Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

I've finished one playthrough recently and luckily for me I didn't have much of an issue with most of the things you listed, except for the first point - questionable combat balance. The early game was rough, then I guess I "got ahead of the power curve" at some point and the game became fairly easy, and I had quite a lot of fun. I only ran into underleveled enemies for a while, and I felt this was starting to become too easy, then BAM the final dungeon, namely HATEOT, happened. I honestly can't recall a more lazy, boring, overtuned, but also long, dungeon from any of the games I've played, and I've played a lot of RPGs, from the old isometric titles to games like TES or Witcher. They made a couple of the most overpowered enemies and copypasta'd them a hundred times all over the 6 floors of the goddamn building. It was just senseless, mindnumbing hacking at thousands of points of HP of the same few enemies over and over, and nothing else.

This too. Dialogue choices are way too plain and generic, except for the ones tied to alignment, which suddenly become way too verbose and feel like too much info was crammed into one sentence. And all the "[Attack] I'm gonna kill you now cause I feel like it yeaaaah!" options make no sense majority of the time. Being evil doesn't mean you're a bloodthirsty maniac who just goes ahead and kills anyone who just starts a conversation with you, without even trying to find out who this guy is or what he's about. In the old BG games conversations with NPCs are colorful, expressional, and fun to navigate.

Also, the way the kingdom management progresses and how it progresses the main plot confused the hell out of me. The game bombards you with problems but at the same time wants you to rank up and do the few dozens of other events. I tried to reason to myself to understand the intention of the devs and what exactly I was supposed to do, but I'm still not sure on this.

To be more on topic, I don't know much about 5e or 3.5e, but I really hope 5e gives more love to magic and spellcasters in general, than 3.5e. Unless somehow P:K translated magic and spellcasters poorly from TT to the game, but I feel spells in general are nerfed to all hell in P:K. And they are boring too. Majority of spells are super bland, including the ones that are actually "strong". It's just the same few effects over and over, but with a bit stronger magnitude, and instead of single target now it is an aoe. P:K makes it feel like you don't need a spellcaster in the party at all, unless you just feel like having one for the sake of it. Why bother with spells when enemies have god-tier saves but brute force fighters can make 5+ attacks per round each dealing 60-70 dmg and critting for 200, and what's more: there's no "saves", no protection, against basic attacks. I think the spell system in P:K is just bad in general. I just hope BG3 makes mages dominating again, and not just because of a few one-shotting spells. BG2 has so many different magic effects, magical protections against just about everything, anti-magic spells, and useful utility spells.