Five Ways Solasta 2 Is Even Better than Baldur’s Gate 3
Solasta II is an upcoming CRPG based on tabletop DnD rules that will put the player in control of a party of four heroes (or antiheroes) with the ability to create all four party members yourself. Given the huge success of Baldur’s Gate 3, a very similar CRPG that was also based on tabletop DnD rules, it is inevitable that Solasta II is going to be measured against and compared to BG3.
We can already glean quite a lot of information about how Solasta II is going to look, by looking at the recently released demo and at Solasta: Crown of the Magister, the game’s predecessor. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do over the past few days, and the great news is that Solasta II is not only a rival to BG3, but in some ways, it is even better than Larian’s award-winning title. In this article, I’ll share five ways that Solasta II looks set to trump BG3.
Related: Solasta 2 Guides and Database
Solasta 2’s Dialogue Interactions are Better
This is undoubtedly the thing that stood out to me the most both in the Solasta II Demo and in Solasta: Crown of the Magister.
To begin with, all members of your party can speak during dialogue cutscenes, unlike the “Silent Tav” situation of BG3. When choosing your response to NPCs, you typically get one option for each party member, allowing everybody to pitch in. Their dialogue options typically depend on their personality and Skills. This feels much more engaging than the BG3 system, where your party leader does all the talking (without actually saying anything), and your allies just stand in the background silently, except for the occasional quip or piece of advice.
In Solasta it feels like your whole party is contributing to every aspect of your adventure, including dialogue.
Solasta 2’s Character Creation is (probably) Deeper
This point should be taken with a pinch of salt for now, because we haven’t actually seen the Solasta II character creation menu. But we have seen what they did in Solasta: Crown of the Magister, which already exceeded what BG3 offered in some ways. Most notably, in Solasta CotM, you could define the personality of each character by choosing some categories on an alignment graph. The created personality type would impact their way of speaking (polite vs slang) and the options they’d tend to present in dialogue encounters (patient and diplomatic vs violent, for instance).
In a recent Q&A, Tactical Adventures (Solasta’s developers) stated that they’ll be keeping elements of Solasta’s character creation, like being able to define your character’s personality, although they’d be altering the formula a bit to reduce the number of options but make the outcomes more distinct from one another.
The main drawback of the character creation in Solasta: Crown of the Magister was just the graphical side because the character models were quite dated in that game. But we have seen in the demo that this problem has been resolved – the Solasta II Character models look at least as good as those in Baldur’s Gate 3.
With all of this in mind, we can be cautiously optimistic about the character creation in Solasta II. If they keep heading in the same sort of direction that they have up to this point, then it looks like we’ll get a solid character creator that allows you to choose your character’s personality in a manner that will have a meaningful impact on gameplay and roleplaying. This brings me nicely to my next point.
Solasta 2 is Better for Roleplaying
This comes about primarily thanks to the combination of the previous two points. It was already a real strength in Solasta: Crown of the Magister, and from what we’ve seen in the demo, it seems to have been carried over into Solasta II.
As I mentioned above, during character creation, you carefully set up your character’s background and personality (for all four characters in your party). This was already a lot of fun, and I didn’t really expect it to be reflected too well in the game. But then I started playing and found that in quite a lot of the dialogue cutscenes, all four characters were acting out the personality I had given them. My well-educated, prim and proper aristocratic Elven Wizard was talking in a very clean and formal manner, constantly scoring high History Rolls for every object I found and educating the party (and me) about what they were looking at. My cautious Bard could often be heard asking the party to avoid dangerous situations, and my half-orc Fighter with a violent personality spoke in an informal manner with lots of slang and vulgarities, favouring a direct approach in most situations.
I was really impressed with how this came together, and I felt myself bonding quite quickly with the characters who I didn’t really expect too much from in the beginning. Of course, it doesn’t always work perfectly; occasionally, someone feels a bit out of character. But the developers now have the experience of Solasta I to perfect their craft. From what we saw in the demo, it looks like they intend to refine and improve on this system for Solasta II, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that plays out.
Solasta 2 Stays Truer to the DnD Ruleset
To be fair, this may be an upside or a downside for you depending on your perspective, or you might not be fussed about it at all. But it’s definitely worth noting the distinction.
While both Solasta and BG3 are based on tabletop DnD mechanics, Baldur’s Gate 3 very clearly tried to fuse this with some of their own game mechanics that they had already perfected in the Divinity: Original Sin series, and they also simplified some other elements of the ruleset for quality of life or game balance purposes, for example removing the Ability Score bonuses associated with the races to make them all more equally suited to any class or playstyle. For the most part, this approach worked well and I don’t really have any qualms with it.
But Solasta offers a different approach. From what I can tell, Solasta is designed to be as true to the tabletop ruleset as possible, and this is placed front and centre of most aspects of gameplay. During combat, you see every dice roll happening for both your party and for enemies. Attack Rolls, Saving Throws, Damage Dice, all of it happens in front of your eyes. While BG3 used these dice roll mechanics extensively, you could quite easily forget about it unless you kept your combat log open. Most combat dice rolls happened behind the scenes. But Solasta shows you everything. This makes turns last a bit longer, but it also means that you feel more in-touch with the mechanics of the game, and while it might seem more intimidating at first because you can see exactly what’s happening and how the game is calculating every spell and attack, it is easier to learn and figure things out.
I can speak from experience, as BG3 was my first foray into this genre, and I had never played any tabletop RPGs before it. I had no idea what was going on with the dice roll mechanics for quite a while, and I am quite sure that the Solasta approach of prominently placing every single dice roll on my UI would’ve helped me learn “on the job” rather than having to spend an hour Googling to understand why my attacks were so inaccurate.
Of course, this all depends on individual preference. Some of you may prefer BG3’s approach and that’s fair enough – it definitely has its pros and cons. I prefer Solasta’s implementation of the DnD rules, though.
Solasta 2 Is More Customisable
The aforementioned party customisation is one thing, but Solasta offers you many more ways to customise your adventure and fine-tune the difficulty.
There are default settings tied to various difficulty tiers, like in BG3. But in Solasta you can customise all sorts of values alongside it, if you want. You can buff or tone down the dice rolls of your party vs the enemies. You can decide if you want an ironman playthrough to stop you from reloading if something goes awry. Quality-of-life settings like the Karmic Dice seen in BG3 are also available in Solasta, which helps to reduce the chance of getting several bad rolls in a row if enabled.
You can get by just fine with the default settings, but if you want more customisation options, or want to turn everything up to max to make the game as hardcore as possible, then you can do it all in the game’s settings.
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