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

I don't know about which claims and what do people claim, I can only tell you my experience. And it wasn't good. It might have been silly of me to choose a class that has mount, since it's a new mechanic, but I hardly see why should I skip a class the game offers merely because it is new.

I played the full version of wrath for about 50 hours so far, and there wasn't a single hour out of it where I didn't encounter a bug or two. Some are small and some are quest breaking path blocking or worse. And I just started chapter 5 which wasn't part of the beta and it fucking shows since the first (and otherwise excellent) scene I get is so buggy half of the time the characters which supposed to be on screen are invisible.

I don't expect the game to be bug free, I do expect it to be feature complete, yet somehow some of the abilities and skills are still blank or have placeholders like it's a bloody beta.

I don't know how should I deal with it really. On the one hand, owlcat is a small company that made an overall great game, and I'm sure six months from now all bugs will be fixed. On the other hand, this policy of releasing a half baked game and banking on the forgiveness of fans (which I assume most fans me included will forgive them) is just an unfair behaviour from them.

I really loved the way that inventory and Combat UI feels which is very surprising to me for the new pathfinder game.


In BG3 it often feels like I am fighting the UI and inventory.

I have around 12 hours now of gameplay on pathfinder but honestly it still feels lile I don't what I am doing. Yes I have tried both turnbase and real time and its still unclear to me.

BG3 feels much better when it comes to combat.

I can't comment on the story yet because I haven't finished either but Pathfinder seems to have vastly more content... sometimes too much and honestly idk if I have enough time to experience all of it in a timely manner.

BG3 might be going for a quality over quantity and I support them for it but one thing I think they should explore is the mythic path introduced by pathfinder where you can become something alien to your companions or something they admire. Grow with the world where your decisions matter.
I am talking about how just because you choose to do evil does not mean you kill all sorts of NPCs in the first act and deprive yourself of their story content for the next acts.
Rather choosing evil just puts you on a different path and allows you to have the same amount of story depth because I am not making graveyards everywhere.
Being just a murder hobo is soooo boring.

Maybe instead of murdering innocent people maybe I want to subjugate them? Or instead of killing both the bad guys and the good guys... how about I take over the bad guys? Early in the game we come accross some junior acolytes that follow our orders why not have the option of just abandoning the origin characters and going along with the Absolute's minions and their characters for another type of adventure.

Solasta, BG3, WoTr, POe, etc etc...Yet Im always back to Baldurs gate 2 for some reason. The writing, the art style, the UI, the atmosphere, the content, all the NPCs, the story...Yea you can be picky picky on this and that, but in general EVERYTHING is done so well. What a game, still in 2021.

I wish I could get into BG2. I still can't get into it because its mechanics are still a bit too obtuse for my small pea brain. Not a fault of the game itself though, just a personal deficiency of mine.

On the topic of bugs, there is something in all of this. I remember when POE2 launched, there were a lot of people talking about major gamebreaking bugs at various points in the game, though I somehow did not run into any personally as I pretty much marathoned the game in a week.

I remember hearing offhand that DOS2 launch was also a really buggy experience the further you got into the game, but I think most people had either forgotten or never made it that far into the game before they were patched out.

BG3 won't be an exception. It's simply the nature of cRPGs in general. There was already one major bug in people abusing the camera to jump out of bounds as seen in speedruns (and coincidentally the same exact thing happened in D:OS2 speedruns), and Larian's apparent answer to that in regards to BG3 was to lock the camera panning to a certain radius around the selected character. Unfortunately, said camera really struggles with large differences in elevation right now, which has infuriated me enough to drop my current playthrough and wait for the next patch to see if those restrictions are loosened a bit. If not, I would consider a mod to remove the camera panning restrictions to be essential if it continues struggling with elevation.

Having played a bit of both games, i can report I like them both, but both have immersion issues. The good news for BG3 is that there is still time to improve the design in that respect. Something BG3 already has going for it are the close up views of characters. The characters in the game, both companions and others, come much more alive if you can see their faces and their expressions. For both games it is still too early too tell for me, but I think there is also an advantage to be had for BG3 in the area of character development. Well designed characters will develop and evolve as a result of their in-game experiences.

An example of poor immersion in P:WotR was a big fight to defend a tavern. The fight itself was very nice, with wave after wave of incoming baddies (I would not mind seeing such big scripted brawls in BG3), but the preambule was horrific. We were told to prepare for in imminent attack on the stronghold. OK, that means keeping weapons and spells at the ready, right? Then we meet a messenger saying that the attack is about to begin. We race back to the tavern, glad not to be caught with our pants down. But inside the tavern we can casually buy stuff and even go to sleep for more than a day. Then it is us, instead of the attackers, that start the battle by selecting the appropriate dialog option. To me, that looks like very bad scripting.

I would chalk that up to a gameplay and story segregation thing, really. Larian would be rightfully reamed for having an encounter like the tavern siege without offering you some way to fully restore your resources beforehand.

Now that I'm playing with Daeran in my party more often, I am starting to notice why he was one of the most popular characters during testing. Starts off the game as a noble that doesn't give a shit about the world unless it can amuse him, then starts evolving into someone who is very much still selfish but legitimately respect you and wants to help you out as a matter of principle. After all, you came into his life as an interesting individual that got more shit done in the span of a few weeks than all of his noble friends did in entire decades.

It's also interesting to analyze why he treats Ember well. One could interpret his behavior as a realization that if he had lacked the social standing he was born with, he would have ended up just like her. The foils become more obvious under deeper scrutiny when you notice that Daeran starts off as the party's dedicated healer, while Ember with all of her positivity is actually in a class focused around debuffing enemies in horrible ways. Either way, Daeran is possibly one of the best representations of a neutral evil character in existence, but one can also argue that it's Ember and the rest of the WotR cast that enables this for him too. It's too bad that the actual player character's choices in regards to being evil are seemingly so lacking in nuance in comparison.

I'm less worried about bugs than I am about extremely questionable combat balance aka encounter design. Bugs are a given, and major bugs will be fixed so it's just a matter of time. I'm also playing just a plain rogue, so I'm even less worried about class-related bugs. It's the questionable combat balance that is what has higher tendency to ruin your fun, and in the worst case scenario, make you hate the game. Out of all the games of this genre that I've played, Kingmaker is the worst offender that is on a whole different league compared to every other game when it comes to this. I can't recall any other game with which I have to so often ask myself "What the hell kind of drugs were they on when they designed this?" Imagine being thrown into a fight in which you're surrounded by what, 20+ enemies, among whom are 3 Defaced Sisters, without giving any sort of hint to players that there may be a fight ahead, meaning that not only your team are totally unbuffed, but there's a good chance that they may even be fatigued from all the traveling. This is exactly what happened in my first playthrough. I decided to play their game - no prebuff, no rest - and took me a good while to win this one. It was a brutal fight at the end of which all my party were dead except for Valerie who had a ring that did constant aoe damage to nearby enemies.

I certainly could just play on easy until the game is in a better state, but I honestly don't want to have to do this for my first playthrough.

If segregation of gameplay and story causes strange disruptions of immersion, then I would call it bad design. Just like sending things to camp and teleportation from everywhere in BG3. If it is not possible to do away with such goofy gameplay mechanics, then at least provide an in-game explanation that is not too hard to believe.

In case of the tavern defence fight, just having the warning to be prepared and the messenger would have been enough. The enemy waiting for you to become fully rested is plain silly. If you were to arrive at the scene with the assault already underway, or just beginning, the thrill would be much greater. And if you came underprepared: shame on you for not listening to warnings.

I've found the actual fight immersion breaking as well. The paladin and her fighters are coded to remain in place, while your party is supposed to run around killing the alchemists. Imagine a battle scene in a movie where the side characters are standing still, not even daring to take two steps to stop an enemy from destroying their defenses, because they all wait for the main character to arrive and do the job. And the leader is supposed to be a paladin?

That was a strange experience, yes. I also expected the paladin´s wife to show up, by the way.
But my in-game explanation was that the paladin employed a military tactic of holding a solid line of defence at a chokehold, no matter what happens. It is a tactic that can easily be attributed to a paladin´s conservative, inflexible and narrow-minded mentality. But it would have been nice of her to inform us of her battle plan!

Then they should have coded her as able to move within a radius that covers this chokehold. This would have worked as a defense tactics. At the moment it doesn't, because she literally stands there if the attacker is out of her reach, even if they are very close. If the barricade is destroyed, there will be no chokehold to hold.

True. In my game I was unable to observe her behaviour after a breach, because the line held. The minotaur happened to slip over a conveniently placed patch of grease.

I do have to argue this - I have ran into at least two show-stopping bugs in my playtime, one of which is now preventing me from even continuing the story at all. Full crashes trying to enter Gwerm's Mansion in Kenabres, and then of course constantly crashing attempting to load the Drezen seige. With any luck, the fix they were promising in two weeks time to these x% load crashes will resolve them, but they are still quite disabling. The latter has certainly rained on my parade.

This is not taking into account a copious amount of gameplay and class-related bugs. A simple look at the bug report area on the Owlcat forums will show that there are still quite a few things needing to be ironed out, though no one expected perfection. And from what I've heard of Kingmaker, this is certainly better - so they are learning and improving! Which is great.

I was not expecting bug free, of course - not with how huge this game is, the dearth of options available to you, etc. I was at least hoping there wouldn't be anything to cause complete crashes that effectively halt your progression of the story, though.


Well, no one is forced to take the murder hobo options if they don't want to.

Of course it's lazy, because the aspect of being a murder hobo in a tabletop game is one of the laziest and least interesting approaches to playing D&D/Pathfinder/etc. I genuinely do not expect any company making a D&D/esque game to spend all that much time or thought on a murder hobo route's writing, because there's little and less to write for it. It's there for the few types who enjoy it, but at least in my time playing up until the Drezen seige, I saw plenty of evil-coded dialogue options that were fairly subtle or at least pragmatic, a little bit of being a jerk, and overall pretty good options to lean more towards the selfish and 'evil' side of things while not just being a lazy caricature who murders anyone in sight.

Now the reactions to it, I can't really say much about - as, at best, I would take quite neutral options at the lowest, and good options most all other times. It's simply how I play. But by no means do I think their evil options are lacking and shoehorned into being a murder hobo - that's simply one option. The laziest and the easiest.


As far as I recall, my bugs in Deadfire were the result of apparently managing to do quests out of order, which mucked something up in the code. It effectively locked me out of doing the ending I wanted (the Huana), which was incredibly disappointing after I'd poured so many hours into the game, and the things I had apparently done wrong to cause the issue were so far back that I'd effectively have to replay the whole thing again.

I still adore Deadfire, if not quite as much as POE1, but yeah - some of the bugs it still had even so long after launch were pretty crippling at times.

i don't see the murder-hobo option as evil really, it's more just an option to kill whoever you want for whatever reason you decide. You could be role playing that you just feel something is off about someone and attack them (right or wrong). I like that it's in there, even though I've almost never used it (Regill and Hulran aside).

As for bugs, i've had some for sure, but nothing game breaking although I haven't gotten to Drezen yet (school started)

This I cannot question because it is clearly a sincere post that is also well-stated and balanced and reasonable. Same with @MarbleNest's similar post. All I can do is to ask you guys specifically and others like you, why the need (compulsion?) to play a new game immediately upon release? WHy not simply adopt a gaming rule for yourself (as I have done) to wait a few months before diving into a new game? This is very much a sincere question.

The game still has time limits like kingmaker or have they let it go this time?
Besides, I can see that they managed to make even worse mechanics than managing the kingdom.

I unfortunately ran face-first into one of the issues that burned me out on 3.X with Wrath of the Righteous and it quickly soured my enthusiasm for the game... I expect to go back to it and have fun, but was irritating to run into again.

Basically, Pathfinder 1e sits on this weird boundary between "let's create mechanics to allow for players being able to create a wide range of character concepts" and "let's make sure that when we build a character option that it is fun in practice and not just cool on paper."

In this case, the dhampir restriction of being harmed by healing magic. I understand the logic behind this, but it makes playing the concept a headache that just totally undermines option's existence. "You can have this option, but it's really a horrible trap."

3.0 and 3.5 had a lot of options like that, some of which I suspect were deliberately designed that way. Pathfinder feels like it did a valiant effort to remove some of the deliberate traps (Fighter is very fun in PF1e, especially with the Combat Stamina optional rules at which point you feel a bit like a martial caster) but then stuff like this pops up.

I hear PF2e handles it better and I had been hoping WotR would be PF2e so I could try out those mechanics (what I've seen on Streams did not fill me with enthusiasm, it felt a bit like specialize in a task in order to achieve basic competence or just be useless at it, and a lot of treadmill DC increases where you have advanced on paper but haven't actually advanced in practice).

I know 5e handles broad concepts better than PF1e did... (the disappointment of the yuan-ti race not-withstanding) but we're unlikely to get options like the dhampir or reborn in BG3.

Undead in DOS2 behaved in the same way. And like DOS2, undead in Pathfinder are healed by a different way, negative energy spells and effects. Seemingly why the game provides a lot of inflict wounds scrolls, or at least I'd think that's why. But it really sucks if you have party members like Seelah using Channel Positive Energy healing effects without the Selective Channel feat.

Life-Dominant Soul worked for that, I just expected it would solve the issue in general and being unable to use healing potions was really annoying.

You can use inflict wounds scrolls as potions ( I have like 50 of them in my Aion Playthrough), or make inflict wounds potions (You do not even have to learn to do that, your benched party members could do that for you in the camp). In Wotr you can even use potions in your party members (check the arrow over the potion) so other characters could also heal you.

I played a Dhampir in the beta, and I found it very useful. The enemy clerics/cultists and the Vermlek type of demons are adept at using channel negative energy against the party, and dhampirs are not only immune, are healed by it, so they do well tanking against that type of enemies. That also doubles against all types of negative energy attacks, like the vampire touch of the nabassus, etc

I didn´t find any enemy that attacks with positive energy, so the only problem is being damaged by your own party. You do not even have to make your clerics/oracles/pallys/etc learn selective channel, there is the feat you said: Life dominant soul.
If you do not want to pick a feat, can also pick classes with the death domain ( inquisitors, clerics, divine hunters, druids, etc), at level 8 you are not damaged by positive magic.

That also works with the vampirism or lich curse of oracles and stigmatized witches , which also turns you into a semi-undead.


They are not only healed by negative energy, but they are also resistant to death magic , which are a very common type of attack in Wotr: enemy cultists, templars, necromancers, succubus, etc use them; and they have the blood bite, which is basically a vampire touch spell for free, that you can use in living enemies or corpses, after the combat finishes. You can even pick an undead horse that also gets healed by negative energy. Thematically it's a great class to play, I had a blast in the beta.


If I remember correctly the tavern defence, the Pallys of Irabade are protecting the door of the tavern with the civilians inside, making a shieldwall there. There are also allied men-at-arms fighting with you in the yard and archers shooting at the enemy hordes from the roofs while you are fighting the demon and cultist waves.
They do not have the manpower to do it all by themselves, at least that is what I understood.

IMHO it makes sense. I mean, it´s an RPG game; would it be more immersive if the fight is over when you arrive and you do not get to fight? Or if you arrive tired and without spells, because you cannot rest, like the fight against the defaced sisters in Kingmaker?

Ed: About the start of the battle, if you You know about the attack so you can warn Irabade about it and wait in the tavern until the time to repel the enemies. You do not even receive the messenger´s warning.
Also if you the number of named enemies is significantly reduced. So you have several roleplaying ways to make the fighting different.


The tavern defence had some more improvements since the beta. Now the UI let you know the state of the defences and structures of the tavern that you have to defend, so you now know if the arsonists are destroying them on the other side.
Honestly, I found the tavern defense one of the best parts of the chapter 1, roleplay and mechanically-wise.