same, with wands looking like strips of red licorice.

- Lacking the assets to decorate the adequately proportioned maps they wanted, every town/fort street is littered with piles upon piles of the same boxes, barrels, carts, bales of hay, barrels, boxes and more barrels.

- Every cutscene begins with the same "last guy enters from stage left" animation.

- Movement checks are all athletics, no acrobatics.

- Detect magic detects nothing.

- One puzzle offers underwater loot by draining the water - but doesn't my athletics check mention swimming?

- Dialogue at the start of the last zone introduces fire spiders as dramatic new foes... except you've been fighting them all along.

- No screen edge mouse scroll is a weird omission these days.

- The camera simply doesn't zoom out far enough to take in the battlefield, not to mention the lack of tilting.

- I am fucking sick of interface timesinks and every low-budget "indie" game abuses them to no end. Aside from readying your weapon and lowering it for every single attack, some of the death animations (spiders and elementals especially) are just insultingly overextended. And the dice... ugh, the fucking... never mind, later.

- Main campaign, albeit well paced, runs only to level 10. I was technically 11 in the screenshot above, but the last zone lacks rest points.

- Worst of all, zero roleplaying.

That last one's a major issue in a story-based ROLEPLAYING game.

- No alignment implementation whatsoever.

- No practical impact of backgrounds (aside from some trivial and badly-written two-room side quests) or personality traits.

- The one time you're set up for a moral decision (killing a defenseless cultist foot soldier) he pre-empts the choice by spontaneously dying.

- Four factions introduced as competing with each other, mutually exclusive, but really you can just level them all at once. They're thematically identical anyway.

 

And even the linear storytelling and dialogue hardly leaps off the page by its literary genius:

Surprisingly good voice acting can't compensate for characters written as gamers struggling to stay in character, especially your own party whose banter is too obviously exactly that: banter. Pre-chewed snarks, put-downs and stating the obvious, especially when randomized (my barbarian wanderer giving me a history lesson? or better yet, an etiquette lesson? WHAT!?) can't but come across as fake and shatter the little immersion you managed to scrape together.
 

I've griped enough on this blog about bad storytelling that I shouldn't have to reiterate the point, but specifically in the case of tactical RPGs I have to once again ask: what can you give me that Planetfall doesn't? If all you can offer is party-based tactics on a grid, the market is increasingly saturated with competitors more capable of algorithmically generating that with more character/gear/ability options, and even within D&D rulesets, Low Magic Age makes a better bare-bones dungeon crawler. I'll skip my gripes about 5e for another time except to say I'm NOT a fan of it dumbing absolutely everything down and relegating combat outcomes almost entirely to dice rolls and an advantage/disadvantage system even more dependent on dice rolls.

Which brings us back to the dice.

The fucking dice.

The motherfucking dice fetish.

Instead of fleshing out its many practical and aesthetic lacks, Solasta dazzles you with customizable colored dice in thirty-one flavors rolling at the bottom of your screen with every single action. Dice rolls are born of necessity on tabletop, and one of computers' best advantages (aside from not having to interact with a bunch of flesh-and-blood imbeciles around a table) is automating that necessity in the background and leaving you to focus on actual gameplay. With, yes, a breakdown of each die roll in the combat log if you should so desire to look into the details.

 

There you have Solasta's biggest problem: it doesn't focus on good content per se but on fetishizing the hobby, the form devoid of content, the "feels" of sitting in front of a vinyl placemat rolling dice, in keeping with your party's banter sounding like a bunch of socializing apes stuffing their faces with pizza around a dinette set. And, in keeping with interface timesinks, even if you turn off the stupid dice roll animations the interface still pauses every single action as if it were displaying the dice!

 

So why, despite this combination of overstretched budget, 5e idiocy and gamer fetish idiocy, am I standing behind my initial statement that Solasta looks more promising than its competitors? Well, the basic mechanics, ignoring the over-randomization of d20s, are solid. Tile movement, targeting, verticality, hit dice, overland travel and restricted resting complete with quick rests, reactions and quick actions, surprise rounds and difficult terrain, status effects and dialogue prompts, faction rep and light levels, all this fundamental framework simply works, more clearly, reliably and comprehensively than you find in the likes of Original Sin or Wrath of the Righteous. Tactical Adventures even paid attention to some long-standing quality of life issues like a quick travel option in town that doesn't skip encounter triggers, automated trash loot hauling, cutscenes not breaking you out of stealth or repositioning you in your enemy's crosshairs, etc. You do get gratuitously boosted to lvl2 in the tutorial, but at least generally speaking, both levels and gear come slowly enough to feel far more significant than usual. Even the AI is pretty good: runs around / out of damage AoEs about half the time, weighs this against keeping up the pressure on you.

 

Microsoft having destroyed North American cRPG development, that vacuum is begging to be filled. Crown of the Magister may be a mediocre campaign at best, but Solasta as an underlying system has raised the bar for basic gameplay and left TA plenty of room to grow, should they feel inclined to write better content.

If only it weren't in 5e.

 

Oh well. They did release their first expansion campaign, Lost Valley, so I guess we'll see if they persist in wasting their potential.

___________________________________

 

edit 2022/08/20:

Continued for the Lost Valley campaign here. Long story short, disappointing.