Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

Impression after 16 hours of play: The good: Really in depth with its systems. Hours spent on character creation alone, faithful recreation of pen and paper systems. Good presentation. The bad: Buggy as hell, to the point of severely impacting or stopping your gameplay experience. The writing is bad and boring, the characters are shallow and boring, the roleplaying aspect of the game i find severely lacking and contrived. I've been playing cRPGs all my life, as well as tabletop pen & paper games. I love the first Pathfinder, but this is nowhere close to it at the moment. The bugs may get fixed, but i'm pretty sure we're stuck with the writing quality.

Forcing spyware on users? Shady EULA language? I like this style of computer RPG a lot and from what I've heard this is a good game... But I'm not going to buy it even at a significant discount if the devs are known for trying to slip spyware onto their ACTUAL customers, us gamers. I CAN wait for a couple of decades for GoG to purchase the rights to this and re-release it without the DRM, so unless Owlcat really manages to apologize for crud like the aforementioned and rolls spyware and underhanded crap out forever, they better be happy eating whatever money they managed to gather before they got tricksy. At least buying the actual TTRPG enables me to play with whoever I want, however I want, without anyone spying on me or my group. I'll be messaging Paizo Publishing about being more careful who they sell their licences to, and consider cutting Owlcat off if they don't fix their ways. If Owlcat is feeling unfairly judged, they can always give us a list of games, devs and publishers who use this "industry standard" stuff, so everyone'll know to avoid them too!

Here we have another very ambitious cRPG beneath TONS of bugs. What was the point of a beta stage if the game released in a beta state? I had hoped they learned their lesson from Kingmaker, but this seems buggier. Broken AI pathfinding (ironic), camera glitches, HUD glitches, broken items, incomplete buggy levels causing NPCs to be able to walk through solid material sometimes, completely broken line of sight for Charge ability still, potential for an apparent recursion issue in the code at the start of turns, keeps disabling turn-based mode when loading a game even if you had it on before, keeps resetting party formation. It was even worse at launch though, so at least some progress has been made, albeit that progress should have been made during development and the beta stage. Beyond this, we have another grand epic Pathfinder adventure meant to be as faithful to tabletop as the NWN games, which means far more than everything else besides BG3. The result is, along with the NWN games, the deepest, most tactical, and most diverse cRPG gameplay. Bugs aside though, that gameplay could be a lot better. The spell selection of this game is surprisingly weak and tame, BG3 is going to be much better here. For some reason, if a party member fails a skill check, no one else in the party can attempt it. AI is horrendous - they will run right into AoE spells like Grease, they will constantly use invalid tactics that have 0 chance of working. Some enemies cheat too, e.g. I saw a level 1 human wizard cast Magic Missile which resulted in 2 missiles somehow. The game begins with a ~4 hour repetitive dungeon crawl, and the first 20+ hours are spent in the same city so pacing is an even bigger issue here than in Kingmaker. Characters are generic caricatures, voice acting is a mixed bag and dialogue is sometimes too contemporary. Writing isn't a strong point but they did try. Still though, bugs are main reason for my low score. This makes NWN 2 look polished.

I play a lot of TTTRPGs - but I have never seen such a messy system as Pathfinder. It started out as a bells and whistles version of the old 3rd edition ruleset. But it has morphed over the years into a rules heavy mess. There are too many character classes. Even these are broken into numerous prestige classes and subclasses. This requires a fair degree of knowledge to build a optimised character. I actually found this intimidating. Crunchy and rules heavy systems really do not appeal to me. So this was the first sour note I hit with the game. The second was the story. In a story based game, if you as a player don't care for the story being told - thats a game thats not going to remain installed for long. The characters you control as part of your party also grated with me. I didn't like them. So strike two. I don't care for the story and the characters annoy me. The acutal gameplay...the combat takes too bloody long. The devs throw way to many enemies at you for a turn based game. The combat is satisfying as long as it works. But the RNG rolling the dice in this game is a barsteward. One early fight I had with a couple of low level enemies took 20 combat rounds. The amount of missing was staggering...given my characters had decent starting values and were fighting low level monsters. Somehow the dice always rolled lower than results, every round for 20 rounds. By the time I finished what was the tutorial mission. I was introduced to the main game. When I saw the crusade mode...I hated it immediately and so there was strike 3. I'd wait for Baldurs gate 3 or maybe try Solasta

The Positive. 1. The art style looks nice. The Negative. 1. The game is buggy. My game would crashes numerous times with no rhyme or reason as to why. 2.The voice acting leaves a lot to be desired. 3. The npc's themselves range from unlikeable, to so irritating that I wanted to choke them with a toilet plunger. After playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous I am now of the opinion that PC role playing games might have peeked with Planescape: Torment or possibly Knights of the Old Republic 2.