What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Zevox]

Okay, so, Solasta. Started playing it, and admittedly, it's a bit rougher than I expected.

Visually in particular, oh boy. The faces especially are reminding me of nothing so much as Gladius, that strategy-RPGish gladiator game I replayed last year, which is a 20 year old Gamecube game that wasn't exactly cutting-edge visually itself even when it came out. I honestly didn't think it was possible for something released only a few years ago to look like that, even a low-budget indie game. Not any kind of deal-breaker, just legitimately surprising to me that it looks as bad as this - and it's not doing itself any favors by trying to show characters more cinematically during cutscenes, with close shots of their faces at times. Probably should've kept that camera further back even during the story cutscenes.

As far as the story goes, eh, seems fairly standard fantasy thus far, nothing too interesting, but nothing wrong with it either, which is fine. The dialogue is kind of awkward at times though - thankfully not as much so as in Stellar Blade, but still noticeably enough that I went to check if the game was made somewhere that English isn't the native language, and yep, French company, so I'm assuming slightly sub-par localization is probably to blame for the clunkier dialogue moments. Again, nothing major to me, just a pretty noticeable flaw.

One thing that does bother me and makes me less inclined towards to the game is that it really seems to favor a style of D&D that's not entirely to my tastes. It assumes that the party is motivated by a desire for loot and money rather than altruism (even though most of my party has altruism and/or friendliness as major personality traits), the party seem to be sarcastic jerks to each other a lot (again, despite the personality traits I assigned), it wants you tracking how much food you have for journeys, every single normal arrow is counted if you're using bows/crossbows, encumbrance limits are pretty tight and you lose mobility quickly for going over them; in general it favors more fiddly bits of the game's mechanics I much prefer to have glossed over, and sets a tone for the game that isn't to my preferences.

It also doesn't seem to give me the full information about a lot of things, which can be frustrating - I can find no way to know the weight of an individual item, nor can I get more detailed spell descriptions for the spells the game has that aren't a normal part of 5e D&D (i.e. I had to learn that the Shadow Dagger cantrip has a 1d8 damage dice by casting it, the description only tells me that it deals psychic damage on a failed save). The UI in general is clunkier than BG3's I'd say. Also, unlike BG3 despite this being the console version it does not let me directly control the characters, I'm moving a pseudo-mouse cursor around and point-and-clicking them, which is always kind of awkward with a controller. Fine enough in combat, but for general exploration, it's definitely not my preference.

That said, I am generally enjoying the combat portions of the game at least, there's definitely been some good design there. Like BG3 it uses terrain well frequently, which is good. I did run into a frustrating bit during my latest journey though, where a random encounter put me up against a four-person group, three of whom could attack three times per turn. While I was level 3. And I'm playing on the normal difficulty. The fight almost wiped me, two characters were unconscious, one was straight-up dead, and the last one at 1 health when I finished it; thankfully despite the dead character being my Cleric, the free revivify from the plot crown let me get her back up. But when I ran into that same encounter a second time later in the journey, you'd better believe I reloaded the save I'd made after surviving the first one; that's just some BS right there. That is the one thing that's bothered me about the combat thus far though, other than that, it's certainly easy to see why it's the game's strong point.

Oh, for my party, since it's a full custom group, I went with a batch based on Legend of Zelda characters: Link as a Fighter, Zelda as a Cleric, Sheik as a Rogue, and Midna as a Sorceress. Which has wound up feeling weirdly appropriate given the number of cube-shaped rocks I'm pushing around to solve minor puzzles. Also appropriate that I chose Midna to be the one to pick up that crown. Yeah, strange how things are kind lining up with that party design decision I made on a whim, but I'll take it.