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

I guess I would say the joke's on me for holding on to some seemingly long gone values when it comes to video games...

Owlcat have been very confident about their ability to release the game in a good state, and since they are a small studio full of passionate people I (foolishly) trusted they'll deliver the best experience possible.

But yeah, it's probably the last time I'm gonna do that.

The problem is not with me specifically though. The problem (which may be a lost battle at this point) is that even honest developers like Owlcat abuse people's enthusiasm and expectation and bank on them being forgiving provided they'll fix most stuff some months later. My comment was merely to (maybe pointlessly, but let's be fair we do it a lot here) express my big hate for this practice. And I'm in a bit of a bind because on the one hand I love owlcat games and want them to succeed, but on the other the whole deal just doesn't seem fair, especially when owlcat could have acted differently.

I'll have to retry that a bit.

Yes, for me it was mostly enthusiasm and an assumption that, at the least, they would have ironed out the worst bugs - such as things that completely crash the game and make it impossible to progress something. I often expect most games to have at least that much testing done, but alas, as many recent AAA titles have shown, such an expectation is often useless in this day and age. It's a pity.

Though to their credit - or perhaps just my own luck - I did not run into nearly as many bugs or crashes as other people have reported experiencing. Gwerm's Mansion and starting the assault on Drezen are the only instances I've had of full crashing making it impossible to progress... one is just worse than the other, as it is the direct progression of the story vs. a side area for a companion. I've also not, to my knowledge, experienced many class-related bugs other than Life Link not working properly.

I think I will continue to support Owlcat's future endeavors, as they have clearly done better than Kingmaker's initial release seems to have gone - just yeah. I will learn to temper my enthusiasm and perhaps wait a little bit before playing their next title, whether or not I prepurchase.

I´m used to playing betas and Kickstarter early access games (not recommended unless you have a penchant for punishing yourself for no reason) so the bugs on the game releases are like amateur hour for me,



Until this past years, that was the only way to find the type of games I like ( cRPGs, strategy games, card games, etc)

But yeah, I do not remember any games without bugs or a game that do not have two or three fixes and patches in the first month. It´s a common practice, that is becoming so usual that I think most of us are unsensitized. Some of them are never even fixed until some fan modders do the job. I do not think that´s a good practice.

That said, some devs like Larian or Owlcat at least seem to care about the games unlike other publishers like EA or buggysoft; so at least you may expect a playable game in a few weeks. I mean they spent a lot of time and resources patching games like dos2 or kingmaker, they gave the enhanced edition for free to the game owners the ones in Owlcat even added the TB mode for Kingmaker at the same time they were developing the TB for WoTR, three years after the game release. Bugthesta and others could learn a thing or two about good RP practices and taking care of the client.

I'm playing and enjoying both. I'm leaning more towards BG3 at the moment because of a few key gripes with WotR:

• Combat lacks impact - when you hit something, most of the time it just... doesn't react. Not even a meaty thwack, for the most part. Sometimes it will explode into gore. Sometimes it will wince like a bee just got near its face. That's the extent of combat animations; nothing feels as meaty as it does in BG3.
• The voice acting is bad most of the time and often downright terrible. I can't help but wonder if they gave an intern a $15 headset and a closet to record in for their VO work. Even when it's tolerable, it's so melodramatic and exaggerated that it takes me out of the world.
• Dialogue is often unnatural. "Although you are x, and also a dragon!" is where their love affair with shoehorning in exposition begins, but certainly not where it ends. It makes dialogue feel disjointed, and it's made redundant by the fact that half the time they show you precisely what some NPC just said moments later. Clumsy attempts at exposition should not be dealing 3d12+8 psychic damage to me every hour or so. This takes me out of the world and seemingly brings out my inner critic.
• Puzzles are incredibly basic. This is a minor complaint, but it leads to rather a bland dungeon experience.
• Lastly, a lot of character creation appearance options are just profoundly ugly. Not any sort of natural ugly, but like a LOTR orc and a frog had a baby and it developed several addictions.

Actually, one more gripe for the pile: I've had four saves corrupted so far. BG3 has load times that can vary, for the exact same reload, from 20 seconds to 4 minutes (off an SSD, no less), but at least it will load.

None of which you propose addresses my issue with this fight. A simple solution would be to have the paladin and her troops defend the area by letting them move to attack, and then return to hold position. Instead they are standing there like dummies, as if it was a comedy sketch and not a battle.

And add even more units to the fight? No please, it´s time-consuming enough playing the tavern defence in TB =D Let´s leave the pallys defending the door Please. Life is too short
Man, I always play that part with the enemy/allies units` speed at x3 and still it takes a lot, but playing that part in RTWP with all the entangles, webs, greases and etc I spawn all over the yard it´s simply not feasible.

Anyway, IIRC the pallys are not just standing there, they smash the enemies that reach the barricade already. They simply do not break formation and pursue the enemies, as logic dictates if you are in a tercio or a falange.
There are a lot of units helping you already, fighting in the yard with you, shooting arrows from the roofs, why do you want to pallys too? Your ideas of "immersion" would make that fight a chore, tbh

This fight is already a chore as it is. And what makes it so is the design choice of spamming enemy units in large numbers. Improving the allied ai would at least make it go quicker, since they would get better at disposing of the enemies themselves.

As for rtwp, I've used web and pit spells in this fight. No idea why you think it is not feasible. It doesn't really matter if some of the allied units run into them, they don't care.

If you read what is said, focus on the good mobs, take.a good position especially for your ranged units and play RTWP, this fight last 6 minutes...

The problem is not your allies to go into your pits, webs, stinking cloud, grease, etc, is your hasted party members happily running into them in RTWP, even if you have ranged weapons. Maybe I phrased it wrong, it is possible to do it in RTWP indeed, I just do not enjoy playing in that mode much, I only use it to finish quickly trash mobs.

You can just have them hold position, I've had no problems in preventing the party from running into the aoe. The fight still drags on in rtwp, even if it's over faster, because of the waves of teleporting enemies.

Which is another annoying mechanics. Enemies spawning is such a slow animation, what happens often in my game is that the model is already there and there are red-circled, but my party cannot target them.

Party members use to ignore the hold position, even more if you have a staff and a cantrip in autocast, they sometimes go into melee just for the kicks, I assume, but yeah, there are ways to do that, but that´s more of a personal preference. As I said before, you can play that fight even in core and above in real time, I just do not have much fun playing like that.

Another random point of comparison between these games...

Make the wizards look cool!

Maybe it's just me, but wizards look pretty lame in both games. Owlcat gets some points for not putting me in a bathrobe sack, but then immediately loses those points for all the dumbass hats. Caps, Pointy Hats, Circlets, they all invariably look dumb. Focus on the robes instead, and give us an option for hooded or unhooded appearance which is about as much headware as I ever want to see on a wizard. Save the silly merlin elminster headgear looks for non player characters.

I'm over here seriously considering a Kitsu just to avoid the minor annoyance, but somehow Fox Smulder the Furious Fury Invoker just isn't really grabbing me as a character build, you know lol

That picture was made several months ago and a couple of those pluses could be easily converted into minuses at this point. Plus you can't really say game journalists hate WotR either. :P

I also have one comparison,

BG-3
39,237 review 88% on half baked alpha

WotR
3,253 review 81% on full released game

like it? )

I dunno, I think half of the BG3 fanbase gives off very uncomfortable overzealous fanboy vibes too. The subreddit itself is a testament to that. When the EA began, that sub's behavior towards any criticism was basically pre-release Cyberpunk community in cRPG form. I feel like there's still hints of it today, though I imagine it's died down in recent times as people have actually figured out for themselves via repeat playthroughs that BG3's issues are actually real and aren't a figment of the imagination of so-called haters.

Given how cRPGs usually go, I don't see BG3 staying that high. It is definitely not going to get the ratings that D:OS2 did, because as time goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that what really happened was that people went into D:OS2 with few expectations and got completely blown away. It got hailed as a game that revitalized a dying genre and turn-based gameplay style. But it's been a few years since and more people have reached the poorly balanced second half of the game that warranted a definitive edition overhaul, and people have gone to explore the cRPG genre and returned to find DOS2's writing to be lacking. cRPGs are no longer really a dying genre, and turn-based is suddenly in vogue again.

But the magical first impression effect is still there, and carrying over into the expectations for BG3. And now BG3 has to contend with people going in with expectations far too high, with people unironically calling Larian the next indie torchbearer after CDPR fell from grace to their hubris, combined with how people tend to feel that there's usually something fundamentally *wrong* with heavy RNG nature of DnD-type systems in general. Couple that with the increased cinematic approach that, while pretty, has potential weaknesses that didn't exist in DOS2. For example, I forsee a long term shitshow if BG3 somehow ships with unskippable cutscenes, combined with mini cutscenes for even talking to random NPCs. Such a thing won't bother people now, but imagine what happens when it's spread out into a 60+ hour RPG, and especially when the topic of repeat playthroughs come up too.

I've played the EA about 3 times now, and know I can safely alt-tab for a few minutes as soon as I reach the druid grove attack and Alfira's song, for instance.

I actually dislike how you get to fight level 7 (the other was level 9, I think) demons while still level 3 in the market place My party could defeat them, because their ai isn't very good, but there was no proper build up leading to these encounters. If you start out with "epicness" like this, it get stale quickly. Aec'Letec was so memorable in BG1, because it was not easy to find him. In WotR, the demons are just like goblins in BG3.

I don't really buy the epicness comparison arguments, because one could say the exact same thing about running into things like mindflayers, minotaurs, beholders, and githyanki, with your party at that point already accepting that they're part of one really fucked up adventure to begin with. It's really just a matter of what the story and setting is trying to convey, and there's nothing inherently wrong with this unless it's a total thematic whiplash, which isn't happening in either game.