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

Here a thing. I have not seen a single topic either on steam, reddit, or on the official forums of other games shouting that they should be like dos-2 or should not exist. But opposite i see a lot, even a HELL LOT. So don't play the victim here and address it to someone else but certainly not to the Larian fan. They didn't start it and they don't have to finish it.

Not to pick on either of you... but this sort of typifies online interactions these days. People divide into tribes naturally and very quickly and then argue endlessly and mostly fruitlessly about silly things.

Nobody started THIS... it started when our ancestors thousands of years ago first learned to talk (or when Eve ate the apple if you are of religious inclination). Best we can hope for now is that people stop falling into this trap over and over and over.

What's killing me about Pathfinder is the darn ranged combat/ magic system. One thing I really like about 5e ruleset is I don't need the Precise Feat to shoot into melee combat. In Pathfinder, I created a Magus. She is supposed to be able to fight and wield magic. She has the ability to strike with her rapier and use her off hand to attack with a spell with range of touch. I attack with rapier and use Shocking Grasp...

Enemy gets a free Attack of Opportunity and kills me because I cast a spell at melee range. WHAT?!!! Come on now! What's the point of Shocking Grasp if I can't even get into range and use it without the enemy killing me first. On top of that, one time I actually did hit with it and it only did like 4 HP damage. Stupid as all get out!

So I decided to keep her back at a range because she was dying too much up close. Nope! She sucks there too because she gets a -4 to hit since I sent Amri and my other melee fighters up close to keep the enemies away from her.

So, not only does she suck as a mage, she sucks as a melee person because she doesn't get to wear super awesome armor or carry a shield... then to make matters worse, she sucks at archery because in almost every battle the other party members are engaged in melee combat with just about every enemy, so she has no targets she can hit easily with.

Long story short, Pathfinder's mechanics are okay, but some of those rules are just sucky and make certain types of characters completely junk.

So this I will say for BG3, at least I don't feel like this when I'm playing it. I feel like Gale is a squishy baby, but at least if I keep him behind the other companions he makes a useful member of the party as he hurls his spells at range at enemies. Same with ranged attackers like Astarion. If I keep him away from enemies, at least they are useful and don't have weird penalties incurred against them

Yeah, after almost 20 hours of Pathfinder gameplay, I'd still rather play BG3 any day; janky homebrew or not, 4 party members or 6, Day-Night or not. I'd still prefer 6 party members, Day-Night cycle, weather, a new UI, etc., but it's WAY more fun and less frustrating for me.

And after 20 hours, I still feel like I'm trying to figure Pathfinder ruleset out. Why do my people suck so bad? Why is it I drink a potion and attack one round only to attack and not be able to use a potion the next round?

I don't consider it a resource drain so much as additional replayability. They could tack on, say, another 5 or so hours to the main plot, but incentive to replay the whole 60+ hour long affair matters more to me. Ensuring there's content beyond what you can see in a single playthrough will end up giving me more hours of entertainment overall, so I'm thinking of origins as functionally being side quests. If you'll indulge a bit of hyperbole, if developers should take into consideration the fact that most people don't finish games, 80% of the content should be in the first 30 minutes.

If all or most of them suck I'll end up eating those words, though.

I decided to buy the game.
I'm only in the early stages of the game, but what is especially noticeable is the non-existent artificial intelligence.
Opponents only attack the closest character, and due to the fact that it is a tank, 99% of the time the rest of the team is not endangered in any way.
This is terribly disappointing, maybe there will be smarter enemies after that, but I don't really hope for that.

No, that's normal. The enemy AI also can't deal with Grease, which can break the game.
These games are held to very low standards for whatever reason.

They usually attack the first character they see, but you can exploit that to get them on the tank most of the time. I agree that it would be nice to see better AI, but I think the problem is that AI is really difficult to code (I think it can be done better than WotR does it, but maybe not a lot better).

Dunno, the time I played The Ia goes as far as taking AOO sometimes to smash your casters backwards, archers hit your clerics first, ambushers stay hidden until they can hit you, and they ignore your summons and attack the summoner, enemy conjures summon creatures and cast invisibility on themselves, etc to put some examples. Far from perfect but it works.

Unless you have the advanced IA option of the difficulty options turned to 0? I didn´t try that option.

While I do think Larian brought some fresh air into cRPG mainly through reactivity and object/environment interaction I never understood how well DOS2 reviewed. They had a fairly polished indie game with a distinct engine, but the writing was generic, the armor system was severed flawed, the game was pseudo-non-linear, the environments were repetitive, among many flaws. I cannot see it as 10/10 game even with all minor innovations.

Having said that, I still prefer Larian's approach to re-interpret the franchise/cRPG than being extremely faithful to originals like WoTR. The innovation Larian is bringing to BG3 (if in fact they pull it off in the end) is doing this massive cRPG with this many permutations while having cinematics and full VO in a engine that allows environment interactivity. Even if mechanically may not be that different, the player experience is totally different and, in the end, is what it matters for a game to be innovative and raise the bar. And, to be clear, I am huge critic of Larian and current BG3 design choices.

I certainly expected bugs haha! After reading about Kingmaker's initial launch and the like.

I just... suppose I hoped there wouldn't be anything to the degree of major crashes that completely hamper one's ability to progress the story itself. But, with any luck, their promised fix in 2 weeks to the x% crashing that people are experiencing at various points will help out. As I said, this has otherwise been buttery smooth for me and I take that as a win. I may be disappointed my playthrough was so harshly put on pause, but I'm by no means disillusioned with the game! I just eagerly await the fixes, which seem to be coming quickly already.

While the cRPG genre is not dying as much anymore, I still think it's important to support small developers who are trying to revitalize it as much as possible - both with earned praise and trust in investment, as well as criticism and advice where needed. WotR is still by no means perfect, in quite a number of ways - but Owlcat are clearly trying, and clearly learning with each game they put out, so until such a time as they pull a CDPR, I plan to continue supporting their efforts to bring wonderful cRPGs to the hands of fans new and old alike for the genre.


Personally not a fan of the Origin system, and I also feel it's a little bit of a waste of resources for something like BG3. I have not once done an Origin character playthrough in DOS2 - I see little reason to when I can just as well get much of their story with them as my companion. And if an RPG allows me to make my own personalized character... well, I usually do. I'll always prefer to play a character of my own making, over getting to play the Origin of a companion - no matter how much I may love that companion.


I echo the sentiment. Considering how often things are trying to smash Daeran's or my face in, they most certainly go for things besides the tanks - Seelah and Woljif just tended to get to the mobs faster due to me setting them to auto-Charge. While the AI isn't anything remarkable on either our side or the enemy's, it's not the worst I've seen.

The ai is very simplistic, and things like ignoring aoo and also ignoring aoe spells are part of the problem. I already gave the example of a shadow demon, who rushed through the party to target my main character with cold attacks, even though my main a tiefling with cold damage reduction. It seems like the enemies are coded to "attack main" or "aatack mage". Compare that to the Sword Coast Stratagem, a fanmade mod for BG2 created by one person, where enemies will switch targets if their attacks are inefficient. Considering that WotR is a modern game made by en entire team of developers, it is frankly disappointing.

I also had enemies attack their own parties instead of mine with aoe spells, enemies getting stuck on obstacles or even not being able to find a path to my party. And in rtwp my own party is constantly tripping over themselves. Tbh I don't think this will be improved in WotR, someone from owlcat commented on reddit that it would be difficult.

IF you are comparing any videogame in existence with the SCS mod, it´s going to lose always. Period. =D Videogame devs rarely put that much time on the enemy´s IA. I hope any modder make one for bg3 or Wotr.

Man, I love that mod.

I'd expect that the ai is at least capable of changing targets, or moving around on the battlefield without getting stuck. These are basics. BG3, for all the issues that need to be fixed (e.g. searching for stealth was improved with patch 5, but not enough in my opinion) is already better than WotR.

I do not know if we are talking about the same game, but in BG3 moving as a group is a mess. They get stuck, go around, stay behind, move away, etc all the time. At least (finally!) the pets learned how to jump...

The difference is that in Wotr you can play combat in RtWP. In TB they do not get stuck because you move them one by one, you set the targets yourself or they warned you "you cannot move there" . You do not have such problems in TB both in Bg3 or Wotr.

I am not talking about party control, because I agree it is terrible in BG3. I am talking about enemy pathfinding in WotR. You can micromanage your party, the computer cannot, even in tb.

To be fair that also happens in BG3 in TB, when the enemy is "plotting next move" for 10 seconds and then it does nothing. Those could be problems of the game engines themselves. in crowded situations, the enemies do not know what to do. Could be hard to fix because that´s something you usually do not want to mess with when you are already making the campaign based on your game engine.

Maybe if they do an enhanced edition later or something we could get a fix for them.

Which is why I wrote that BG3 still has issues that need to be fixed. I've got the "plotting next move" too, if my party was too far away. (If my party was too far away in WotR, I've had enemy spellcaster throw that fireball on their own party.) In WotR I've had enemies trip over obstacles while standing a few steps away from the party. And if it is indeed caused by crowded situations (which I am not conviced by, since I've observed it even with smaller enemy groups), then the devs shouldn't design encounters that spam enemies in large quantities.

Yeah sure, but BG3 is an early acces title still in the first period of its development and the other is a published game.

Frankly, this is what I was expecting, and I am not throwing shade at Owlcat. I imagine a game like Wrath is a hell of a job to test out for bugs and properly polish.

It's a shity situation. It doesn't mean I don't recommend the game. But I would highly recommend waiting a month or two.

Huh. Pretty hefty patch just now. Still quite a lot of bugs to address, but the most critical gamebreaking ones appear to have been stamped down.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1184370/view/2984186817505058694

But for real, next game really should just use an early access model instead of kickstarter. There were probably a lot of subclasses that never got properly tested in beta due to overall lack of player interest among the more hardcore segment of the community that would have paid enough to get into the beta.