

Palace of Ice moves the cap to 16 and it seems like the ideal starting point is level 10. Those who have Lost Valley already had the level cap moved to 12 but if you only have the base game, it is at 10. If you wanted an example of the aforementioned technical limitations, this is probably the most obvious one.

The one part of Solasta that Palace of Ice didn't manage to improve are the stiff character animations in dialogue that cause voice acting to sound just as stiff. Granted, it is not on the level of Dragon Age: Origins but the overall experience is well worth going through and its ceiling has to do with technological limitations, which are one of the reasons Tactical Adventures are closing the book on Solasta with this DLC.

The result is my favourite storyline of the three and a definitive improvement in storytelling. Took the best parts of both Crown of the Magister and Lost Valley and stuffed them into the Palace of Ice while leaving the negatives behind. However, we will not be playing several sides or have different endings that could conflict with each other, which was the case in Lost Valley, eliminating the potential threat to story and immersion in the process. As soon as the first act is complete, we get to choose which one of them will be our path through the campaign. Initially, our party is invited into the lands of the Snow Alliance, which is basically a federation of five smaller nations. As such, the story is not as linear as in the base game but it is also not as branched out as in the first expansion. On top of that, I would dare say Palace of Ice has an overall better storyline than the previous adventures as the devs took the feedback to heart in both the Crown and Lost Valley. This already gives it an edge over the previous expansion, Lost Valley, because the storyline is not standalone, giving the players who went through the base game something more to be invested in. Palace of Ice kicks off a few months after the completion of the Crown of the Magister campaign.
