Solasta: Crown of the Magister Review
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Introduction
Solasta: Crown of a Magister is a fantasy RPG from Tactical Adventures, a team of RPG enthusiasts helmed by Mathieu Girard of Endless Space, Legend, etc. fame. Set in the original world of Solasta, the game utilizes the OGL version of Dungeons & Dragons' 5th Edition ruleset, which makes it one of the first digital adaptations of this immensely popular iteration of D&D.
Following a successful crowdfunding campaign, Solasta spent several months in early access. An early access phase that lasts less than a year? That alone should tell you these developers mean business. And sure enough, the game's early builds were already showing quite a bit of promise. And with the full game now live, let's dive straight in and see what it has to offer.
Ruleset and Systems
The first thing we should note about Solasta is that while it's positioned as a tactical RPG, in reality, it sits somewhere in-between a tactical title and a fully-featured CRPG. Essentially, it can be seen as the 5th Edition's Icewind Dale, where your party of customizable adventurers follows a mostly linear path of straight-forward quests that usually culminate in combat, but structurally it's all arranged in a way you'd expect from a proper CRPG - hub towns with shops and NPCs, factions and reputation, various side quests and optional activities.
And while these bigger RPG elements tend to be pared down, they still provide Solasta with this air of adventure and excitement you won't get from an unabashed tactics game where you're just hopping between encounters with occasional story intermissions.
Another thing of note about Solasta is its options menu. Before you even get to the actual game, you'll be greeted with a very robust screen that will let you customize and fine-tune a lot of things. And while yes, you do get plenty of graphics options that should allow you to run the game without major issues even on a fairly humble system, it's the gameplay-related options that are the real treat there.
For starters, you get to pick one of five difficulty settings, with the middle one offering an authentic D&D experience. But then you can further customize things by adjusting a bunch of sliders, while also ticking and unticking numerous boxes that will help you better tailor the experience to your liking.
You can make monsters smarter and deadlier. You get to choose between rolling for health on level-ups or getting your full die of hit points. There are three different encumbrance variants, an option to preserve dice rolls between reloads, an option to group monsters according to their initiative, and much more.
Deserving a special mention is a set of options that revolve around spellcasting rules. Sure, you can just run around throwing fireballs left and right, but where's the fun in that? Alternatively, you can go for a more true-to-tabletop experience where spells have verbal, somatic, and material components. In gameplay terms, this means that to cast a spell, your characters will need a free hand, a spell focus item, and the ability to speak, with certain spells requiring some specific ingredient item on top of that. It's really nice to have all this stuff in a video game.
And while we're talking difficulty, generally, the authentic mode with some custom options that make things a bit more spicy offers a nice level of challenge provided you're not using an optimized party and aren't resting at every opportunity. If you play Solasta that way, you'll have a reasonably challenging experience where some encounters are easy while others can pose quite a threat. And being able to up the difficulty even further is very much welcome.
Now, unfortunately, this breadth of options doesn't extend to classes. Once you're done tinkering with the options and are ready to start creating your party of four adventurers, you'll discover a fairly limited class selection. Currently, you can only create Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Rogues, Clerics, and Wizards, with Sorcerers already promised as a DLC class.
This being a 5th Edition game, at least each level-up will feel meaningful and give you some new class feature, but even so, the lack of class variety is one of the game's biggest blunders. And if you'd like to learn more about the game's implementation of the D&D ruleset, you should check out our early access preview.
Class options aside, you do get to customize your starting equipment. And then, there's the whole Background thing. Picking a character's background and then alignment determines their personality, which ties into Solasta's unique conversation system.
And let me tell you, while some may overlook it, Solasta's conversation system represents the biggest advancement in that particular area of RPGs in a long time. Every time a conversation or a story moment happens, you get this cutscene where you get to make the big decisions, but otherwise, your characters are free to act on their own.
I'm not really sure how the developers pulled it off, but the whole thing works. Sure, every once in a while, you get a non sequitur, but for the most part, it really does feel like an intelligent conversation between fully realized characters and not just a bunch of stat boxes you created five minutes ago.
I really would like to see this system expanded and used in a more robust CRPG where dialogues are a more frequent and impactful occurrence, as right now, this system feels more like a proof of concept. A very impressive one, but still. Having it in a tactical RPG feels like a huge waste of resources. Resources that could've gone towards more classes for example.
Another neat Solasta feature is the Scavenger system. Thanks to it you no longer have to agonize over maximizing your dungeoneering profits. Just leave everything but the stuff you intend to wear on the ground. The helpful scavengers will sell it for you. Aside from saving you a lot of time and effort, it helps with Unity Engine's long-term performance by cleaning up the levels once you're done with them. It's great.
Before moving on to the next section, there's a couple of minor issues I need to mention. First - Solasta doesn't support multiclassing. For someone who enjoys creating weird class combos, that's a bit of a bummer, but seeing how the level cap of the retail release is set at 10, it's not too bad. And second - the game's selection of feats is limited, but it's at least much better now than it used to be during the early access phase.
In the end, combining a pretty faithful adaptation of the D&D ruleset with Tactical Adventures' own ideas seems to have resulted in one mighty impressive RPG specimen. And as such, let's now take a closer look at the game's actual content.
Story and Gameplay
The world of Solasta can be described as Dragonlance meets The Witcher, where humans aren't the natives, and their cataclysmic arrival together with their gods and the villainous lizard people known as Soraks is the big twist that provides the setting with a bit of unique identity.
The game begins a thousand or so years after the aforementioned cataclysm when your party of frontiersmen for hire is sent to check up on a remote outpost by what's essentially Solasta's version of the UN. This sets into action a chain of events where your plucky band of adventurers and one mysterious artifact become Solasta's best bet to avoid total annihilation.
It's a pretty decent fantasy setup, all things considered, but the actual story feels a bit too abrupt. I don't know whether it's the translation or something budget-related, but things happen way too fast, supporting characters don't get enough room to breathe, and occasionally the actual writing can feel less than convincing.
But at the very least, the story is functional enough to point you in the right direction and make you curious about what awaits you around the next corner, with the game's locations ranging from humble goblin villages to ancient gravity-defying palaces.
All these locations are designed with both verticality and illumination in mind, adding extra layers of complexity to the game's formula. And because the game actually gives you the tools you need to circumvent these additional challenges, like the ability to run on walls, fly, or teleport short distances, it harkens back to the games of old, like the Might and Magic series where things like these weren't seen as an aberration.
And while the main quest is linear and the world map mostly exists just to provide a bit of flavor, you'll still get access to a good chunk of side quests that will allow you to revisit certain locations and fight some new, usually more challenging, enemies.
Add to that a number of quests related to your characters' backgrounds, and you get plenty of content, resulting in a playthrough of roughly 30-40 hours, which is about the perfect video game length as far as I'm concerned.
Following your many excursions into the Badlands, you'll be able to visit a friendly town, restock, and interact with the game's factions. This mostly means unloading the artifacts you find onto them in exchange for reputation. You get enough of that, and you'll get access to the special faction stores selling some very nice items. This will be one of the more reliable ways of outfitting your party with better gear.
Then, you have your good old dungeoneering that's pretty much self-explanatory. And finally, there's crafting. Unfortunately, if you choose to ignore crafting in Solasta, you'll be missing out on some really powerful items. But the flipside of this is a cluttered inventory where you never know when and if you'll need this or that ingredient. It's a real shame there aren't tabs to sort between gear, consumables, ingredients, and quest items.
And in general, Solasta's gear selection is a bit uneven in that some item types are overrepresented while others are few and far between. But the items that do exist tend to be pretty fun and rarely offer mere enchantment bonuses. You add to that D&D's Attunement system where each character can only equip up to three powerful items, and you get some meaningful gearing choices. And, in a rare but welcome occurrence for an RPG, unless you break the game in some way, you'll never have enough gold to buy everything you want.
All geared up and stuck in some dungeon, your party will be dealing with numerous combat encounters that also benefit from the game's verticality and illumination angles. Having to think in three dimensions when coming up with a battle plan is nice, but seeing the AI crawl across a wall or fly at you through the air is even better.
As a result, the game's pillars come together to create a unique and memorable experience both in and out of combat. I do, however, wish there was a way to speed up combat animations. I also wouldn't mind it if Solasta focused more on non-combat challenges like traps and puzzles.
And, if you're someone who enjoys crafting adventures of your own, there's always the Dungeon Maker tool. I don't really know if it will ever have the impressive functionality of Neverwinter Nights' editor, but even in beta, it allows you to easily create and share custom dungeons. With the currently available tools, I can easily see some people putting together tense combat-focused modules where resources are scarce and each encounter is deadly, and that's as good a start as any.
Technical Information
Solasta is built using the Unity Engine, but for the most part, it doesn't run too bad. As mentioned earlier, there are plenty of knobs to adjust and sliders to fine-tune, so you should theoretically be fine here performance-wise. There were however a couple of areas where no matter what I did, my frames tanked way below acceptable levels, but that didn't happen too often.
Having played Solasta for the first time as a pre-Kickstarter demo, camera controls were one of my biggest worries about this project. But those issues seem to have been fixed by now. There was a couple of spots in the release build where the camera refused to cooperate, but once again, those were the rare exceptions.
I did encounter quite a few bugs, but they were fairly minor, like a certain special attack not dealing full damage or a particular attribute tome being unusable. Hopefully, these will get sorted out shortly, because right now, they're not exactly few and far between. Still, at least the game itself is stable and doesn't seem prone to crashing.
Visually, Solasta looks mighty fine when observed from the usual isometric angle. During the conversational close-ups however, the game's modest budget becomes more apparent, which once again raises the question of why even go the cinematic route. Other than that, some animations can be a bit wonky, especially when firing bows and using the Spider Climb spell.
The save system is pretty much ideal with manual, quick, and autosaves. Though if you're someone who doesn't use a couple of rotating save slots, you should be aware that they're capped at 50 in Solasta.
And one last thing to mention here is the game's UI. It's really well-made and functional, but perhaps a bit too functional. This is a fantasy game. And while that doesn't necessarily mean everything should be stylized to look like ancient scrolls and parchments, I do expect item descriptions of more than a single dry sentence. And even for those rare items that do have detailed descriptions, their text box is tiny and annoying to scroll.
Conclusion
While at times it can feel like Solasta: Crown of the Magister is trying to bite off more than it can chew, the overall experience remains enjoyable throughout this D&D-based title. The developers seem to understand what makes an RPG fun to play and they do their best to stay true to their creative vision. You add to that an opportunity to play a digital adaptation of the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and you get a game no RPG enthusiast should overlook. This here is a new RPG from a passionate team with fresh ideas. Let's just hope that for their next project, Tactical Adventures manages to implement those ideas a bit better.
