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

Throne of Bhaal was terrible. Way too much time and resources went into the megadungeon rather than the actual story and gameplay of the conclusion of the saga. Lazy placement of +4 weapons into the basic inventory of every merchant instead of the unique and fun ones with interesting and unique descriptions and histories to read, general lack of sidequests (seriously, there's what, like two?) incredibly boring and empty towns bereft of exploration or things to do in general which was particularly dissapointing after coming from BGII, which improved on the 'big city' of the previous game with the spectacular Amn. Lazy 'summon party members' mechanic instead of organically meeting them in the world like the other two games. Essentially no player choice outside of the final scene of the game, romance epilogue's that don't take into account your character's alignment, and that of your partner. (seriously, you can get some hilarity reading about how charname -god of murder, and Annomen's wedding being attended by angels) Generally an extremely linear and uninspired plot. and a relentless push with high level enemies and xp being handed out like candy to push you towards the extremes of high-level play features introduced with the expansion when it should have slowed down and given a more measured experience. (seriously 'immunity to magic weapons' is a reward you can get in BGII, but it's completely useless in ToB because every enemy down to the lowliest conscript is packing magical weapons)

ToB was a huge disappointment. When Beamdog was working on the games and I heard they'd be adding new content, I had high hopes that they'd be doing a pass over the ending parts of BGII to polish things out and maybe give back some of the cut content, and had my fingers crossed for an overhaul of ToB. Pretty disappointed how that ended up. ToB is a real black mark on an otherwise stellar series.

I think most of the problems with Throne of Bhaal are the problems with high level D&D, at a certain point the numbers and abilities available become so ungainly. The story was good, but the pacing suffered from the shorter amount of time given it. People will pile on to anything critical, which can change the perception of it towards absolutes.

One thing I'm not so sure is true anymore. RPGs aren't the niche they were in the 90/00s. Playing games on a computer used to be the seen as the niche specialist alternative of console gaming, but we live in the Steam era, not so long ago the Yakuza 6's release was making headlines, similarly D&D itself is part of the culture, a confluence of events between 5e, streaming and some clever placement in media, people's cultural image of D&D has moved out of the 80s and into the present.

One last thing. The Baldur's Gate games were never niche, Planescape is niche, Baldur's Gate is the Star Wars of RPGs. Its fanbase actually crosses genres, kind of like Final Fantasy 7 did, and it's had an outsized influence on the genre.

Some of it, yeah. The story is... okay. The writing, though, in ToB? Took a massive nosedive compared to SoA.

And not really. You have Dark Alliance, but the crossover of fans of the originals and Dark Alliance is smaller than you think. Mass Effect and Dragon Age are the Star Wars of RPGs, arguably.

So, sorry for the double post but I'm catching up and I'm lazy as all hell. Yeah, this is somewhat common, but this is also a bit of a misattribution. You're comparing people who were gamers then to a climate of gaming now. My parents got me into BG at a very young age, but very few of the people I game with in my own demographic have fond or *any* memories of Baldur's Gate, really. All this to say that BG WAS big for its time. BG2 was a success, critically and sales-wise. It was sold in Wal-Mart, when I say niche I don't mean obscure necessarily. I mean the market is a lower volume market.

I'm fairly sure if you were to look up top sales numbers of 1998-2002 roughly, it wouldn't even appear on a top 20 list. I'd say zelda, pokemon, Mario, Halo, Fifa and some other mainstream titles would fill those lists.

I've not played Dark Alliance, but I'm not sure what it has to do with crossover for the original games. I'm talking about people who didn't usually play rpgs, playing Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy 7, even if they never finished them. "Sooo many words! When do I get to shoot someone?!?"

And what did they sell Dragon Age on? How many "spiritual successors" to Baldur's Gate have there been in the past decade?
If you don't like the Star Wars analogy, look at it like television, the number of people who watched the Twilight Zone and Star Trek is pretty small (Star Trek was almost cancelled twice), but as the medium expanded, shows like that became touchstones, if not for the audience then for the people making shows, or here, games.

I was agreeing with you about sales volumes when they first released, my point is that being big early has more impact on what follows, now that rpgs and computer games are booming business.

I agree with you, @Sozz. The cRPG genre fanbase as it exists today was effectively established by the BG games. Or put another way, BG made cRPGs cool to play and expanded the appeal of cRPGs beyond their niche fanbase.

This is IWD fan erasure and I will not stand for it.

Ok. The more I play WotR, the more I am finding that it has SO many pluses over BG3:

1. When you equip gear, it shows on your character.
2. Mounts and/or animal companions that you can even equip, name, level up. I feel like they are true companions.
3. Item management is easy and not painful.
4. Even when I get tons of loot I can't use, I sell it and use the money to further SOMETHING aka the crusade. So everything has value, even junk.
5. SO much lore. If I REALLY want to delve into it, I can.
6. RTWP for those who like that and TB for those who like that. Plus, gosh dang it, sometimes RTWP works better when you hit some fights with lots of grunt enemies.
7. Battles are, for the most part, pretty dang good with plenty of noncombat encounters so it's not just all fighting.
8. Plenty of player choices throughout the story.
9. DLC Through the Ashes was pretty fun, and it can be imported into your main story so you can actually meet characters from the DLC while playing your main game.
10. Items are unique and enjoyable and rewarding.
11. Lots of versatility with character creation. Yeah, maybe a bit too versatile, but the point is you have plenty of options and can customize your character pretty much like you want.
13. Party of 6 max, leaving room for custom characters and pregens.
14. Day/night, weather, creatures in the environment, consequences for sleeping too much that aren't overly painful but still meaningful.
15. Good versus evil storyline with plenty of gray mixed in that keeps you guessing who is really good or evil.
16. Balanced combat system - for the most part - with solid rules, classes, etc. Again, everything has purpose and meaning. Druids feel like druids, rogues like rogues, clerics like clerics, etc.

Sure, there are things I'm not crazy about, but I'm telling you, the more I play it, the more I'm really loving it. Larian. Come on. I'm still holding out hope you can put out a better final product than Owlcat with a truly solid system.

HAHAHA no. It's use every buff available and roll down enemies or get rolled. Even then Vavakia Vanguard says hi with it's 82AC.

Owlcat did "balancing" in the wrong way. Instead of a adding class levels along the template, they just added stats, buffs and levels. All that combined renders most spells useless in the late game stage.

Oh my god yes. Owlcat way of balancing is pumping up numbers to stupid levels and adding every buffs/status effects under the sun. At higher difficulty, combat is decided on how much you have meta game'd with stupid dips in random classes and the number of effects you can spam before each encounters.

Also, DLCs are terrible since they are all separated from your main playthrough. No I don't want yet another dungeon crawling DLC to add to the pile.

As someone who has put several hundred hours into the game, I'm curious about other people's experiences with it. I play on quite low difficulty, with a lot of stuff tuned down specifically so that things are just challenging enough for me to have use a decent variety of spells and abilities without things getting overwhelming and without having to use a whole bunch of pre-buffs. I didn't even start doing that until my most recent run , 600+ hours in, because I didn't really absorb how useful that was until that point. I'm genuinely curious why people play on higher difficulties when they don't enjoy them. Especially since WotR lets you adjust so many variables. I know I wouldn't enjoy the high difficulty with high-stat enemies, and I don't even try it. So I sincerely wonder why people don't just lower enemy abilities until they find somewhere that's more their speed. Unless of course finding their speed just isn't possible with the options available. But then, I also don't tend to care about game combat very much, and I think nothing of just turning difficulty all the way down and mowing through everything in real time for a while when I get tired of it and just want to go to the next story beat, then turn it back up later.

I, too, made the mistake of playing Kingmaker on Challenging to start with because I wanted to play "by the rules" instead of watered down stats, etc. Big mistake. Yes, the games are both balanced for Normal pretty darn well, imo, as I have had challenging fights but not overwhelming ones. Even the Red Dragon fight wasn't frustrating, and I enjoyed the fact that it wasn't just fight it to the death. There were things you had to do, steps to take, and different results based on your choices.

Anyway, I hated Pathfinder on harder difs, but now enjoying immensely.

You are right on every one of your items. Excellent list. And I totally second your overall sentiment.

Well, that's the beauty of DLCs. They're OPTIONAL, and not required for the base game. So you don't like these particular DLCs, don't buy them. I on the other hand, LOVE DLCs that are not intergral to the main game. I don't care for pure dungeon crawlers, to be sure, but standalone story DLCs are the best.

For me it is a missed opportunity, considering some paths only show up very late into the game and you barely have time to enjoy them. I want to enjoy my gold dragon for more than an act damn it!

I also don't get it. I CAN do every DLC in WotR via the main campaign except Through the Ashes which you do and then can import into the main campaign. So they've actually integrated them all into the main campaign in some way.

And as far as DLCs go, I liked Solasta's Lost Valley better than the main campaign AND it was sort of a part 2 to the main story.

I'm just saying, BG3 has some serious competition. I love it, mind you, but it is really lacking in a lot of areas.

Usually for DLC I like story DLC that happens after the main story (and with the main character and companions from the base game) because that way I can still play it even if I don’t feel like replaying the game.

However, I love BG3 so much that I would like any kind of BG3 story DLC, either during or after the main story!

Same. I'm a huge fan of story content.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous?

More like... Poopfinder... Poop of the... Unrighteous.

Amirite?

( I have not enjoyed Owlcat games so far :P )