Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Best thing about BG3: Pathfinder & Solasta

I am right there with you on this. In order, the games I am waiting for great anticipation are: P:WotR, Black Geyser, Realms Beyond, Solasta. More long-term the wait is for Avowed.

Probably for the best, Pathfinder Kingmaker was a bug ridden mess when first released. Kind of wonder if stuff is still messed up related to feats not working and so on.

I played Solasta some more and IMO, it's a nice little game to scratch that turn-based tactical combat itch, but it's just not much more than that.



The world setup itself seems to be decent, but it's another trope of great Elven empire brought low by some sort of mysterious world destroying cataclysm, which both resulted in immense loss of knowledge and created many world-changing anomalies, including somehow introducing new races to the world (humans, dwarves...) which came from somewhere else. Now elves and other races pick the broken pieces together and create some young kingdoms and shaky alliances of convenience. It is almost Dragon Age world setup with more equality between kingdoms and races, they even have their own version of darkspawn there.

NPCs you encounter are largely forgettable - I'd struggle to name more than 2-3 NPCs off top of my head. Furthermore you don't have any companions - your whole party is 4 blank slate characters you create when you start, which IMO is a HUGE weakness - there won't be any party dynamics, romance, conflicts and nothing really - because all these 4 characters are all you get and they are all your main. The small upside is that whole party involves when you talk to NPCs and IMO that works well, but that's the only good thing about it, IMO.

The graphics are simplistic, but get the job done. It looks like something you'd expect out of 2010 game, but DA:O is a 2010 game too and IMO it's around that level give or take (more give really, but still good enough to get the job done). Characters look so-so, somewhat blocky, but not outright horrible - totally 2010 game standard there, where you already got faces and animations, but it's definitely nowhere near anything up to date there. Armors look decent, though.

Combat is ok-ish. Spells are flashy, they look ok, there is no "realistic" fire and such, but they are ok. My pet peeve mostly comes from their almost maniacal adherence to 5e, which includes pop ups every time you have some sort of valid reaction or action you can take. For example every time paladin attacks you get a popup mid attack asking if you want to use smite. I, personally, don't like it because you get that shit midswing and it makes you miss much of combat animation of swing itself there.

And holy crap... Act 1 EA is so TINY... literally 3 tunnel style quest areas - initial keep, library and then master's keep and city hub? That all???



I hope this game will do good enough to have a more invested sequel, but it ain't no BG3, not even close by far.

I'm curious about the 3.5e part. Especially that it doesn't seem to offer all the choice 3.5e is famous for. What are the advantages over 5e? I went from 2AD&D (Infinity Engine... well, touches of 3e) straight to researching 5e for BG3. I must say 5e looks great in general.

I also have high hopes for Black Geyser. It looks like it could be great, but for now I'm going to hold my enthusiasm. I'm somewhat concerned about the Greed mechanic - it looks like it could be a gimmick that seems cool on paper but is just annoying in actual play.

Solasta is for me a funny thing in a way. It shouldn't be of any interest to me. It's a turn-based custom party dungeon crawler that doesn't seem to aspire to any particularly interesting narrative. Yet I find myself really wanting to play it.

Well they also, like with Solasta, are using the SRD OGL. It's just the 3.5e SRD rather than 5e SRD. So they also, again like Solasta, are limited to only being able to use those things that are in the SRD and nothing more, which is rather minimal.

As for differences with 5e, I am very firmly in camp preferring 3.5e as the best D&D edition. I find 5e to be too focused on combat and somewhat gimmicky in the changes made in it relative to the older editions. But ultimately it is very much a personal preference.

You haven't checked? They patched the living hell out of that game, it's stable and bugless now, atleast that is my personal experience, experienced zero bugs of any kind during the whole playthrough. A lot of people seem to think that PFK is still bugged but everything was fixed.

For me pathfinder is super laggy and stuttering. If I can run Witcher 3 on ultra there is no reason pathfinder would perform so poorly

Not gonna lie, Solasta looks like an on-rails snoozefest plus doesn't even have plans for playable gnomes, shameful.

Not only this, which is certainly my experience replaying the game often, is that they patched the game to be stable and bug-free pretty darn quickly following release. No other game developer has even come close in how tirelessly the very tiny Owlcat team worked in the weeks and months after the game was released to put out the patches. On this issue, they get an A+.

Not that they would have more choice, if they left the game as it came out, they might not sell the next one so well.

Gnomes are for punting.

For some reason I thought 3.5e is more lenient in licensing (Pathfinder and all that) and it's 5e that has a more restrictive approach of only the SRD being OGL.

The devs can still add as much homebrew as they want, right? Solasta kind of does it. It's probably more a matter of limited scope/resources. Also tradeoffs - if they can put, say 6 races, they'll probably want those that people know from D&D so there's no complaining "why no X race". I'd love to see more games with interesting races, not just the bog-standard set of humans, elves, dwarves, halflings and maybe gnomes.

The 5e open license lets a creator add homebrew so long as it doesn't use any of Wizard's non open content. BG3 presumably has far more liberty.

Yes 3.5e SRD OGL works the same way as 5e SRD OGL. They can do anything homebrew they want so long as it isn't any copyrighted material. But yeah, I think Ceres Games (Realms Beyond) has even less resources available to them than Tactical Adventures (Solasta).

Thanks for clarifying. Well, fingers crossed for all the studios! I hope these upcoming cRPGs are successful.



I think BG3 has all the liberty in terms of using 5e official material. As long as it's setting-appropriate, I'm guessing. Hopefully we'll see some Xanathar and/or Tasha sometime in the future.

Pathfinder Kingmaker is largely bug free now. If you've never played, now's a great time to try. Fair warning, it's as complex and obtuse as the Pathfinder ruleset it implements, but it's well worth the learning curve.

A year or two from now we'll lovingly say the same about BG3 I hope. 😄

There's no plays like gnome.