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

> Refuses to elaborate
> Leaves

The writing quality itself may be of dubious value by our refined English standards, but only a pretentious fool with a stick up their ass would doubt that the presentation is quite good for what they have to work with. It's at least a breath of fresh air compared to many recent cRPGs having little more than dialing the verbose drama and shock value up to 11 with the subtlety of a brick to the face, and endings failing to match what was built up throughout the plot. The only real exception was Disco Elysium. Maybe by your logic, it's not too much of a surprise then that the cRPG that sold the most in recent memory also happened to feature what the vast majority of cRPG enthusiasts considers to be among the worst overall writing in the entire genre, and I say this as someone who played said game as my first ever cRPG and got into the genre because of it.

What you call childish only reveals to us that you don't understand the subjectivity of fun. At the very least, the Pathfinder games don't try to pass themselves off as a thought provoking experience, while it feels like I've heard every single buzzword in the industry in regards to BG3 at this point, at least a whole year before a theoretical full release.

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The below contains one of my favorite quests from beta testing, Daeran's chapter 2 quest. Not sure if there's anything better beyond the end of chapter 4. MAJOR ASS SPOILERS if you haven't made it there yet.

The one thing that leapt out to me was the entire party up to that point in the game participating in the quest, so I made sure to get all the possible companion-specific banter in the footage. Stuff like this is what I mean when I say that WotR gives its companions a lot of personality through very indirect means.

Well, it's already slightly but noticeably easier than it used to be in the beta, for one.

WHICH comparison, exactly?
There have been a good few dozens different angles across the thread so far.

It was probably allready mentioned somewhere around here ...
But the topic is quite long allready, so i simply refuse to search it.

If there is one thing, that Larian should simply copy from this game, it is its Difficiulty settings ...
This is exactly as i hope it will look in Baldur's Gate 3. :3

So I've been messing around with the crusade stuff, and now I really have to question why they even bothered.

Fights were a lot faster during beta phase 2 at least. Like gargoyles weren't insanely tanky for no real reason. Then again, many of your units weren't very tanky during that phase either. But I think they had the overall balance about right during phase 2, so it's just baffling that it has seemingly regressed in the full release to the level where a bad fight may snowball into a miserable experience for the rest of your playthrough because you aren't given enough time to recover, from what I've observed from other people. All of my fights have ended perfectly thus far, but again, I have the power of foresight.

Please for the love of everything that's holy, just ditch the management stuff for the next game. I understand the impact it adds to the narrative, but it seems like it's just sinking development resources at this point for a concept of dubious value. Just like the origin system.

I had friends who almost refused to trust me when I told them "Yeah, don't expect HoMM 3, this crusade system is fairly terrible".
Now they are cursing every time they have a battle to deal with.

+1000

I mean, the fights against gargoyle armies especially during chapter 2 basically end with like 8 turns of all four of my units whacking away at the lone gargoyle unit after I've already cleaned up the rest of the army, while the lone gargoyle unit does inconsequential damage to my clerics.

It's like... I never saw this shit in beta. Like, why?

I'm still having the time of my life when it comes to actual gameplay otherwise, but it's really awkward as hell.

I haven't got back to WotR for 3 days (still at the market quest in the prologue) cause I've been doing my 2nd Kingmaker run and still having fun and I want to finish it. But the posts in here make me think it's best if I hold off on getting back to WotR, but man I'd rather not have to wait for another 2-3 years like with Kingmaker.

let's see, so I am a dualwield Rapier Elf Ranger, Camellia as another Rapier wielder, Seelah as front line Tank and then Lan, Daeran and either Ember or Nenio.
So 3 front and then 3 ranged/mage and I have so far had quite an easy-enough time of it. More than I expected given everyone saying it was so hard (playing on Normal/Core).

Think I had 2 party wipes so far (up to just before the assault on Drezen).

Kingmaker is still glitchy for me. I use potion, it sometimes works, sometimes not.

I haven’t actually run into any major bugs yet. Most early game bugs seem to center around certain archetype features not working properly. It’s just the balance is off right now, especially in regards to the crusade and some very overtuned fights on higher difficulties if you don’t have a halfway min maxed setup.

I’ve heard there’s major bugs with crusade stuff in chapter 3, so that’s why I’m just taking my time right now.

So far the biggest disappointment is the writing, especially for the evil path. It is not only worse than Kingmaker, it's worse than BG3 (which has been very lacking so far). In Kingmaker the writers combined both the lawful/chaotic and evil/good axis to create a dialogue system with plenty options available. Not only is this missing in WotR, the evil options are so simplistic, it's just laziness on the writers part:
[Evil] I don't like you. Attack!
Or other variations of the above.

+100

My only complaints thus far have been bugs and game-stopping crashes for some areas, and the Crusade system. With any luck, both will get ironed out as time passes.

We already got quite a large bug fix patch not even but 4-5 days after release, with more promised to come as they try to address the worst of the issues (that being the full crashes). But outside of those issues, the game has honestly been pretty amazing in most aspects.

As for the talk of the writing being subpar... trust me, I've played games with far worse. It may not be flowery and verbose (not that I dislike that style of writing - I tend to write stories that way myself and love books like that), but if nothing else it gives quite a good feeling of an actual tabletop game in the form of a single player video game experience. And really, at the end of the day I think hardcore fans of D&D or Pathfinder tend to want that more than anything.


I honestly saw the Evil "immediately attack" option as a way to be a murder hobo, if one so desires. There have been instances of more analytical or pragmatic yet harsh approaches that are also considered "evil", though, so I think overall there's a fairly good blend in terms of player dialogue options.

The overall writing for Evil paths, though, I can't comment much on. As even when I try to play a detached chaotic neutral character, I always seem to end up in chaotic good by midway through the game anyway. :|

I can't comment too much on the quality of the evil writing specifically (though in general I think the writing is really good and has me thoroughly engaged) but I've noticed some standout evil opportunities beyond just killing everything you come across. Like at some point you can have a devil come to you after having pledged his forces to the crusade and ask for the freedom to sign contracts with willing soldiers. He lets you see a sample of the contract (in writing, which I found delightful) so you can be reasonably assured it won't bounce back against you. So he gets your soldiers souls and in exchange they become stronger while they're alive, thus becoming better assets to you. Which is in my opinion top notch pragmatic evil.

Oh come on. Kingmaker was in a perfectly playable (no bugs worth mentiong) state within about 6 months of release max. And claims here of WotR being "buggy" are clearly exaggerated. Yes there are bugs but nothing truly show-stopping, which is eminently reasonable at launch.

And for people whose standard is no bugs at all, good luck finding such a game (and that includes future BG3).

People will always have different experiences with bugs and how they impact their game/system.

Personally I would agree though, I haven't had any bugs that break the game, just the odd glitch and it has been a much better experience than other day1 game releases.

"Murder them all" you can do all the same in BG3, and also for the most part in BG1 and 2 (with notable exceptions of immortal npcs). This is why I call it lazy writing, because it requires no thought or effort on the writers part. It is only a matter which npcs the programmers let you kill. The issue is that this is the only option that comes often for now. My character is neutral aligned and I wanted to play a slow corruption before taking the mythic path. I am not interested in playing "suddenly starts killing random folk". I guess she will stay neutral instead.

Play Lawful! Most of that seems to revolve around PUNISHMENT FOR ALL... lol.

I don't get the criticism about evil path in BG3. They aren't done, and yet there are multiple evil avenues to take ranging from kinda evil to total murdering crazy person.

First evil playthrough I did some evil things only to turn on Minthara at the end. 2nd time, sided with her. 3rd evil playthrough, everyone died like I was a child of Bhaal. Different experience each time.

The straight evil path is murder hobo evil, that's why people don't like it. True to the originals, to be fair, but underwhelming in this day and age.

Having said that, it's certainly nice that a smarter evil, also known as lawful evil, can infiltrate the camp, torture fools and the like, just to sabotage it.

I'd honestly make it a quest, the sabotage, and also make it harder to even access the camp itself to begin with. Maybe to roam in it we'd have to first torture the mercenary dude, or complete some other unethical task, something like that.