Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

More 4.5 than 5 stars - it most certainly isn't perfect. Tl;dr: Still slightly buggy and with a few places with random difficulty spikes, it nevertheless is a /wonderous/ role-playing adventure with an engrossing story and party members with a lot of character. Technically, it seems mostly solid, at this point. Release had a lot of stumbles, but things are certainly getting better. The earlier stutter-slowdowns have been addressed (for me, at least) and I've not been noticing serious bugs, lately. Others have been complaining, still, so apparently there are still some glitches, but there have been regular bug fix patches, so that /is/ something still being addressed. From a story perspective, this /finally/ feels like a game that plays a worthy successor to the now ancient Baldur's Gate 2. Many quests, mostly the freedom to choose which one you're dealing with, now, and usually considerable freedom in how to deal with ending those quests. Multiple alignments you can aim for, multiple mythic powers to choose between and flavor the path, interesting party members... I've put over 150 hours into enjoying this world, and just kicked off another run through. Mechanically, it's /complex/. Depending on who you are and your play style, you might consider this either a strength or a weakness. On the one hand, you have the ability to work at chinks in your opponents' armor rather than needing to power through. On the other hand, you frequently /need/ to work at the chinks in your opponents' armor rather than being /able/ to power through. This both gives you an immense amount of freedom in character design and places a considerable burdn on learning enough of the rules and gotchas to use those capabilities correctly. As I've mentioned, I quite like most of the party members you can obtain. There are some that I don't want in my party, and want dead ASAP, but even those are interestingly written and interesting concepts. For those willing to be evil, YMMV.

-Min-maxy, even on normal. -Will throw higher level enemies at you. -Not meant for turn-based combat. A lot of combatants, takes forever. -Good companions. -Good story.

Obviously this is a review in progress, as the game was just released. I do want to mention that they have made some considerable improvements in the early stages and the game feels much, much friendlier compared to Kingmaker. Some knowledge of the pathfinder/dnd system is of course still required, but the additional tips provided are certainly useful. And kudos on the character creation process!

I played Kingmaker and loved it, and so went on to play this as soon as it came out. I didn't encounter any bugs or balance issues. The game was engaging, different builds are fun, all new content is great, story is solid. I loved it so far just like Kingmaker. I played it for 57 hrs so far, but haven't gotten to the part where you command armies (so can't review that bit yet), and I've taken a break from it for now. My one issue is with the mounted combat feature. Basically, once you get a mount, you can fight on it mounted with added abilities, or the mount just fights by your side like your creature companion. It even has its own leveling and equipment. This system is great until you imagine it implemented with a paladin and his/her horse in a dungeon. I can either ride my horse down dungeon corridors, fighting from horseback (weird), or have this horse run around biting and kicking people, in a dungeon (even more weird). It's like I have this intelligent horse familiar that isn't constrained by tight quarters. Maybe that would make sense for a small character riding a wolf, but weird for a horse. This breaks immersion - despite the fact that this is a fantasy game with lots of unrealistic stuff, this is too blatant for me. From a balance point of view, I get why they did this - if a character's strength is mounted combat, he/she should be able to use it in more than highly limited open terrain. But you'd never use mounted combat outside of open terrain. I think maybe if they had a leave/recall feature for mounts, especially horses, that would make more sense. I don't know how to go about character balancing, though, because if you build a character around mounts, you expect to be able to use that advantage. In general, a lot of early game is dungeon crawling, so mounts don't really fit in for most of it. Maybe developers can figure something out regarding that.

So I waited to buy the game until it got decent discounts, because that's usually when games are mostly bug-free. Kind of depressing that the people who pay the most are also the ones who get the nastiest bugs, but what can you do. Anyway, I go and start the game, roll a character that is kinda fine, I will probably regret it later but whatever, start the game, and save. Except nope. Saving the game is impossible. Literally. That is what the error says: saving the game is impossible. I'm sure at some point I wil be able to save the game. You know, when the devs decide I've earned it or something. I just don't care. I have other things to do with my time, I can't wait for you to decide that I have somehow earned the right to save my fucking game. So, congratulations, you get a MEH review and a MEH rating. Because you couldn't be bothered to implement a save function.