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

I'm only near the start of Act 3, and so far I'm enjoying the BG3 plot more than WotR, though I confess that's probably more to do with the fact that I personally don't really rate WotR's story than that BG3's is blowing me away. And, to be fair, there are many good cRPGs - in my view BG2 included, much as I love it - with pretty weak main plots so it's not a dealbreaker for me in any case.

So far, I am ...


I'll wait until I've actually finished the game before making any final judgements, though.

Fair enough buddy, maybe I misread your post then. We're good. The game isn't remotely perfect for sure, but I do think there is a lot to enjoy here, and I think focusing solely on reviewers being what you consider overly positive is a bit reductive. There are a lot of normal players that feel the same was as the reviewers do.

Well, because a review is supposed to provide both sides, the pros and the cons, the things that work and the things that fail. But all the reviews completely gloss over the negatives, or even worse they will mention some of the negatives but then say something like "it's fine, this doesn't really matter." This is my point. Sure, if they liked the game, that's totally fine. But why try to downplay or spin the things they found to be negative? And then I could go further and say, well, surely there are also people, potential reviewers, who did have major issues with the game. Why not allow them the opportunity to write reviews? Just look at how that Eurogamer reviewer is being treated, because how dare they give only a 4/5 rating for the game. Clearly at least some people out there are looking to actively suppress negative views/reviews.

Also, page 100 on this thread. Yay!!

Ok man, I feel like banging a wall here. It is as it is, BG3 is the top rated game this year, along with Zelda and both will be competing with Starfield for GOTY. This is the reality, and no amount of bitterness from your side will change that. And this want diminish rpg genre at all. Obsidian will deluver a solid Avowed, I'm sure and Inxile was surprised everyone with Clockwork Revolution. CDPR will blow our minds with The Witcher 4 and later with next Cyberpunk. They'll just have more incentive to give us even the better game. Because they now know it can be done.

Okay folks, let's agree to disagree (again) and move on.

NGL Starfield gonna be crap because of Bethesda, like Diablo 4 is crap because Blizzard.

The crap part being over 1 million DLC and putting non refundable instant purchase buttons above the login button or whatever.

Bethesda went down the gutter since they started adding stuff like horse armour DLC to Oblivion, tiny meaningless stuff that should have simply been a part of the game anyway.

In general, review sites won't care about things like that , and will still rate it 20 shiny gold stars or whatever.

Skyrim wasn't even all that good, 1000x easier than BG3 or even Morrowind even on the hardest difficulty, no more custom spells, no more mark / recall, just fast travel everywhere.

Well yea BG3 has fast travel too, but then BG2 did as well but at least it said 'Journey took 16 hours' and fatigued you, or you got waylaid by enemies and must defend yourself.

Nowadays just click on portal on map and instantly go there, sigh.

Seriously, where the heck are you getting "bitterness" and "diminish rpg genre" from my posts? I have not either explicitly or implicitly said any such things!! What the hell?!

*** Ahem ***

How do you put up with us Queen lol

Yeah, I'm done. Thanks and sorry! Carry on, folks.

BG3 is a good game but hardly an anomaly, act 1 and 2 were really good but act 3 was a flop and the ending kinda meh, much prefer the slides in WOTR to three peasants with clubs and sickles killing 2 mind flayers. The graphics and animations are clearly better than WOTR and the voice acting is impressive for almost everyone, having everything voiced with a narrator is a big plus.
There are some really good quests and especially the companion quests. And speaking of companions they were all interesting albeit a bit too horny, sadly Karlach was the only one that felt out of place for me, her dialogue would have been awesome in Cyberpunk2077 but dind't really fit someone in dnd that just fought 10 years in hell.
The biggest complain might be the core system of the game, the ruleset of dnd 5e, my only experience with dnd are video games so no idea how it is in the tabletop or pen&paper, but compared to Pathfinder it felt like a dumbed down version fit for console or mobile games, tactician was way too easy, maybe they should add one more difficulty setting for people who want to spend more time with the battles and actually need to use some potions/scrolls etc.

If the game would have ended in act 2 with the defeat of Ketheric and throw in some more sidequests in the acts, it would have been a far better game. The whole second act is about ketheric, you can see his influence everywhere his whole family is across the map and you can learn things about his past his wife and daughter etc. the whole tragic shabang, was really good.
And then in act 3 you arrive to the coronation of gortash where he spills his whole plan in front of everyone and just let's you go instead of just killing you and take the stone right then and there, he clearly didn't need you because orin can't hurt him and he has the whole city under control to deal with the little bhaal cult to take full control but anyway, orin has a cool design but there is hardly any story, besides her mother and sarevok wanted to kill her as a child. It was just boring compared to ketheric, and weird that they didn't attack you after the events at moonrise towers. And yeah the netherbrain with its supreme calculations lets you climb it to see the grand design in action... the emperor instantly joining the brain when you don't give him the stones etc. and then the ending at the pier all feels so rushed and without much thought.
But still it's a good game and many criticisms are reinforced because of the massive hype around the game, i will definitely play it again in maybe a year or so and would instantly buy a dlc, but WOTR, for me, was the slightly better game.

With these games devs have to balance what works in tabletop VS what is annoying in video games.

Example in wotr you have spend so much time buff spamming every 5 minutes or you just get wiped out, and especially in the early game when buffs last for one minute. Bg3 you don't and many buffs last till a long rest. I would say this makes bg3 the better game because it's less annoying and doesn't waste your time.
Wotr is better story wise but bg3 could not offer that much detail and still maintain its high level graphics.
The resting system in wotr is annoying and consumes a lot of time, I hate it, bg 3 I can beat the game on like 10 rests. Again bg is a better design.
Wotr is also stupid hard game, with enemies with 80 plus armor class, even on normal half the classes are not viable, in this I think wotr is a poorly designed and often annoying game, I like it, but bg3 is better again because it's mechanics are not annoying.
FYI I have done something like 6 campaigns to completion in wotr on core or higher. I love it, but it's a chore.

I see your argument and its a fair one, but there are some points I'd bring up. First is that if you bear the game jn 10 rests, you're missing out on enormous chunks of character story. I won argue that resting in BG3 is more annoying because if you do it wrong you just miss stuff. No such risk in WOTR. Also I always find it strange when people complain about WOTR being too hard and annoying because of how much you can fine tune the difficulty. I'm playing BG3 on the lowest difficulty and still running into difficult fights, but with Wotr I can tailor things so any enemy is an utter cakewalk and I can play any class I like, without needing to bother about buffing. A lot of the time I just turn the difficulty so low I don't even need to do anything and I can just enjoy the story. No such option for BG3.

I don't think even REMOTELY that the combat in WOTR is better than in BG3, so I didn't really expected this to be a popular opinion.

And I say this as someone who:

- has his fair share of issues with how BG3 handles some things
- still likes WOTR very much

To be clear, I'm talking about a comparison with the turn-based version of the combat in WOTR. The RTWP is just unplayable trash for me.

I didn't even complete WOTR... I'm still in the process of completing BG3...

And no annoying swarm battle in BG3... And probably 10% of battles have swarms

WoTR is better in every regard except the acting of the dialogue to me. Swarms are fine if you know how to fight them. Buffing can admittedly get quite annoying except when using one of the mods that make it easier to execute. But BG 3 has annoyances like the camera, party movement, small party size and things like the absurdly broken shove mechanics that are just as annoying.

This made my think...If we got Larian, Owlcat, Solasta and Obsidian to build the next great RPG, how would the roles be distributed ?

Obsidian: World building and atmosphere/immersion. Music.
Owlcat: UI/Options movement system.
Solasta: Gameplay system.
Larian: Cinematic dialogues, story and sex. Sound design.

Thoughts?

The story in BG3 is rather weak.