I get the appeal of wanting to decide, but that seems like it might get intrusive on an actual play level. Of course, I haven't played Solasta, so I'm not sure how it works in practice. I'm just trying to imagine what it would look like.
It's not very intrusive at all. It depends on the implementation. For example, the dice rolls for skill checks in BG3 could stand to be -a lot- faster than they currently are.
I have a higher level combat demonstration for Solasta here, and at one point I actually get a triple attack of opportunity from three party members/allies at once, and you can clearly notice my shock when the UI lets me pick if I wanted to spend my reaction with each of my three eligible party members at the same time. Shame the enemies never rolled high enough for the game to let my wizard react with throwing up a Shield spell in this footage, although Greenmage is busted as hell to begin with on a sheer utility level (it's a homebrew wizard archetype with archery fighting style, a few ranger/druid spells, and light armor proficiency!), and my Paladin did get to show off his protection fighting style at the start of the fight.
Then again, this is kind of expected for Solasta. The devs there clearly went all in on having a responsive, clear, and easy to understand user interface for the combat, and it shows. Probably by far the best UI in terms of actual functionality for any cRPG I've ever seen. They did have an interview last week, mostly talking about the recently revealed Dungeon Maker tool. But when the topic inevitably shifted into BG3 and other DnD games, they straight up said that they were focused on the combat for Solasta and did not intend to compete with BG3 in the narrative department.
There is also another big cRPG based on D&D, which is currently in early access. And there are actually other Dungeons and Dragons games in development. Just this morning, I wrote about a triple-A open world RPG that is apparently coming from Hidden Path. How do you feel about the resurgence of D&D in gaming?
Mathieu Girard: I think it's great. It's a huge franchise and license, so I guess it can have different forms of expression. And we're different than those games; they shine differently. I don't think we have to be trouble or shame because I guess there's a market big enough to have different forms of games based on this.
Emile Zhang: Just to go back on that, to be honest, at least in the studio, we all grew up on those games, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, for Mathieu even going back to Gold Box; I was a little bit too young for that. Seeing a resurgence of D&D and cRPGs in general is super exciting. Also, as Mathieu said, I think we have a lot of differences between the different games. Pathfinder could exist when Divinity existed. We do focus on different things. Solasta is much more focused on the combat, tactical and rule aspects of D&D 5. Whereas Baldur's Gate 3, for example, is a lot more narrative and it's super great at doing that. We don't plan to tackle them on that end, that's for sure. Different experiences for different people, I am sure we have a lot of fans who love both; we know we do.
