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Solasta: Crown of the Magister Preview - Looking Good Before Early Access
Tactical Adventures' Solasta: Crown of The Magister is now nearing completion as the team prepares to release the game into Early Access later this month. Solasta: Crown of the Magister is essentially a love letter to pen-and-paper RPGs and is specifically based on Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
Solasta: Crown of The Magister began as a Kickstarter project back in back in 2019, and very quickly amassed supporters from all over the world. By September of that year Tactical Adventures had raised over $270,000 from more than 6,000 different users. That support allowed the team to broaden the scope of Solasta and include more classes, backgrounds, and features than were originally intended.
For the second time this year, Screen Rant was able to sit down and speak with a few of the developers behind Solasta: Crown of the Magister, including the founder of Tactical Adventures, Mathieu Girard. During our conversation Girard and his team showed us an updated version of the same preview of Solasta from May, but now with improved mechanics and more content.
Character Creation In Solasta: Crown Of The Magister
One of the first things that Tactical Adventures wanted to show off was the Solasta: Crown of the Magister character creation suite. At this time there are five different different ancestries (or races) in the game for players to choose from: Humans, Elves, Half-Elves, Halflings, and Dwarves. Some of these ancestries also have additional sub-races to choose as well, like Hill Dwarf and Snow Dwarf.
Classes and backgrounds give players even more customization. Classes are a pretty standard affair that fans of 5th Edition will be familiar with, featuring classics like clerics, paladins, and wizards. Backgrounds will grant characters different personality options as well as new options in dialogue situations, helping to deepen their individuality. For example, Tactical Adventures showed a situation where a character with the spy background was able to converse with a scout and was given different dialogue options than other characters. According to to Girard, this was done for one very specific reason, as the team wants "people to have fun and avoid frustration, but we mainly want to allow players to create the exact characters they use in their tabletop games."
How Solasta Translates 5th Edition Into Video Games
After character creation, Tactical Adventures showed off some of Solasta's introductory missions. For each of the four characters that are created, players go through a short tutorial mission that shows them how the game is played while also giving them some background details about their characters. While we'd been shown these missions before, there was a considerable improvement to the lighting and character models in the updated versions. Solasta: Crown of The Magister looks better now, and there are still plans for many visual improvements before Early Access. One of the newest changes that Tactical Adventures has added is dice that are rolled whenever players attempt to complete actions. This is something that players are able to disable if they want, but it really adds to the D&D flair of Solasta: Crown of The Magister.
When asked about the most difficult aspect of adapting D&D into a video game, Girard said the team had to work hard to ensure that verticality and lighting were incorporated. In Dungeons & Dragons, players can use light and the terrain to their advantage, which is not something that all video games include in their varying depictions of combat. In Solasta, players are able to climb terrain and use high vantage points, as well as benefit from spells like levitation or flight.
The Early Access version of Solasta: Crown of the Magister is almost ready to to be played, and will be available for purchase starting on October 20th. Players will be able to purchase the Early Access version for $34.99 and get roughly ten hours of content to play through. Players will be able to level each of their characters up to level six, deliberately chosen by Tactical Adventures because that's the point that most classes start receiving more complicated spells and actions. It will allow players to get a glimpse of some AOE spells while showcasing how extra attacks work for melee-focused characters.
As far as a final Solasta: Crown of the Magister release date goes, Tactical Adventures is still hesitant to pick one out. Girard reiterated that the game will come out in 2021, and the release date will be somewhere between six months to a year after Early Access launches. This is being done because the team wants to give enough time for a wide array of players to test things out and see how they work, which then gives Tactical Adventures enough time to fix any issues that pop up.
The small look that we were given of Solasta: Crown of the Magister was impressive, and the new updates have proven things can get more interesting as development progresses. Tabletop games are seemingly more popular than ever right now, and Solasta: Crown of The Magister looks primed to capitalize on that growing interest with a worthy entry into the video game variant of that genre soon.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister releases in Early Access on October 2oth for PC.
