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

He got temp banned in a different thread and the mod made it explicitly clear that derails like this were why, so I don't think you'll need to worry on that front.


My view on the story is that it does what it does rather well. The real selling point is the interactions between the companions and supporting cast anyway. A fun party drastically elevates the experience, and I'm evidently not alone in the belief that WotR has among the best cast of party members in existence. DA:O for instance would have had naught more than a generic excuse plot at the end of the day if it weren't for Alistair, Morrigan, Leliana and company.


Saves will most definitely be wiped by full release. Or at least existing saves will be considered corrupted. Consider that even BG3 essentially wipes saves after almost every patch thus far, even though the opinions on the impact of each patch widely varies. I think the only cRPG in recent memory that didn't wipe saves was Solasta, and it's several magnitudes far smaller in scale than BG3 and WotR.

100% agree. But if we want to judge the game fairly, the problematic nature of the story should be mentioned. and it's not just that it's generic. there are some problems with certain plot threads.

however, even so, if we are discussing comparison to bg3, WotR takes this game effortlessly

WARNING in SPOILERS about BG3 main story plot do not read if you do not want to:
That said I have a bit difficult to estimate BG3 plot from Act 1 Early Access only.

Well here is my question about Pathfinder 2? What if I do not want to control a freaking army at all? What if I do not want to do that since
A. If I really want to play a strategy game then I can play another game.
B. I want to feel this like an adventure and playing Dungeons Dragons and not control some freaking army.
Can I from Pathfinder 2 settings choose no Army Campaign? I guess not there you go...

Well and then those freaking annoying Mythic spells in Pathfinder 2.
You know what in my country I could join DnD Pathfinder Pen and Paper group. My first question would be to GM do you have Mythic spells? If yes then my answer sorry do not want to play.
Mythic spells if not some usual core book that people buy when they initially buy Pathfinder Pen and Paper. It is an extra optional book... some like it and I very much dislike it.

Seeing people praise WotR's writing after having just abandoned Kingmaker on account of a hidden timer screwing me over with a character I wanted to have around and not having an extra save, but having already, um, appreciated how freaking awful its writing is throughout sure is a sight and a half.

Is it actually good, or are people just kissing its feet to spite BG3's defenders? Because I really, really doubt that something anywhere near compelling could come out of the writers who worked on Kingmaker's plot and characters. When the premise of you having a kingdom and having an army and such amounts to it all not doing anything in the plot (apart from helping to bypass one final overtuned skillcheck), and you effectively remain an adventuring schmuck who has to do everything themselves throughout the game, it shows that it has no legs. And it's rather difficult to feel anything about the Evil Disco Ball and Nero-wannabe and pretty much every other antagonist (Nyrissa especially, with whom there are random hints of your PC being infatuated with her, which appear outta freaking nowhere) when they are barely characters who don't exist outside of their specific chapter (apart from the Evil Disco Ball, but his motivation is basically non-existent, so it's a main villain with all the nuance of a child throwing a tantrum).

If Linzi was meant to be a stand-in for the writers (a specific writer?), then I say it's a perfect fit, given how bad she's at her job and how irritating a character.

i find Kingmaker gameplay design really well thought out. it's punishing due to their design especially if you don't have an earlier saved games like vordakai's tomb. Kingdom Management take times to learn and understand and actually there's some difficulty or challenges in it. i would say it involves in alot of trial and error. there aren't really many helpful guides out there. also the Kingdom Management is deadly. you can easily waste your time without doing much of anything (progressing your party, leveling and upgrading them). when the timer hits, it's only about you able to beat the encounter or reload to earlier saves to prepare for it.

while personally loving this, many casuals may find it very punishing and unforgiving. i would say if owlcat maybe and perhaps do a hard saves checkpoint for every critical chapters (which is non deletable saves). then players may still can go back to the latest chapter checkpoint before it's really Game Over.

there are plenty of time (hundred of days) before the timer kicks in for each chapter. it's a balance between the kingdom events and party leveling and progress.

they make it more easier with Wrath of Righteous. i love the crusade battle. it reminds me of Heroes of Might & Magic. some people here dislike crusade battles. I think there are only few forced major crusade battles. also if not mistaken there's a difficulty for the crusade battle if anyone don't enjoy it.

That's a weird conclusion to come to.

Kingmaker's story and pacing was... Unique, for lack of a better descriptor. But there's a reason why there's a major consensus among beta testers that the WotR companions are much better written then their Kingmaker counterparts, with a couple exceptions on both sides. The actual story could be hit or miss based on how much people care for the source material, but the companions are great enough that they absolutely elevate the experience for me. I didn't really have that feeling with Kingmaker.

Real spite would be bringing up D:OS2's writing and wondering why people would expect much better from BG3, but it's a useless exercise for the purpose of this thread. Both WotR and BG3 are big improvements over their predecessors in that department anyway. Granted, these days I have similar feelings about things like kingdom management and crusade management as I do with the origin system. It's not much of a secret that the crusade management in WotR has been kind of an afterthought, it was just merely functional until beta phase 2 started adding some depth to it. Though I still think the origin system is the worse waste of resources by far.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next Pathfinder game doesn't have some sort of side management system, because I get the impression that the devs may have realized that they might have bit off more than they can chew with the crusade system. If it's based on Iron Gods as most are theorizing now, I don't think they can fit any kind of management system in that campaign without coming up with a concept that straight up didn't exist in the actual modules.

in regards to BG3.. i think the only noticeable changes personally were the visuals and it being dnd5e. apart from that i don't really see any more different than being a DOS game. they have close up dialogue system much like witcher 3 or dragon age and nice visuals / facial or appearance. apart from that would be the Forgotten Realms settings. but even that larian failed in making me having the feels that i'm in the Forgotten Realms. a very big pity i would say.

also comparing to wrath of the righteous, i seems to experience significant changes visually from beta 2 to beta 3. i kinda impressed in that. but problem with owlcat they are still back to square one with being how buggy the game which strike similarity like the first pathfinder kingmaker.

also the companions in wrath of the righteous.. i love most of them except a few which.. i think due to gameplay reason and my party composition.

i rate wrath of righteous 8.5/10 so far .. if they iron out the bugs i would say it's a 9/10.

i also dislike the nerfing of the ranger class which is against the rules. but i understand it being significantly more powerful due to the abundant of demons in the game.

I am hoping that feeling changes as soon as we reach Baldur's Gate, personally. The Pathfinder games have made me legitimately interested in the setting enough to theorize where each subsequent game might take place/which modules they might be based on.

BG3 so far just makes me want a Waterdeep game, and only because I'm also part of a tabletop group running a campaign taking place around that city too, along with sheer bafflement at how there isn't a recent cRPG taking place there yet. Though it's clear that the setting of Act 1 doesn't really lend itself to building the world, it's only really focusing on the immediate area and the people already there. Reaching the city of Baldur's Gate proper should change that quite a bit. Unless it's something like Arx, which was rather disappointing in scale for an area that was seemingly hyped up throughout all of DOS2.

Now that I think about it, I remember really liking Aleroth in Divinity 2 (the action RPG before the Original Sin series). The entirety of the expansion took place within that city, and I remember it was a large and visually interesting city with a lot of fun quests throughout. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if I was one of only a handful of people on this forum today who actually played that game and its expansion.

I am anything but a casual (in my opinion, at least), and I found it unforgiving regardless because it's not a well-implemented mechanic. Kingdom management is much too random and in the late game can become impassable not because you're bad at it but because your highest stats have success chance of 30% or so against the checks it throws at you. I've beaten the game once on Challenging and the part where you are bombarded with ridiculous unfixable hits to your kingdom stats (Pitax) that can ruin your game unless you safe-scum a lot or just switch it to cheat mode is NOT well thought-out. Neither are the late-game fights where you are drowning in enemies that have godlike stats and a lot of DR/resistances. The Bald Hilltop, on the other hand, was not a problem at all. It was more of a nuisance and a really weak plot anchor rather than an actual challenge.

I used to stand up for it back when it was being bashed for being unplayable on release due to how difficult it was at the start (The Old Sycamore and such). Having finally played it to the end after two enhanced editions and a myriad of patches, I, in retrospect, don't really agree with my assessment back then. It's a design disaster for the most part, and unless they intended for the players to min-max to hell and back, I see no way to explain why the game has an abundance of enemies with ridiculously overtuned abilities (+8 to AC from Dexterity on a random cat is insane) and that can hit you so reliably that any AC value below 30 in the early-to-mid game is already too little for your frontliner. It's not interestingly challenging, it's a stat bloat through and through. And people complain about how BG3 does that, when that one troll in Kingmaker's penultimate chapter was almost unhittable by my divine hunter PC with a +5 weapon, 26 Dex, and a bunch of active spells without casting True Strike on top.

All the class choices and multiclassing possibilities are nice, sure, but how many of them are actually functional against what the game throws at you and how many are just plain garbage? The alchemist is pretty much mandatory to have, as spamming difficult fights with force bombs saves you a lot of trouble (tactics, planning? Grenade spamming!), while someone like the crusader can neither do their cleric duties right nor hold their own in melee and ends up hampered in both ways. Something like the magus is a fantastic concept that is fun to play and build - but they melt in melee and can't hit crap without constantly using their weapon enhancement ability because of the lower BAB, so I had to scrap my very first playthrough because I kept dying to bandits and start with a regular ol' fighter (well, Aldori defender) instead.

As for the writing, maybe it is indeed dependent on whether or not you like the setting to enjoy it. I can't really take Golarion seriously, though. It took the edgier/more nonsensical parts of the D&D settings and cranked them up to the max while still clearly just taking a lot of the concepts and using them as their own. The pantheon alone sure is a... collection of extremes. And as far as Kingmaker specifically goes, it really makes you hate their version of the fey with a passion. Will-o'-wisps especially.

About gameplay - I'm so glad you said it because I am pretty casual and in some circles it means I can't have an opinion on the gameplay XD. But yeah I agree, especially when it comes to the fact you have millions of classes, but if you only count viable ones you have much less, and even if you can make a less great class work, you have to be super powergamer minmaxing to do so. About stat bloat I also agree, and that's why I call it buffinder. If that is too much annoying for you to play the game, you're out of luck because wrath of the righteous is the same.

About crusader system and kingdom management - unfortunately I feel like the crusader system is not much better. Fortunately you can easily remove it from your playthrough.

About story and writing - I generally agree with what you're saying here. However, I think the owlcat writers are much much more better than the TT buffinder writers are. That means that most original content in wrath of the righteous is amazing. I really really hope owlcat next game will be original, or at the very least not based on some existing buffinder adventure. At the very least, while these extremes you talk about are still in the game, the overall writing is still a big improvement.

The largest issue with comparing bg 3 and wotr is the systems. BG3 is a 5E game so the mechanics of the games are different at a core rule set vs Pathfinder which is 3.75 rule set.

The rules in 3.75 were not as balanced class wise. Saving throws worked much differently meaning certain mechanics at high dcs can be difficult for characters to handle vs 5e where those mechanics are not necessarily game breaking instant death is not necessarily going to be instant death in 5e vs 3.75 where its going to kill you. Barbarians / Paladins in 3.75 are drastically weaker in a lot of offensive perspectives than fighters. 5E shored this up significantly. 5E generally your not going to find a mage out damaging a melee character in single target damage but instead trading it off for aoe and utility. There are still some weak points to balance in 5E but its significantly less noticeable compared to 3.75 mechanics. Powers for leveling all the way to 20 in one class are also significantly better than 3.75 where multiclassing was much easier to work with as a lot of classes were very heavily front loaded so that you got a lot of the good abilities early out so deciding if you wanted to go all the way to 20 or not in a class was much less difficult of a choice. Part of what enabled a large amount more with customization to characters. There is a lot more focus on break points of power levels in 5E when choosing to multiclass stopping at the wrong level could drastically decrease your characters overall performance.

Mythic paths I think would have been much better as a I hit level 20 now there is this to explore aspect as it is traditionally in Pathfinder its something for after you already powered up like a beast. However illithid mind flyer powers are along the similar lines with BG3 so you cant really say that bg3 doesnt really add above normal power levels to characters.

Story line wise both games are decient for the story plot but its a matter of perspective I personally enjoyed watching other playthroughs more of pathfinder with some good narration than BG3 but that was dependent on content creators and the fact that WOTR choices felt more impactful on the way the story was going. Its one of BG3's current weak points while there are alot of choices present most of them are negative if you chose evil or as if the choice doesnt really have any direct impact and that your actual choice to kill or not kill an npc is really more impactful than any real dialogue choices in a lot of cases. It really feels more like a punishment than a real choice if you don't follow the path of a good guy in the game in general. The best arch of good vs evil choices being impactful with changing how the story actually unravelled was probably the SwTOR mmo game where everytime you played through the game it felt like you were playing a completely different story based on your choices. While it didnt drastically impact the game the story felt like you were going down a different path. BG 3 it doesnt really feel like your story changes that much with alot of the current existing choices outside if you kill certain people certain options are just not present.

It also again feels like picking any evil path is punished. If anyone can give me a positive benefit to choosing an evil path that benefits you more than choosing a good path I would be in shock and awe. PS different cinimatics dont count. You lose out on party members. You lose out on items and you dont get anything to replace the losses at all. If you chose the goblins even you get access to less shops and item crafting in general. Where as even if your the good guy in most cases you can pick pocket anything you would have lost out on for being good. Its just really not impactful. There are no particular rewards for doing an evil path or quest options really that truely expand evil play throughs.

WOTR you give up the good guy path you can take the path and get different bonus powers / benefits. You can benefit from evil items that give you particularly good bonuses in place of good items you cant benefit from.

Thank you for the tip. Considering the likely bug-a-thon it'll be on release, giving it a year or so, just like the original, and picking it up on sale is probably a good call then.

My main gripe is not even with the stat bloat but with how they don't give you any tools or tricks to deal with it (and the combat in general) apart from just giving you a +2/4/6/8 to all your physical/mental stats belt/headpiece and a +5 unobtanium weapon of fire (hopefully of the type that your character is using, as in - one of the swords, occasionally a scythe or a bow, but good luck getting a good heavy crossbow). Finding and forging magical items and artifacts in something like Baldur's Gate 2 was engaging and interesting. There was lore behind the items, and they had interesting and powerful effects you could strategize around. Kingmaker barely has any item descriptions apart from the - again! - overly verbose ones on the stuff you restore with the Storyteller, and there's almost no reason to pick a belt with a cool effect over a belt that increases your Strength, Dexterity and Constitution by 6. The abundance of the latter kills any instances of actually interesting gear. Did they do anything about that in WoTR?

No, and when you started talking about it I was like "bullseye" because I feel like that all the time. some items (I came across a necklace) are special cool ability items in addition to providing the generic bonuses (in this example some cool abilities in addition to +3 NAT armor) but most items are just like you said, more generic tools in the numbers race.

There's a greater variety of gear in WotR, but it's not a high bar to clear considering Kingmaker was largely sparse in most weapon types outside of your companions' favored gear. Finnean the talking weapon can morph into any weapon type you need, at least. I have noticed that there's a lot less straight stat upgrade gear, and a lot more accessories with actual unique effects. There were enough unique accessories that I had to constantly weigh whether I wanted to equip accessories that boosted offensive effects or keep those standard deflection rings and natural armor amulets on, which was something I never had to consider in Kingmaker.

For example, a ring that allows an archer to launch an opportunity attack at an enemy within 30 feet receiving another opportunity attack from a party member attacking in melee. Or something like the below, which I imagine will be a staple for ray blasters/Eldritch Archer builds.


I would find the occasional straight up +2/4 belt, but I don't recall running into any +6 gear until I reached chapter 4, which I understood to be about 2/3rds-3/4ths through the game.

The biggest problem (or strength, depends who you ask) of WotR is that it is a niche game, and the developers develop the game specifically for their niche audience that seem to like the things we hate (powergaming, minmaxing, etc). I feel like more work should have been done with the difficulty settings, that while are better than most game, still lacks more customisation that might have made the game more accessible. For the most part, I still find the difficulty to make the game either hard and sometimes too hard or too easy.

Then don't play a campaign centered around leading crusade into hells? We will see if it will be a problem - P:KM revolving around being king with kingdom management and kindgom itself being tedious and difficult to care for, was to me a bit problematic.

Yeah, that's a very good question. Unfortunately, I have been hearing how great P:KM story and companions are, and I have hard time believing that we played the same game. So, yeah, I am remaining doubtful whenever WoTR will offer anything appealing to me until I give it a go myself.

Kingmaker has setting to tune down both the complexity and the relevance of the kingdom management, by the way.

And generally speaking I'm not sure it's even possible to fail a "timer" in that game unless you purposefully ignore something for months in a row.

Like I said earlier and I'm trying to be very objective here, I think some elements of the story are improved a lot. The pacing is much much better, you don't feel like nothing happens and all the things you do feel important enough and not like filler. The companions roster is the best in recent years at the very least, and of course not all of them perfectly written but the good ones are really good. Moreover, some of them are actually unique.

The story is still not too great at least until chapter 3, which is a significant chunk of the game, but the companions are good enough to carry it imo. And since I don't care for the gameplay almost at all, and outright despise buffinder system for the most part, if the story was bad I would have ditched this game a long time ago

.... Except you are not being objective at all, no offence intended.



More work with the difficulty settings? O.O



As you can see you have 7 difficulty modes and you can customize from the difficulty and strength of the enemies to the number of the enemies you face in every encounter, weak critical hits against the party, party speed, encumbrance, dead party members rise after combat, etc.

And, like kingmaker, you can turn off or put the crusade management in automatic mode if you do not like that kind of strategy minigame with minimal story impact.

I mean, if you have that kind of customization and you want even more because it does not reach the sweet spot you will like for your game... well... I do not think the problem is in the game.
You simply cannot ask the devs to adjust the difficulty to every player in the game, but you could ask that they provide the more options they could with the budget and human power they have. And they did.


Evidently, it´s not the type of game do you like, or even the tabletop it´s based on. that´s fair; but it seems you are just finding fault in everything in the game, even things that are objectively not there.

... And just for the record, the fact that kingmaker and WoTR are hard games nobody argues, but I also have to say I finished the game with a party of 5 bards, so the need of what you called "powergaming" and min-maxing are only needed for the harder difficulties. Pretty sure in story mode with the lowest "damage to the party" setting the IA wins almost all the fights for you with autoattacks (I know that for a fact because my sister do not like combat and management, so she played the game like a visual novel, just to read and roleplay)
You still need to beat some enemies that have particular resistances with the right spells or weapons, but you have all the time in the world to do so in the lowest difficulty settings.
As I said it´s a hard game. it´s like playing dark souls and complain that you are dying. Yeah, it´s a hard game from starters. Nobody said otherwise. But unlike the dark souls series you can lower the difficulty to a manageable point, letting players that like challenges play the game too.

I find it a good decision to allow people that like challenging combat and people that are there for the story and are not interested in to play the same game. I think BG3 would be like that too.

I'd be careful with turning it to auto mode, if it's like Kingmaker, it will screw even some main and important quests on later acts.