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

I was able to work around most of the quest blocking bugs but I've hit a game blocker.

I left the main quest dungeon mid quest to check on the status of one of my forts (the game won't let you access the campaign screen in the middle of a dungeon) and that confused the game. Clearly, was expected to complete that quest and then return to the campaign screen.

My save was corrupted so that it gave very long loading time and then a hang. Even worse it seems that corruption has somehow spread to other other saves.

I'm reinstalling but may need to start over -- which is saying something because it took me a loooong time to get the end of chapter 3. And, apparently, chapter 3 is one of the better polished chapters.

There are some really good things about the game but the bugs are beyond annoyances -- QA should have said "no" to the release date.

Not from many remember. Till this day there are still many bugs in the TB mode which the support is basically is non existent in kingmaker. As for WotR some of the bugs make the game unplayable no minor annoyances. For example I have yet to run into any bug in BG3 and have not had any issues with the game. Does that mean that all the other post complaining about crashes are minor annoyances? Just because you are having a good experience does not mean everyone is. If Owlcat lowered the price from $114 then maybe they could have had more beta testers for their early access.

+1 not to discount game-breaking bugs, but owlcat has been very active in responding to issues and feedback as players report them and they hardly are the only studio that has had issues with endgame balance or bugs.

You make a good point but I don't think its something that could be solved by having more people involved with the beta. The bugs I've run into have all stemmed from the same point -- going backwards when the game expected me to go forward. I would enter an area, get damaged, got back to safe place to sleep and return. Game freaks out. And these bug weren't uncovered because the EA testers are more skilled than I and don't feel the need to resort to such "casual" tactics.

Professional bug testers deliberately try to break the game by doing things like this. It's a rare EA tester who will play thinking "I'm just going to see if I can screw up this game"

Looking at it from a different angle, though, I understand if they decided to just release the game and then fix it over time based on player feedback, rather than trying to find all the bugs by themselves and based on just the beta players. For a game like this and for an indie studio like Owlcat that would probably take forever. Not the coolest move, but understandable.

Yeah, I'd like to believe that they do play their game, but the problem really is their design philosophy. It's very inconsistent, for one. If this game is anything like Kingmaker, then the early levels will be brutally punishing, but then it starts to get easier and easier, as you catch up and eventually get ahead of the power curve. Until they decide to come up with 2 or 3 of the cheesiest enemies and copypasta them 50 times all over the dungeon. And sometimes you get the feeling their idea of fun is to try and make things as painful as possible for players. So if you're playing the game for the first time, not knowing what to expect and what you should prepare beforehand, you're in for a world of pain. I play many other games on high difficulty, and I think the design philosophy in these Pathfinder games is the most... problematic.

I don't know about BG3, but compared to that, DOS and DOS2 encounters show a lot of careful consideration, in terms of enemy variety, placement, behavior, abilities, as well as intended approaches to encounters. So at the very least, I'll trust that BG3 encounters won't feel so cheesy and, I don't know, "metagamey"(?) on high difficulty settings.

Taking on cheesy opponents doesn't sound un-fun, but I understand that it can be a crutch in making difficult encounters at higher-levels. I think the bigger problem is just how much less fun D&D gets at higher levels, 5e too, but especially 3.5 where your power set is such that it's difficult to come up with enemies that aren't, for instance, gods and demons, or extraplanar entities who warp reality...roll to attack the concept of entropy.

I've reached the point where quests are too bugged to continue, and compared to where that was for me in Kingmaker, Owlcat has improved by leaps and miles, but I don't think people should just discount how a game is unplayable because the maker is on the ball trying to fix it.

Frankly, this is exactly what I was expecting from Wrath (I am not gloating, I still think it will be a good game and I have already bought it but I won't play it at least for a couple of months). I do think we should give them the benefit of the doubt, Owlcat is still a small studio and this project was extremely ambitious.

On the other hand, I don't really get the people here who hate on BG3 with an undying passion because it is "fundamentally broken" (an unfinished game still early in early access development) but cannot take any criticism for Wrath, because that's just "bitching" when you criticize a game whose developers apparently made little to no effort to publish a polished game. It's a legit thing to be frustrated with the game-breaking bugs that invalidate entire narrative paths in the game play.

Also, claiming that Kingmaker has no bugs still, that is just false. The TB mod is a buggy hellscape. Actually, I encountered more bugs with the official Owlcat made TB mode than with the fan-made Turn-based mod (where I don't really remember any game breaking ones, while in the official TB mode, it breaks the game all the time).


I agree, I do prefer Larian's design philosophy. They make me think outside of the box, while Owlcat encounters usually just make me frustrated.

Yeah, I'm somewhat confident that if DOS 2 is anything to go by BG3's encounter design will be at very least somewhat competent and diversified enough across the entire game.
Even dozens of hours into the game DOS 2 was still pulling novelties on the player when it came to enemies and encounter setups.

My worries lie on what orbits around that.

For a start their entire skill/stat/armor system in DOS 2 was utter garbage.
Scaling too steep, an armor system that didn't make any sense, didn't really resemble anything and crippled significantly the variety of tactical options worth considering. Not to mention the omnipresent, metastatic cancer that was necrofire.

Owlcat conversely has an excessive fondness for stat bloat and ramping up to eleven the amount of trash mobs. Also, they seem way too fond of being the "dickish DM", sometimes gratuitously antagonistic to the player.
Then again to their credit playing at Core now feels far more forgiving that it did in beta.

For me the difficulty curve isn't an issue. Rather, that feeling of low level fantasy adventure from PK, which reminded me of BG1, is gone. WotR starts out slowly, but then the mythic part arrives and it feels like playing BG2, except you go from Irenicus' dungeon straight to ToB. You get all those epic powers and enemies get high spell resistance, high ac, high saves and a list of immunities and resistances to balance it out. In BG2 you didn't get "improved alactrity" at level 6, but neither did you have to worry that much about highly magic resistant enemies early game. My party is level 6, in chapter 2, and only Ember can reliably use offensive spells, because as an elf she gets a bonus to spell penetration on top of the feats. Because the spell penetration feats alone are not enough. It wasn't like that in PK.

Throne of Bhaal is a good comparison to make, they feel like encounters that are more hyper engineered to force the player to use every tool they're given. It's also like a lot of the optional bosses you find in JRPGs, they're more endurance runs, that people play repeated to learn the one combination of moves that will work.

The game has few more serious problem.
You're always one bad roll from death, and that's not even an exaggeration.
In act 3 (and even part of act 2), Owlcat starts throwing enemies at himself who just love to kill your tank in one round (without even a critical hit).
The game is so unforgiving that usually when your tank dies, you can also load the game. The worst part is you can't save while in combat.
Another thing is giving the enemy mass stuns with a huge range that is turned off by the entire team for a million turns.

You can complain that BG3 expects you to rest after each fight, but it looks like in Pathfinder, the further you are in the game, more and more often you are forced to rest. At this rate, until the end of actu 3, I will have to rest after each fight (or use millions of hp potions)

There is a workaround for that. Make the first mythic feat whatever the "can't die for two rounds" one. Otherwise, yes. The undead tigers et al always get initiative and take out your tank in the first round.

There is a significant difficulty spike in C3 - but it should still be possible to clear most maps in a single go.

I cleaned the entire Drezen siege aside for the final boss fight in one single session without rests. Core difficulty.
Admittedly I couldn't do it in the beta, but as I said they tuned down things a lot after the release.

And whoever says that you are expected to rest after each fight in BG3 is full of shit, anyway.

Which is another limitation of EA. EA tends to attracts people who are better at video games than the people who will wait for the final product. I don't need to rest after each encounter but I couldn't imagine running the game without two healers in the party. I need both Ember and Daeran to survive.

Unfair is a reload fest, but I'm finding it not so bad on hard. (Still some reloads there, but not annoyingly many).

My experience also. I waited about 4-5 months I think before buying KM because I has heard such horror stories the game was unplayable. I think I bought the 1.3 version and haven't had a single crashing or game-breaking bug ever in, like, 600+ hours of play.

I've read comments about Wotr being buggy as hell but it won't stop me from buying it.

It's not like they have a different option.
It's not a big studio so if they left the game in this state I wouldn't bode them for success with the next games.

Again, WotR doesn't cost anywhere near $114, so yet another exaggeration (not you @KillerRabbit).

As for testing, I've long been anti-EA on principle, but now I am rethinking EA. I think EA is still just wrong for a big, well-established studio with a long record of making video games. Those studios should be going straight to a proper launch of their games. But for a small indie studio just beginning to get into the industry, EA is probably a very good way to go, way better than using public betas (which is not the same as internal pro beta testers). I think in the case of WotR, this was Owlcat's single biggest mistake. Instead of using public betas, they should have gone with a combination of some professional beta testing and EA.

Can anybody actually remember a game that released without bugs? I don't think that's a thing anymore, if it ever was.