Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Lost Valley

Solasta appears again with a chunk of DLC offering a new campaign with new subclasses. The campaign is fun and setting well done. The only downsides are that some of the exp. can be a bit lacking and some of the combats are a bit much in certain areas thus interrupting the flow. There are different factions to help and join and I have finished the dlc campaign twice now on authentic difficulty with different factions. The new monsters are fun to fight, animated well and look good.

The premise of the DLC is quite interesting and the mostly non-linear nature is, too. You get some more sub-classes to try out and a couple of nice locations, loot, tons of recipes and ingredients for crafting. Overall I had fun playing this and returning to Solasta. However, I felt that it didn't really manage to make full use of the setup: The various factions remained rather vague, with their motivations sometimes unclear. There was little interaction between them (so don't expect any unfolding dynamics there) and when there is, again the reasoning behind it is hazy at best. Sometimes completing a quest for one faction (or even minor group) would result in drops or raises of the rating you have with another seemingly unrelated faction. Some quests will destroy your reputation with another faction (admittedly, this makes sense in some cases). Unfortunately this is usually not exactly telegraphed ahead, so unless you are willing to load (and have) an old save, it might lock you out of another factions questline. Furthermore, either I missed a lot of dialogue, or some quest goals just come out of nowhere. E.g. you are supposed to investigate one location for a faction, but when you are there you are suddenly supposed to repair some "mana generators" - why? What's their purpose? In what way does it help the faction? This never seems to be explained. Another minor nitpick - I got some acchievements unlocked for things I never did. Some of these things might be down to bugs, so maybe they will be fixed. So, as I said, I enjoyed playing the DLC, but I can't help but think it feels a bit rushed and has a lot of unrealized potential. If I could, I would have given 3.5/5, but as it is, I opted for 4/5.

Even if you can download plenty of stories from players that created campaigns and you don't need more than the base game, I gave a try to this story as I enjoyed the main campaign. If it's not as interesting in term of world building, it's still interesting as it's entertaining enough. Also, in this one, there's deeper interactions with factions to make it an open world story. So, if you enjoyed the base game, that's a good way to fill the pocket of developers for this work. I won't fill their pockets with their classes DLCs as it should be part of the core game or as a free DLC. Basically, new classes are not that relevant to enjoy the game for an old school player like me who enjoy the basic "Warrior-Mage-Rogue" classes. Anyway, this DLC being good enough, I'm waiting for more stories from DMs-developers. I wonder what kind of world they have in mind.

I liked it more then original campaing. It felt little longer. Ending didnt make any sense to me, so 4/5. And i have to recommend using Unfinished bussiness addon, it makes a game far better.

I like the system in Solasta. I like the original campaing just fine (it's a bit too linear and predictable, but overall had good time with it). The DLC wants to give you more open ended approach - but it fails in so many places. The open-endedness promised ends very quickly without player's agenda - the game just randomly forces you into some of the faction quests and decides for you what side you're on. And you can do nothing about it (Saving Reya is the most heavy offender here that I experienced, but there are others too, less severe ones). Also almost all the quests have only one resolution. And picking any faction will (without external research) semi-randomly screw your relations unpredictibly becouse once you go up to a certain point, you just cannot opt out of doing some quests. But before getting to that point you had almost no info about what faction this thing is against. It would maybe be a lesser deal if the entire dlc campaign didn't revolve solely around those factions. So things like this just randomly ruin your campaign. Also maps feel unpolished, lots of enviromental bugs everywhere (like missing model, dislocated collider/hitbox etc.).