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

BG3 for graphics, cutscenes, animations, music. Pretty much everything that requires big budget production. Class balance. More (non mythic) class specific story content.
WOTR for fun and wild character builds. Functional power fantasy. The MC as a focal point of the story. Releasing in a state that isn't obviously unfinished.

I love WOTR to bits, but let's not go too far now.

WOTR was like BG 3: fine in the parts covered by Early Access.

Afterward it got fairly buggy. But what it didn't have is so much obviously cut content and loose ties at the end of the game. It felt much more complete, albeit buggy in parts.

No contest - respectfully - BG3 kicks WOTR into a cocked hat. I was so excited for it, desperately wanted it to be good - I had terrible RPG cravings with nothing new on the immediate horizon and I foolishly bought the deluxe edition in excited optimism. I then slogged my way through 70 hours of the game but sadly, the story and characters aren't engaging enough (I can't remember anyone now or what happens), the ruleset is used as cudgel to punish, rather than as a set of tools allowing the player to be inventive. The battle/armies mechanic is bizarre and out of place, and smashes what narrative there is into a pulp. The word 'tiresome' really encapsulates my experience.

Complexity and granularity aren't a substitute for good game mechanics or world building, and sadly I stopped playing feeling frustrated, bored and irritated.

My experience with BG3 is the complete reverse, am dreading the game coming to an end but when it does, I'll spin the party around and immediately start all over again.

Edit: why did my brain write 'encaptures' - no such word! Doh.

Firstly, I had never heard the expression "kicked into a cooked hat" before and I like it, kudos. Secondly, this is probably a taste thing because you cannot convince me that Wrath is not the better game. The only thing I think BV3 does better is graphic fidelity, and even then I found Wrath pushing the limits of more traditional isometric graphics and artstyle more exciting and enjoyable. BG3 at be more popular, and I appreciate being able to go into depth with the character creator (love a good character creator) but I will go to my grave saying WotR is the better game. And maybe I'm wrong! It's opinion.

For me BG3 does everything better except for not having shared inventory/encumbrance. That is the one thing I liked better in WOTR.

I think given that BG3 needs to work seamlessly as a single and multiplayer game, and a multiplayer game that supports party members acting adversarially to each other, separate inventories are necessary.

Encumbrance can be a bit annoying, but can you imagine the vitriol that would echo across this forum if characters could carry unlimited explosive barrels at a time?

Agreed - WotR has some very gorgeous and moody locations. Most importantly, I am not fighting the camera all the time, which is a real pain in multistory buildings in BG 3.

True! Just remove encumbrance, then. That way I can carry all my loot (and I don’t really care if other people want to carry barrels)!

I'm interested in a comment from Sven if he played Pathfinder - Wrath of the Righteous and what he thinks about it

I beg to differ... Swarm is non-sense... Just pray that your AOE spells did sufficient damage to kill them... And swarm can slip pass your tank blocking the doorway...

Just pure luck, no strategy... In Kingmaker, already frustrated with the swarm mechanics but Kingmaker is still acceptable to me as the swarm battle is not as common as WOTR. Thus only get frustrated for that few fights...

BG3 harpy is annoying to me too... But it's only 1 battle only.... Imagine if 10% of the combat in BG3 had encounters that can lure you and you can only prayed that your RNG is good to you, that's what WOTR is to me... Note for those fighting harpy, summon raven is very useful in that battle... And pray that they will not target that kid... Many times, I reload because that kid died...

Pathfinder wotr is a good implementation of pathfinder combat system. That is all. Ok, some good voice acting and music here and there. Everything else is mediocre-to-bad. Haven’t played BG3 yet, waiting for PS5, but i finished kingmaker and wotr 2 times each, and they’re buggy, average at best games.

No, they really aren't.
It would be more than enough to have separate inventories "by player" rather than "by character".
Which in practical terms would translate in an unified one when playing in single player.

You can mod it or download mods...

You can try https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/261.
I never use it before but descriptions say that it increases weight capacity by 4x

Encumbrance in WotR actually bugged me more than in BG3, though admittedly that's probably because of the way I'd set up my party. Or I might just have been doing it wrong. My party could carry vast amounts of stuff to the extent I never had to think about weight in the shared inventory, as I had two triceratops animal companions. But I also had three very weak characters (Nenio, Daeran and my PC) who couldn't manage to wear the armour I wanted, carry backup weapons or put the stuff I wanted them to have access to in their item slots, or at least not all three at the same time. I ended up giving them strength boosting items which they only needed for that reason and which ruled out other items that would have been more fun. And of course I could have boosted their strength on level up, but I resented doing that just so they could be properly equipped.

Admittedly, I end up juggling stuff from my weak BG3 PC's inventory fairly frequently, but at least she can wear basic light armour and carry the potions and scrolls she needs to use!

I greatly enjoyed Kingmaker, and most of WotR up until the later parts of the game. While the mythic powers are a great power trip I found having to cast 10 buffs before every fight a real drag. It just got to be too much micro-management, not so much in terms of inventory but in trying to manage spell loadouts and buffing. To be fair, I had similar issues with Throne of Bhaal.

Patch-finder: Wratch of the Microsoft Excel.

420 AC enemy (with 2 Touch attach AC) with 69 BAB.

I love it.

I love BG3 more, simple as.

"Oh you forgot to tuck your pants in that specific corner, in this specific arc of this specific quest?, well, no this particular ending for you!"

I mean, that's exactly the main reason why encumbrance should exist imo: to limit what individual characters can wield in combat. If you chose to dump strength (or not buff via magic items), then you are punished by not being able to carry much for protection/use/flexibility in combat. But in exchange, you have a higher [other stat(s)] that make you otherwise more effective in combat. Choices and tradeoffs.

Whereas moving loot around such that no party member is encumbered while traveling is a process that just takes time, and thus shared (non-equipped) carry capacity is a QoL feature.

This relates to one of my biggest issues with 5e - dump stats. If there exist some (many) classes for which Str has negligible benefit, that's an issue with design. Removing encumbrance (or, you know, allowing Dex instead of Str to be used automatically for all finesse weapons) without adding back a correspondingly powerful use for strength unbalances the system.

I like both, but WOTR feels more like a the Baldur's Gate games of old, due to a more indy-ish retro style, as opposed to AAA cutscenes/dialog in BG3. And WOTR has the option to play real time. So visually, WOTR is closer to the games which inspired it.

But in terms of gameplay progression, there is something about WOTR which irked me. Towards the end of the game, all the bosses had like AC40 or more. Nobody except pure dedicated fighters had a decent chance to land a hit. Pure fighters had to roll 14 and above to land a hit. Non or hybrid fighters had to roll a perfect 20. I remember the end-games bosses being almost immune to all spells and had AC40. So the spellcasters and hybrid classes were standing around whiffing all the attacks and only my pure Fighters dealing all the damage. Entering a battle without full buffs basically spelled your doom.

BG3 isn't like that though, and neither was BG1 and 2. I think the Pathfinder games took it too far in that regard.

For party encumbrance in WotR all you need to do is to make sure you have at least one party member who has an animal companion. Animals have very high strength numbers, and having even just one in your active party is all it takes to get more than enough carrying capacity. I usually had at least two animals (not even horses but rather dogs/wolves/boars), and never had an encumbrance issue.

For individual characters, it really comes down to a very simple rule: don't put anything other than light armor on any character with less than 14 STR. With light armor and weapons, my low STR characters never go over on encumbrance.