Solasta 2’s character creator makes building a D&D party the best part of the game

You can spend hours creating your party of four

Solasta 2’s early access build is estimated to take anywhere between 10 and 15 hours, but I spent far too long farting around in the character creation engine instead. Like in the first game, you create four custom characters that make up your party for a fantasy adventure using a crunchy system based on Dungeons & Dragons. In this case, your characters were all orphans adopted into the Colwell family, so they can all be a different species.

The first game in the budding franchise from Tactical Adventures, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, had a similar hook, so players could customize a party of four — a novel approach compared to similar games that put a single custom character in a party with various adventurers. In migrating from Unity over to Unreal Engine 5 between the original and its sequel, the level of detail and graphical fidelity is a huge improvement, starting with character creation.

“In the first game, our characters were not that good, so we took a lot of effort to make them look much better and provide a lot of customization for the players,” Tactical Adventures studio head Mathieu Girard told Polygon in a video call, noting that players can select faces and mix them together to create something unique. Everything from scars and freckles to tattoos and eyebrows can be manually adjusted and positioned. Want to give your dwarf frosted tips in his hair? You can do that. What about blonde roots for your elf wizard? Yep. You can randomly generate characters or simply start from scratch.

Solasta 2 also offers six premade heroes — one of each class available with the start of early access. Having fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard, paladin, and sorcerer at launch offers a healthy mix of options. Missing classes like bard and barbarian are in development and will launch as part of future updates. Similarly, players only have access to dwarf, elf, halfling, and human species at first. But that’s just the starting point.

Solasta 2 adapts D&D’s revamped 2024 ruleset, dubbed 5.5e (at least in D&D Beyond, anyway) rather than the version of 5e released in 2014. It’s ostensibly the same system with various tweaks to smooth out progression and make both classes and subclasses more balanced. The most significant change, however, is that character creation refocuses on backgrounds that offer ability score increases and access to origin feats. So the way you make your characters feels different than in games like Crown of the Magister or even Baldur’s Gate 3.

You get to distribute 27 points across your six ability scores as opposed to rolling dice for your stats, something that Girard and Tactical Adventures marketing director Pierre Worgague acknowledge that players want. For those who still want to roll, there’s good news: “We heard the message,” Worgague said. “We need to bring it back.”

For players like me who want to spend a long time carefully recreating their D&D characters, Solasta 2 feels like a dream. My first character was Clarty the Cleric, an armored dwarf I first played decades ago in EverQuest Online Adventures and later adapted as my very first D&D character. He’s dumb but charming (low intelligence and moderate charisma) and proudly tells everybody that he’s the largest dwarf they’ve ever seen (high constitution). But above all, he’s wise (gotta get high wisdom to power his spells!). I thought about making his traveling companions before remembering that our party was horribly unbalanced with a rogue, two sorcerers, and a druid.

I considered building characters from the ongoing campaign I run, but ironically that party consists of a barbarian, ranger, druid, and monk. Not a single one of those classes is available at the start of Solasta 2 early access. The owlin wizard and changeling warlock I play in other ongoing campaigns were also out. Instead, I decided to just make Clarty my hero with a new band of adventurers, randomly generating and tweaking a human wizard, an elf fighter that specializes in archery, and a halfling rogue. (Yes, I’m basic. I like good party balance.)

Because Solasta 2 uses the open license for 5.5e’s System Reference Document, you won’t ever see official D&D subclasses that don’t already appear in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. But Tactical Adventures makes up for that with unique subclass additions like Aether Warden, which transforms the fighter into a martial-caster hybrid. The nuances of these various subclasses really make Solasta 2 stand apart from its competition. I reckon that their novelty is enough to intrigue even diehard tabletop D&D players. Most classes don’t pick up a subclass until a few levels in, so you don’t get to see them as part of the character creation process. Solasta 2 also lets players lean into multiclassing for interesting combinations.

Family dynamics are another compelling twist on characters in Solasta 2. “If you remember, well, you're playing a family,” Worgague said. “So we decided to let the player assign certain roles within that family.” One sibling can be the scapegoat, and another the golden kid that mommy loved the most. These roles within the family influence how the siblings interact with each other and the rest of the world at large.

Every time I play traditional D&D, I have the most fun during session zero, when everyone creates their characters, debates the party composition, and brainstorms backgrounds and shared history. Solasta 2 understands the importance of this ritual unlike any other game of its kind. The adventure technically starts when the four Colwell siblings appear on-screen for the trek to their mother’s funeral. But if I’m being honest, it really began the moment I decided Clarty the Cleric deserved another chance to save the world.

Solasta 2 early access releases on Thursday, March 12, at 12 p.m. EDT for Windows PC via Steam.