I made games professionally for over a decade working in QA, then as a QA lead for years, and working my way through production for years. I'm intimately familiar with the game development process. This game isn't done.
I started keeping track partway through a playthrough. It isn't a complete list of the things I saw. These also aren't fully researched (I'm playing for fun, not working for the team).
Hunter’s Mark
Text is not accurate which makes it look a lot more valuable to a greenmage than it actually is. In the pen and paper game it only works on weapon attacks. The tooltip in Solasta doesn’t limit it to weapons. This should mean that it triggers from cantrips, and magic missile, and scorching ray and the rest. The tooltip also doesn’t indicate that it’s limited to doing extra damage once per turn and always triggers and is “spent” on the first successfully damaging attack (unlike the plethora of attacks that will ask you if you want to use the ability (paladin smite and the like). All of that combines to make the spell seem a lot more powerful than it actually is which can make the spell feel disappointing for having the limitations it has.
The spell doesn’t always work. Your QA team can figure out exactly when.
It may be that a second cannot work on the same target (ie: ranger and greenmage).
I had a hunter’s mark up, took damage and lost concentration. I cast a new hunter’s mark on a new and undamaged target that no one had previously cast hunter’s mark on and shot them with an arrow. They took D8+3 damage in total without taking damage from the hunter’s mark and the hunter is still concentrating on the freshly cast spell and the target didn’t die from the attack.
In the same fight I tried to move the hunter’s mark from one target to a new fresh and undamaged target and hit them. This second target already had hunter’s mark from a greenmage on them. They took D8+3 damage with no damage from hunter’s mark. On the second shot they took D8+3 and also D8 damage from colossus slayer. The same target did take hunter’s mark damage from the greenmage.
Moving the mark to a second target doesn’t (or doesn’t always) put an icon on the target to signify that you have the mark on them. The caster is still concentrating on the spell, but you can effectively forget which target has a mark up by which caster.
Guardian Spirits
Burrowing seems to make a creature immune to the damage when entering the radius of this spell. This makes me think that anything like misty step would do the same thing, and it’s possible that invisible creatures would avoid the damage, also.
Bestow Curse
I’m going to assume that bestow curse damage has the same hunter’s mark issues. Separately, this should apply the extra 1D8 damage to each attack meaning 5 magic missiles apply 1D8 necrotic curse damage 5 separate times. This would be using a 3rd level spell slot bestow curse to function like a first level slot hex spell (not implemented in your game yet). This is a pretty bad spell (not your fault, it’s in the player’s handbook) and it’s been hard for me to make useful. Things die before you can really get in for a touch spell, and then use disengage to get some distance, and then use something like a scorching ray or else to trigger the curse damage.
Heroism
Does nothing (or the tooltip is broken)
Summon Weapon
Cannot be used to attack the round it comes into play. The player’s handbook says the spell can do this, and the flaming sphere can do it in your game.
Identify
It doesn’t make sense that when you identify an item you’re given the name, and then you have to go into your inventory to get the actual details. There should be something going on that defines the item for the player. As a place holder you can just display the detailed view of the item on screen as if the player cursored over the item and held alt. If you're going to spend the time to cast the spell you're going to want the details.
Daylight
Doesn’t counter Aksha’s darkness and her darkness can be cast within daylight (the spell). That’s basically the point of this spell and this fight happens as players get access to it. While some things in the game exist that daylight cannot defeat it seems pretty stupid to me to bring in the spell and an opportunity to use an amazing feature and then bypass it immediately with an exception. That’s a huge “feel bad” moment you created by hand.
Summon Minor Elemental
Very weak feeling spell with a +4 hit modifier (CR 2 elemental) for a small amount of damage. You get access to it later in the game (which is as it should be) and by then it has a very limited ability to be functional in combat. The flaming sphere is better, the spiritual weapon is better, spirit guardians is wildly better and they’re all lower level and not having to spend the player’s bonus action to make the spell act doesn’t even things out. They can be damage soaks which isn’t nothing. Still, the overall feeling is very underwhelming.
Ritual Spells
None of these currently require the spell be prepared. It just needs to be known. Ritual spell functionality isn't done being implemented.
Summon Spells
Concentration will be maintained on a summon spell after the thing the caster has summoned has died.
Guidance
This doesn’t work on the Misaye locked chest quest. I understand that this is a quest and it’s designed to have the DC always be higher than what the player rolls until the troll cleric urges you to pay enough to get the magic sword. There aren’t many instances where this spell could be useful and this seems like one, and then it doesn’t get totaled with your attempt.
Comprehend Languages
I found one instance in the game where this spell was useful (I happen to have triggered it at level 10. This leaves it feeling like a really weak option to have learned. This is a “feel bad” within the game.
Insect Swarm
This spell sticks around after it's no longer being concentrated on. This can effectively make it impossible to move forward without taking damage from the spell because it won’t go away. This also has the potential to kill the player if it happens to be cast in a place where the player will be standing during a cutscene.
The combat log doesn’t say what triggered attacks in an easily read way. You can figure it out if you spend time on it. It would be a lot more user friendly if when you attack someone with a weapon attack that has extra radiant damage on it, and also use a smite ... each of these damage sources should be clear and apparent. This is the case with virtually every other video game of this type. Either there is one line item and a sum of all the damage with hover over to get a breakdown (which seems best), or a separate line for each component of the damage that lists both the source and also the damage (rather than a list of damage sources, and then separately a list of damage quantities).
Halfling
You have the heavy tag on weapons like the greatsword and longbow, but small creatures can still use them without disadvantage.
Ranger
When you reach level 6 there to pick a second favored enemy and terrain there is no indication for what you currently have and no way to look at it other than to cancel. The triangle warning icon already exists in the feats section to display when an option doesn’t provide much benefit. This is really two separate bugs.
Does natural explorer do anything at all? The description makes it seem useless.
Colossus slayer damage doesn’t trigger correctly. It will trigger only once during the character’s turn with multiple attacks, which is correct. But, it can additionally trigger from opportunity attacks. It should be able to trigger any time the character deals damage to a wounded enemy, but only once per round (similar to sneak attack).
Colossus slayer may not trigger at all if the first attack kills the target before the colossus slayer damage can be added in. For example: strike a target with 5 hit points with an attack that does 6 damage with the base attack. No colossus dice will be rolled and no hunter’s mark die will be rolled. If the hunter then targets a different wounded enemy and attacks there will be no colossus slayer damage included in this other attack. And, it clearly wasn’t applied to the first target.
Hunter ultimate level 10 ability is meaningless in this game. This should be replaced with something that would get used. The only way that a bonus to stealth specifically when against a wall and ALSO not moving would be useful within the confines of this game would be while waiting to take a shot to snipe targets, and you can do that wit the pause functionality.
Rogue
No reason to have sleight of hand. Giving the player the ability to put proficiency and also expertise in this is creating a major “feel bad” moment for players. It’s easy to take a thing out of the game. It serves no purpose and the only thing this can possibly do is make people feel bad for having spent limited resources on it.
Wizard
Why can I not see my current spell slot status as a mage when I take a short rest? To make an informed decision about when to use arcane recovery you would want to know exactly what your spell slot status is before you do a short rest. This could be a part of the arcane recovery tool tip if you’re not sure about how to include this in the UI.
Short Rest
Seems like characters should only have the ability to attune to items they’re wearing instead of allowing anyone to attune to anything that any other character is wearing. This also creates a situation where you need to make sure the right person is wearing the right thing, and then attune to it. This also creates problems in situations like when you dump 4 rings of poison resistance on the players. It would be easy for player character 1 wearing ring 1 to attune to ring 2 being worn by player character 2.
Sneak
Movement isn’t decreased when sneaking. Sneak movement should be half speed by default.
Loading keyword
Weapons with the loading keyword such as the heavy crossbow don’t actually have the loading feature implemented. Seems like you should remove keywords that have no functionality, and add the keyword once the functionality has been implemented (as with the heavy keyword).
Follow Up Strike Feat
When using a magic weapon you do not get the effects of the magic weapon (ie: +1D8 lightning damage). If that isn’t a bug, then the tooltip should be making it clear that you’re attacking with an unarmed strike or something other than the weapon, and the icon for this attack should be changed appropriately, and the animation used for this attack should be changed because it shows a regular weapon attack.
Two Weapon Fighting
- Attacking with an offhand was not implemented correctly. An attack with a weapon in the offhand should only be allowed when the action was used to perform an attack (which includes thing like a shove). In this game you can do anything with your action and still use your bonus action to attack with your offhand.
Crafting
Resources are limited and rare. Why are characters provided with a recipe that doesn’t explain what the thing being created does? Shouldn’t you have the ability to see what the end results are before you build the item or before you purchase the recipe? If it’s so rare that you find certain kinds of primed items and not all of the end results are desirable, how much “fun” are you adding by allowing a player to create something they really don’t want and cannot get resources to make another item that may be more useful?
The pacing for weapon and armor crafting is bad. It’s good to not give the player all of the best equipment at low levels, but you seem to be going too far in the other direction with no strength based options other than one two handed option more than halfway through the game. And, there is a shop with a ton of crafting options players get access to very early on.
Inventory
Automatically equipping new items (rings, bracelets, boots ...) is really annoying and it makes it harder to find the items. I don’t understand why this is default behavior.
Aksha Difficulty
This fight is exceptionally poorly balanced. You can reach the fight at level 4 and it’s significantly more challenging than anything else in the game. If there were more equally challenging moments as you play through, then it would be easy to see this as a steep difficulty spike and not much else. Instead, it’s a difficulty wall. The fight can certainly be beaten, but the difficulty of this fight shouldn’t be wildly harder at level 5 than other boss fights are at their appropriate levels. And, that’s exactly what you’ve done. You’ve made the hardest fight in the game at level 4 or 5. And, it isn’t even close. This fight is substantially more difficult than anything else in this game, and it even includes an added bonus of ruining the only strategic application of the daylight spell with a natural ability that is an exception to daylight’s ability to dispel magic.
Green Dragon Illusion
It was really disappointing that when you finally find a dragon fight in this dungeons and dragons game it’s an illusion.
Arwin Merton
You have a whole side mission about getting this guy his sword. It’s a longsword that does lightning damage. Then you get him as a companion and he’s got two longswords and they both deal radiant damage. There should be a boolean value check to see if that quest has been done and if so it changes his inventory to include the sword that the player gave him. Or, if that’s too much, just give him the sword so he has one that does radiant damage and one that does lightning damage. For anyone who hasn’t gotten the sword it won’t make a difference. For players who got it and kept it they may think he would be using two lightning swords. For players who get it and return it they’ll be happy that it seems like he’s using the sword. For players who do multiple playthroughs and do different things the trick will be apparent, but it's still better than what you're doing now.
Tip
Your tip on dodging is worded poorly. It states that you give disadvantage on attacks for the remainder of your turn. That isn’t how it works (it lasts until until the start of your next turn which may be more than the end of the current round, let alone your current turn).
Loot Item Pacing
It’s not often the player gets usable weapons and armor from loot. You should fix that. The Arwin Merton sword is fantastic (too good, really), but it’s a short term reward as if the player finishes the quest it’s gone. As of level 9 (with a level cap of 10) I’ve not found a primed longsword to craft an alternative. I’ve also not found a primed morningstar or a primed battleaxe. This is a problem with your loot pacing and it needs to be fixed. I imagine you want players to have to pick between D8 one handed weapons with no magic vs magic D6 and D4 weapons (I’ve found a magic handaxe, a magic dagger, two primed scimitars, a primed dagger, and two primed short swords), but you’re dragging that out for too much of the total playtime of the game. Then later into the game when you defeat the spider queen you get a short term +3 greataxe. This is underwhelming compared to the outstanding lightbringer greatsword you get access to pretty early on, and I don’t know how common it is to have two separate 2H characters in the same party. And, without the great weapon master feat that would potentially make use of the outstanding to hit bonus from this weapon the need for the extra to hit modifier isn’t very high. A 20 strength grants a level 8+ player +8 to hit. The +1 enchantment on the lightbringer greatsword brings that to a +9 to hit. The two handed fighting style really rewards you for having the most number of dice possible and trying to gain advantage to farm for crits, especially with a paladin using smite for extra damage, and also the champion fighter with an increased crit range. In my opinion you should be granting the player 1-2 low powered 1H strength based weapons by about level 6 (could be something like the mace of smashing with no to hit modifier). By level 9 they should have the ability to upgrade those through quest rewards or crafting.
I have no idea why you’re making it rain +1 leather armor and most other types of armor are pretty hard to find with magically enhanced versions, or the components needed to craft them. Usually studded leather is pretty common and you don't have that as an option at all.
Huge Gameplay Shift After Green Dragon
Prior to the fight with the Green dragon things were pretty open. When you defeat that boss and head back to town suddenly you’re on rails. The game becomes long stretches of exposition followed by walk down a single direction corridor with nothing to explore, nothing to discover, nothing to pick up and then there is a fight, and then you go to the next place along a straight direct path with no exploration where you’ll get exposition. The process repeats. I’m assuming this wasn’t intentional and there was a lot of gameplay you had to cut and splice around to make the last third of this game work within the time you had allotted. If your game isn’t done ... don’t release it. I don’t buy two pieces of bread for $15 hoping that one day the insides of that sandwich show up and it all ends up tasting good. Why would you expect me to do that with a $40 game?
Aer-Elai Acid Pit
What is this supposed to be? You get into a tiny fight with wraiths in a brightly lit space where they have disadvantage. This is the end of the game and they pose no threat. There is a meaningless walk through floating stones then another fight with a single wraith in a brightly lit space. This is a straight line with two fights that are both an absolute waste of time. This is very exemplary of the content after the Green Dragon boss fight.
Aer-Elai Mist
This is another uninspired straight path through a level with a single fight. There are four greater air elementals which pose no real threat to players at max level. I get it, there is a series of fights with no long rest possible in between. I think you’re going too easy on the players by a lot.
Aer-Elai Rift
What happened here? I was excited to get a final boss fight. I see all these things and buff up and then a bunch of dragons come in and the fight lasts a single round. Then you move forward and get another final fight. Subverting expectations isn’t the same thing as doing something well. I get it. You wanted the moment where unexpected help comes in to save the day, and you wanted the added benefit of some kind of emotional impact as they get slaughtered in a cutscene before the real final fight. Set up a harder fight and have the dragons join after 6 or 7 rounds and end the fight with a cut scene that also allows the players a free long rest to prepare for the real final fight. This lets the player struggle with a challenging fight and actually feel relieved when the cavalry comes in.
The actual final fight was too easy. It was finished in a couple of rounds. No healing was needed. The fake final fight was over in a single round. This was a really disappointing finale to the game.
Ritual Spells : for any class or for Wizards ?
Wizards do not need to Prepare a spell to cast it as a Ritual. Maybe you know this and mean it is the case for all casters (would be a minor bug or deviation from the rules in that case).
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I think you are over-reacting, while there are things that TA needs to fix, a lot of your complaints are artistic choices TA made and not bugs in the program. TA is a lot closer to 5e than BGIII, and although i wished TA would be truer to RAW, i think we should congratulate and celebrate not badger this first attempt to make a real 5e game
yellow flower of courage
TA is doing a better job playing 5e than most in-person players and DMs i've seen:
player: "i want to play a half-pixie/half-gem dragon that drives a tank with an invisible anti-magic supersoaker gun"
DM: "none of those things are really possible, especially at 1st level"
player: "your mean!"
yellow flower of courage
It’s not often the player gets usable weapons and armor from loot.
The Early Access version, which matches this version, gave out so much loot that every last player ended up with a magic weapon or two, the best available magic armor, three attunable items each, and a few backup attunable items to swap out if needed. They 'fixed' this in the main version by trashing the vendor's buy percentages, which was a quick hack that didn't address the source of the problem and caused problems with the rest of the economy, but that's a different rant.
My point here is: even with a max buyback rate of about 30% on loot, reasonably smart use of loot and the vendors will get you the setup I described by level 7 or 8, maybe a bit more if you do some grinding. That's quite a bit more generous than most D&D campaigns I have played (but is on par with a lot of the CRPGs).
I strongly agree with this statement. The game is full of bugs. Just look at the Cleric spells and how bugged the the Aid spell is.
Or the text for the "Creed of Arun" feat - which has the completely wrong text.
Or add to is the fact that you can not equip and use weapons you are not proficient in (which 100% violates the rules of 5E), and the big selling point was that they are using the 5E game mechanics. Well that's simply not true. In 5E anyone can use any weapon. You just don't get the proficiency bonus if you are not proficient with the weapon. That's it.
It's so bugged.
TA is doing a better job playing 5e than most in-person players and DMs i've seen:
player: "i want to play a half-pixie/half-gem dragon that drives a tank with an invisible anti-magic supersoaker gun"
DM: "none of those things are really possible, especially at 1st level"
player: "your mean!"
Except they are not using 5E rules. You know... major problem there. :)
I think you are over-reacting, while there are things that TA needs to fix, a lot of your complaints are artistic choices TA made and not bugs in the program. TA is a lot closer to 5e than BGIII, and although i wished TA would be truer to RAW, i think we should congratulate and celebrate not badger this first attempt to make a real 5e game
He is not overreacting. For all that this has spent time in EA, there are too many issues that haven't been fixed. If even the tooltips had been updated like I recommended some four days before release, upon re-reading some of the other posts, I would be a lot less angry than I am.
I get that they are a small company. I get that they released something pretty awesome with what they had, but like Encased, that is not an excuse to release an unpolished game.
How to phrase this... it was nice to see things progressing in EA, but if I had the choice to vote for something released on time vs released with polish? I'm voting for polish every time.
It's the difference between playing KOTOR 1 which may have had a few bugs but was pretty well polished and playing KOTOR 2 which while fun was released before it was half-polished and thus suffered for it.
Like it or not, polish makes or breaks an RPG. They may have shelf lives well beyond other games, but the polish has to be there because no one wants to play a bug ridden mess that they can't understand how to use properly. Or refuses to function correctly.
How many people can still go back and play the first two Fallouts? How many people can go back and play the Ultima series? Final Fantasy? Saga Frontier? Temple of Elemental Evil? Icewind Dale? Planescape: Torment? Baldur's Gate 1+2? Wizardry? Might and Magic?
Pools of Radiance? As far as I'm aware that one died because it was a bug ridden mess. Even then I hear people talk about how the first one was amazing.
Might and Magic 9? Could have revitalized the series, but 8 kinda sucked. So what happened when it came out as a bug ridden mess? No one played it.
Fortunately for them, they're a brand new company and this is their debut based on some ideas with a LOT of potential. They have some slack this time, but if they get known for releasing bug ridden messes... well that's going to affect their bottom line for a lot longer than a lot of companies realize when they listen to the marketers.
Hell, I tend to pick up stuff from Black Isle's successor Obsidian BECAUSE I trust their work, even when it''s something new that I've never heard of before.
I wish Troika was still around, because all three of their games are still pretty effing amazing.
But back to our topic.
Without me going into my opinion about how the whole crown adventure set-up really was a piece of shit story wise.
The gaming industry AND customer base is so much more unforgiving these days than when it started that it's not funny.
Fans can look past the failures. Newcomers can't.
Hell, I personally had no interaction with ADnD until I played Baldur's Gate when it came out for PC. That game is what spawned my interest.
Does that mean I had any understanding of the intricacy of the rules? no. Does that mean I understood how to gauge the relative strength of weapons? no. Does that mean Sarevok killed me 90% of the time even when I had the gear, levels, and access to tactics that would have literally pin-cushioned him rather easily if I used them correctly? Yes.
The difference between the Sarevok fight and the starting sorak fights is that the soraks are at the beginning of the game when the players who are complete noobs haven't adjusted to things, and the first encounter with Sarevok was a scripted movie so it didn't matter. Are the Soraks really all that hard? no.
Yet, the Sarevok fight did not cost black isle customers, while the Sorak fight already has cost TA some.
Thus, that difficulty jump was too much for the noobs and should have been replaced or reduced.
My mind is a wreck right now, and I need sleep. Hopefully I'll be more coherent in the morning when I try to finish this.
But, one of the points I was trying to make is this: A long time player of these types of games who have seen the gamut of half finished gutted out on release games, to fully fleshed out and polished gems can tell the difference no matter the lens people want to use. Those same players will then call it what it is, an unfinished and unpolished game.
That stuff leaves a mark on us. We wonder if we should trust what the creator says and the quality of their work.
It doesn't matter if there are many 5e games out yet, or not. If the quality is poor, story OR polish-wise we'll look elsewhere.
Thanks for the callout on ritual casting! Book says the wizard just needs the spell to be in their book to cast it as a ritual. I believe that means that characters like the cleric do have to prepare that spell in order for them to be able to cast it as a ritual.
Maybe they got that right. I'm not going to go in and explore it. I'm good with just assuming they got it correct and I was wrong on that point.
Thanks for pointing it out!
Folks, they are using 5e rules, but there are some bugs and errors. It is a huge endeavor and they got a lot of it right.
That said, I am waiting for updates/fixes before doing a second playthrough (my first was a few months ago). Therefore, I do feel there are too many bugs, and I prefer to wait.
So clearly, I am not one to say I am satisfied with the current release, but to say they are not using 5e rules is a very narrow minded point of view, like looking at it through a needle hole. They still have some work to do to make it perfect. Perfect implementation of tabletop rules in a video game, is... ... never seen. Kingmaker Pathfinder got very close, but does it have bugs and errors? Of course.
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Bugs in a released game are normal. Some amount of balance issues in a released game are normal.
I don't think they actually finished developing the game. It doesn't feel like general difficulty has had more than one or two passes. Everything that happens after the green dragon fight feels like a rushed first pass after discovering they needed to cut a bunch of content for time, and that is unacceptable for a released game.
What I would expect, in the case of most of these bugs, is a better implementation of buggy content, and the removal of things that bring nothing to the table. Again, understanding that bugs will always be present in released games. I've shipped more than 20 video games and every single one of them has shipped with bugs.
There is no reason to have Heroism as a spell anyone can learn if that spell does nothing, right? That seems like a really easy fix to me.
There is no reason to have sleight of hand in the game if there isn't a single place in the game to use it, right? That seems like an easy fix.
If the heavy and the loading keywords do nothing there is no reason to put them on weapons, right? It's just sloppy.
These kinds of things are minor. They're not what I expect from a complete game. "hey, let's remove the stuff that we didn't get time to develop." doesn't even take a lot of industry experience to realize. There's also no excuse for the subtitles to not match up to what is actually being said. Those are text changes. You don't even need to be an engineer to do that. There was a cutscene where an NPC dwarf delivered dialog from behind a barrel. A level designer placed the camera for that ... everyone on the team knows it's bad ... they just have other things they need to focus on. It's sloppy and unprofessional to leave things like that in a released game.
There is no way it would take much development time to fix the offhand bonus attack functionality. You just create a boolean value that tracks if the main action was used to attack (including the shove action), and if that value is true, then you display the option to attack with the bonus action. That's the kind of thing even a novice software engineer can do quickly. That may already exist for the follow up strike feat (I'm not interested in exploring the limits of the feat to see exactly how it works).
As far as I can tell the third level daylight spell doesn't do a single thing that a regular cantrip or holding a torch doesn't already do. I've not explored the content enough to know if that's 100% true or not (that's not how I play games for fun). It seemed to me that any source of light that puts a vampire (or whatever they were called in this game) into the state of bright light was enough to trigger things. So, they don't have any kind of a boolean value that checks to see if the light is caused by daylight (natural or the spell). Additionally, the darkness that Aksha creates effectively counters daylight where it's cast. Additionally, casting daylight over Aksha's darkness doesn't counter it. There is one place in the whole game where you might use the ability for daylight to counter magical darkness and it doesn't work. And, there is no place in the entire game where a daylight spell costing a 3rd level spell slot actually does something unique. If you don't have time to support a thing ... you cut the thing until you DO have time to support it.
I'm not going to list everything over again. There is a lot of things I listed that there is no excuse for. And, if I'm honest it's really embarrassing that character models don't hold weapons inside their hand in a professionally released game after launch. It's minor. It's also always apparent and makes this look unprofessional.
And now they're stopping bug fixes and things. Now they're going to make a new sorcerer class. Most of that should be pretty easy. It's largely reusing the same spells that already exist. The new subclasses will require some kind of balance and tuning. Largely, it's metamagic that will be the big feature for that class. But, let's look at the metamagic from the player's handbook.
From what I can tell three out of the 8 metamagic abilities are going to work well out of the gate. I think most of the others will be broken or implemented poorly.
* twinned spell - this will be simple to implement. When triggered only take the number of targets a spell requires the player to click on and increase it from one to two. All of the UI and functionality for that core concept already exists. All they need to do is increase the spell targets from 1 to 2 and if the spell targets aren't 1 do nothing different.
* careful spell - this will also be simple to implement. After a player picks a location for a spell they can bring up already existing UI to let the player pick up to the character's charisma modifier in targets to not take damage. The spell goes off like normal and don't apply the damage done to those targets.
* quickened spell - this will be easy to implement and allow a caster to do something like cast a fireball on a group as a bonus action and then also shoot an arrow at a single target (or cast an inferior cantrip as an action).
* distant spell will be garbage. There aren't many instances where spell range is a real issue. Often line of sight, or visible distance (even in the open and in the daytime) will be the limiting factor. Implementation will be super simple.
* empowered spell will be more challenging for them to implement. Realistically they're going to want to display the dice like normal and offer the player the ability to click and pick dice to reroll. This will actually require a new mechanic of some sort to be made. I feel certain the team CAN do this, but it's going to require more work than the others.
* extended spell will be garbage. All of you have played through the game at least one time with a spell caster. In how many instances did you need a longer spell duration? It could be useful for summons and the flaming sphere. Time passes pretty quickly outside of combat though. The number of instances where a new player who is moving slowly and progressing through a level and trying to explore will actually have one of these things last for multiple encounters is incredibly unlikely. So ... the value is making mage armor last 16 hours instead of 8?
* heightened spell may be useful. I ran with max stat spell casters and I found saving throw spells to be too inconsistent to really rely on. Banishment on elementals was too expensive (maintaining concentration on a spell for the full duration instead of just using guardian spirits to kill everything before that banishment spell would have ended makes a lot more sense. If there were more challenging fights with very few numbers of elementals I could see using concentration for this rather than on something else. Upcasting hold person and blindness would become a lot more interesting with this. Maybe things like faerie fire. This only allows you to heighten the DC on one target, but even so being more sure to get it on the one target you want to burn down may be useful.
* subtle spell will be useless. I can't think of a single place in the game where it will be useful. This will be the sleight of hand of metamagic.
I've worked on lots and lots of games in the past with lots of different teams. If they start to focus on bringing in new content here's exactly what will happen. All of the existing bugs will be there because the team switched to creating new content. Then they'll make new content and that content will also introduce new bugs. The general state of the game will continue to degrade and get buggier and buggier. New content is good. But, if the core of what you have is disappointing you won't fix that by making new stuff, and you will also 100% be introducing more problems into the game.
I've mentioned a lot of problems with the game in this area of the forums specifically created to talk about problems with the game. I want to be clear. I think the team has the core of a FANTASTIC game. It think the audio team has done an amazing job with the music (though, SFX could use polish). I think the've done a very good job of implementing 5E rules. If this game was in beta I think they would be doing 100% fine. I think what they really need is another 3 months of polish on what they have right now and this would be the kind of game that would be rated an 8 or 9 out of 10. They need to cut content that doesn't do anything until they can actually make it functional. They need to fix some sloppy things that need fixing (with priority on things that more players will see). They also need to basically redo everything after the green dragon fight. They can keep the story, they can keep the VO work, and the localization work that goes with that (though, I'm curious about how the localization was done if the subtitles don't match the voice ... usually localization is done based on the text files). They need to start over with level design (after that green dragon fight), but they can keep the same atmospherics and general environment textures already used in each section (this will take time and be iterative). They need to do a pass on the whole game for difficulty (this will take time and be iterative). They need to do a pass on the game for loot and rewards. They need to do a pass on the vendor system.
I would bet money that most of what I've said is on the timeline for work to do in the future, or was regrettably cut because they had to give up on it due to time constraints. I'm sure every bug I've pointed out and nearly every bug mentioned in these forums already exists within their bug database.
They can keep the story.
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Note: If you are not into spoilers, don't read any further.
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This is about the only thing that I don't agree with. I'll get into why in a moment. I'm of the opinion that they should start work on an actual relatively low-level campaign (1-10), maybe even focus on the political themes that they've already introduced. Fleshing out the world itself beyond the broad strokes we've been given.
Maybe it's even the aftermath of the war game scene alluded to in the ending? Dunno, as that isn't important. The point is that they develop things more so that they can eventually go back and make a proper campaign out of the general stuff we've been given for a story that should be taking place at levels 8-15 if not 20.
As for why? We have a huge can of worms that is leading into saturday morning cartoon shenanigans when Soraks are quite frankly too socially tough of a creature to be handled with that sort of carelessness. Well, with any sort of realism anyways.
Primary can of worms: No one important to the story is an elf. We have rumors and in-game lore that they were asshole nazi grade slavers, but that is kind of countered by the grand reveal that all the actual Masters were dragons. By extension turning the empire into a dragon ruled empire. Especially seeing as how all we know is that at some point an elven emperor was killed and someone else took over the empire.
We only have classical examples of DnD dragons to work with, and not the Solasta lore changed version so I can be wrong. But, given that they didn't see the need to change the Green dragon interaction beyond the Lawful Evil excuse for that guy to attack the party? Not really expecting to be wrong.
Chromatic dragons are greedy pieces of shit, on par with any player character. Which means that theoretically the lawfulness of slavery can be attributed to them. After all, they are as far beyond an elf in longevity as an elf is beyond a halfling. And shit rolls down hill.
Between the classic natures of the dragons, and the whole crown scene of the dragons going through the rift, that whole thing is just an excuse to give the sorak god the means to corrupt them and have the crown on hand to open a rift or FAR more likely a recurring short-lived stable 'Gate' into Solasta once he's done so, so that he can go back to insidiously corrupting the gods that escaped his influence. Whether the writer realizes that or not, it's really the only path left for his story to go regarding those dragons and future rifts to solasta from Tirmar.
There is no re-opening a rift from the Tirmar side and having a half-dead dragon come through to warn everyone. The rift itself kills them with it's mere presence (according to current lore), and with fellow corrupted dragons (that IS the evil god's MO after all) attacking them alongside sorak support, all of whom specialize in infiltration the only thing getting through are dead bodies of allied dragons given how few went through.
Note: The 'princess' has had over a thousand years to find out more about the gods and how dangerous they are, including how much they outclass her in raw power. So she shouldn't be asking if the Sorak god is really that powerful, especially if the rift can kill her and not a god (which is a foolish bit of lore, she should just outright state that matters of state require her to remain in Masgarth, you can even use the excuse of the famine going on to justify it given the loss of so many of her clerics).
Second Can of Worms: Arivad/Einar being the same god split in half somehow, literally implies that the evil god will always have a path to solasta even without the crown being handed to him on a silver platter.
One of the underlying bits about magic that has held true in just about every book or story I've read is the law of sympathy, where magic designed to affect one object can affect its twin.
Apply that on a godly scale and I foresee some bs shenanigans from a handful of writers to take advantage of that bit to corrupt Einar when they finally want him to go full on evil god. because those writers are going to come along.
Lesser cans of worms:
The Soraks going after the crown should have been noted as deliberately killing the clerics. Clerics that powerful do not grow on trees, and the Soraks would not pass up that kind of softened target. Especially after taking the risk of dying to set up the scenario.
Mardracht should not have been a black dragon, and he should not have had that little HP. Chromatic wise, given his actions, he is at worst a blue and likely would have been better off as an off-color dragon. Or a gem dragon or something. Just felt like an excuse to follow a trope. I would prefer in any re-write if he really was simply an actual ancient elf that is half-way to being a lich or whatever name the elven version got. Especially if he brought his actual undead army to the 'final battle' along with any of his followers you let live besides Aksha.
Orcs in this world aren't stupid. Do yourselves a favor and drop that trope with their crappy grammar. If you can understand their language, they should be talking relatively normally. The 'stupidity' should only be shown if you are relying on one of them to translate.
The Legacy Council - Like it or not, just about every one of those kingdoms would have their own path into the badlands. Thus, there needs to be some benefit regarding what the PCs should be able to share with the council as a whole versus a particular sub-group. Maybe that's how you should handle the Masgarth rep? That way you can have an in-game way to justify gaining the princess's favor and the cool magic stuff she's willing to gift you, and just as easily lose access to it for not doing your job and having things split equally?
The encrypted spell book from the magister's tower: We never hear about this again.
Soraks in general should have some kind of hard limitation on their shapeshifting. I would prefer if it was the inability to take the full form of a full-blooded elf, so that they have a social weakness that the unobservant can miss. But, it could be something as simple as being unable to say "Arun bless you!" Without falling over dead. You know, on account of being the 'Beloved of Sorr-Arrath.'
This can give any writer a full on stop when it comes to them, though I'm sure there'll be ones that come up with some sort of convoluted reason why it didn't work 'this one time' in the same way that we were completely forced to give up the crown so that the Soraks would have an excuse and ability to steal it.
The Badlands and Rift Energytm. Not really all that sure where the separation comes from when it comes to dragons. That the badlands became the way they were implies, to me, the energy of the rift itself still lingers in the badlands and that is what kills dragons. Probably wrong, but it's deliberately not been made clear regardless.
What is the afterlife like, if there is one? Yeah, the gods exist, but 'life after death' hasn't been clarified.
One of the dragons claimed that Manacalon revered life, so where did the 'Defilers' or vampires come from? Are they from Tirmar? Did all the undead follow humans from tirmar as mariake brought them with her? Because while the thought of Mariake being the mother of undead amuses me on some level, it wouldn't clarify why that elven lord was a ghost. In a way it's part of the life after death question.
It should be noted that during endgame several party members that hadn't worn the crown were reacting to it while my crown bearer didn't.
Some instances feel like the story was written to take place during the cataclysm itself, others feel properly set in a world a thousand years after the events, and a third set feel like they were written in a mix of the two.
Lesser question: Why didn't the antiquarian ghost reveal the nature of our sorak spy (assuming the ghost's report was the days long spiel that I envision)? Was our sorak spy somehow able to send his spirit to Sorr-Arrath?
Why does the crown bearer get the literal memories of the paladin (who isn't wearing the crown) and not the magister (who is) during the vision? The bearer literally even says "I had a vision. I was a Paladin, powerful."
Cult of Arivad's instant death upon capture is never clarified or expounded upon. Was the guy really their slave, or was he lying about not having a choice?
Even if I did my bit to promote the game, I have to admit that I have been surprised by the number of bugs on release too. At first I thought it was minor, but they kept coming, and some of them really serious. The release was obviously a little bit rushed, easy mistake of a first game so I really wouldn't make such a fuss about it. Though I'm somewhat perplexed by the latest update in which they say they will put the fixing on hold to release the sorcerer.
I'm wondering if part of that isn't due to the lack of reporting tools. I had zero feedback whatsoever on most of the bugs I reported. And indeed, most of the bugs I had reported on the first EA release are still in the game. So I think they're just overwhelmed by the quantity of reports, and since these forums don't allow for any decent bookmarking / searching, they just read a small amount (if any) and drop the rest. It's clear that if they do another EA, I won't participate since it felt so useless to report the bugs here; I can understand how that may happen but I wouldn't want to be part of it again.
As far as 5E goes, I echo what others said, it's as faithful as one may expect from a video game for which slight adaptations are necessary. It's more faithful than most other games, expect maybe Pathfinder. There is one page on Steam with the differences, some are missing like Scribe Scroll and Stealth, but since I've reported that here there is no chance they ever read it. Those differences are very minor anyway, except maybe how stealth/hidden is implemented.
The story is perfectly fine and interesting, but it's a tactical CRPG (the hint is in the developer's name). It's not heavily story-oriented on purpose, at least that's how I understand it.
While I think the title of this thread is needlessly antagonistic and provocative, I agree that full release should have been delayed until the game was in better shape. Additionally, putting further bug fixes on hold in favor of prioritizing the release of a DLC class seems like a resource allocation mistake.
As a final note, Redglyph's point regarding bug fixes in Early Access and a proper set up for community involvement in the process is a major missed opportunity. Tactical Adventures is a small studio and Solasta is its first release, so organizational and structural inefficiencies are to be expected. That makes communication and coordination between the developer and the game's community extremely important. The lack of easy and effective interaction on bug reporting is perplexing.
Hopefully, Solasta is successful enough financially for Tactical Adventures to be able to learn from the flawed release of their first project and to improve on it in the future.
I stand in the moonlit dawn, Free from clouds of attachment.
Yes, it goes without saying that this is a great achievement, and a well-deserved success! In a first project those hiccups are unavoidable, I hope too that they'll be more comfortable with the whole delivery cycle in their next project.
This is about the only thing that I don't agree with. I'll get into why in a moment. I'm of the opinion that they should start work on an actual relatively low-level campaign (1-10), maybe even focus on the political themes that they've already introduced. Fleshing out the world itself beyond the broad strokes we've been given.
The lore is indeed really, really thin and sometimes contradictory. I hope any future DLCs or part 2 will flesh that out further. I was able to overlook this, as the story is not the primary focus in a mostly tactical combat-oriented game. But we have other RPGs available where the story and characters really matter, not to mention your choices, so I hope TA will give us more of that as well.
As for the bugs... yikes. I wrote in a review that they managed to iron out the bugs from EA and that it was well done. I should have waited until the late game stages that were not available in EA before making that judgement. While there are no major gamebreaking bugs left (according to my experience), there are many tiny annoying bugs still in the game.
I can totally understand that a small team like TA needs more time to fix errors and that more often than not, fixing one bug creates three more. Still, some of these issues have been reported in the forum as early as November 2020, a few weeks after the EA started. One of the poison vials is still labeled as a healing potion in the tooltip. That error has been around since the beginning and the latest hotfix even said that it was fixed. It's not. So yeah... although the original post comes across as somewhat angry, the frustration is understandable.
A hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.