D&D 5E (2014) Solasta 2 Announced!!!

[Sacrosanct]

Nothing beats worst dialog in a video game over the original Resident Evil. But yeah, when there’s an unnaturally long pause between speakers (assuming the program is loading voices), it immediately breaks immersion, especially for high stress conversations.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The original campaign for Neverwinter Nights 1 was pretty dire.

Yeah, I can think of a few that are worse than Solasta 1, but NWN was the most high profile. Although NWN2 main campaign was only marginally better.

 

[Burnside]

Yeah, I can think of a few that are worse than Solasta 1, but NWN was the most high profile. Although NWN2 main campaign was only marginally better.

I enjoyed NWN2's story (well, except the ending) but the camera in that game is a nightmare.

NWN1's original campaign is very poor. I cheerfully completed the (endearingly goofy) base campaign for Solasta but don't think I ever got past act one of NWN1 (take a drink every time an NPC says "The Waterdhavian creatures!")

I also cut Solasta's dev team slack for being an indie outfit. NWN1 was made by Bioware with a big budget and the toolset is awesome, but there's no excuse for how dire the writing is in the base campaign.

What worries me about Solasta 2 is that they seem to have upgraded everything except the writing - and that's easily the thing that needed the most improvement. I watch dev vid after dev vid about Solasta 2, and while they are very frank and open about most of the first game's flaws and ways they are addressing those issues in the sequel, they have never said anything about how bad the writing in the first game was, nor have they introduced any new narrative designers they've added to their team to improve that area.

Solasta 2 with Solasta 1-level writing has a ceiling of being "fun dungeon crawl with great combat, cliched plot, and wooden dialogue." Solasta 2 with good narrative design and writers who can write credible English dialogue is potentially an all-time classic CRPG.

 

[wicked cool]

I’ve participated in some QA on their videos and I’m expecting good stuff on combat/keeping true to 5.5 but nothing on immersion/writing/romance etc. there’s just no budget

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I enjoyed NWN2's story (well, except the ending) but the camera in that game is a nightmare.

It's terribly railroady, in the sense when the game actively prevents you from doing the sensible thing and makes you do the stupid thing on several occasions.

KotOR had a similar dodgy camera, but people let it off because the plot was good. Masks of the Betrayer gets by for the same reason.

NWN1's original campaign is very poor. I cheerfully completed the (endearingly goofy) base campaign for Solasta but don't think I ever got past act one of NWN1 (take a drink every time an NPC says "The Waterdhavian creatures!")

Yeah, I did get through it once, but I failed in an attempt to replay it. Solasta mostly suffered from being entirely linear, and that was because it didn't have the story tools* that NWN had. The actual plot was generic and cheesy, but was acceptable with gameplay that was fun. The second expansion had a marginally better plot. The first just proved that the game engine couldn't support a sandbox.

I agree that what I would want to have heard about Solasta 2 was that they had hired narrative designers and writers. But NWN had the tools and the writers and still messed up.



*such as the ability to set variables to track who has said what to who.

 

[Burnside]

I’ve participated in some QA on their videos and I’m expecting good stuff on combat/keeping true to 5.5 but nothing on immersion/writing/romance etc. there’s just no budget

I don’t 100% buy this as a budget issue. Games with lower budgets than Solasta 2 (Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Skald: Against the Black Priory, etc.) have much stronger writing even though they’re very linear. I’m not expecting romances or sandbox play. Just dialogue that reads like it was written by a good, professional writer, and an English translation that reads like they had a professional editor who is a native English speaker review it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don’t 100% buy this as a budget issue. Games with lower budgets than Solasta 2 (Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Skald: Against the Black Priory, etc.) have much stronger writing even though they’re very linear

It kind of is, because the people doing the writing are employed for other skills than writing. So it’s a hit or miss how good their writing skills are.

With a bigger budget, you can hire people whose only job is writing, so hopefully they should be good at it.

 

[Cergorach]

The original campaign for Neverwinter Nights 1 was pretty dire.

Wait... There was a story?

I played it, but to be honest I don't remember the story... But NWN1/2 were pretty epic in their scope of what you could do, both as characters and as DM. That is what I remember or NWN...