Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

Lots of "oh no, the game drove me into an impasse, time to load a save from 5 hours ago", lots of "score a twenty or never hit anyone in this fight", lots of "*confuses whole party from 100 meters away*". And I'm no even playing in harder difficulties. This game has a lot more features than other comparable games, but darn is it unpolished, unfriendly and unbalanced. Oh and the voice acting is sometimes ridiculous (props to that GI Joe angel).

Granted, I'm still fairly early in the game, but I already have some observations. First of all, this game is much more polished on release than Kingmaker (the devs' previous game) was. I have not encountered any bugs yet, and I'm currently playing on a laptop with Intel integrated graphics (and the performance is surprisingly good as well). The sheer number of classes/feats/spells/other mechanics is almost overwhelming, but the tutorial and other helping messages/systems do a good job with explaining stuff. The story is engrossing from the get go and I can't wait to proceed further. Overall, so far this feels like the most ambitious CRPG ever since BG2 (and in some respects quite a bit more ambitious even than that), and the delivery matches the ambition so far.

* utterly boring start with a hilariously incompetent dragon "protector" * very interesting followers with much more drama in the first few hours than they've had in the entire Kingmaker game * still a buggy mess ("Doesn't wear armor" after every other rest, text bubbles missing in "cutscenes" leading to minutes of painful waiting) * extremely unbalanced, no matter what difficulty you take, half the fights feel like a joke, and the other half like banging your head against a wall * occasionally awfully long "cutscenes" ending with a fight, forcing you to watch the unvoiced text bubbles for hours if you have to reload a few times Overall an experience just like Kingmaker. They've learned a bit from it, but not as much as you would have hoped. A diamond in the rough. It will take a lot of patches and a lot of mods, but then it will become a gem like Kingmaker.

THE BAD -Crusade Management- If you played the first game you remember how awful the kingdom management was. Crusade management (this game's version) is not as bad as that because there aren't completely arbitrary, hidden deadlines that will softlock your game. (You can still get softlocked if you lose too many units early on, but it's harder.) The army combat is SLOW, grindy, unfun, and just a mess. You can disable it but you get punished for it, for some reason, apparently, by losing items and quests. Just a terrible design choice. Baldur's Gate 2's stronghold management and fast travel were more fun, 20 years ago, by reducing the "management" aspect of it to a few dialog options and class-specific quests. Even if the management minigame in Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous was well-done it would still interrupt and detract from the CRPG aspect, which is why people buy these games. No one bought this to play Civ 0.7. -Other QOL/game issues- "Real time" map travel is still reeeeally slow. Even moving the map is reeeeally slow! There's no reason for it to take 20 seconds for me to scroll across the map. You can still get locked out of or miss really important NPCs, locations, dialog options, and items very easily, which may be "realistic" but feels arbitrary and frustrating. There is such a thing as too much choice in character creation, especially when you have to handle NPCs. They did enable an option to level up NPCs automatically (thank god) and retrain, but even so, you spend soooooo much time in inventory or character creation, in a game already bogged down by crusade management. Main plot feels too fast at first. The map only opens up halfway (?) into the game, at which point the pacing slows down a bit. THE GOOD Everything NOT covered in the above complaints is mostly pretty solid. Not incredible, but pretty good. Bug-free for me. [Insert insect demon joke.]

I'll keep it short, the game is very fun and enjoyable. The gameplay is essentially an improvement on Kingmaker in every way on the adventuring side, and the writing and characters are excellent and very compelling. However, this game is riddled with bugs and half baked mechanics, namely the Crusade mode. What is particualrly frustrating is an incredible number of bugs were present during the games Alpha and Beta stages, including several game breaking bugs that can completely tank a playthrough, most glaringly one that does not allow some users, mainly the ones using a laptop, of the game crashing at 92%. It is frankly pathetic that a game this good, with so many testers, is in such a sorry state on launch. I pre-ordered this game with the Mythic edition, but this will be the last time I trust the word of Owlcat games.