Solasta II Jumps The Gun - or - Crabs! Why Did It Have To Be Crabs?

On Monday, the first of Steam's three annual opportunities for developers to share what they've been working on, or offer up a taster of what they've already produced, will go live. Next Fest starts on 24 February and runs, as usual, for a week, ending on 3 March.

This should sit fairly well with my schedule, for once, although I'll probably be too busy to get stuck in until about halfway through the event. I should at least be able to pick my traditional half-dozen demos on opening day, even if I don't get around to playing any of them until Thursday.

Happily for me, some developers don't seem to be able to wait for the starting gun, which gives me a bit of a headstart on my reviews. I saw a news item on one of the MMO websites about one game that had already released a demo, although I can't now remember what it was and yesterday I got an email from Steam , telling me one of the games on my Wishlist had done the same.

The game is Solasta II, the sequel to Solasta. I very much enjoyed the original and I'm currently in the middle of the DLC, Lost Valley, which is just as good, so the opportunity to see how much the game might have improved in further development was most welcome.

I downloaded the demo immediately. It's quite big. I think it was around 13gb. It begins with a very clear description of what the demo is and is not, which seems like something more demos could do.

I like the idea of the demo being a standalone adventure. It's not entirely clear whether it's a segment of the eventual, finished game or an entirely separate production, although I think it's more likely the second.

Having a pre-made party is another thing I like. It saves a lot of time and gets straight to the point, which in Solasta is always the fights.

Here, it needs to be said, Tactical Adventures have a big advantage over many other RPG devs. They really aren't at all interested in many of the things - characterisation, inter-party romances or even role-playing - their competitors place such great importance in. Grimmtooth would most likely approve.

No, the whole point of the Solasta series is - as you might expect from the name of the company behind it - tactics. There is a plot but it very much takes second place to the exploring and the fighting. I very much doubt many people are playing these games for the dialog or the story.

That said, I have quite a soft spot for the voice acting, which manages to be idiosyncratic and distinctive without ever being very good. I'm sure the actors are professionals but they don't always sound like it. 

The dialog often gives the impression of a bunch of quite gifted amateurs giving it their best shot. None of them ever seem to get too emotional about anything, either, which I count as a blessing after some of the over-wrought histrionics I've had to turn the sound down on over the years.

The characters in the demo are new but I recognize the voices behind some, if not all, of them. The dwarf is for sure the same voice as the dwarf in the game I'm playing. All of them are pleasant to listen to and the dialog is as terse and amusing as always. The conceit that the four party characters, all different D&D races, are orphans who were brought up together and now consider themselves siblings works nicely. It also explains the mild bickering that has always been a feature of inter-party conversations in the series.

In fact, there isn't very much that's different in the demo from how the game has always been. It seems to be a case of something not broken not being fixed, which makes a pleasant change, if you're used to MMORPGs.

There are some changes, of course. The UI has been revamped to look more up-to-date and, while I'm not convinced it's an improvement, it's certainly no worse, so that's fine. I noticed a few minor tweaks to the way combat works but nothing significant enough to stop me from carrying on pretty much the same as before. 

It looks as though they might have removed the "Ready" option, or at least I couldn't find it. That was Solasta's version of "Overwatch" and I used to use it a lot. The action bar has been condensed and simplified a little, too, but otherwise the transition from original to sequel feels very smooth.

By far the biggest and most obvious improvement is how the game looks. The original came out in 2021 but looks a fair bit older. Its graphics were functional and aesthetically consistent but I doubt anyone would have called them beautiful.

By comparison, the demo for Solasta II looks gorgeous. There's far more detail and the world looks richer in both color and texture. Character models in conversations and cut-scenes are much more "realistic" and facial expressions are more convincing. I suspect Tactical Adventures are quite proud of what they've achieved bcause there are plenty of close-ups and the camera can now sweep majestically across the landscape to give some delightful aerial views. 

There are also Viewing points that work almost exactly like Vistas in Guild Wars 2. If you click on one, the UI disappears completely and the camera spirals up and away to give you a magnificent shot of whatever scenic feature you've happened upon.

It's also now possible to move the camera far ahead of anything your characters have seen for themselves, making planning a route much easier. I just wish you could click on the map and have the characters go there instead of having to come out of map view and click on the world itself to get the exact same effect.

One innovation in the demo is that you don't actually have to click to move at all. If you prefer, you can now control movement of your party directly, using the cursor keys. I thought that might be a good option but unfortunately its a bit flaky still (The demo is flagged pre-alpha.) It also seems it's been so long since I've used the cursor keys to move in any game that I now find it uncomfortable and weird. I hope by the time the full game arrives they'll not only have tuned the movement but also added WASD as an option.

As to the adventure itself, not to give any spoilers but it involves a visit to see an old friend that turns into a full-blown dungeon crawl. The town, where said friend lives, is spectacularly scenic and incredibly badly located atop some perilous clifftops over a massive cave complex. Given that the caves are home to a large dragon and some kind of apocalyptic magical device, it's an accident waiting to happen. And happen it duly does.

It's a chunky demo. I played for an hour and three-quarters last night and didn't finish it. I was right in the middle of what might or might not have been the climactic battle, when Beryl bounced in and made me stop. Luckily, you can save at almost any point, even mid-fight, so I should be able to pick up from where I left off, later today. 

If I'm right and that was indeed the big, set-piece battle at the end, I'd guess the demo is probably intended to run for a couple of hours. It is, however, entirely possible that the climax is a fight with the dragon I mentioned earlier, in which case there's probably a way to go yet. 

Dragon fights are always fun but in a way I hope that's not where we're headed because, frankly, I do not see my party coming out of a dragon fight in anything more than small, smoldering pieces. Maybe it's only a small dragon...

Watever the outcome, this is a fine demo. It showcases the game's strengths well, it's fun in its own right and it's making me look forward to the finished game even more keenly than I already was. Can't ask more of a demo than that. 

If I have a complaint, it's that there are too many fights with crabs. Crabs, I think it's fair to say, were never the highlight of anyone's D&D campaign, so why use them in your show window? Kobolds? Sure. Crustaceans? Nope. Other than that, great job! 

I'm going to count this as one of my Next Fest reviews so that's one down. Unless of course the demo turns out not to be in the event after all. That would be a fun twist!

Pictures And Words

Stars Reach is using every means possible to draw attention to itself. As well as the pre-alpha, which began with only a partial NDA and then dropped it entirely shortly after, there have been numerous interviews, livestreams and press releases.

If you have any interest in the game at all, it's likely you've seen some of the activity but one thing you might have missed if you're not actively signed up to the news feeds is Clere's Story.

Clere is the one person out of billions chosen to be Earth's emissary to an unidentified alien entity, for which she has to travel to Enceladus, one of Saturn's least-celebrated moons, leaving behind her daughter, Sofia, currently frozen in cryosleep to forestall an otherwise inevitable death from an ice-age disease released by climate change.

This fascinating backdrop to the in-development MMO comes in the form of two (So far.) chapters on the Stars Reach website. The story is very well-written. In parts it could be said to owe something of a debt to certain scenes in Kubrick's 2001 but I'd happily read it if it were a short story in a published collection.

I find it odd, then, that having taken the trouble to create the story, Playable Worlds is doing so little to publicize it. I only happened upon it by chance, when I was looking for something else on the game's Steam page. The first episode appeared there on 13 December, two days after it arrived on the official Stars Reach website.

The Steam version ends with the immortal tagline "To Be Continued" but for Steam users it hasn't been, even though Clere's Story Pt. 2 came out on the website just a week later, on 18 December. I haven't received any emails about the story and I can't find any mention of it on Discord either, although it needs to be said that I can't even find my own name on Discord, even when I get emails telling me someone's been talking about me there.

I don't imagine this lack of visibility for Clere's Story is doing Stars Reach any harm. This kind of world-building by way of long-form prose most likely only appeals to the already-committed. 

It's rather sweet, when you stop and think about it. That companies bother with this kind of promotion at all, I mean. I guess they all have plenty of writers and would-be writers on tap, who'd be only too happy to spend a couple of hours knocking out a few hundred words of what might uncharitably be described as Authorized Fanfic. 

They all do it, though, or a lot of them, anyway. Over at DCUO they've just begun a story featuring Batman (It's always Batman...), the first chapter of which is pedestrianly entitled "A Deadly New Mystery". I read it this morning and enjoyed it for what it is but it's not a patch on Clere's Story, which is both much better-written and has considerable emotional heft.

The DCUO tale, however, has the benefit of a much higher publicity profile. I head about it in a news story on MassivlyOP but if you google "DCUO "A Deadly New Mystery"" you'll get hits all the way across social media, from all of DCUO and Daybreak's accounts on YouTube, Instagram, X, Facebook and more, along with news stories from the likes of MMORPG.com. They even put it on Threads ffs!

It's not a fair comparison, of course. DCUO is a successful, established, long-running game and "A Deadly New Mystery" isn't just a one-off lore dump but the first entry in what they're calling a "Story Blog", part of the new content delivery system being rolled out for 2025. Still, the difference is striking.

Which got me wondering just how much Star Reach has penetrated the public consciousness or even that part of it that has any interest in online gaming. So I had a little look.

On Steam, the game has just over three and a half thousand "followers". It was news to me you could follow a game on Steam, which shows how observant I am. There's a button for it right there on the game's Store page. Stars Reach has one more follower now so we'll see if that gets me any notifications about new chapters in the story.

Wishlisting is something games always seem keen on so I checked that next. According to SteamDB, Stars Reach is #1099 of their 3,352 "Most Wishlisted" games. It doesn't give actual numbers but according to an anonymous survey of 125 game developers back in 2023, as reported by GameWorldObserver, it generally runs to a median average of twelve times the number of followers, meaning Stars Reach might feature on around forty thousand wishlists. Seems like a lot but who knows?

That's specifically Steam, though. How about a more general awareness? Google Trends is always good for that. 

To give a little spurious perspective I added comparisons to a couple of vaguely relevant titles, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and Solasta 2. They don't really have anything to do with Stars Reach but they might appeal to a similar demographic and one has just entered Early Access, while development the other has only just been announced.

It's an interesting chart. It shows that in the last 90 days interest in Pantheon bubbled along quite consistently until the EA release on 13 December, when it sky-rocketed. Perhaps more significantly, interest has remained around the same level since and is even trending upwards. More evidence there that Visionary Realms' strategy is paying off.

Solasta was nowhere until, entirely coincidentally on the same day Pantheon went into Early Access, the public announcement was made about the game being in development. That drove it briefly above Pantheon in Google search but interest quickly fell back to a low mumble as fresh news died away.

That still puts it above Stars Reach which, other than a brief, unexplained blip on 3 November, doesn't even register in the comparison at all until 21 December, the day after the NDA was lifted in full. There is a blue line for a little while before that but on mouseover it comes up as zero.

All of which is, as they say in the gameshows, just a bit of fun. I have no meaningful understanding of how Google Trends operates so all I'm doing is looking at the pictures.

They do say a picture is worth a thousand words but in this case I'd say Clere's Story is worth a lot more to me than Google's charts. If it's any indication of the quality of the lore we're going to be able to enjoy in Stars Reach one day, I'll be a happy little space explorer. 

It's just a shame such quality work isn't a little more prominent in the PR cycle right now.