Anyone else playing this?

As a huge fan of isometric D&D-based RPGs like the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, and their spiritual successor Pillars of Eternity, and having enjoyed Owlcat Studio's previous Pathfinder: Kingmaker game (despite some of its issues), I was anxiously awaiting this release. I was a Kickstarter backer when it was first announced, in fact. And boy, did it pay off.

Their first attempt at a Pathfinder game, 2018's Kingmaker, was good but flawed. Luckily, Owlcat seems to have taken a lot of the feedback from that game to heart when producing Wrath of the Righteous. Wrath of the Righteous is noticeably improved over Kingmaker, and they've specifically addressed a number of the major complaints a lot of people had with Kingmaker. (While it's not a direct sequel to Kingmaker, it's built around the same game system in the same world setting, and there's a tiny bit of story overlap and cameos for fans of Kingmaker.)

I'm a little under 100 hours into Wrath of the Righteous at this point, and just barely into Act 4 out of 5. You start at Level 1 (of 20), and I'm currently at Level 14, although the early levels are gained faster than the later ones. So there's clearly 150+ hours of content here, but then I'm the kind of guy who likes to do all the optional side quests.


Here are my thoughts so far...

-Great story and setting. Much, much darker than Kingmaker. Understandable, considering the gist of the game is that you're leading a crusade against the ravening hordes of a Demonic invasion, who are spilling out from Hell to rape/pillage/murder/corrupt their way across a portion of the world. Luckily, they don't shy away from the nuances here. It's not a matter of "Good Guys good; Demons bad". There are Crusaders who are evil and flawed, and Demons and Demon-supporters who think they're doing the right thing for understandable ends. And there are times when you have to work alongside the lesser of several evils in order to do the greater good. Or, it's entirely possible to play through the game as an Evil character, fighting the Demon invasion for your own nefarious purposes. More on that later.

-Excellent character voices and personalities. You have a party of 6 (main character plus 5 companions at a time), and there's around a dozen companions total to choose from. Unlike a lot of other RPGs, party members are fully fleshed out, and have their own storylines, dialogues, thoughts, and personalities.

-Beautiful visuals. You can tell they really took their time with the backgrounds, character models, spell effects, monster designs, etc.

-Lots of cool additions/improvements over Kingmaker. Some of them are relatively small, adding things such as animal companions that characters can ride as mounts, or the ability to teleport across the world map in certain situations to speed up traveling back to your home base. But one of the best and biggest additions is the new Turn Based Combat mode. While the game defaults to Real Time With Pause like all its various predecessor isometric RPGs, they also included a mode that mirrors the turn-based combat of tabletop D&D/Pathfinder. It's the most faithful game adaptation of TTRPG combat I've seen. It's seriously awesome. And it really helps to make big combats easier to process, since everything is slowed down into single turn bites, rather than a mass of things happening in real-time on screen where you're constantly having to pause just to figure out what just happened. And the ability to switch between Real-Time and Turn-Based combat on the fly is fantastic, since you can mow through smaller/simpler combats quickly in real time, and then slow it down into turn-based when fighting larger groups of enemies or tougher bosses. (I actually waited until I was a couple dozen hours into the game before trying out Turn Based mode, figuring that Real Time With Pause had been good enough before and was still good enough now, and I was seriously blown away when I flipped it on to check it out. I wish I had played that way from the get-go.)

-Gone are the constant "This quest will fail in X days" time crunches, which was a big complaint folks had about Kingmaker, where you were constantly being harassed to rush from one side of the world map to the other (and back) in order to complete quests before their timers ran out, and if you made one false misstep, you'd be screwed out of completing that quest in time.

-Combat difficulty ramps up much more slowly than in Kingmaker, which is good for newer players. That's not to say that there won't be challenging fights, because there sure are, but some of the Kingmaker combats were downright frustrating if you didn't prepare exactly the right spells, or didn't level your characters in very specific ways, etc. And in Kingmaker, it was entirely possible to wander into areas where you characters would be totally outclassed by the enemies. No so in Wrath of the Righteous, which does a better job of gating off the more challenging portions of the world until you gain enough power to be competitive.

-Seems like there's lots of replayability, which is funny considering this is already a 150+ hour game. This goes beyond just the obvious replayability that comes from playing a different class of main character, or focusing on a different combat style, or choosing different primary party members to utilize, or changing things up from a "Helpful Good Guy" playthrough to an "Asshole Evil Guy" playthough. Part of the game involves you aligning yourself with a specific "Mythic Path" from which you and your Crusade draw their power, which are based around concepts that roughly mirror the 9 standard D&D/Pathfinder alignments. Things like Angel (Lawful Good), Azata (Chaotic Good), Trickster (Chaotic Neutral), Devil (Lawful Evil), Undead Lich (Neutral Evil), Demon (Chaotic Evil), and several others. Plus a couple even more off-the-wall secret options that can be uncovered. These different Mythic Path choices can reportedly totally change how major portions of the game will progress.

-Like Kingmaker (and just about every other video game these days), there were a lot of bugs at launch, but they've done a good job of addressing those so far through a number of patches.

-The Crusade mode is a bit bland and clunky. It's basically a quasi-strategy-minigame that harkens back to the old Heroes of Might and Magic, where you build up towns to generate resources to build stacks of units to take into turn-based army-level combat and lay siege to enemy forts. But it loses its luster after a little while. Or at least it did for me. Became just something that I had to trudge through in order to get back to the "real game". There is an option for "Auto-Crusade", if you want to skip this part, but some of the choices you make during the Crusade portions can affect other parts of the "normal" game, so you might miss out on some stuff there if you set it to automatic.

-There's a decent amount of overlap between the classes and roles of some of your companions. There's 3 companions who are dedicated archers. There's 3 heavily armored tanks. There's 2 dedicated healers and a number of secondary healers. There's 3 dual-wielding melee types. But at the same time, there are major gaps that no companion fills. Like there being no Druid or other Nature-focused companions, no Bard or Skald type companions, no Alchemist companions (which I think is one of the most fun classes in Pathfinder overall), and no companions geared towards Mounted Combat despite them touting Mounted Combat as a big addition to this game over Kingmaker. While you can address some of that through deviating from a companions' default build and multiclassing some companions into different classes, you get some companions when they already have a number of levels in their starting class, so it's not always viable to switch halfway through. Alternately, you can hire "mercenaries", basically companions that you create yourself from the ground-up like you do with your main character, but then you miss out on the real companions' dialogues/quirks/stories/voice acting/etc. that they've put so much work into. And building several different companion characters from scratch or multiclassing existing companions adds a lot of complexity and is something that's pretty easy for a newer player to screw up, due to just how deep and complex Pathfinder's class system can be.

Which is a nice segue into my final thought...

-It's still the Pathfinder system, and Pathfinder can have a steep learning curve. (Understandable, considering it was based on Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition, the most complex and bookkeeping-intensive edition of D&D so far, and they then added further complexity on top when they spun off Pathfinder as basically "3.75 Edition".) This complexity and steep learning curve was one of the major complaints about Kingmaker, and while I do think they've done a lot to make Wrath of the Righteous more accessible to folks who aren't super knowledge about about Pathfinder, there's still a bit of a learning curve here for those who aren't already experienced with Pathfinder.

Luckily, there are a lot of tool tips and tutorial entries for various aspects of the game itself. So you don't necessarily have to truly geek out over learning the Pathfinder system to play the game, but it helps.

And beyond just learning the mechanics and the intricacies of how spells/abilities/defense/resistances all interact within the Pathfinder system, this complexity certainly isn't helped by the fact that the class and leveling system is ridiculously complex. There are something like 25 available classes with 4 or more subclasses each, with some of the subclasses drastically altering how the base class works as well. So that's 100+ different class options, and you can multiclass to combine levels in various different classes too. Then there are dozens/hundreds of additional feats and abilities to choose from within the various classes. And a huge number of different spells to choose from, spread across all the numerous spellcasting classes. Literally thousands and thousands of different ways to create/level each character. So even just creating a character at the start, or leveling up your character and companions, can be a massive undertaking with a big learning curve. And it's entirely possible to screw your character(s) over by taking levels in different classes that don't mesh well together, or by choosing a class/feat/ability that doesn't interact like you though with your ability score spread or that doesn't quite work with your preferred combat style. So if you want to get the most out of the class/leveling system, be prepared to either take a deep dive into the Pathfinder rules, or find and read up on some character creation/build guides.

Granted, if you really wanted to, you can select from a handful of premade main characters and enable auto-leveling for your character and your companions, and you won't have to worry about learning the intricacies of the class system and all the various feats/abilities. But what's the fun in that? (Plus, some of the companions' builds are a bit lacking in *oomph* as-is, so by strategically customizing them yourself you can give them a big boost in combat power.)

Plus it has a fairly generous "respec" system, where if you decide you don't like how a certain character was leveled up, or it turns out a class doesn't work like you thought, you can speak to a certain in-game NPC to reset that character/companion back to Level 1 (for your main character) or to whatever level that companion was when you first gained their services (which runs the gamut from Level 2 to Level 10), and then rebuild them with a different build path. The first several respecs are free, and past that the NPC starts charging increasing amounts of gold coins for additional rebuilds. (But you'll end up with a ton of gold in the game after the first Act or two, so that's barely a hurdle.) So no character leveling choices are necessarily fatal in the end, since they can always be undone. It could just get frustrating thinking you have the right idea, but then having to snag yet another do-over for that character because you misunderstood something. And it can easily get overwhelming just staring at the wall of options for character creation/leveling.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: RogueJSK,

Played the first Pathfinder and discovered it definitely wasn't for me. I was never into (A)D&D, so the mechanics are a bit much for me to handle, as a casual player.

Pathfinder kingmaker and divinity II are great games.

I am waiting on BGIII, I have gone through it twice now and it is a great game, bugs notwithstanding.

My son wants me to try the new pathfinder as we both really liked the first. I am going to hold on to when we can both play it.

Thanks for the report, Rogue.
This sounds like it might be for me. I Started Kingmaker twice but didn't get far, lost interest at a couple bottle necks early on but have been thinking about it again.

I'm a fan of Pathfinder (D&D 3.75) and all before it.
So many games and such, I put it on my wishlist for now and will keep an eye on it.

I had started it before The Great Unvoluntary Overtime of 2021 got underway. Hopefully one day soon I will see the inside of my home again for more than 4 to 6 hours of sleep a day.

"Get promoted," they said. "It will be fun," they said...

quote:

Originally posted by copaup:
"Get promoted," they said. "It will be fun," they said...

Ha. I feel that in my soul, brother.