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

I'm planning to play the demon path in my next playthrough so I'll see how it goes, but I will say in her defence, you don't explicitly start walking that mythic path until after you've been made commander and retake Drezen. At which point you've already shown yourself as possessing supernatural power, doing things no mortal could do in service to the crusades and you're really effective. A conflict to remove you would further strain resources in a way that would only further hurt the war effort after a point where it's been shown that they can't simply sit and rely on the wardstones indefinitely anymore. I admit that it's not a GREAT rationale, but I think it's a decent explanation.

Like I said, the bg3 story is much more exciting and draws me in. The more you delve into it the more it makes sense. People who typically have problems with the story are those who don't fully play the game and delve into all the details to fully understand what's happening.

W o t r plot is relatively straightforward and doesn't have a whole lot of depth. Same with King maker. With King maker, I pretty much figured out who the bad guy was right away in Chapter 1.

Meanwhile, in bg3 I have only played the EA and have spent over 600 hours playing the game and still don't know who the main bad guy is or what is actually happening. I have lots of theories, but I have a feeling that in many cases I'm way off base. That to me is a good story.

My take on the plots of WotR and Kingmaker are that yes, the actual plots are straightforward, but that straightforwardness is in service to you just being able to experience the world and events. The appeal of the game is the journey, not the destination. It's seeing how the mythic paths impact you and your experience, in interacting with people and quests and seeing how those change things, seeing how your choices can change things, and seeing how all the events and occurences change your character. In Kingmaker, the plot is, I would say, even more basic than WotR, but I think structurally it works almost better than WotR, even though I like WotR way, way more. Kingmaker is about being the ruler of your barony and the choices you make as a result. I would argue that the overarching plot is way less important than the small plots you get involved in each chapter, and the overarching villain really just exists to facilitate those smaller plots. You don't even really make moves to solve or directly address the main plot until pretty late in the game. But you know what? I FELT like a ruler when I played it. I felt like my decisions had weight and influenced people, and I was so excited whenever I had a stretch of time to just do nothing but rule and play in kingdom management. I feel like those games aren't interested in telling you a story so much as they are interested in letting you make a story. Despite not really being an open world game, I genuinely think it's a structure that should be the default for any open world game, because it encourages and rewards taking time to just...adventure and do stuff.

After my most recent playthrough of WotR, when I finally completed the secret ending for the first time, I actually went to the pathfinder wiki and read up on just what it means to The game felt so much more personal to me because it actually felt like MY story. Even playing two iterations of the same mythic path felt meaningfully different because I had freedom to play out the arcs of two different characters going down the same paths.

If that style of storytelling isn't for you, I'm not gonna cast judgement, it's not for everyone. BG3's story, I don't think will be for me (mainly because I think it's poorly told rather than because of any style issues, but that's another topic) but I do think that if we're going to compare the games, then it's worth acknowledging that they aren't trying to tell the same kind of story. BG3 is clearly more focused on the plot as the end goal in the way Owlcat's games aren't, and that's, if not the strength of the games then what I really am drawn to about them.

Er..... no you didn't, because the bad guy of the game wasn't even mentioned until the third act at the earliest, and wasn't met or encountered until the final act.

Act 1 sets "N" up as the antagonist - there's nothing to 'figure out' there, it shows you that directly and without question, as part of the story design. It's not hiding that - it's deliberately setting it up as the hook, and she serves that role throughout most of the game, visibly pulling the strings on the minor antagonists and other elements as the clear puppeteer. If you think she IS the actual villain in this story, though... well, you missed the truth.

The parallel is that BG3 has set up the Illithids and the Absolute as the bad guy in Act 1, and by the time we get to act 5 and discover that it's Thariz'dun, the Chained Oblivion behind everything, lots of people will no doubt be genuinely surprised (good for them) ^.^

P.S.: I also enjoyed the kingdom element of Kingmaker, but it works best with a few QoL mods fixes, it must be said. Though I loved that it was stat-efficient to fill as many non-essential city tiles as you could spare with brothels ^.^

Hi Niara nice to chat with you again. It's been a little while.

I find it interesting that you don't consider N as the main antagonist, but since you put it the way that you did I guess I can kind of see why.

You know, the more I think about it though the more I realize that it isn't much different from Shadowheart. I feel like in bg3 it is pretty dang obvious that Shadowheart is a Sharon, but I'm supposed to pretend like I'm surprised when I find out she is. So, I guess in that regard they are similar.

That's fair, and sorry for the snappish tone, It's late and I'm tired (again... I have to stop doing this)

I do agree that it was a bit frustrating that the characters spent so much of the game acting like they weren't aware that N was behind all the problems... the game makes it so patently clear that it can't be called a secret or something to 'figure out', but the characters, and thus your options, do require you to go along as if you aren't aware of this... yeah, that's a fair criticism.

I'm still suggesting the chained oblivion for BG3, only partially tongue-in-cheek (it actually matches Thariz'dun's usual MO to a tee); one part as joke, but one part because Larian's story writing arse-pulls so much already, and is so dedicated to the inelegantly over-epic throw-it-all-at-the-canvass approach to story elements that it's as legitimate a guess as any and more than some ^.^

I can see why you'd find that aspect of the plt to be really engaging, but I will say for my part that part of the reason reason the story doesn't work for me is that I don't feel like I should be caring about the main bad guy yet. Thus far I feel like the only relevant conflict is getting rid of the tadpole (I haven't been able to get into the underdark yet so maybe things change down there). Everything else that's going on with the cults and what have you feel too...almost tangential I guess. I can't help but think about it all through a lense of "how do I get rid of this tadpole?" I don't feel invested in the world at all so all the other stuff going on, I don't feel long term investment in it. And part of that is because thus far, it feels as though every plot thread we get involved in ties itself up. Outside of the tadpole, nothing we've gotten involved with is our problem unless we make it our problem. Once we have the tadpole out, there's nothing that's going to compell my character to keep getting involved in any of this. Once we've gotten rid of the tadpole we're not gonna have to worry about the cult. We have no real indication of how far-reaching they are on the surface, and as far as act one tells us, we can just leave and go back to wherever we came from because we have no idea where we're from and it may well not be anywhere close by. Nothing in act one makes me feel like once the tadpole's gone, I have any connection to anything in this unnamed area. In fact it feels as though the game specifically wants me to not think about this region once I leave. And I don't even have any sense of what's beyond this region either. The promise of the game is going to Baldur's Gate, but what's in Baldur's Gate? Why is it a place I should be excited to go to? The game hasn't told me.

With the Pathfinder games, I very deeply care about every place I am. I feel invested in its fate and the people there. It doesn't matter who the villains are or if I the player can see them coming - you know who the villains are in WotR explicitly from the start - because it matters to me to stop them from harming this place I care about and the people I care about. With BG3, once I've solved the problems going on *right now* I can just move on and not have to worry about it anymore. And at that point, why should this place matter to me?

Let me give another example from another game. Pillars of Eternity. In that game the framework plot is kinda similar to BG3. You have something wrong with you that will kill you if not solved, and in trying to solve it, your quest is intertwined with a mysterious cult that you have to fight against. I ADORE Pillars of Eternity because just from the word go, it gives me a world to care about. Even though I'm also specifically an outsider to the region there, I'm offered an opportunity to expand on why I'm going there. The village of Gilded Vale is kinda like this region in BG3, in that it's basically an opening region for you to explore for a little while before the world opens up to you. But the first permanent party member you meet there is a guy who's lived there his entire life pretty much, and his story is intimately tied to the story of the region. If you care about him, you care at least a little about the region. Also the people you meet there are just local villagers. Regular people who-crucially-live there and you have to deal with the intricacies of their mundane lives. You care a little bit about their plight and difficulties, and the big quest of the region really matters to them. You also don't realize that you're on a ticking clock yet, so you don't feel any pressure to rush as you deal with the local politics.

More BG3>WotR:

11. There's more than 1 way to skin a cat. I do like that encounters aren't just "There be bad guy. Kill bad guy. Move on." Most encounters in BG3 have multiple multiple ways to handle them. Even the Githyanki patrol, one of the hardest fights, can be handled without necessarily fighting them and/or there are various strategic ways to go about fighting them. For example, The Spider Matriarch can also be handled in a variety of ways. You don't HAVE to kill everything to even get all the loot. You can often sneak or talk your way around things. It's definitely more varied in BG3 than in either Pathfinder game. For the most part, in WotR, you go to map, you fight bad guys, you clear map of bad guys and loot, you move to next map location. One of the things I actually did like about the Through the Ashes DLC for WotR WAS that they started providing you more options to either hinder or actually avoid or kill enemies.
12. Multiplayer, and multiplayer where the characters actually TALK to each other about events in the game. Example: After the Sazza encounter, my custom characters in multiplayer start to talk to each other about the event and such. It makes the custom characters come to life more, like they're not just quiet minions that do your bidding.

13. Every character has a story in BG3. There aren't extras with no names and no backgrounds. Every goblin and myconid and such is someone. Shoot, even the animals have names and stories and personalities. I do like that.

11. I agree with you in principle here. There are certainly multiple approaches to most encounters, but I feel like the way BG3 approaches them is unsatisfying for me. I recently discovered Shadowrun: Hong Kong and that game gives you a lot of freedom to approach various jobs you take, and I found that way, waaaay more satisfying than BG3. For me it feels like a lot of the time the alternate solutions come about kind of by chance. Larian seems to want us as players to just mess around with the world and see what happens, and I personally prefer games where I can understand the outcome of choices I make. Larian's approach honestly stresses me out. I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter more deeply. Particularly your thoughts on BG3's approach to giving those options.

12. I get that a lot of people enjoy multiplayer and for those that do, it's an objective improvement, but as someone who does not enjoy multiplayer and often finds any sort of multiplayer experience kinda stressful, I can't help but look at multiplayer and see it as being responsible for several frustrating aspects of the game, like the control system and the inventory system.

That is true, but I don't think it is straight up good point to BG3.

What do multiple paths/multiple solutions serve? In a AAA like farcry it is to provide different gameplay options depending on player preference - generally it goes down to shoot or sneak depending in players preference. I don't think BG3 (and cRPG in general) achieve this goal. Really D&D is about combat and maybe conversations, depending on writing quality, but side solutions, stealth, environment are underdeveloped and should be used as side systems they are.

I do think multiple/paths solutions generally serve RPGs a different purpose - reinforcing player choices and actions.

• 
  You CAN stealth past this encounter because you invested in stealth
  
  You CAN talk down the enemy because you heavily invested in conversation skills
  
  You CAN talk to this corpse/druid and learn new
  
  Informarion because of class and spells you chose when lvling up

BG3 doesn't do that - so far player options aren't dependent on choices player made.nthey even go so far to provide speak to dead medalion early on, and plenty of speak with animan potions. Defeating major enemies through "cheese" is less of an option and unique circustance and more of effective strategy available to all. Also because choice are so plentyful they don't have much impact - everyone is likely to talk to corpses, so they don't hold valuable information, maybe outside one I can think of.

In other words, yes BG3 has a lot of choice, but I am not convinced that these choices are for the better.

Ok. So like, played some Kingmaker last night. Get to this random location and start exploring. There's a Nightmare. Fight the nightmare. Find a few random items. Done. What was the point of this location? No quest. No point. Just walk around and fight this tough flaming horse.

Another example. I go to a map location, roam around a little bit, fight a few demons, pick up a few random loots, and done. Again, no real point. It was just to fight some bad guys and get some loot.

BG3. Get to school building. Meet 3 ogres. I can either:

Another example. Phase spider matriarch. I can either:

I'm consciously reminding myself that I didn't ask this question to argue or convince you of anything, because I don't think you're wrong. I'm interested in broadening my perspectives and understanding my own opinions about these games. I think that personally, with a lot of locations in WotR in particular (It's been years since I played kingmaker) just exploring an area and seeing the story crafted for it is enough of a point for me. Like there's a small village that's not really relevant to any quest or story, it doesn't even have a side quest attatched to it. But it has a story of its own. It's a ruined town that's plagued by undead. Undead that I interpret as being the corpses of the townsfolk. So yeah, the only thing to do there is fight undead, but seeing the place itself is to me a reward on its own because it shows a level of care and consideration for world and setting, it helps get across just what kind of place the worldwound is. Pathfinder isn't the best example of this (I would say that's the pillars of eternity games) but still, I like that it's only point is to exist, that it's not inherently relevant to me and to the plot.

Meanwhile with the ogre encounter, I think that for all the options for how to tackle them, it feels...less impressive fundamentally. You could argue that the point of killing the flaming horse or the demons is to remove threats to your barony/the crusade, same as removing the ogres or the matriarch. And the Spider Matriarch is the same. All the methods you list out, to me still just feel like combat. I don't know about any gem there, and if you hadn't told me about it I'd probably just have avoided the spider in perpetuity because tome it's all just a fight to me, and a tough one that I really hate doing from the one time I got caught up in it. No matter how many ways you can approach the fight, it's still a fight. They don't seem like different solutions to me, anymore than positioning myself in different spots on the map in Pathfinder are different solutions. As for killing a thing that's plaguing the local area...no one's left there. Everyone except the druids are dead or just gone and we don't even really know why.

About 80% of the locations in the case of Kingsmaker, not only that they looked identical, but the only thing they had was a single fight with poor prizes. If they cut them out, the game would be even better because shorter.
In the case of WotR it is better, but still many locations are for nothing.
The difference is that with BG3 you actually have more than one option.

I don't want to do the work for the developers and imagine something they should do.

It's time for other game news again.

Solasta Warlock details:

https://www.solasta-game.com/news/167-dev-update-33-warlocks-so-anyway-i-started-blasting

I'd say Eldritch Blast is one of the few spell effects that BG3 wins on. I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing at first.

Chain pact seems week at just one minute per long rest. Needs more activations, or needs to last longer. Meh, I am planning to run blade pact anyway, so not going to affect my playthrough.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

BG3. Goblin encounter in Blighted Village. You enter. Talk to the goblin captain/leader. There are multiple ways the encounter can go. I can convince them I'm friendly (especially if I'm a drow). Thus, no fight at all. I can sneak into the village and avoid them entirely. I can sneak in and work my way up onto one of the buildings and fight them with height +2. I can cast a Disguise Self spell and become a drow or something prior to entering and trick them into thinking I'm friendly. I can just waltz right in and confront them and fight them. It isn't just a fight. It's a potential fight, but there are many more ways to handle the situation. You don't HAVE to fight, and that's the point. While exploring BG3 map, you encounter many potential enemies, but with each encounter there are many options besides just straight forward fighting. Besides having multiple strategies that you can use in combat - such as surfaces, throwing, shoving, blowing up environment things and causing collapses and such - it isn't just a hack/slash game. There's a lot more actual roleplaying involved that COULD result in lots of fighting if that's your play style. Nevertheless, Larian HAS done a good job at not making it all about a single style of fighting.

Pathfinder. Uses items and potions and scrolls and such WAY better, but it's pretty much all combat. Every encounter is, for the most part, combat. You enter this map and you fight your way through to the end. The variety in Pathfinder games, however, has to do with the varied items you have at your disposal. A ring of summoning to summon a specific kind of creature that can really come in handy, potions of various kinds that REALLY make or break certain battles, a Dino Animal Companion Triceratops that you can summon and add to your party, etc. So Pathfinder does better at making a more varied strategy with items and potions and scrolls and such while in combat while BG3 does better at actually having more roleplaying options during encounters that aren't all necessarily fighting.

Does that make sense?

It does make sense and I get your argument for sure. I would even say you're basically right, but I guess for whatever reason that stuff you're describing from BG3 just doesn't appeal to my preferred method of roleplaying. I don't care about combat very much in games, Sometimes I even turn the difficulty way down and just mow through mobs. To me, the fights are potentially enjoyable interludes between the real roleplaying, the places where I make big decisions that define my character, where I have conversations with companions and secondary characters I find interesting. I think that for me, the decisions we make in BG3 just don't feel important. They don't feel like things that define my character and who they are the way decisions in Pathfinder do. Most things that aren't conversation feels like something I the player figured out, not my character. Maybe I've just been spoiled by games like Pathfinder and PoE, where basically every choice comes in the form of dialogue boxes, so if it's not in dialogue boxes, it doesn't feel like it counts/is really in character. Because while I can easily understand a charcter seeing the ambush at the village and doubling around to ambush them, because there's no acknowledgement from the game (text boxes) it feels like an out of world thing to me, like a lot of the potential solutions to encounters.

To me the REAL variety in pathfinder games is in the decisions I make outside of combat, and the little and big reactions those cause. I played as a dwarven monk who worshipped torrag in one playthrough, and in an early scripted set piece battle, my character actually got blessed by Torrag (I'm not sure if it was because I was worshipping him, because I was a dwarf, or both) and my skin became like rock. In my most recent playthrough, I was a dhampir cleric of the goddess of death, Pharasma. And twice when I pushed back against undead, my goddess sent her sacred animal to show her approval and gave me a blessing that actually provided a stat boost. Also, a vampire tavern owner slipped me several potions of negative energy because as a damphir I can't heal from actual healing potions. That stuff is what REALLY matters to me in the game, and nothing BG3 has shown so far comes even close in my estimation.

Another Start Scenario:

The Nautiloid crashes in the mountains.
You and a few other survive without the Tadpole. (no Timer)
You find a village and must stay because the mountain pass is blocked with snow for a few weeks.
To repay and stay in the village, you slay monsters in the vicinity.
Over time (Quests and Sleep) the snow melt, the people assemble a caravan for trade.
You make a last Quest because in 3 days the caravan starts.
You come back, a XXX attacked the village. Village people and not used companions are kidnapped.
A ruthless organisation used the free mountain pass to invade because the Nautiloid promises treasures.
YOu fight against the rearguard and now follows the Kidnappers... Act2

Thats my aapproach and maybe more in Gray Ghost taste.