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

No I disagree with you. Skyrim is total shit for being roleplaying game. I bought it for 10 euro and it is the last time I believe Elder Scrolls games are good. The Skyrim graphics were not bad though not very good and I was delighted you could get mod to make it for adults only. Witcher 3 is roleplaying game with adults content even without any mods. Witcher 3 graphics is better then Skyrim graphics.

Anywya BG3 graphics is better then Pathfinder 2 graphics that I can tell even without playing Pathfinder 2.

This thread has become so messed up.
Pathfinder 2 sounds interesting, it is definitively in my list. As is Solasta. I need a break from BG3, I'm a bit burned out after all the playthroughs, I did. So those two games might come in handy.
And I, too, don't really care about what Google says. I watch gameplays and decide that way, If I buy a game or not.

I haven't played the beta, but if Wrath of the Righteous retained Kingmaker's worst traits (warning: a rant)...:

- the tedious overtuned combat being most of what the game has to offer (apart from perhaps the middle where you can get ahead of the power curve), testing not one's skill but how min-maxed their characters are, something that D&D/Pathfinder handles very poorly what with the spells, resting, and death implementation. The endless Wild Hunt battles in the final two chapters of the game are some of the most obnoxious, time-wasting, luck-based trash fights ever conceived for a CRPG. And while on the subject of being overtuned, having DC 20+ skill checks at the start of the game constantly and hitting as high as 45+ by the end turns it into a savescum fest. Who needs balancing, anyhow? My last 20 or so hours (Pitax and onward) turned for me into an absolute slog that I really wanted to end sooner rather than later, and yet it had the gall to keep going.

- the unbearably verbose and awkward writing that doesn't even manage to maintain consistency on characters (Amiri constantly switching from being very articulate to barely stringing a sentence together), with such a big emphasis on the characters' alignment rather than their actual personality (which, sometimes, is the only part of their personality - see Valerie and how dim-wittedly she behaves to fit into the Lawful Neutral archetype) that it's practically impossible to get attached to anyone, except for, personally, Jubilost (whose character, at least, makes the verbosity and overnarration make sense) and the DLC tiefling twins.

- the plot that is incredibly transparent and obvious but is sloooooowly spoon-fed to the player along with their character who remains clueless for about three times as long as they should have. Really, why would someone named "the guardian of the bloom" be responsible for something literally called "the bloom". Inconceivable! And having your main villain's motivation be "just 'coz, lol" is infuriating, frankly.

- the pointless and shallow RTS mode added on top that has all the depth of your average mobile game and requires about as much thinking, and devolves into an utter unbalanced nightmare at the endgame which is better just skipped by making your kingdom indestructible.

- the practically complete lack of character expression apart from, again, alignment - and romances. I played as a paladin first, now tried again as a wizard/cleric/mystic theurge as WotR draws nearer, and there's hardly anything different based on the class and deity. It doesn't affect your kingdom options (but guess what does - freaking alignment!) or provide any additional choices - at most you either can or can't detect magic, and that's about it.

- the awful quest design and scripting that made me waste a lot of kingdom stats because of the game locking story progress until you do a very specific obscure thing (Brineheart and dealing with Pitax influence).

...then I don't have too much hope for it. Solasta was rather disappointing as well, because it did nothing well apart from the ruleset implementation (and even there they screwed up here and there). All the while BG3 actually offers a highly interactive, reactive, and deep experience that goes beyond just watching your stats grow and optimizing your gear for the next dozen or so hours of endless grindy combat that amounts to always having all your spells active and hoping your rolls outsteamroll the enemies', which really makes me second-guess replaying Kingmaker.

Then again, I loved PoE2, which is apparently seen as some kind of mental deficiency by the more elitist folk out there. So what do I know?

I've finished one playthrough recently and luckily for me I didn't have much of an issue with most of the things you listed, except for the first point - questionable combat balance. The early game was rough, then I guess I "got ahead of the power curve" at some point and the game became fairly easy, and I had quite a lot of fun. I only ran into underleveled enemies for a while, and I felt this was starting to become too easy, then BAM the final dungeon, namely HATEOT, happened. I honestly can't recall a more lazy, boring, overtuned, but also long, dungeon from any of the games I've played, and I've played a lot of RPGs, from the old isometric titles to games like TES or Witcher. They made a couple of the most overpowered enemies and copypasta'd them a hundred times all over the 6 floors of the goddamn building. It was just senseless, mindnumbing hacking at thousands of points of HP of the same few enemies over and over, and nothing else.

This too. Dialogue choices are way too plain and generic, except for the ones tied to alignment, which suddenly become way too verbose and feel like too much info was crammed into one sentence. And all the "[Attack] I'm gonna kill you now cause I feel like it yeaaaah!" options make no sense majority of the time. Being evil doesn't mean you're a bloodthirsty maniac who just goes ahead and kills anyone who just starts a conversation with you, without even trying to find out who this guy is or what he's about. In the old BG games conversations with NPCs are colorful, expressional, and fun to navigate.

Also, the way the kingdom management progresses and how it progresses the main plot confused the hell out of me. The game bombards you with problems but at the same time wants you to rank up and do the few dozens of other events. I tried to reason to myself to understand the intention of the devs and what exactly I was supposed to do, but I'm still not sure on this.

To be more on topic, I don't know much about 5e or 3.5e, but I really hope 5e gives more love to magic and spellcasters in general, than 3.5e. Unless somehow P:K translated magic and spellcasters poorly from TT to the game, but I feel spells in general are nerfed to all hell in P:K. And they are boring too. Majority of spells are super bland, including the ones that are actually "strong". It's just the same few effects over and over, but with a bit stronger magnitude, and instead of single target now it is an aoe. P:K makes it feel like you don't need a spellcaster in the party at all, unless you just feel like having one for the sake of it. Why bother with spells when enemies have god-tier saves but brute force fighters can make 5+ attacks per round each dealing 60-70 dmg and critting for 200, and what's more: there's no "saves", no protection, against basic attacks. I think the spell system in P:K is just bad in general. I just hope BG3 makes mages dominating again, and not just because of a few one-shotting spells. BG2 has so many different magic effects, magical protections against just about everything, anti-magic spells, and useful utility spells.

You just have a taste for finer things

PoE2 was fine. It had some wasted potential in regards to the companions, but it wasn’t aggressively bad at much of anything outside of the main story being a massive railroaded sequel hook that might never pay off at this point. Complete sign of hubris from the writers or the upper management right there.

Josh Sawyer confirmed more than once that he also regretted splitting the major story focus on TWO narratives that conflicted with each other (namely chasing Eotas and dealing with the power struggle between factions).

I am not surprisedthat you got various titty mods for Skyrim and then felt underwhelmed by it as a game. Skyrim has its flaws, sure, but it's not that bad. Just rather light weight. And having everybody walk around with obvious modern day plastic surgery and aggressive makeup and photoshopped faces is not going to help the immersion one bit. It just makes everything look completely absurd.

As for the Witchers, there certainly is role-playing elements in it, but it feels to me that too much focus is placed on player skill rather than character skill. That's a trait of action games. Still, there is some character-definition in it and there is a fair amount of dialogue and there is consequences to choices. So I'm not willing to reject the franchise as "not RPGs", but they're not really the deepest RPGs either.

MMO's, yes, of course you'd be a fan. To my knowledge there isn't an MMO out there that isn't about repetitive grinding, with an absolutely pathetic story that has more problems than the last season of GoT. Being a tiny bit blunt, I'm occasionally hard pressed to find people that I feel like having a conversation with, so why would I then want to spend hours playing a game with bunch of of the people that I don't really want much to do with in the first place? Sure, call me antisocial, but if I wanted some clowns to run around and be randomly incomptent in my games, I'd probably be playing Counter Strike.

Anyway, it seems to me that the "RPG" of MMORPG is really to suggest that they're the same form of "role-playing game" as the Diablos, the Path of Exiles, and what have you. Meaning really just action clickers with player-directed stat upgrades and mindblowing item grinding. Imagine running that Boddhi boss lady 500 times for good drops, totally makes sense, right? Or maybe you'd need to kill Lord Firecracker 1000 times to have a 5% chance of getting Carsomyr, right? Awesomesauce!!! (No, not really). Point is, anything and everything that makes any game more MMO-like is, in my opinion, hopeless garbage that needs to take a quick hop into the fires of Mount Doom. Just my opinon, of course.

Cyperpunk 77, indeed a total flop, but MP is hardly the reason. There's no MP that could save that game. It has a railroading and janky storyline that really isn't about the player character, its environment lacks interactivity, and there's really not a whole lot of character development for the protagonist. The dramatic majority of quests in the game are random fedex or assassination jobs that have zero impact on anything. The few times it matters whether you've done a quest, it doesn't matter at all how you did it, whether you went full murder hobo or peacenik. The itemization scheme of the game makes exploration moot, and while the city looks glorious, there's really not a whole lot of effort put into designing with verticality in mind. There's rarely ever any reward to climbing up and it's usually not possible to go below.

And in action terms, the AI is rubbish, the enemies are all the same with marginal visual differences, the weapon variety is lacking, and CDPR completely failed to set up truly "epic fights", in no small part because of how much impact character level has. Overlevel and you're nearly immortal and just pwning like a madman, underlevel and you get one-shotted from a random gunshot in your general direction. Reducing the game's problems to just being lack of MP, bad AI, and bugs is selling CDPR short in terms of the rank incompetence on display. The game isn't just bad, it's like if a clusterfuck met a disaster that it really liked and produced a whole family of purified awful.

Getting back to this topic, WotR. A pathfinder game, meaning a game using a crack-snorting variant of the D&D 3.5E ruleset. I'm sure it does get a lot of things right and from what I can tell, it looks like it does have some more Baldurian design elements, but I really don't like 3E that much, and I very much suspect that WotR late game gameplay will either be quite doable, if you've optimized the everlasting hell out of your character and your companions, or it will be completely insane, if you've taken a role-playing approach and just picked whatever "felt right". And 3E optimization is hard. I say that as someone with a university degree. Trying to figure out all the nuance in all the race and class options and the exact right time to take this or that class for access to this feat or that class skill is more work than I put into some of my classes, back in the day. That's frankly more work than I feel like putting into a game that I'm playing for fun. The alternative appears to be the cookie cutter approach, which gets old real fast. Do I want that in BG3? Not really. Were BG1 and 2 like that? Not at all.

Frankly, most of these games shouldn't be an inspiration for BG3 in any imaginable way. BG1, BG2, PST, maybe a few popular books on how to design user interfaces, maybe a book on human-computer interaction, and that's really all Larian needed to focus on. They are well versed in everything else they need to make a great game, after all. Frankly, I worry some times that Bethesda managed to come closer to the originals with their first modern Fallout sequel than Larian is aiming to do with BG3. And to be brutally honest, I am very worried about all the MP nonsense that appears to be part of the single player experience that Larian has in mind.

Thank you for the reviews. Yes agree with you about Parhfinder 1 and Solasta bad games.
I wonder if Pahtfinde 2 is better then bad Pathfinder 1? Well I guess I wait for full reviews of Pathfinder 2.

It seems like we really can't have any topic about anything anymore without Terminator trying to monopolize it with his inane incoherent ramblings.

Every time I get home from work, I open this thread and wonder if I had somehow suffered a stroke on the way back.

I totally understand some of the others’ views on this now…

First things first, I POE2 is one of my favourite games. As it is the witcher series, planescape, wasteland series, the divinity series, tyranny, Neverwinter nights series, bg, iwd, fallout, temple of elemental evil, pillars of radiance, modded elder scrolls games, etc... or even south park: SOT

To like them is not mutually exclusive. They have more in common than... let's say battlefield 4 or league of legends. Pointless battles over a niche genre, like western crpgs only makes it more niche, and that causes fewer sales and less money to make more. Myself, I´m perfectly ok with having so many titles, or even more, even if those are not perfect for me.

I find it funny that 90% of the threads about WoTR are full of people just complaining about the things they do not like about the first game instead of talking about the second (the second game those posters did not even played). and the threads become just another thread about Pf:KM instead.

Second, I am not going to argue the reviews here ( some are a matter of personal opinion, some are so plain inaccurate it is not even worth the time to refute because anyone playing the betas more than 10 minutes will find it false)

but I find it puzzling that there are many people judging a game without even playing it.

There are some things that videos, photos or second-handed opinions simply cannot convey. Games are meant to be played, a stream, videos, does not show everything that a game will have. There are even cases that some things that seem awful or boring in theory work well when you are playing. Like the terrible camera of Mirror edge that causes vertigo to everybody besides the one that is playing, because it makes you feel you are really jumping between buildings. Or the 8-bit graphics of undertale or "to the moon" , that become part of the story itself.
Even the fact that you can finish a game without killing no one may seem boring to some, but it works in games like Alpha protocol or Undertale.
It happened to me that some games does not appeal to me for some puntual things; but after some time I actually try them and became one of my favourites, because some flaws may not be flaws, or simply may not matter if you are playing it.

The first Neverwinter, for example, I dislike the main campaign even remastered, but after trying multiplayer, the two expansions and the many custom campaigns it was a game worth buying and playing ( I have the impression that Solasta is going to be like that, it has a lot of potential and there are many people already making fanmade campaigns)

BTW there is something fundamentally wrong with a label like "RPG"
when you enter, let´s say steam or GOG and you find that games like "Devl may cry" "Baldur´s gate 2" "The witcher 3" "Disco elysium" and "Kings bounty" are in the same category -RPG-

This is a war we lost 20 years ago.
There are people who legitimately think Diablo 3 qualifies as RPG at this point.

Diablo 3 to me always will be Hack & Slash.. But yeah, these days they are called action rpg or w/e. The Witcher 3 is a RPG of sorts. Though you could also put it under action/adventure or 3rd person RPG. back on topic.. took the plunge and will see if pathfinder 2 grabs me more than the first one did. Doubt any RPG's out there will quickly replace the old Black Isle Studio works..

Well, yes.
The entire Witcher trilogy and Gothic are action RPGs, since they are games with "RPG framing" (branching dialogues, storylines affected by choices and consequences, etc) and an action, mostly-skill-based combat.
Diablo is a hack'n slash, as you said, since its gameplay loop is entirely focused of whacking hordes of enemies and there's hardly more than that.

The point is that you'd have a hard time trying to convince a general audience that they aren't all under the same "RPG" label. The nuance is not particularly valued outside of certain circles.

Preach, brother!!!

[Nice to have you back active here]

This is what makes Obsidian above the rest. They actually sincerely make an attempt to reevaluate and critique their own games and the approaches they have taken, and are not afraid to admit if something did not work out as they expected or where they were wrong about something or regret a choice they made. Self-criticism is big at Obsidian, unlike certain other peer studios that seem to be governed more by ego and hubris.

Close this thread already thank you or do something about rude Tuco and Saito Hikari. Many posters here talk here about other PC games and yet they only attack me.

BG3 vs Pathfinder 2? Easy to compare BG3 better graphics, support multiplayer, better trailers , nice story with movie effects, excellent music and no annoying strategy game to control an army like Pathfinder 2.

The only thing Pathfinder 2 has that is better right now it has more classes, races etc. and more levels (but I dont care about getting to max level 20) and if max level is 12 in BG3 at full release that is fine with me. Of course with an expansion BG3 could raise the max level to 20.
Well I have not played Pathfinder 2 so I know nothing about its camera control or any thing about controlling it.
Companions? Well since I have not played Pathfinder 2 it is very difficult for me to compare BG3 companions vs Pathfinder 2. Well OP had an opinon about that but we really do not know yet all companions of BG3.
It is possible that BG3 will get more companions example in Act 2 and/or Act 3.

However since BG3 is at Early Access we really need to wait for full release before knowing how much classes, subclasses and races BG3 has at full release.

Try to convince someone that JRPGs are not RPGs at all.
"But it has RPG in the name" they say.