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

I am presently doing one such run, trying to keep the elf rogue lady alive. It's freaking hard, I might add. All it takes is 1 enemy deciding to make her a target and ...

I really like Pathfinder world building. They have towns and people and lore and so forth. I love how in Kingmaker I built more villages and I could go visit them and their people. I like how in WotR I visit lots of locations, each with their own stories and history.

I do not fully get that from BG3. Instead I get questions. Lots of questions. Why were fishermen on the shore? Where was their village? Did the nautiloid crash into it? I don't see signs of a village. Moonhaven is desolate, and it has been for 130 years. So... And here's this grove that's got druids, maybe twenty total. No gardens. No nothing. Where do they get food? Hunting? Hunting what? Where are all the animals? Foraging? Foraging what? There are hardly any plants to eat in the area. No night. No time. No weather. Fires burn forever. People have the same convos.

Remember, I LOVE BG3. I'm just saying that Pathfinder feels more like a vast world and more alive to me. BG3 feels very unreal with everything smashed together, no animals roaming, no commoners, etc.

Seeing Larian's world design I'm always puzzled that Vincke sees Ultima 7 as his "dream RPG". If WOTR feels natural -- Ultima 7 is basically a world simulation. NPCs live their lives too, day turns to night, enemy encounters feel natural and can be comparably rare (like facing a wolf in the wilderness). The only thing the DOS games too take from Ultima (7) is that you can basically pick up everything. And the top down perspective. The maps in BG3 are just as compressed, with druid groves sitting right next to dungeons sitting right next to goblin camps sitting right next to swamps, where the game suddenly changes to night time. It's dense, it's packed for sure. But it's basically a D&D theme park.

However, what I like more in BG3 than in DOS is that each map isn't essentially one combat parcour, ideally meant to be tackled in a very specific way. https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd....6DD195AD430C7FE5EC87F8AE67A996550F93337/ Part of that is down to D&D: Gear doesn't have levels on its own, with a lvl 2 sword in DOS basically doing double the amount of damage than a lvl 1 sword. A sword's a sword, end of. Plus, not every path to every destination in BG3 has enemy mobs gate keeping that destination from going there. (Additionally, depending on your character, some enemies may not even turn hostile). In that regard, Owlcat could take a few cues, certainly. They seem to be a developer that thinks padding the game's length by placing another couple mobs onto the maps, and then some more, is decent design.

If their Warhammer game is going to be turn-based exclusively, they'll have to change that. Or else they risk mass-alienating players quickly.




It's one reason why I'd love more devs to tackle smaller and more confined spaces. It's less expensive to show change and impact on locations and characters that are finite than in a quest that sees you traveling the world all the way from Mordor and back again. Obsidian's Pentiment more recently actually reminded me of this...

You're seeing the same settlement not merely during different times of the day. But seasons pass too.. eventually, the game's plot spawns over a quarter of a century. By the time the game ends, you kinda feel as if you had "lived" there with those people... newborn, dead or still alive, some of which depending on your own actions!

I agree and disagree. The point of mobs is that you feel like you have an actual army of enemies as opposed to a handful. BG3 does fairly well at spreading out the goblins and making them unique enough that they don't feel like mobs. I also agree that I LOVE that BG3 has options instead of you have to fight every battle, AND you gain experience whether you fight or not.

But WotR has mobs because you are supposed to feel like there are demons everywhere. That's part of the story. You are in a hellscape full of evil demons. Meanwhile, BG3 almost feels like there aren't enough goblins or spiders or creatures in the bog.

Yeah, but they have to pace it a little better. To have like hordes in Drezen may make sense. But to have hordes everywhere (to exaggerate..). Plus, they did this in Kingmaker already. I like both games, mind -- but the late chapters in Kingmaker were just horrible. Like an intern just going over all the maps to finish them off, seeing "empty spots" and placing another couple paste&copy mobs there. Coupled with the Pathfinder inherent buff and rest to regain hp/spells routines, it was just repetitive like hell. And just busy-work instead of a challenge.

Even compared to similar RtWP games, Owlcat have always been excessive in their amount of combat in general. It wouldn't surprise me if there was more than in both Icewind Dale games, even (which have more variety too -- and in IWD 2, even the environment was a thing, such as barrels exploding or orcs using war drums to call reinforcements if you didn't destroy them). However, Owlcat games don't collect stats.

I'm always thinking: Less but more unique would be so much more. It's easily what I personally dislike the most. No wonder that it's the chapter where you do all the detective work to look for the source of a disease in Kingmaker that I remember most fondly -- it was such a welcoming change in pace. Season Of The Bloom was it, I think.

Let's not look for deeper meaning where there is none.
Hordes of enemies serve exactly the same purpose as in other games.
They just make the game longer.
Most often they appear from the later stages of the game when the developers run out of ideas for interesting fights.
The problem I have with Owlcat is that it starts halfway through the game.
Poor AI certainly doesn't help.

By the way, if in new game they don't work on this aspect, I doubt that the game will be good.

Speaking of a new game, did you notice that Owlcat reduced the party size to 4?

I'm not looking for deeper meaning where there is none. Imagine WotR without so many enemies. Would it make sense? You hear the demons are coming to attack the Defenders Heart inn. The city is overrun by demons. The game is building up for a major enemy attack is coming.

Combat starts. 4 big demons attack and that's it. The city is overrun by demons. They COULD attack with a horde of demons and cultists, but they only send 4 big demons because, well, it's a game and we only want tough, unique enemies. Hmmm. That would seem very strange to me.

No. The story fits with greater numbers of enemies, and Owlcat did well at mixing them up. It wasn't just manes constantly thrown at you. You had manes and cultists of many kinds, and babaus and dretches and bugs and so on and so forth. In short, they actually provided MORE variety of enemies instead of only a select few really challenging ones that can easily kill you if you lose initiative.

i have to agree with GM4Him, having hordes of enemies isn't simply a "making the game longer". WotR has tons of issues, ironically them trying to mimic tabletop rules of an insanely crunchy system TOO much, but the number of enemies doesn't feel like it's simply thrown in there because they couldn't think of anything else.

Also, the idea that video game devs just make more enemies because it makes the game longer is bizarre. Zombie horde games entire premise is that there's a HORDE attacking you. Another game that I love is the Earth Defense Force series, which centers around a ridiculous amount of monsters/aliens that a small group of soldiers is fighting. The whole point is that it's so overwhelming, there's no possible way to win, but somehow, humanity finds a way. Thematic reasons for the number of enemies isn't "finding meaning where there is none", that's a very common story telling tactic.

Vaguely adjacent: having recently replayed some of the older Nival (the alumni from which formed Owlcat) titles (Rage of Mages 1 and 2, Evil Islands, Etherlords 1 and 2), it really is remarkable how they carried the same design shortcomings with them through literally decades. Those were (and still are) great games, but boy if they don't have some things that are seemingly not balanced at all or implemented as a bandaid.

The first two have missions where you either cheese/game the systems or die horribly and spells that were either absolutely useless (such as the equivalent of chain lighting they had) or too overpowered to ignore (petrification that allowed you to have an enemy indefinitely stun-locked), Evil Islands is an incredibly detailed concept with some really deep mechanics (the game's from 2001) that ultimately amount to you spending most of the game crawling on your belly avoiding most enemies and relying mostly on sneak attacks because they are overtuned as all hell (in a game that has a spell crafting mechanic and a variety of weapons and armor to pick from, most of which end up being cosmetic), and Etherlords 1 is an MTG-like turn-based strategy game where you build up your heroes' decks by buying spells and runes to charge them on the overland map, but they didn't teach the AI to do that, which results in most missions having the enemies start with ridiculously overpowered heroes that would bum-rush your castle (losing which ends the game), and once you defeat them (by basically rushing to get what spells you could and getting as many level-ups as you can) all the AI can do is summon starter deck users that would just suicide on your then high-level heroes. As a result they just dumped the strategy layer from the sequel entirely and turned it into a linear sequence of battles with some exploration and deck-building involved.

Still, none of the above were as much of a time sink as Kingmaker and WotR. They had the decency to take 20-40 hours to beat with no artificial playtime bloating. They also had plentiful bugs, though not nearly as many (and certainly less than the later Nival titles, which are great too, but very rough and sometimes very interesting in theory but really obnoxious in execution). They really are an antiquated developer.

I also agree with @GM4Him. Sometimes, given a game's story, or even just a specific localized situation within a game, it is entirely appropriate for there to be a mob of enemies. Even though on an individual combat situation basis obviously a crafted combat situation is superior to a mob, somethimes the mob is what is contextually appropriate. And games should not shy away from giving us contextually appropriate combat scenarios. If TB combat makes such scenarios tedious, that's the devs' problem which they should have to address.

I will say this. There is a way to handle encounters with lots of enemies without bogging down the game.

This is what I wish they'd do in BG3:

Grove entrance fight, the first one with Aradin and his two mercs. Cutscene occurs. New ending to cutscene. Party member asks you, "Should we help or simply observe? That's a lot of goblins."

Your options, while you hear the battle taking place:

1. "We hit them from the top of the hill."
2. "We hit them from the east."
3. "We hit them from the west."
4. "Heck yeah. Let's just watch."

If option 4, cutscene shows combat play out without your help. Lots of goblins, like thirty plus worg plus bugbears plural, swarming Aradin and friends while tieflings help shoot them. In the end, lots of tieflings and Aradin and friends all die, but the goblins fall back, retreating towards their camp to get reinforcements. Your consequences are that Minthara will now attack the grove sooner.

As for options 1-3, you engage a small group of maybe 4 goblins while animations show others moving and fighting Aradin and the defenders in the background. As your combatants move, so enemies and allies in the background move simultaneously in scripted combat. If you attack background enemies, they THEN join your combat rounds, but if you leave them alone, they auto fight in the background.

After defeating 4 goblins, you then get another cutscene. Here comes the boss and his worg and bugbears, now focusing on you. Same concept. Lots of NPCs auto fighting in the background while you face the boss and his main crew.

The point is that there would APPEAR to be more enemies, like you're ACTUALLY saving the grove by killing the boss. Instead, Larian has made it so you fight only a handful of goblins but you are treated like you killed at least a hundred.

Interestingly, that's how w o t r handled some of their larger scale fights. While fighting enemies in the Gray Garrison, you witness Irabeth leading troops against demon forces in other places nearby. It is not turn based combat that is all taking place at the same time you are fighting a few demons here and there.

There is a delicate balance to be had. I will say that certain battles felt a little too long in wotr. However, I do feel like in bg3 in certain places it just feels like there aren't maybe as many enemies as there should be based on the story.

Battles that feel like there should be more enemies are like the fight on the helm in the prologue. Feels like there should be more bodies, more enemies fighting all around, etc. The battle at the grove gate, as mentioned. And why isn't there a single druid helping defend the Druid's Grove? Come on. There should be far more enemies and allies based on the story and the way everyone treats you.

More spiders in the spider lair. More skeletons in the necromancer lair. More animals in what they call the forest and also the bog. Not high powered enemies, mind you, and maybe not even enemies you have to fight, but more things moving and lurking around. As you pass through the spider lair smaller ones skitter away. As you pass through the forest small animals run into hiding, birds fly away, etc.

Now that some enemies can move at the same time, I expect to see larger battles in the future. The goblin camp was a good exemple why it really wasn't a good idea before it. Having to wait for every goblins to do their sometimes elaborated fight was way too tedious to go through.

Yes. True. The new system reminds me of XCom DLC with the Lost. They moved all as one in a mob manner. It definitely makes it quicker.

But group movement of enemies doesn't do anything to address whether it is reasonable to expect that a low-level party of four can defeat that many enemies, even if those enemies are mere goblins. So for me, regardless of anything else, the goblic battle situation is poorly designed no matter how you slice it. A person playing on "normal" difficulty, who does not min-max or handle their party turns in a perfectly optimal way and simply does whatever they feel to be appropriate, should not have to keep reloading a fight. If that is what is happening with players, then the encounter design is flawed. Encounters ought to be designed such that an average player playing the game in a very casual way can still end up with a solid win.

Btw, I like your idea three posts up.

100% agree. That's what I mean by delicate balance. And with this, there is no difference between cRPG and Tabletop. A good DM does not bog down the game session with excess combat. Some things are scripted so that players aren't bored while waiting for the DM to play the game by him/herself, moving endless numbers of NPCs during Turn-based combat.

In WotR, Defender's Heart was an example of what I'm talking about. It was, admittedly, too much. In RtwP, the battle is much quicker, but in Turn-based, it lasted forever while the player watches the computer control one NPC after another in seemingly endless combat. I will say, this was poorly done. Instead, it would have been better to have a cutscene where Irabeth basically says, "Cover the left gate." And the player focuses on that gate first. If the player moves the camera around, they see other enemies engaged in combat with NPC allies, but they aren't able to engage in those fights. They are background and scripted while you, the player, focus on one gate. Then, after a certain number of turns, Irabeth cutscene. She calls out, "We're losing on the wall. Quick! Help reinforce it!" Then the battle expands at that point to include both the left gate and the wall. Etc. etc. etc.

As for the Goblin Camp fight in BG3, I have quite a number of issues with it:

Too many enemies. If I convince Minthara to go attack the grove, why are there like 30 enemies still in the camp? Shouldn't there be a LOT less if she's rallying them to attack the grove? If I kill all the leaders, shouldn't the camp fall into disarray? Who is organizing them and convincing them to continue to fight me? Wouldn't a good number of them freak out if they learned their leaders were all dead? Maybe those who are 100% devoted to the cult might remain and attack me to get revenge for the Absolute, but those not branded would likely lose heart and take off (wasn't that Wyll's plan after all?). Ogres without leaders would probably turn on goblins and try to kill them and eat them. Goblins who used to serve Moglobiat (probably misspelled it there) would likely turn on the cultists, accusing them of leading them astray from their one true god. If the Absolute was so great, why are her leaders dead? "Liars!" they would cry and start attacking those who were branded.

And another issue I have is that no alarm is sounded. No one spots you kill the last of the leaders. No one runs off to warn the camp. They just somehow know you've NOW killed their leaders, and they turn on you and attack. There should be two avenues here. One is some of the troops inside while you are fighting the leaders attempt to run off and warn the whole camp (similar to how they have the goblin kids in the dungeon run off if you are rescuing Halsin). If you stop the runners, you avoid the camp even knowing their leaders are dead. If you don't, THEN the camp outside is warned.

If the camp is warned, then enemies should come into the temple in smaller squads to try to save their leaders. They shouldn't just be waiting to ambush you as an entire horde when you leave the building. Once the leaders are dead, some of the goblins/cultists should be fleeing, screaming that their leaders are dead. At that point, chaos should take over the entire encampment, again with some turning on each other, some fleeing for their lives, etc. Smaller groups of enemies to encounter instead of one massive fight.

And when you exit the building after the leaders are dead, you don't engage in any fights unless YOU target an enemy and attack it or you maybe get too close to different groups of combatants. The goblins and their former allies are now trying to kill each other, and you can use the distraction to simply flee. Or, if you're a murder hobo or you want to make sure none survive because they're all evil, you CAN engage in as many fights as you want, targeting one group of enemies at a time as you make your way through the camp.

They could manage the grove fight this way as well. Goblins coming towards the main gate with Minthara. Goblins attacking from the shore where the harpies are. Goblins attacking from the waterfall entrance area. Goblins attacking via the secret tunnels. Cutscene. Zevlor asks, "Which avenue would you like to lead in the defense?" You choose. During whatever fight you have chosen, another cutscene. "We're losing at the main gate. Zevlor needs your help" or "We're losing at the waterfall. Arron the halfling druid merchant is leading the defense. He needs your help" or "We're losing at the heart of the grove. Kagha/Rath needs your help." Then you must choose. Do you keep fighting where you are, or do you fall back and help defend one of the areas that is losing. This would be SO much more epic, and it would avoid a lot of the tedium of watching every single one of the 30 goblins/ogres/spiders + tieflings, etc. move and attack, and it would give a much grander impression of the entire situation.

Instead, at present, if you defend the grove, it feels very NOT intense and exciting. Enemies are easily defeated and the whole scenario is rather "wha wha". If you are siding with Minthara, it seems like a tedious slaughter with very little effort and just boring as you are working your way through to slaughter everyone. In either case, I'd rather have a bit more scripting and a bit less "every single NPC has to be present and taking turns in combat until every enemy has been personally killed by you and your attack squads."

Ok. Add this to the WotR list of really fun game elements.

I don't care what you say, being able to have my sorceress/Dragon Disciple turn into a full blown Black Dragon freaking rocks!

And chalk this up as awesome for Solasta. The fact that I can download other people's created campaigns they made via the Dungeon Maker is also very cool. Some aren't great, sure, but just the fact that I can make my own campaigns via the Dungeon Maker or play others' is really fun.

Not saying BG3 needs that, mind you. I'm just saying, both those things are cool.

Cause I'd definitely rather have BG3s Grymforge and City of Darkness beyond than any single map in either Wrath or Solasta. Say what you want about BG3s maps, it's SO much more fun to explore. SO much.

I'm presently doing the Midnight Isles DLC on WotR, and all I can think of is Beneath the Stolen Lands with a new paint job. Just move about a fairly linear dungeon and fight... Fight... Fight... Yes. I might defend a lot of the combat in WotR, but I find no joy in this DLC, just as I didn't from the Kingmaker one. I'm only doing it because for some reason I feel that I should. I enjoyed the Through the Ashes DLC a lot, but this one... Not so much. There isn't enough interesting stuff in the dungeons and not even story to keep me interested. Sigh.

Solasta's' DLC's maps have actually grown on me the further I went, and I was pleasantly surprised considering the same people designed the freaking Lava Forest and overuse the "push the block, knock down a trunk" interaction way too much. The non-linearity in discovering some late-game areas is really neat, although there are quite a few scripting bugs (I basically can't continue a certain questline if I want to get the resolution I want because doing so instantly makes my reputation with one of the factions negative, potentially because I went to a certain area before I got the quests for it, but it's kinda stupid they don't account for it by checking whether or not you already did the relevant quest, and in an earlier quest I negotiated the alliance between the two, so it's even dumber).

Still...


...Anyway, while the writing is still god-awful and the raw 5e combat still feels very rigid to me (though it might be because Solasta has very bad AI which would just focus a reckless raging barbarian while there are undefended spellcasters with low AC, and very few weapon types/additional things like potions and throwables), Lost Valley is actually really neat. It could do with fewer bugs in the quest chains, though - it really feels like they got confused in their own net of triggers and conditions and the result works well only if you carefully follow the plotlines without hopping too far ahead if you got a lead to some late-game place early.

The 'final dungeon' of Solasta's Lost Valley campaign was definitely the best dungeon I've seen in a cRPG in recent memory. A lot of interesting encounters and background information in there too.