I went into Kingmaker knowing NOTHING about the ruleset. And my first character was an Eldritch Archer, which is apparently one of the hardest classes to learn. I had not played ANY tabletop DnD prior to that as well.
Spamming Arcane Accuracy and having a lot of Scorching Rays memorized is very difficult to learn indeed.
I am still on the fence about whether or not I want to buy WoTR in the long run (definitely not right now), so I am curious about a few (potentially somewhat spoilery) things:
- Is there any reactivity from companions apart from their quests and interjecting into conversations here and there but without much consequence? As in, will someone similar to Linzi or Tristian just drag behind a chaotic evil (or Jaethal - behind a lawful good) character, only saying an occasional "boo" but not doing anything?
- Is playing an evil character just as unrewarding and clashing with the narrative as in Kingmaker? Because I really suspect that it is, given the whole "crusade against evil" theme of WotR. Kingmaker seemed to actively punish you for evil/dismissive choices at every turn, and playing a goody-two-shoes was definitely what the plot was written around.
- Is the replacement of the Kingdom system just as shallow? I know it's turn-based army fights akin to the HoMM series, but are they actually properly made or just there because why-the-hell-not, like the Kingdom was in Kingmaker?
- How does the difficulty look at the very early/very late stages of the game? Do early-level characters still face against 20+ AC enemies with sniper accuracy while in the late game you deal with thousands of HPs worth of enemies, or did they actually balance their f***ing game this time?
It's more like it took me 3 years and all the way until WotR beta phase 1 to realize I had not been using my Eldritch Archer's Arcane Weapon Enhancement ability properly, along with a couple other things. And most of the difficulty factor was back when Kingmaker was a pure RTwP game, before the turn-based mod was created and then officially built into the game, and thus the round-based buffs were finicky as hell.
Anyway, answers.
1) Companions will interject a lot, and I mean A LOT, but won't directly act against each other in quests or anything. The party ultimately still defers to you, the devs aren't going to randomly have a party member leave just because you had two specific party members have a disagreement at a specific point in the game, and you ARE the party leader, after all.
2) One would argue that evil characters may be MORE rewarding than a good run. Lich mythic path especially has more secret companions than the rest as far as I've heard. It doesn't clash with the narrative at all, it'd only somewhat feel awkward in the first two chapters for obvious reasons.
3) Honestly? The crusade system when I played in beta was rather interesting, but I felt it was sort of an afterthought in terms of development work done on it throughout the entire testing period. I am hearing of some concerning bugs and possible balance issues involving them right now... I honestly hope the next game ditches all of the management stuff, because it's clearly not the strength of these games.
4) No one has really gotten that far enough into the game to know, besides the few special people hand picked to take part in closed beta of the final two chapters. I cannot give a fair assessment as I am playing on normal difficulty either, but most people seem to agree that Core and above is bullshit and poorly balanced. It's largely going to depend on what you're really looking for in this game.
I could say that my rationale for enjoying WotR is mostly for the writing (especially party banter) and character customization, and not for the balance. Probably ironic considering how much I care about BG3's balance in comparison, but at the same time, my approach to BG3 is that given Larian's prior development history, my expectations around BG3 are that its combat is literally the only thing that I really care about in regards to that game. Everything else about the game in their current state is just a bonus to me, until Larian can show me that the companions are somehow going to evolve past the limitations imposed upon them by the origin system AND the decision to kill off half the party that completely kneecapped the D:OS2 companions in the end. Though WotR raised my expectations a lot in the companion writing department.
