Since it seems to come up a lot again:
I fully agree that Solasta did a near perfect job of faithfully adopting "by the book" 5E rules and showing clearly that those rules work absolutely fine in 'a videogame', without creating accessibility issues - best proof: friends of mine who didn't know the first thing about DnD and enjoyed playing it (at least mechanically - regarding the writing they felt it was somewhat lackluster, and I agree, but that's not the point here).
I love Solasta for that proof of concept. Great job by Tactical Games, I was genuinely + pleasantly suprised to see how well it all worked out, even better than I had initially felt it could.
And: I'm convinced that the most important reason why TG managed to do this, is because that was exactly what they were going for. It was their highest priority the whole time.
Now Larian seem to have very different priorities for their project, and I don't blame them for that at all.
Their goal is not to create just 'a videogame'. It's first and foremost to make an incredibly complex C-RPG with countless stories, choices, variables and possibilities, at a size that defies everything any of us have ever seen in any C-RPG to date - and I'm excited for that mainly.
And given the budget and level of investment of Larian into this one big title, it absolutely has to be a priority to make that game and it's more complex mechanical choices as accessible as possible to an audience that to a large part may not have played D&D before, while at the same time exposing and advertising the fundamentals of 5E to that widest possible audience in a way that it can promote one of WotC's ( = big investor) most popular products.
So their highest priority is most likely not to deliver a 100% PHB-compliant 5E adaptation. It's not top of their list, and it never will be. They never claimed it was, and they never "lied" about it either, as some more vocal forum posters like to throw around. Quite the opposite: In the early days Swen even had mentioned in interviews that the attack roll / low HP system would feel like a hard sell to non-D&D players so they wanted to change it to a high HP / most attacks hit system, but apparently WotC had put their feet on the ground in that regard - because it would otherwise deviate too far from the published rules probably.
I've said it before, and I'll gladly say it again: When EA began, I was firmly in the camp that liked to yell "this is not 5E..!! You must make it 100% compliant with 5E!!!! Like Solasta did!!! Why can't you do it, when Solasta obviously can!?!?!"
Answer: Larian could, if they wanted to. But they don't, and there are numerous reasons for that.
Since then, I told myself 2 x 3 words:
Get. Over. Yourself.
Deal. With. It.
I sleep a lot better since then. And I'm excited for early August.
Last edited by endolex; 21/07/23 11:55 AM.
