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

Yes but it kinda forces you to type up your response in an external editor because reviewing/keeping track of what you're writing in that tiny space is a pain, unless you're keeping it really short. Also, for any in-depth feedback you'd need to make paragraphs and bullet points too. There were a couple aspects which I had quite a lot to talk about.

Are there some issues? Yeah. I ran into Threshold and got absolutely SLAPPPED. It was a massive jump in difficulty.

Is it still, in terms of scope, depth, characters, writing, mechanics, and potential, great?

Absolutely.

I honestly believe if they can iron out a few things, and they are patching stuff, it will end up as one of the greatest games of all time.

No joke. I laughed, I smiled, I even got dust in my eyes.

It's an amazing game.

I just purchased PF- WotR and the game is a delight. 20 hours in with a random witch class that I hate but cannot be arsed respec. I mean animal companions as war MOUNTS!!! The possibility to fight a demon army with your own undead lich army? Your own personal hardcore undead bodyguard with 4 comabt classes to choose from that levels like a companion..... The possibilty to level to 40 as 2 x level 20's...

BG 3 is a good game in the making but cannot hold a candle to pathfinder WotC. It's a bit like comparing a wet beer fart to a category 5 hurricane.

Glad you're loving that game. Very easily my #1 cRPG of all time right now.

And your analogy made me LOL

I'm at 200 Hours already, and I've hardly scratched the surface.

This isn't a game living on gimmick either.

So many classes.
So many archetypes.
So many feats.
Amazing characters whose story is both immediately front and center, but never takes away from the fact it's YOUR CHARACTER that is the main event.

The synergy, the Mythic paths, the groups feats, the actual questions that the story asks, and your ability to influence the story.

The more I play, the better it actually gets.

I have hardly even touched spell casters, and haven't looked at Mounts, but I believe you can be a halfling riding a dog LOL.

If they support this game with DLC (and yep a free little quest was released apparently) I just cannot see another single player RPG approaching the level this game has reached.

While the pathfinder series as a whole (referring to Kingmaker and WOTR) definitely have that baldur's gate vibe going for them, I do find it a bit annoying that no CRPG moves away from the idea that difficulty = bloating HP of enemies lol. As for the companions of WOTR, haven't spent too much time with them yet so none of them particularly jump out at me at present. The only one I find annoying so far is the wizard girl Neno xD. she is just not my thing. For me Pillars of Eternity hit a bit more notes for me than Pathfinder does so far, not sure why exactly. Maybe the world grabbed me a bit more. But I neither see Pathfinder series or Pillars of Eternity as particularly innovative to be honest, they obviously aim at the nostalgia of the BG series somewhat. I know Pathfinder is its own setting (not living under a rock lol), but I think it is time they try and make some innovations especially in how they handle difficulty settings. Throwing more enemies at you with more HP does not always make the best experience lol.

Regarding difficulty, I've already uninstalled the game and unless they patch some of the glaring issues, a dlc with new hairstyles is not going to convince me to install it again. Nothing fun in fighting an enemy that has a fear ability which ignores all fear protections, yet you cannot even check what this ability actually is, because it doesn't have an in-game description. It's just an icon with nothing to it.

I mean I personally hate paladins and deranged goody goodies which the game is full of but it fits the story. Besides I killed them all whahahaha!

To me the first rule of D&D is let the player write the story. Having characters already written takes more than half the fun away from the game imo. It even lessened the experience of DOS2 for me quite significantly. Interesting side characters are fun but only as a distraction to the main story not as the premise. 6 characters with the same condition makes something "special" become generic.

This is where WofR smashes it out of orbit. You are the chosen one because "reasons" no spoilers. The class combination in pathfinder in general is done like no other game. The number of spells, skills and feats is staggering in WofR. To even write the text for them all must have been an epic task. The mythic paths add allignment based progression into awesomeness BUT the companions only get a taste because YOU, the player created character are king. There is even a bloody might and magic game thrown in as a campaign map? I said it earlier but honestly you cannot compare BG3 and WotR as the games are too disimilar. WotR is £10 cheaper than BG3 EA also. Goes to show what a game can be if the DEVs give a shit about the fanbase.


I agree HP/DR/AC bloat makes for generic difficulty options, however there is an option in the difficulty called something like "allow NPC to cast additional spells". This on the surface may not seem like much but man I tried it on "normal" and my entire team got spanked because the NPC's all started buffing the crap out of each other with haste, mass invisibility and stuff like that. I was like "derp!! turn off for now" .

Personally, I don't agree that the Pathfinder series is some remarkably good RPG, there were much better titles.
Both the first and the second game have a lot of problems that significantly reduce the quality of production
I think I'll start with the first game first, because here I have the most problems.
Some of the accusations are repeated for both WotR and Kingsmaker because in many cases Owlcat simply fails to learn from mistakes.

I'll start with the plot. The game has a terrible pace problem.
The first act is probably the most boring of all.
The second act doesn't get much better until about halfway through the act.
That's when the story begins to take off. Then there's a great act three and a nice act four. Unfortunately, then a huge decline in the game begins. Act 5 is a huge drop in quality and then the worst dungeon I have ever seen in a games. Find me a person who managed to complete the last dungeon in Kingsmaker without spending a few hours there or by following the guide.

The game also has a huge problem with the level of difficulty. When playing hard, the first act is difficult and
then the difficulty level drops head over heels to a level where the fights could as well be fought automatically in the middle of act 2.
Then in the last dungeon the game decides to increase the difficulty level by about 500%

Another problem for me is managing the kingdom.
The mechanics are so good that even the developers themselves probably did not believe in its success and gave the option to turn it off completely (not that it was somehow thoughtful and did not cause any problems with the game). The management itself is just boring. From time to time, there are cards to which you should assign a certain advisor and then wait a few days for the dice to be rolled. And that is one of the problems, the mechanics are completely rng based. It practically doesn't matter who you choose (not counting the modifiers you can unlock), ultimately your success will be determined by rng.
This gets annoying later in the game where the chances of success are often 50-60%. Here comes another problem. The game is so badly designed that the player can literally lose all advisors to one of the positions, which will result in a slow but practically inevitable defeat. This has been reduced somewhat with the mercenary's ability to assign a mercenary, but due to the very high penalty to success, most likely he will have around 30% or less to success.
Another (less) annoying problem is that oftentimes you just have to spam the skip a day button for several months.
At one point I had to literally skip 10 months of the game in order to even be able to push the story further.
It was not a very interesting activity. Apparently, you cannot skip days for auto management (I didn't play myself), but if it really is, it must be a very pleasant time of several dozen minutes of waiting.

Despite the fact that a long time has passed since the premiere, there are still some serious bugs.
Fortunately, I only came across single gamebreaking and I only had to go back 3 hours.
Of course, this applies to the PC version, in the case of the console version, it is supposedly still barely playable.

I won't write much about companions, some of them are well-written, and quite the opposite, but it's mainly a matter of taste.
What I don't like is "talking" (although it's hard to call it that) while resting. This is literally a two-sentence exchange.
What's worse, in some cases they are so general that they could as well be assigned to several characters.
There are a few more problems but to address them I would have to use some pretty powerful spoilers.

Of these smaller things, the game completely ignores the player's race or class.
There is also the issue of alignment, or rather the question of dubious implementation or writing of Owlcat, but this will be referred to more in the case of WotR.

Overall, this is quite a lot to complain about, but I still enjoyed the game until I got to the last main dungeon.
Then the flustration started.
In general, the game would benefit if they cut the entire thread of kingdom management out of it and shortened the game by about 10 hours.
Such systems don't work well in rpg games and let's make a deal, if people wanted to play a kingdom management game, they would play crusader's kings.
At least I finished this game unlike PoE1 which I abandoned at the very end of the game.

Due to the fact that I got quite a long post, I will refer to WotR later.

Maybe it is cheaper now, but it is worth remembering how much it cost to access the early version. Still, however, BG3 has a higher production value (full sounding costs, not to mention filmmaking).

Pathfinder can and does have a lot of feats, but in most cases they're either mandatory or completely useless.
No matter what magic class you play on each, you choose the same feats (as long as the character is to be useful). The same for archers, you always choose point blank shot or precise shot.
It is better in the case of the melee character, but still from some level 15 you do not have literally meaningful feats to choose from.

Another strange fact is that the game literally copied the descriptions from the PnP. Some mechanics are implemented differently despite the descriptions.

I think your comments are fair on pathfinder kingmaker. Personally hated the convoluted kingdom management, in fact it drove me batty. Owlcat has done alot to remedy this in WotR as it is rewarding and incentivizes map combat etc. While I personally didn't find too many bugs, both pathfinder games are not without their issues. This however it is massively overshadowed by what the games do right, this is of course my opinion.

Companions are hit and miss in any game simply because the writers have to build interesting personas for as many people/players as possible. That being said I do find pathfinder companions a bit cheesy but it is the fact they don't try to be "real" is why I can overlook it. BG3 the characters try to be "real" but come off worse (imo) because of it. To be grounded in reality and have fantastical backstories while living though something equally fantastical and x 5 companions is somewhat ridiculous.

I suppose it all come down to a matter of taste. My nostalgia for games like BG1&2 are not comparing it to todays games, it is more time for time. Yes BG1&2 have aged badly but the year they were developed they were basically 10/10 compared to what was around at the time. People in my opinion want a BG3 to reflect what BG1&2 did in 2000ish they don't want pure 5e or DOS2-2 they simply want a BG game built on the foundations of a known working format suitable for a AAA game in 2022. Larian have broken away from immersion/rpg and gone for something inbetween arcade 5eish combat in a lifeless and unchanging DOS2 simulator.

Yes PWotr isn't perfect, but it offers SO MUCH, its very easy to nit pick this and that being bad.
It just has it all. Big party, lots of classes, a solid story with lots of NPCs, detailed dialogues, deep system, big game world, atmosphere/urgency/day-night cycles, pretty nice art style, classic RPG UI, mounts, mythic paths, kingdom management etc etc...I mean COMMON, who else OFFERS THIS?!?! Most definitely NOT BG3.
And that game is just CONSTANTLY being updated/worked on.
I am telling you, at this pace, the more this game evolves; and later chapters get adjusted, it will rank up there with BG2/Torment/Arcanum as a legendary RPG.

It could be a long post again
I wouldn't say that they actually did their homework in kingdom management.
Of course, on the plus side, they removed rng as well as automatic failure. Theoretically, you can still lose this campaign, but you have to do it on purpose or have a bug that at the beginning of act 5, the enemy's army automatically attacks Drezen as soon as you enter the map and you automatically lose (I'm not sure if they fixed it).
The fights themselves are not very interesting. He prayed that you would choose a mage hero in the beginning, otherwise your army will bleed out with every fight and you will have to skip even more turns to make up for the losses. In the end, you will come across a mage who will kill almost all shooters, if you cannot heal (the first one is already in the second act).
If you've chosen a mage congratulations, you've just won the entire crusade. This is not even an exaggeration. I literally didn't lose a single unit throughout the game.
The combat mechanics itself is not very interesting, as you'd expect, it's just a worse version of homm 5. If I wanted to play this game, I would just install it.
It's hard not to mention that when you select units you literally don't know what they are doing. I don't know why they put wall feats on the units that make the description illegible (they do not matter in the slightest).
I really don't need an inferior version. Interestingly, some of the Owlcat team (I don't know how true that is) previously worked as homm 5.
Worse is that they implemented the auto crusade mechanics again, as if they did not believe that their mechanics are good (because it is not).
Only this time they did it again without any thought.
Already in Kingsmaker, setting it to auto options could cause huge problems and one could conclude that they would improve it.
Little spoiler: they absolutely didn't.
I would say it's even worse. This time the game was able to block you mythic paths (interestingly, it worked for some players).
AI just seems to build random buildings

This is another mechanic whose sole purpose is to extend the gameplay (as if the game itself wasn't long enough).
I could probably write a long time about why this is a bad mechanic and why Owlcat should stop putting plugs in their games, but I'm afraid then this post will be longer than the full description of the kingsmaker.

If they still hadn't patched the game, it would have been a scandal.
Honestly, the state in which this game was released requires a lot of patching.
As for the other things, well these aspects are up to the individual player.
Some people completely don't care about the size of the party or other things.
Graphics are a matter of taste.

I personally adore the game to be quite honest. It's not quite my favorite (that honor goes to PoE1), but it's definitely in my top 3. It just hits so many sweet spots for me. I got it at launch since I was a kickstarter backer, and have since played it through three times back to back, and loved every time. I can see a lot of reasons why people might not like it, some being a matter of taste, some being genuine flaws in the game, but in general I think it succeeds more often than it misses. And more than that, I respect that the game, and Kingmaker before it, took some really big swings. They were ambitious and really tried to do some new stuff, WotR especially, and I personally liked the outcomes. I can forgive some of the mistakes and clunkiness knowing that they resulted in an earnest attempt to really try and deepen the genre.

I honestly see Owlcat as one of the major potential evolutions of the genre. One that focuses on polishing the aesthetics and deepening the sense of immersion and choice that's offered. Just seeing how much reactivity the game has to so many things was amazing. I see Larian and Baldurs Gate 3 as another branch, one which can coexist perfectly well. It's a branch that finds a way to bring the genre to the mainstream, using AAA budgets and resources to polish things in a more cinematic direction. Both are valid and I genuinely believe there's a place for both. I think that for all its flaws and genuine failings, WotR really fulfills a lot of its potential, and I hope that by the time it's out of EA, Baldurs Gate 3 does the same, because there's enough in the game currently that I like that it makes me really want to like this game more than I actually currently do.

One thing is for sure, in the case of your next game, you shouldn't allow your sponsor to post your own quests.
The hellknights quest was already tragic in Kingsmaker, but what appeared in WotR was even worse.

<Some people completely don't care about the size of the party or OTHER THINGS??>
Well, that sums up why cRPGs are shit these days LOL.
Anyways 90% of gamers probably dont care for RPGs. And for those who do would probably prefer single character Diablo like games with multiplayer and 3 classes made for mobile devices or consoles....so who cares. Right?

Its like OWLCAT offers something that includes nearly EVERYTHING for the RPG fan and people still complain that its too much make it simpler LOL. Im like NO NO add MORE!!!

Why would the size of the team matter?
For me it makes no difference whether it will be 3, 4, 6 or even 10 as long as the game is good. Many classes also do not matter what is important is whether playing them is enjoyable. A game might as well have 0, 3, 10 or even 100 if the developers are able to make each of them enjoyable in its own way.
History is also a relative thing, even on the example of BG3 you can see that some people like it and others completely hate it.
As for the NPCs, when was the last time you saw an RPG game that doesn't have many NPCs? This is a certain standard in role-playing games. Of course, they can be written in different ways (better or worse), but whether they are really liked is again an individual matter for the player. Let's meet the characters in WotR this is definitely not the top of the writing ability. Most of them are quite simple, but that doesn't change the fact that people may like them (some people say they even like Nienio). What I really don't like are the 5 minute quests for comrades in act 5 (if you counted the travel time it would be even less).
The big world is a double-edged sword. The maps are claustrophobically small (not counting the main locations), of course that might be an advantage for some, but I would prefer if they removed most of the single combat maps and introduced a few larger side locations instead.
The artistic style is completely a matter of the player's taste.
I personally prefer a more minimalist UI style.

What is important to me are interesting companions and a story that will not make me want to skip most of the dialogue (this is the reason why I never finished PoE1).
I am able to endure a lot. Ugly graphics, uncomfortable controls, lousy combat as long as the plot is interesting.

This is where I'm at. I was playing through it early with my son watching/talking about it as we went, he's about the age I was when Baldur's Gate 2 was out.

Yes there are other way's to approach an RPG (Diablo, BG3, whatever) but for what WotR is, it's absolutely amazing.

Again, yes there are bugs and some balance issues here or there, but honestly once I came around to understanding the basic systems, I was floored.

Granted, that 2e D&D -> 3e -> 3.5 -> Pathfinder is my sweet spot, and so I love the Class/Build options, and I love the fact you can create your own companions (I havent even tried that yet) or that you can find all these interactions between the companions, and on and on and on.

Its just great, it really is, and I think it will go down as one of the great RPG's of all time.

If Pathfinder has taught me anything about game balance is that if you add enough options the game practically balances itself. As there are no strict "classes" you can pick, what works just works and ALOT of stuff works so balance be damned. The foundation of the player character is so wide whatever "class" you build with any design methodology will essentially work. The downside with that is it requires a base level of intelligence, understanding and interest to figure out workable builds. For some that in itself is enough to hold interest. Min/max crap is easy but a unique diverse workable fun build? Not so much, but when you find it - job satisfaction. Grammar be damned!!!! lol.