Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Which one of BG3, PoE, PK the worthy successor ?

The launch version was broken, but the patched version available today is mostly Ok. I beat it twice and noticed no bugs.



PoE2 has no story. There is no antagonist, no player agency, no twists or reveals (Pathfinder Kingmaker has a secret ending that is not easy to unlock, just as an example), no narrative structure (unless the whole main plot is seen as a prologue or maybe as a first act). This applies to the main quest, which is a series of talks with zero consequences and zero surprises, and the semi-open world. You sail somewhere, kill everything, get the McGuffin. Nothing more there. PoE throws walls and walls of text at you with world building exposition. Then the successor is published and: Nope. Nothing. Then extensions and DLCs are published, and again: Nothing to talk about. One DLC is even just a combat arena, literally. This is kinda relevant for a story driven game in a story driven genre.

Then fights in PoE2 are not really interesting, meaning diverse or challenging. Of course the vanilla game on default difficulty can be beaten on auto-mode, but even on the highest difficulty all fights can be handled by the same sequence of actions and abilities. One aspect of Pathfinder Kingmaker that reminded me of BG:2 was that I had to choose the right spells, positioning and focus on enemies for each type of encounter. And boy does Pathfinder Kingmaker have difficult fights. And boy is the highest difficulty actually difficult. (And unlike PoE2, in Pathfinder it makes a huge difference if you excel in a fight or barely survive, because of how resource management is handled.) Until you have figured out how to power play, and this again reminded me of BG:2, and Westley Weimer's Tactics mod.

And so PoE2 falls flat in the story section, in the combat section and in the exploration section, and that's IMHO the reason PoE2 was not a success (relative to the expectations of the publisher), and Pathfinder Kingmaker was one, despite the awful state it was published in.