Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What games to play other than BG3 only?

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Now stay on Topic I have not said all things in that video. However on topic. Fact remains Hogwarts Legacy sells excellent! I do not have updated sales figures of current sales. As well her books sell well still. Thay youtube video was posted like 10 hours ago I have not posted that video before.
Fine I will order books and the game... but the game Hogwarts Legacy I will buy when I can get considerably discount. Why this? I believe the game Hogwarts Legacy will be very good to me, but not my top games like excellent in my personal subjective taste.

Games like my top taste example? Baldur's Gate III and I did buy BG3 already long time ago in Early Access. Now I am not saying BG3 was excellent in early stages Early Access, but gradually it has become better. They have added more classes and while not 100% perfect they have made BG3 more like Dungeons Dragons 5.0.

How is that on topic? o_O

I believe you've been asked and warned multiple times Terminator.

I'll give you a month to re-think.

Wasteland 3 is pretty good.

I don't like it when AI kicks people out of jobs. Voice acting, however, is criminally underpaid work.

A big pro for me in gaming is that characters might finally sound the same. I hate it when the German lines are OOC. Almost always, the voice actor brings an execution contrary to the og... or sounds just too different. Petty as hell, I know. I've been mad about it for more than half my life. Seems there's no growing out of it.

Just a quick question---

Would people recommend Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous for someone who was just "okay" with Kingmaker, prefers turn-based to RTWP, and doesn't like individual combat encounters lasting more than 2.5 hours?

I like what I see online about the choices and build options, but I am worried the length of combat and the overall crunchiness of the Pathfinder system might make the game too time-consuming.

Depends.
- Did you play Kingmaker in the later-added TB mode or in RTwP?
- Of the early-game (less abilities per character) vs late-game (lots of abilities per character) in Km, which did you enjoy more?
- What was your opinion on the Kingdom Management in Km?

If you played Km in TB, then WotR is more of the same: combats are length-wise designed for RtwP, so TB combats can be a slog.
In Kingmaker you get Mythic abilities, which makes your characters more powerful and more complex.
Imo WotR's Army Management was a much worse version of Kingdom Management. More intrusive, less fun, more time-consuming, and gates exploration progress. (This was as of like a month or two after release, so it might have been updated to be less terrible...?)

I enjoyed Km for the most part, playing through twice but never completing the final couple Acts because it just got to be too much.
I dropped WotR somewhere in the Act 2-3 range after ~40hrs playtime, as I just didn't enjoy the combo of 6-person party + RtwP-designed-game + Army Management.

I liked Km, but absolutely LOVE WotR. The quests and the areas and the companions are so much better. Even the strategic level of the game, the crusade and its management, are actually fun to handle (at least on the lowest difficulty setting for the crusade). But as for combat encounters, yes, as @mrfuji3 said, quite a few of them are tough in terms of both difficulty and quantity of enemies. But, if you are willing to (a) lower the difficulty setting as and where necessary, and (b) use RTwP for encounters with many easy enemies, then the combat can be quite fine. Lowering the difficulty is how I play the game, and always using RTwP because that's what I like.

Yes, but with some reserves.
Don't go past normal difficulty if you don't plan to minmax, else every combat will indeed turn into 2.5 hours chores.
Download a mod to pre-buff before each fights. PF can be overwhelming with the amount of status effects and you will be casting the same spells a lot.
Also put the crusade mode on auto as it is a terrible, unbalanced and time consuming version of heroes of might and magic.

In Kingmaker I remember that putting Kingdom Management on auto would result in auto-failing...Amiri's personal quest? Maybe also Valerie's...? Or maybe not auto-failing, but locking you out of and unable to get her sword..?

Is there something like that for WotR and crusade mode?

There is something important you can miss by putting it on auto, but it depends on so many other hidden factors that it doesn't really matter anyway.

Confession:
I didn't finish the game. I did the first 10-15% of it. I played it in turn-based but it felt the game wasn't built around turn-based and was going really slow and clunky. I don't hate RTWP. I love it in Paradox games and would take RTWP grand strategy games over turn-based grand strategy any day of the week. But for some reason with the need to select each character to manage with different moves and statuses, --and if you ignore or miss one, bad things happen-- RTWP makes RPGs feel very micromanagement-y for me. I know a lot of people like the more detail-oriented style of strategy, but I've always been more of a big-picture kind of person who likes things in macro-chunks (except when I'm playing economy simulators. Then I LOVE micromanagement).

I might give Kingmaker another go before getting Wrath of the Righteous. How do the characters and writing stack up between the two? I vaguely remember finding some of the characters in Kingmaker very annoying (not all. Just like 1-3).

I completely understand. If you do decide to play WotR (or even Kingmaker again), I'll second what others have suggested:
- play on an easier difficulty, so that you can just RtwP the normal and easier combats.
- either download a mod for pre-buffs OR try to have no melee spellcasters (or 1 if they're your main).

In retrospect, a big problem I've had with both my Km and WotR playthroughs are magus/eldritch scoundrel types, and even Paladins somewhat. Melee casters that require mirror image/blur/etc+ in combat, have to deal with possibly provoking AoOs, have lots of varied options, and just generally require a lot more micromanagement.

Ranged casters can kind of just do whatever using auto-AI, and you can just swap to them briefly for big spells. Full martials also can just be left to go ham on the enemy, maybe occasionally toggling abilities on or off or choosing a next target. It's those in-betweens that made playing in RtwP a chore.

(I can't really answer your question on comparing the characters and writing - I don't really remember plus I didn't get thaaat far into WotR. Roughly comparable iirc.)

Now that I think about it, something I liked a lot in WotR is how independent your companions are. They often participate in discussions, they aren't always tied to either your butt or a camp, they can even leave you for some times to pursue some goals they have. I hope BG3 will let them unglue from Tav and participate more actively in social events.

Same, minus the RtwP. While I despise Owlcat's business practice of releasing a broken game and only fixing it 1.5 years later, it the now fixed game is amazing. Right there next to BG2 in terms of quality.

In KM turn based mode was an afterthought and TB was something of a slog. It's much, much better in WotR In WotR I only play RtwP on the first maze otherwise it's turn based for the rest of the game.

Like @mrfuji said battle are really won or lost on how well you buff before battle so downloading a prebuffing mod will make your life much easier.

I would not recommend putting the crusade on auto. The super easy difficulty setting is quite fine, and you don't end up missing out on some important quests or having stupidly damaging crusade outcomes. Plus, crusade management in WotR is sooooooo much better than kingdom management in Km.

I hate pre-buffing as a concept. Period. In all cRPGs including the old IE games. Just absolutely hate it. So the way I choose to play these games is to never pre-buff (other than in very rare situations where a specific pre-buff is mandatory to get through the encounter) and to just dive right into the combat, but offset this by lowering the difficulty level (in WotR I play custom difficulty with "moderately easy" enemies). I also only very rarely use offensive spellcasting and limit myself in combat to melee and missile weapons and support spellcasting. This is my standard cRPG playstyle, and perhaps why I so strongly prefer RTwP and not TB.

Hell yes brother. Another reason the 5e system is better. Most buffs are either after long rest because they last until next long rest OR they are combat specific and tactical in nature.

Buffing 20 spells before every combat is bullshit. It's crazy that they even had a solution to this with the Sequencer spell - all they had to do was make it a UI feature instead of a spell so people could just slap a single button to get all those spells in place, but they never did this.

I used two mods to deal with those issues. First, a mod that allowed me to cheat in units for the Crusade mode, and then I just autobattled everything. I don't enjoy the crusade mode at all, and it's extremely tedious imo. It takes so long to do it properly. Second, an autobuff mod. I set all of the buffs I want (the mod has quite a lot of granularity as well) and one button casts all of them. It's so good.

If you build a big stack and use a mage general (Setsuna Sky for instance) then the crusade mode becomes fairly trivial even at the hardest difficulty. Seriously, Setsuna Sky is the real hero of the crusade. If they let him go on adventures he would curbstomp everything.

Re. crusade army battles, right now the game makes it possible to auto-resolve them when your army strength is two or more greater than the enemy army's strength. So if your army is an 8 and the enemy a 6, you get that "let them flee" option when you make contact with them and you win absoluetly with zero losses. I have, without any mods, been able to easily recruit enough units into my armies such that I have two armies, with generals, that auto-win my army battles 90+% of the time. Only rarely have I had to actually fight, and even then with an army stronger than the enemy such that it was pretty easy to win.