Hi everyone,

according to GOG Galaxy I have been playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for already 30h and 11m. Just finished exploring the main antagonist's lair. And I am really enjoying the game so far.

I have encountered a few weird, annoying, immersive breaking bugs so far, but thankfully nothing which broke my game to make it unplayable. I was wary in buying the game in the first place, considering I did pre-order Pathfinder: Kingmaker and was very unhappy back then, about how unpolished the game did feel to me.

The more in awe I am about the amazing writing and the presentation of the story which I have seen so far in WotR. It is smart, captivating, and it feels very well thought through. As in: loose ends like what happened to people you did X to them are often concluded early and very specificly despite they can be considered extremely tiny story details.

Also I am very happy about the customer support I have experienced so far from Owlcat. I can see how nice and fast the developers (representatives) on GOG, Steam and official Owlcat forums are working hard to take care of community feedback as good as they can.

I got terrified however by how different the tone is on Steam forums. With my experiences with the Owlcat support and forums moderators I like to have faith in them. I can understand the frustration of many players / customers about bugs which might spoil their fun. But the level how some react to them seems not appropiate to me, making those feedbacks which are actually hinting at very important issues going under in the masses.

The game has a huge scale with all the many objects, branches in choices, and so on. And there is the matter of individual game client platform setups (aka your PC/Mac/Linux - especially with PC and Linux there are countless possible setups). Some bugs are easy to understand and will certainly be fixed as soon as the developers know about them. It is an almost impossible feat after all, to take every possible setup into consideration. Like the fact: a lot of bugs I have seen and read about in the forums are loading errors. A matter which differs greatly just by simple things like is your game installed on a HDD or SSD?

I may be just lucky with my current playthrough considering my 08/15 / standard good heroine approach of the game. Which seems to be the most polished path, comparing to additional paths like Gold Dragon, Lich etc. I have never heard about yet (I really did not inform myself about the game before buying, though).

But there seem also a misunderstanding about what Owlcat has done really well it seems.
With the many complaints about game mechanics the matter means to me: why complaining at Owlcat in the first place? Instead they are to be praised if they made such a good adaption of the pen and paper rules that it gets annoying. Yeah, playing along the rules can get annoying for some certain players who never experienced "harsh" rules.

A lot of players are kinda used that games are designed where failing is not an option by design. Not to mention NAT1 throws (P&P players know what I mean).

With them too, I think it is good to give suggestions and see if they can be implemented and if it makes everyone happy. And if it affects only a part of the player base, how about making some stuff just optional?

Like the crusade mode or leveling up your characters - I have a hard time understanding a lot of the complaints since most sound just like ranting instead of being useful feedback. Plus they are optional.

And is it really fair to complain about the difficulty of the game and certain events when you have the option to scale them to your liking? Pretty much all difficulty spikes I have encountered so far are optional. I could just avoid some enemies which are too strong and are supposed to be mini bosses which you can find by exploring. Thinking of Lost Chapel e.g. I had lots of troubles with the monsters on the other side of the map around the Desna puzzle. But I did not need to go there in the first place.

The game is not perfect and probably will never be. I myself would not dare to combine a game type A with a game type B if one of them cannot stand alone on itself to be fun (I am thinking of the crusade mode).

But putting that aside there is so much more I can praise Owlcat for doing a job good and right. And I think this point is something which should not be forgotten despite the many "loud" issues mentioned here.

Thank you Owlcat for making a fun game. <3

Sorry for my bad English - it is not my native language.



Note: I felt like making this post after feeling overwhelmed of what I have seen on Steam forums. I do not think the same bad tone would be to be found here on GOG (I naively assume most players here are like me middle aged who love good old games ;-D ). But nevertheless I like to share my impressions about the game and devs.

So that they always can keep in mind: the majority of customers who are entirely satisfied have no reason to become "loud" on forums. They are too busy enjoying the game. Yet it is awesome knowing they can get help on forums with some developers checking in and giving quick assisstance. Keep up the good work!

The scale of choice / consequence and paths to the credits is extrodinary.

Like you, there have bene some stinkers of some bugs - but nothing that has broken the game, and it's a testament to how good it is that the I fight through the bugs and keep playing.

Kingmaker was similar on release, it took months to get bludgeoned into a stable game I could actually play through - this is leagues ahead of that on release.

I'm having a blast, there are the same UI issues from Kingmaker that haven't been resolved, there is some awful level design (the backtracking through the Abyss - my god) - but....BUT...I haven't stopped playing, I can't stop playing.

I love it.

I am hook, line and sinkered into the story, the characters and the world. I need to see it through to the end, and then I need to start over again and see it to a different end.

I am really somewhat worried that because of how more complaints usually get to the developers than actual feedback might make the developers overlook needed improvements and suggestions, aside from bug busting.

Like as you mentioned UI issues.

So far I have read a few good suggestions and having suggestions myself of which I can just wonder if the developers take note. Like

giving scrolls an extra marker in the inventory, like a tiny exclamation (!) mark in their corner when a character you select can learn them

having in kingdom management additional information as in decree requires logistics - which is currently occupied by decree X

having a hinting note when leveling up not to take a skill or spell when you get that spell/skill as class progression bonus later on

an ingame prompt of hinting people as a suggestion that the AI can take over the crusade management for you (e.g. after a heavy loss battle), for people who struggle with that part of the game

Also I think there was a hotkey missing for stealth? To me it is more important when such things, alongside bugs, get more attention. Showing that the players really care about the game that they take their valuable time to submit feedback. Of course that only works when the studio in return pays proper attention and take feedback serious as what they are. Gifts of appreciation. ^^

I have been sending mu suggestions using the alt+B screen.
Including things suchh as:

Adding an existing quarterstaf feat that allows you to hold it with one hand.

Improvemnt and clearification to the life-dominant soul feat.
Allowing the order of the pike also use weapons training to pick the poleArm fighter weapons group instead of only the spear one (as is the case in p&p pathfinder)

The addition of the butchering axe and saw-tooth sabre (and the adding of Achaekek, diety of assassins)

And let's not forget a glaring omission: the Tyrannosaurus as an animal companion, because why use raptors.

Much gratitude for developers starting to check on GOG.com forums again. <3

This is an average crpg, but to be honest I'm not a fan of Pathfinders version of DnD 3.5 e... which was the best (lore included) created by Wizards imo. Don't get me wrong, the game is still a solid yet average crpg imo... but that is all that is needed in today's market of mediocre crpg offerings. The game is solid enough for me to still support them in the future.

Your statement is not wrong.
Yet I think what the game excels with, and what I wish from other cRPGs, is the variety of classes. It gives a feeling of being huge right from the start. And the presentation kinda fits modern days.

I am still fond of Pillars of Eternity franchise and alike though. I cannot wait for the upcoming Baldur's Gate and having high hopes for that. Solasta I did not like that much, despite the very good adaption of the combat part of D&D. The presentation matters too to me.

This post makes me wonder if the game would be playable on my old desktop, which has only integrated graphics.

Some specs:
* CPU: i5-4670 3.40Ghz
* GPU: Intel HD 4600
* RAM: 16GB
* OS: Debian testing
* No overclocking (can't overclock this CPU anyway)

Makes me wondering if it might be worth the time to download and install the game, since, unfortunately, it's one of those monster games with a size in the double digits of gigabytes. Lots of classes is a great way to give the player interesting options.

It's a feature that's found in many of the best CRPGs, including Wizardry 8 (15 classes), Final Fantasy 5 (22 jobs, which are what the game calls classes), and Dragon Quest 7 (54 classes (maybe that's too many), though 34 are monster classes that many players are likely to ignore).

(Note that FF5 and DQ7 differ from the other games mentioned in that not all the classes are available right away; FF5 gives you the jobs in groups, while DQ7, in addition to having you play for 15-20 hours before you unlock the class system, has classes that require mastering other classes to unlock. This is in contrast to Pathfinder, where a large number of classes are available immediately, with only prestige classes and mythic paths having to be unlocked.)

In any case, even if I can't play this Pathfinder game (I'm working on building a new computer, which will have an AMD Ryzen 5600G), I can still theorycraft possible builds. (My first playthrough (attempt) might be an oracle of life, with the Angel path; a later one I might try that Trickery path that's apparently rather silly.)

Well, that's what difficulty options (the game apparently features a whole menu of them) and mods are for.

Don't like it when characters die? Well, how about make them only go unconscious and auto-revive at the end of combat?

Want characters to die, but don't like enemy criticals? You can change that.

In fact, I've read that every option can be changed mid-game except for the iron man one (the one that limits saving). But is leveling up *really* necessary? I have a feeling that the game isn't designed to be beatable at level 1.

(Then again, maybe someone will take this as a challenge and actually attempt this? Allowing companions who start at higher levels might make this potentially doable (though they'd be required to stay at their starting level).) One thing I like about the game already, even without having had a chance to play it:

* I *really* like the ability to customize the game's difficulty, making the game harder in the way you prefer and easier in the way you don't. A player might easily find some difficulty aspects of the game to be quite enjoyable, but find that others really hurt the experience or lead to frustration that the payer might not want, and being able to cherry pick just the fun aspects of the harder difficulty lets the player do this. (I wish more games would do this!)