Play When my colleague and I stopped by to visit the Tactical Adventures team and see a Solasta: Crown of the Magister demo at Gamescom, it was immediately clear to both of us how much care, attention, and reverence the development team has for the source material – even if it’s not an official D&D product. But the game is being developed and based entirely on the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition SRD (System Reference Document) – the free resource Wizards of the Coast put online so folks can develop D&D-adjacent projects using those rules. To be clear, Solasta is not a licensed game, so the stories and lore of the Forgotten Realms or the iconic landmarks of Faerun aren’t on the table here. Designed by developer Tactical Adventures and headed up by studio founder and creative director Mathieu Girard, Solasta: Crown of the Magister is the honest-to-goodness attempt at making an unofficial Dungeons & Dragons game. Without dipping too deeply into hyperbole, Solasta – at least from the little I’ve played thus far – seems like one of the best attempts at turning the intangibles of the tabletop experience into video game ones and zeros. But that’s why I’m so excited by what I played of Solasta: Crown of the Magister. I mean it makes sense, right? How do you cram a game system that lets you do literally anything you can imagine, within an incredibly complex ruleset no less, into a video game? You can’t really design for that. The problem, if there is one, is that though these incredible, iconic, masterful fantasy video games exist, translating the experience of Dungeons & Dragons into a video game is apparently pretty damn hard. And most recently, the earnest attempts at capturing the licensed experience wholesale in games like Sword Coast Legends, and the near-perfect combat systems of Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin series. I murdered scores of kobolds, gnolls, and skeletons in hack-and-slash adventures like Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath. I cut my teeth on a mountain of Gold Box PC adventures, tile-based dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder, and the Infinity-engine series like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape, and Icewind Dale.
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