Originally Posted by Wormerine
After Kingmaker that gametime doesn’t inspire confidence in me. Still, I quietly hope that WotR’s campaign won’t be such a chore. I will boot it up once its somewhat patched up.

Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves, Kingmaker was only as long as it was due to all the kingdom management downtime. I wager that about half of our playtime was spent sorting that out rather than actually adventuring.

WotR has nothing like that, the actual management stuff this time around happens alongside adventuring, and it's more of a minigame rather than something that the entire game revolves around. One of the later chapters even cuts off your access to the management stuff for highly spoilerific reasons.

I'd wager that if you cut off Kingmaker's management stuff, it'd actually turn out to be a shorter game than WotR.

These days, I'm a lot more hyped for WotR than BG3. Even though I tend to favor turn-based combat more than RTwP, I am a much bigger fan of well-crafted narratives that don't confuse good writing with being overly verbose, being complicated for the sake of being complicated, and story beats highly reliant on shock value more than anything else. The WotR cast of party members is quite possibly the best set of companions I've ever seen in any game to date, probably because there's so much party banter that you'll get to watch the entire cast reinforce their personality and beliefs against each other in very subtle and indirect ways. It gives off the impression that the whole party develops as a group throughout the entire game, instead of the characters feeling detached from each other like in most other cRPGs.

At the moment, only Shadowheart is anywhere close to the level of the WotR companions, and she won't get all the way there if the other BG3 companions don't receive a similar level of focus and care. And I will still vehemently argue that the BG3 companions won't reach a similar level of praise outside of memes and fanart if Larian insists on staying true to the highly implied 'everyone not in your active party dies after Act 1' course.

That's not to say that you shouldn't be allowed to face consequences that may result in losing party members - WotR can have plenty of that (there's even one choice right in the prologue that results in this, and there's no perfect outcome to that that will allow you to please both parties). But that is completely due to player choice, and not some arbitrary headcount limit at the end of the day. Which is what many people are fearing in BG3, seeing how DOS:2 handled it.

Last edited by Saito Hikari; 31/07/21 09:58 AM.