Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Comparing Baldur's Gate 3 to Wrath of the Righteou

Okay so Wrath of the Righteous so far will have 24 classes, each of which gets 5 Archetypes, a pile of Prestige Classes/Bloodlines/Mysteries/Patrons/Spirits ect..., 11 races by over a dozen Heritages (in 5e D&D terms subraces), both RTwP and TB mode, Backgrounds, 9 Mythic Paths, a Crusade mechanic, and more (the Kickstarter is far from over, so I will be updating this post).

So how does Baldur's Gate 3 compete with that?

I think BG3 will have to pretty much offer all Player's Options from PHB, VGTM, XGTE, MTOFs, and the Artificer from E: RftLW, plus every FR deity to even come close to competing with PF: WotR, plus more some how.

I'm still looking forward to this game.

We still don't know a single thing about BG 3, but looking at Larian's previous work and the fact that they're developing with each new game, we gotta expect surely a lot of stuff and very rich character build, BUT i think quality is more important over quantity. There were a lot of games with triumph of form over content that erased from the minds of players shortly after the release.

I would like to have like 8 perfectly balanced and polished up classes than 24, where most of them are blank and boring.

I would like to have like 3 big maps full of content, hidden secrets, story and filled with interesting stuff than 8 big randomly created maps with lack of idea and poorly organized content.

Remember that quantity doesnt mean quality. Sure, Wrath of the Righteous might be a great game, but if BG 3 will get less content counted in numbers, it doesnt mean it will be worse.

And again - we know nothing about BG 3 for now. I can only give Larian loads of credit, since all their Divinity games except Beyond Divinity were really, really good. It should bring profit and experience, and they should be able to create a great BG game.

Bg3 will definitely have fewer classes and races since it uses 5e. The comparison won't make sense anyway since BG3 is made for people who have no previous experience with DND while WOTR is made for Grognards.

My question is; why would it have to compete?
Both BananowePole and Hawke make good points above, but I'm not certain why there would be need for competition in the first place.

They will more likely not come out near to each other in time.
They are not mmo/online games which removes the need to compete over a longer period of time.
And it's not like some other game genres where there are 10-20+ new games each year flooding the market. Isometric rpg's are few enough and long enough apart that I would guess most genre fans picks almost all of them up.

Exactly, if someone is a fan of isometric RPG's, he's gonna buy both games for sure. Since (by my guess) BG 3 is mostly finished and we should expect the release at the end of 2020 or in early 2021, Wrath of the Righteous will need like 3 years or more to be finished because even Kickstarter is not over yet.

I really hope Larian wasn't lazy since Sept 2017 and they started BG 3 development shortly after D:OS 2 release

Nope, the planned release is Summer 21, will probably delayed to fall the like Kingmaker. They started working on the game in spring 19 and unlike BG3 WOTR isn't a AAA game so two years sound realistic for a sequel.

Usually AA or indie games are way longer in development than AAA games, because of lesser menpower and finances. I heavily doubt that summer 2021 is the right date, i think they will delay the final release a lot. Of course there are exceptions, but if they plan to implement and polish everything what they stated so far, its gonna take loads of time.

The OP did not say "compete" but rather "compare." And comparing the two games is absolutely appropriate and justified. If a smaller and less wealthy studio like Owlcat can provide all of that richness and diversity of options in their game, a Larian game that does not do the same will inevitably be evaluated as being inferior.

And in fact, if I may offer my theory, I think the reason we're not hearing anything about the details of BG3 is precisely because games like Realms Beyond, Solasta, and now P:WotR are doing so incredibly much on both the content side and the gameplay side that Swen knows he needs to deliver even more than any of those games or else his game will surely get panned on the basis of poor comparisons with those other games. I bet BG3 is constantly getting changed to keep up with those other much lower budget games doing so much, and this is why discussing/showing BG3 gameplay keeps getting delayed.

Warlords Battlecry 3 has much more races than Warcraft 3, more units, longer campaign, much richer hero customization and build, but it is better than Warcraft 3? Definitely no.

Quality and quantity are totally different things. Following your reasoning, TES: Daggerfall is the best game ever made.

Another thing is, how much fun BG 3 will deliver to a player? How about replayability? You can't just say ''this game is better because it has 5 more races and 10 more classes''.

As for me, i have played Pathfinder: KIngmaker and it was a decent game, but i had much more fun in D:OS 1 and 2 or even Pillars of Eternity.

If we take into acount the saying ''you're as good as your last game'' - Larian is definitely a winner to me.

Except that in the post the OP did say compete and went on to list what BG would have to include from the source material to do that.

I'm all with BananowePole here; quantity does not equal quality, and with the amount of stuff that Owlcat is putting into their games it gives primarily one of them: quantity.
Kingmaker isn't bad quality wise, but it doesn't really have a depth and focus given to all the different classes and backgrounds that could have been done if they were fewer.

Many of the "options" in Kingmaker feel like minor statistical changes. They have no impact on the story.

Your choice of class or race has absolutely zero impact on dialogue story or really anything outside combat.
Though that's the case for almost all RPGs.

If I remember correctly, one of the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous stretch goals implies that NPC should react to the player's class, race and even deity. I wonder how it is going to work out though. Maybe we will find something similar in Baldur's Gate 3? I'd love to see anything like this.

NPCs reacted to player's race alrdy in D:OS 2, so surely they're going to implement that in BG 3 too and probably expand it greatly.

I was only making the point that people should stick to debating what someone actually says and not change what the other person was trying to say. I myself agree that quantity of options is good only upto a point, whereas quality is always a good thing.

But as for comparing specific games, for me P:Km (and the PoE games for that matter) blows away the D:OS games. D:OS had no meaningful choices in character creation, or in the game/story. All "classes" were exactly the same where everyone can do all the same things everyone else can do. P:Km is easily the best game for me thus far among the contempory crop of cRPGs.

is truly an exciting time to be alive!.. i really hope my health doesn't falter more.. i wanted to play all the exciting games

I wish you all the health you need.

They passed a stretch goal that changes that for Wrath of the Righteous called double reactivity, NPCs and Companions notice you race (including subrace like Pitborn), Class, and Deity.

Very different game. im personally pretty hyped for both.
Baldurs Gate 3 is attempting somehting new, its a fresh start for DnD RPGs after years of shovelware trash (and probably another 5 year sof shovelware trash to come)

Path of the Righteus is going to be a continuation of Kingmaker thats going to implement more features from its system, including mounted combat which hypes me greatly.
Its more in the line of the infinity engine games: expand on the previous stuff rather than reinvtent the wheel.

For a system like pathfinder that live soff hundreds of splatbooks and continuous adventure paths, this is basically the ideal solution and i hope owlcat keeps doing this thing, its a good niche for a developer of their size.
This way they can be ambitious in terms of mechanics and content, and dont have to be overly ambitious with overhauling their engine and systems.

Ironically, this puts Owlcat int he same position larian was with OS2.
but larian has struck big and now is barging into tripple A territory with a big brand name and a huge team, they gotta take bigger challenges.

I see this as an absolute win.
Also Owlcat is implementing the Turn based mod, so im just gonna dab on all your RTWP glorifiers

Owlcat Studios is the new Larian Studios
Tactical Adventures Studios is the new Owlcat Studios.
And Larian is becoming something without precedence.