Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

I would preface by saying Isometric CRPGs are usually a hit or miss for me. This one, unfortunately, is a miss so far, will come back to change the rating if I end up liking it later.

All the different editions and long list of DLC with mixed ratings are also a turn-off for someone like me who's new to Owlcat games.

Good, not as good as Kingmaker, but still a solid crpg.

great game full of imagination plot and its full of replayability

This is a good game, but I think the burnout can happen fast if you try to play it like other isometric RPGs such as BG3 or Pillars of Eternity due to the games depth. I purposely made myself suffer by choosing Core difficulty (and sticking with it) and even though I had experience with Pathfinder Kingmaker I still had a difficult road. As people say there is a lot of what I would consider "cheesing" or "min/maxing" at a certain difficulty (like Core) if you want that challenge. It didn't always seem tactical in the sense of positioning or team composition, but instead which spells I can dish out or summons to overwhelm the opponent before they slaughter me (and reload if it doesn't work the first dozen times). There is also great depth, positively speaking, in the character class development, so levels are more rewarding unlike their most recent 40k Rogue Trader.

I am still having fun with it, because even though the story didn't grab me in the beginning, the journey has gone a long way and the characters and story have gravitated me a little more. Like I said in one Post on their update article, I've just been treating this like a long d&d campaign that I'll revisit every once in awhile. I am nearing the end of the game, just going to take my time and enjoy the writing and the story, and at my pace start hammering at the combats that will come up along the way.

I personally didn't like this game, mostly because it's very unclear (to me), what I'm supposed to do next. It seems like pretend open world because you have to do things in a certain order for areas to unlock, I guess? I dunno as I'm currently stuck and I can't be bothered searching ever nook and cranny looking for the 'trigger' action to unlock the next phase. Yes, I could google everything, but I don't find that very rewarding either. Yes, I know "I'm dumb", "skill issue" or whatever. I don't care. At the end of the day it wasn't fun for me and that is my honest opinion, take it or leave it.

Luckily it was cheap, so it will just sit here in my unplayed games pile.

Look Divinity Original Sin and Baldur's Gate 3 are awesome games, and I really enjoyed Kingmaker as well... but this game... love it. The only bad thing I have to say is that it's single player.

I bought it for $5 but honestly the game isn't my cup of tea. If you're really into this genre of RPGs then you'll probably love this one, but as someone who is more casual and was looking for something new after replaying BG3 six times; this really isn't going to be a good replacement for that. There are aspects of this game that are well made when you take into account that this is an indie dev; but there are also some mediocrities that being Indie really doesn't excuse. I'm going to list my personal criticisms of the game, and if they're not really issues for you then I hope you have fun with the game.

My first criticism, and this is a big one for me, is that the dialogue and plot feels very generic, cliche, the characters are very derivative, and there is a ton of lore thrown at you right away that is just not friendly to people who aren't already familiar with Pathfinder's world. The character dialogue is your typical, overly played-out 80s m'lady tabletop dialogue that just really shouldn't still be regurgitated in a game that came out 2021. That's going to be a common theme here with my criticism. I feel like this is a game made with similar quality to that of a game I'd of played as a kid, and not something modern. The game really misses the mark with its writing, because this is clearly too mechanically complicated and visually dated looking for a kid to pick up.

The voice acting is hit or miss, and much more often miss. A few of the voice actors do a good job and put in effort; but a lot of them lazily read directly from the page like it's their first time seeing the script, or simply have no acting experience and seem like first timers. The devs could have gone to their local theater and gotten better actors than a lot of the people who voiced for this game. A lot of the voice acting sounds like it was ripped straight out of a game from the 90s... Getting into the plot and learning more of the story, with the combination of lackluster writing and voiceacting really made it an uphill battle that I'm just not interested in climbing.

Graphically, this game is really atrocious. I don't mind a game that focuses on mechanics and doesn't invest its money in the art, but this really is a low for game art. Portraits range in quality from a hand few that look professionally done, to the majority looking like they were done by college students, to ones that look like they were made by highschool students and posted to deviant art. The quality of these portraits is matched by the low poly, janky character models with incredibly low quality textures that literally look on par with games I was playing in the 90s, in terms of quality. The devs would have been better off using generic unreal engine stock character models and textures than whatever it is they thought they were cooking up here. I don't mind budgeting for indie games but... wow...

And the UI, I have to say is so atrocious it makes the rest of the graphics look good. Their font, while pretty, should really only be used for visual things that do not actually need to be read by the player; because this font is practically illegible. And this is the only font used for the entire game. Good luck comfortably reading the dialogue, descriptions of items or monsters, your abilities, etc. And the ineligible font is matched by the horrendous UI organisation. I would say most of the only 2.6 hrs I spent trying this game was struggling to navigate this painful UI and read this horrendous font. While I found a mod that allows you to change the font; I couldn't find one that cleans up the UI. And I'm not even talking about making it look pretty, I can accept a visually barebones UI; but you really have to fight the UI to figure out what the hell is going on. Feat selection, leveling, character creation is all a miserable process and it is locked arbitrarily in an order; so you cannot reference your skills or spells/cantrip selections while picking your feats, etc. The combat UI is awkward, with a hotbar that is too small and can't be made larger for your spells and cantrips; instead you have to expand these little menus to access them and then hide them again so you can see what's going on. Did I mention the icons for all the spells, cantrips, and actions are far too busy and don't easily and quickly convey what they are or what they do? You have a seemingly randomly assigned "Standard attack" with no clear way of changing that either.

And then the combat itself is also wonky if you use turn based, since it was clearly made with the old school pausing system in mind. I could overlook this if the actual spell/ability selection wasn't such a nightmare to navigate. How on earth would a typical player be clicking through numerous menus and slowly reading the ineligible font just to find the one or two abilities they're looking for while it's live action? I imagine the "live combat with pausing" feature is just as slow as the turn-based because of this.

I'm only not refunding because I got it for 90% off.

Very complexe game (unless you know very well that kind of RPG), lot of text to read, but unless the first opus, here in WotR you can take your time.
So, have fun ! :)

Welp made it 4 hours before i got tired of the 90% miss rate, not okay nor fun. Miss miss miss miss miss miss miss miss miss miss......

As far as cRPGs go, the basics are all there. Sharp gameplay, good graphics, complex stories and interesting companions.
But the scaling on enemies is fucked; by the end game, even trash mobs will punish the players badly if you aren't optimizing against them.
For bonus points, someone decided every enemy needs to have spell resistant of too damn high. Expect every offensive spell, be it damage or debuff, to do nothing at all unless you spend an exorbitant amount of resources and equipment slots on optimizing your spell penetration.
So the idea is great... but I can't, in good conscience, suggest it.

TLDR:
If you like cRPGs, why are you even reading this, buy it and have a blast.
If you are on the fence about cRPGs (like some, don't like others), then hopefully this review will help.
If you don't like cRPGs, why are you even reading this.

Lets start this out with about how I really dislike that Steam got rid of the “Neutral” review, because that’s really what I would give this game. Never existed, forget this.

A bit of background to flavor my conclusions to this game – I have had mixed experiences with cRPGs and related genres. I ravenously played through Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 (multiple times), had fun with the Shadowrun series (arguably similar), played Tyranny all the way through, and enjoyed Wasteland 3 quite a bit. However, I completely bounced off: Pillars of Eternity, Pillars of Eternity II, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (while being a pretty big 40k fan), Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and now Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

At first take, this almost makes it sound like I take issue with the Pathfinder system, which in some respects, I do. Don’t get me wrong, the character creation and customization is unprecedented, if not overwhelming. But, the ultimate issue stems from combat and the interweaving of difficulty(ies) in the combat as translated to a video game environment. On the upper end of difficult combat, you are forced to completely min-max every character (equip and stat wise), pre-buff all your buffs for every encounter so that your rolls don’t fail, and fire away. Sure, an encounter here and there might change something up with CC or must target first mobs, but for the most part, encounters seem to follow the cast a million buffs before combat > roll out pattern...every single time. While min-maxing and said combat flow is definitely a skill expression, its not one I find engaging enough to keep my attention. On the lower end of combat, everything is so easy, it doesn’t even matter what you pick as you’ll win every encounter without problems...so your character skills/feats/talents are now just differently colored skins on abilities that steamroll enemies all the same. Some of the games alleviate this with customization in difficulty beyond just easy/normal/hard, allowing tampering with settings to find the “just right” difficulty, but ultimately combat ends up on either too easy to fail or min max or bust.

But Tiq, these games are about the stories and the friends/enemies we make along the way right? This is very true. But a video game needs to be a cohesive experience in order to keep me going. How much motivation do you have to finish a long-winded story when the other parts of a video game are not engaging? Is it worth slogging through all the combat “beats” to get to the story “beats”? Ultimately, this game could not keep me hooked enough into the story to keep me wanting to go through combat encounters – be they too easy or too hard.

I certainly have mixed opinions about this game. I don't hate it, the idea is solid and it's a very true to it's source material kind of game, but I just don't know how to feel about it personally. I've played 500+ hours of DOS2 and I can tell this game is trying to recreate the magic of that game with a much heavier focus on actual DnD mechanics. The issue I have with it is how janky the game feels overall, normally I'd say it adds to the charm but here it makes it feel weaker compared to it's contemporaries, but over all the it's a solid game just not one I can say I enjoy as much as Larian's games.

tl;dr it's a good game and worth a try, but if you're not a fan of DnD or Pathfinder, I can't recommend it to you.

Feature complete and still a hot mess, just not the same hot mess it used to be. Go figure, it's published by Meta. So let's go fast and break stuff too.

I like it... I play it (sometimes), I've beaten it and although I'm not entirely sure why, I am playing it again right now, but due to Owlcat's insane desire to adapt a table-top module into a "rules-as-written" crpg and then throw out any concept of pacing (e.g., mobs that run straight into more mobs who then do the same) or balance (e.g., said mobs of +30 "to hit" enemies vs. you at 3rd level... on normal difficulty) with half-baked and broken tool-tips on the character sheet that don't allow for accurate planning, a broken respec system that specifically punishes prepared arcane casters (sort of a staple to the setting, and easy to mess up), busted feats (spell specialization, anyone?), an AI that literally breaks itself if you don't follow standard (read: boringly optimized min/max) builds or try unusual (e.g., not bum-rushing the mobs) tactics, sorta-finished mythic paths (railways), the RTWP with it's "optional" turn-based mode, which ultimately is just a workaround for the bad pacing and balance, and much, much, oh-so-much more, I just cannot recommend this in good conscience to any but die-hard 3.5e fans, the truest of masochists, and possibly cynical what-could-have-been-a-great-crpg-but-just-isn't enthusiasts. It should have been glorious RTWP battle chess wrapped in an epic tale (the writing is good), but instead it's a low charisma, often turn based, slog.

Kingmaker, however is gold. Or, it was. Too bad Owlcat lost that one to shady publishers, or whatever, what with all the Kickstarter cash they got to make it in the first place. This one is frustrating, yet (sometimes) fun, especially when you can force an oddball build to work, so if you have to buy it (probably just for the prestige of saying you own it at this point), buy it deeply on sale (or just lie, and say you own it). It probably won't be their problem much longer anyhow.

6/666 Denizens of the Abyss agree.

#coxmaddox

A great RPG in the vein of classic D&D like Icewind dale & Baldurs. Lead PC & party very customisable. Run the military campaign as well or let it auto run in the background and focus on just adventure.

Meh.
I obsessed over this game for 10 hours before I started and looked up classes and races and builds and whatnot.
When it wasn't all that fun I even used mods to make it fun and the only thing that came out at the end, after many hours of posting and especially asking around in the official discord is that the game is very much lackluster and the good stuff takes a good while to arrive.

The story starts with a fancy dialog scene that is fully voiced and it makes you think that is the norm but not at all, apparently most of the game is not voiced, not just random NPCs dialog, no one cares about that, but even most of the main story dialog is not voiced so it's almost like playing Baldur's Gate 1 all those decades ago when a double AA game like this should at least have fully voiced dialog when the graphics are nice but most definitely not anything fancy and cost only a minute fraction of a triple A game's graphics.

It's alright but since you get into what feels like a side mission right after 5 minutes of playing it's not exactly hyping you up to play for the sake of the story, especially not in an age where there are gonna be at least 3 different full playthroughs on Youtube that have every last letter of the dialog of the main story and every single side story each.

The combat is where the game falls apart though. It's basic Pathfinder rules and while apparently work great for the actual pen and paper rpg, they are total crap for a video game that plays very differently.

The most egregious issue is that from what most Pathfinder / DnD channels on Youtube say, fights are not that common so usually the DM will only have very few fights a day which means players can use their abilities freely in all or at least most fights.
But because video games are mostly about doing the same fun core gameplay loop over and over this game has a LOT of fights each day and you can only use your abilities in a minute fraction of the fights, making them almost worthless early on and it's not gonna change much.

This instantly means that most of the appeal of the combat is out the window because you will fight without all the options that allow for interesting strategies, cool abilities and really anything but boring and repetitive normal attacks / cantrips most of the time and while there is a free to use unlimited ability for melee it is not very good and virtually the same as normal attacks most of the time.

According to everyone I asked this won't get better for quite a long time and you'll have to wait until you played 10+ hours for combat to truly start to get interesting at all but even then the problem of having far too few uses for your special abilities compared to how often you fight until you can rest to restore uses for those abilities won#t ever go away.

Another major problem is that for some bizarre reason enemies are really hard to hit early on and you will have to build your party in a way that either significantly raises the accuracy for all melee characters or to significantly reduce enemy armor class or everyone will miss around 30-40% of the time, which is obviously not just annoying but also a real liability leading to enemies being able to attack you a lot more often.

Your early game companions are also really damn bad. Early on there is nothing but combat and dialog so early on nothing else matters but half of your companies are not built for battle and most suck, either they are melee characters that barely hit or they are spellcasters with worthless spells and also use a melee weapon they are even worse at.

The class system is also poorly designed and explained, it's by the rules but it only makes sense to someone actually familiar with the pathfinder pen and paper game. Tons of tooltips and you can read them easily, everything is explained a little here and there but overall, it takes until level 10 or something to actually see what makes any class different from others and since there are so many different class with several subclasses each and so many features not attached to a class that can change things a lot but also have a variety of requisites like stats, race, already learned feats and not being of a certain race or alignment or whatever and most of all because it takes 5 levels or so to even get started to see your character be truly different with one build from another not directly opposed built (e.g. 2h sword paladin vs staff sorcerer) it is just overwhelming and confusing and you can't tell if any of your decisions during character creation makes any sense.

Just like the combat, the issue is that the system is not actually suited for use in a video game for players that don't already know the pen and paper Pathfinder and it falls way short so in the end you are left making a character that is either a melee character who misses a lot or a caster who has one or two spells every blue moon and then uses either garbage melee worse than actual melee classes or a pitifully weak cantrip that is basically irrelevant unless the combat lasts 5 times as long as it should have and you get hit a LOT since the enemies have far better accuracy than your party.

This combines into the game being really damn unappealing and unfun early on without even the slightest incentive to get any further into the game because you'd have to subject yourself to the same boring monotony of garbage combat and mediocre story that is not even voiced outside once a month for 10 hours or so before it starts to actually pick up.
I dunno about you but I can think of a lot of stuff that is more fun that playing an unfun game for 10 hours for the vague promise of it getting more interesting by then.

To start with, WOTR is just a straight up power fantasy if you're really into that. Want to be super evil? do you want to help people? do you want unlimited power? it's all there. The Mythic paths have corresponding to all of that.

Story is great, good execution of the "Chosen one trope", i won't spoil much but there is some act that I hate, but most the time is pretty enjoyable ( with QOL mods obviously ), the Crusade mode is okay, I personally liked like it tho but I get why some people hate it. Companions are all diverse, you get some potential bff or lover to some pure evil that can't be redeem. I romanced Queen Galfrey ( an npc, not companions ) and I'm satisfied with the ending. I would say this game is highly repayable with 10 Mythic paths, but I believe only Angel ( Good ) and Demon ( Evil ) have the most content. So far I only had the Angel, and I already love every single of it.

performance wise it's okay, i get few frame drops on some battles with ridiculous spells but overall it's fine, and you can get stutters if you play it for too long ( touch some grass bozzo, jk just restart the game lol ). Most bugs presented on launch are already ironed out so it's good, If i had to compare it to Rogue Trader- Rogue trader have far more bugs than WOTR.

Gameplay isn't really my favorite since i had to cheese soo many of the fights, I barely chew it enough so I can enjoy the beautiful story and writing. But if you're really into it, it's amazing, lots of classes, many subclasses, multiclasses, numerous builds, and so on. If you're into min-maxxing the stats then this is the perfect game for you.

Now I wanna talk about the negative points, first it's not really casual friendly and definitely not newbie friendly, the tutorial is terrible as it fails to tell you that you're supposed to read every words, spells, stats and everything to know what you're dealing with- the information is there but I think the game failed to showed you this. There are many noob traps if you're not careful, and also way too many pointless trash fight ( you can switch between real time and turn based at any time during combat tho, so it's pretty manageable), some enemy stats felt too overturned even on difficulty below normal, and the game relies heavily on pre-buffing and it's almost mandatory to do so, I once got soo bored at hearing Sosiel's prayers to Shelyn for the hundreds times in game so I install the auto-buff mod ( Pls get that mod, unless you want to spend half of a quest pre-buffing your party ).

I really hate to say this but you should get the toybox mod, just in case you get bored on a pointless backtracking so you can teleport, or perhaps you missed some certain choices that are vaguely explained on a dialogue? or what the fuck there are too enemy I'm tired I just want this quest to end ( press the kill all enemies ), managing my inventory is too hard i want to loot everything and keep everything ( turns on the weightless loot ).

so in conclusion? It's almost like a bethesda level of Fix your own stuff level, install some QOL mods unless you wanted to suffer. I'm glad this issue is mainly "fixed" on Owlcat's Rogue Trader since I don't need to install Toybox and other QOL mods to fully enjoy that game. ( As for my pet peeves, I also recommend the Expanded Ending slides, the vanilla one is just way toooooo lacking, not canon? look buddy the entire game outcome is already non-canon to the pathfinder so don't worry about that, beside the writing is on par with the vanilla ).

overall, WOTR is a pretty great game if you come for the story, that is tho if you can handle it's gameplay, difficulty slider is there and it's customizeable but I think there should be more option for some specific parts. For me the combat isn't enjoyable, I can't really find the perfect place for the difficulty, every encounter felt either too easy or too hard- no inbetween. I just want to enjoy the story while still feeling satisfied and powerful on the combat, but sadly I can't find it here. Maybe I can achieve that feeling, but I don't really have the time to study all the spells, effects, stats and builds.

For the people who enjoyed both side of the world tho, then it's gotta be perfect for you.

9.5/10.

Simply excellent.

- Extremely deep mechanics that highly reward mastery.
- Wonderful story that keeps you guessing what will come next, and which spans multiple planes of existence and involves the highest, most important entities from all of them (it is very _extra_ haha, but not at all in a 'cringe' way), including gods, personally intervening in the hopes of influencing your decisions and so ultimately the outcome of it all.
- Compelling and lovable characters.
- Great music! I especially love the one which plays when you first become filled with divine power. It is supposed to make you feel hype, and oh does it ever deliver on that goal !!!
- Inventive and visually striking environments.
- Huge amount of content.
- ... and if all this wasn't enough already, there are some fairly-inexpensive DLCs which add even more! I am a particular fan of 'Through the Ashes', 'Treasure of the Midnight Isles' (which adds on a roguelite addon campaign, which can be played integrated, or separately!), and 'A Dance of Masks' (this is a bit like Mass Effect's *very* popular 'Citadel' DLC, where you essentially say goodbye to all of your friends in a party, before the final battle)

Easily - *easily* - in the top 3 cRPGs of all time.
I strongly recommend this game. I have like 1000 hours in it lol. There are very few games I have which have this level of playtime. That's its own kind of recommendation hahaha!
For new players: start on Normal, but if you're winning quite regularly without struggle, then increase it until you struggle again, IMO - it makes the gameplay more engaging and exciting. Plus, you'll learn new mechanics!
You should aim to be comfortable at the 'Core' difficulty. This is more or less the 'intended' experience I think. It's not too easy, but also not too hard. It's what I play at 95% of the time. I can play and succeed at Hard and Unfair, but they're not nearly as fun, as you NEED to use highly optimised builds there, so you lose out on using inefficient-but-very-fun builds :( and fun is the whole point! Anywayyy,, moving on...

~ Enjoy, friendoes! ~

This is a tough one to assign a recommendation for or against to because it comes so heavily down to person choice. For what it is, the game is well made with heaps of content and customization options for the min-maxers out there. The game's difficulty settings are extremely detailed and provide the opportunity to tailor the experience to your own skill level and interest in engaging with the game's systems.

Where the game falls flat, for me, is more connected to it being based on Pathfinder and the unwillingness of the devs to adapt the ruleset to a PC game without a DM. Mechanically this means an extreme over-reliance on buffing your party before encounters, even random trash mobs by the end of the game. This is because the enemies have very high stats and you need the bonuses to have a chance of hitting them. Many will say that there is a mod that helps speed up this process; but in a well-designed game, this would be a nice little QoL feature, not mandatory.

On a similar note, while the aforementioned character customization options are huge, very little of the options are viable for normal difficulty. Yes, they have faithfully copied this over from Pathfinder itself, but the encounter design negates the majority of the choices that can work. The end result of this is that rather than the game being a tactical experience where you can outplay or out-think a situation, the majority of your success is determined by your party's build. That one build can have 30 AC by the end of Act 1 while another can have 4 is ridiculous.

Excellent characters. Interesting story. User friendly interface and mechanics. Interesting combat because of variety of opponents and of spells and weapons. Very nice interface between basic game and DLC's.

Only criticism is there is far more meaningless uninteresting combat than necessary,

One of the best crpgs. Great narrative, i would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had more VA, fun combat maybe a little too much and soundtrack enjoyable as well. You have to be willing to understand all its mechanics or you won't enjoy it.

Once you understand the mechanics of the game, the possibilities are virtually limitless. My only complaint is enemy variety...its all demons! Other than that, this game is amazing. If you understand DND mechanics, it will help ease you in a whole lot more. It definitely is more complex though.

Cant wait to do three or more play throughs!

this game is so good because i think if the commander wasn't present, half of the companions would just kill each other and the other half would start making out. absolute cinema.

Good combat encounters, good character building, Decent combat

plot = Mediocre and sloppily written, sometimes its a slappy comedy and sometimes its a genocide.
Dialouge = Bottom of the barrel fanfiction level
Non-combat mechanics = really bad. Your walking through a field and suddenly you've been in a storm of tornados for hours, pick one of three ways to send your men to death.
Your walking near a canyon and its full of Swarms of insects! Quick, put together a suicide mission with no real stakes and pick and NPC to possibly send to their death. What is this canyon? why do you need to get your own men killed to cross it? Why is there no option to just walk away and come up with a plan that isint so stupid? Too bad, pick one of the three suicide missions.

Its also one of those games where your "Moral" Choices are between being curcified for a kitten and burning down an orphanige. No in between, no moral questions, just plain old fable Saint and psychopath. And to boot, it does the mass effect thing of sometimes just picking for you, like you pick a reasonable option and your character does something insane for no reason.

TLDR; if your here for the plot, absolute skip, there is nothing for you here. But the Combat mechanics are pretty good and the encounters are fun and well made.

also, this is jsut me, but like, 20+ hours into the game, the quest log starts talking to you like its a person, some kind of insane 4th wall break, but it uses this brief time to wierdly morally chide you about an encounter you cant skip. Like it makes you do something, then tries this first grade moral conflict thing, then just gives up and I have no idea what the gimmick with that was and im guessing neither did anyone at owlcat

Amazing grand setting role playing game if you have the time to play this and love fantasy setting games I would recomend this to you. If you don't have the time don't bother.

Really fun game, and super easy to get into. The game feel intuitive to learn and the story picks up right away.

Great game, but it can also be very tedious at times. There are several battles, one lasting several hours, that you can't save in the middle of, where npcs run back and forth not doing anything. guards running from place to place, running past enemies, just wasting time. Each of these battles (two in the first act, as far as i've gotten) have over a dozen npcs running around uselessly doing nothing. AI is absolutely horrible.

Getting past the horrible AI, it is an exceptional game, almost as rich as Planescape:Torment, with long dialog sessions and deep rich character backstorys. If you like that type of game you will like this. I'm just baffled at the terrible design choices with regards to the terrible AI. Very poor.

I'm going to assume you've played Baldur's Gate 3, because if you haven't--why are you wasting your time here? Go buy the game. Go play it. We'll chat when you're done.

Right, so for the rest of us: you finished BG3 (probably a couple of times) and you want more, and then you find that every other game in the genre has problems that you didn't even think about because they were so gracefully handled in BG3. Maybe the intro is utterly terrible like in Divinity: Original Sin 2 (seriously, look at achievements post-tutorial, nobody plays that game past a few hours) or the plot and initial hook just leave you indifferent like in Pillars of Eternity 2. So you want to know what's the catch in Pathfinder WotR.

The catch is the systems. Pathfinder is a terrible system for a computer game, and anyone who disagrees is a nerd--and by that I don't mean a D&D fan, but the kind of guy who has fun poking at complex systems until he figures out how they come apart. The level of complexity will choke a normal human being, make your eyes glaze and go 'Odin's beard what is this shit'. The game has 25 base classes and about 6 subclasses for each, plus 11 prestige classes; rarely is it ideal to stick with one class for the entire game, because dipping a level into Oracle here or Monk there or Paladin somewhere might give you substantial benefits, but you also want to figure out what feat selection and Mythic Path to take.
What's that, you're not sure what the difference between a Barbarian and Bloodrager and Slayer is? You want to make a fun spellcaster but there's the Arcanist, Kineticist, Shaman, Sorcerer, Witch, and Wizard, and Magus, and it all sounds like basically the same goddamn thing?
Only a nerd with at least 5 years of experience min-maxing D&D 3.5/Pathfinder makes build choices in this game. Everyone else looks up a guide that tells them what to do, because the gulf in effectiveness between optimized and non-optimized builds is larger than the distance between Heaven and Earth.

"But wait," you say. "Can't I just play the game in easy mode and auto level my characters or something?" You surely can. But did you know that buff-stacking in this game means that there's also an incredible gulf in effectiveness between the player who knows what types of buff don't stack (avoid getting multiple of the same keywords, like "+3 to +natural+ armor") and which types do stack (collect all the keywords in the dictionary; luck bonuses, morale bonuses, and especially untyped, unmodified bonuses), and uses them effectively?
What's that? You can't be bothered to research the arcane fucking rules of Pathfinder buff stacking and spending two minutes before each encounter throwing up all your minute-long and round-long buffs? You just want to play the game so you're setting the difficulty to 5 year old, clear in auto-play mode?

Yeah. The systems are garbage.

The crusade systems aren't any better, to be honest.

So! Everything else is pretty good! Great story, great twist, relatable circumstances, interesting antagonists. Quite a bit of thought was put into things like the psychology and ecology of demons and what a ground war between them and humanity looks like, and you get some really good writing into the how and why of people people betraying own kind: what makes dealing with the devil (well, demon; they're different things in D&D/Pathfinder, but you don't care) something seductive and appealing. It's a heroic tale, well-told.

The cast is a bit of a mixed bag. Some characters are interesting, challenging and well-realized, like your Camellia, Arueshalae, or Queen Gallfrey. Others are just okay, and some--you get a couple that are just so shallow and boring that you wonder if they were outsourced, like your Sosiel or Seelah, and others that would have been interesting if they were handled without the subtlety of a brick to your face, like Nenio and Ember. For the most part you pick who you take, so this works out.

I had a lot of fun with the game, would recommend with the above caveats.

Best CRPG I've played in my life, I ended the game within 336 hours of gameplay but believe me at least 50% of them are spent getting choice paralyzed in character creation and level up screen. Also a HUGE improvement from Kingmaker, it had some difficult encounters like its predecessor (i play on Core difficulty on both) but unlike Kingmaker I feel like a lot of these difficult encounters are fair.

Thank you Owlcat Games, looking forward to see another installment of Pathfinder cRPG.

Das Spiel ist vielseitig, tiefgründig und riesig. Teilweise zu riesig und episch - deshalb auch die vielen Stunden. Aber definitiv eine tolle Erfahrung, gerade bei dem Mist der heutigen Rollenspiele.
Und alles Aspekte, die einen nicht ansprechen lassen sich reduzieren. Dafür, dass die Entwickler nur wenig Spiele erschaffen haben ist es echt beeindruckend!

Compared to its predecessor, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, this game demonstrates remarkable progress, showing significant improvements in nearly every aspect. The visuals are more polished, the mechanics are refined, and the storytelling is deeper and more engaging. The game skillfully intertwines a complex narrative with intricate character development, keeping players invested in its world and rich lore. That said, there are still some drawbacks. The game's sheer scope and complexity may feel overwhelming to newcomers, and occasional technical hiccups could detract from the experience. However, these issues are minor when compared to the grandeur it delivers.
For those seeking an epic adventure filled with challenging combat, moral dilemmas, and a sprawling narrative where choices truly matter, this game is an unmissable must-play.

I'm new to the entire cRPG category.
I've played this, BG3 and DOS2 only, loved all three games.
This game is considered finished by the developers, and no new DLCs are coming out, only patches.
Latest pack was the Season 2 pack which includes the last 3 DLCs.

Combat/Build
From the three, this is definitely the one with deepest combat / build system. Near infinite possibilities and build combinations, multi-classing is available from level 2 onwards and all units can be retraining as early as after the prologue.

Narrative and Replay value
Replay value is enormous due to the Mythic paths one might choose, and writing is superb, leaving room for multiple runs taking different choices. I'd say the writing is overall better than in BG3 and DOS2: narrative is richer, there's lots of text to read to deepen the lore and many NPCs have long conversations with interesting backgrounds.

Game length
I had a run with 96 hours and wasn't nearly close to finishing it, then after a long break started a new one and am now at around 127 hours and still far from done.

Production
This game is very beautiful, don't misunderstand me, but compared to BG3 and DOS2 I'd say this is more focused in gameplay mechanics and story than in other production elements such as cutscenes, graphics and voice acting. As in a TT RPG, many scenes have actually no render at all and are written (mostly visions the player character has) and player has to read and use their imagination, which I'm actually quite fond of. There's VA for the most important story elements and party banters only. Cutscenes and animations outside combat are very simple, retaining the isometric view with top down distance from the actors so no individualized dialogue view as in BG3 or facial expressions for the 3D characters.
Character creation is, apart from the class and build, very limited in regards to its visuals: haircut, face type, skin tone and clothing dyes are basically the entirety of options when it comes to appearance customization. This is not really a problem for me since the game highly compensates this aspect by giving you full control over the agenda of your character when it comes to dialogue options (you can really roleplay here).

I might change and or update my review as I delve deeper into the game and discover new things. So far I'm having a blast!

Thank Pharasma for the toybox mod. This game is horribly balanced with many bloated enemy stat blocks with absurd AC compared to the table top version. Even after two years there are quest breaking bugs that require you to mod around (alignment glitch). 
Do NOT buy this game unless you like modding and fixing bugs - the vanilla game is borderline unplayable. 

An interesting narrative well placed in the setting with plenty of fun characters and interesting builds to play with. Unfortunately the player interface, menus and A.I. for the combat is very difficult to control.
I have on many occasion had spells that were in range just disappear when I order them to be cast.
Enemies and allies alike ignoring exposed mages or archers to rush a seemingly randomly selected target.
The worst offender of the AI are any moments where there is an objective to defend and friendly NPC's are present to assist... for they will do nothing. I watched an important NPC paladin stand and stare at the cultist who ran through a line of soldiers to stand 6 feet in front of her and she passed her turn 3 times without making any attempt to eliminate him.
Summary: If you like pathfinder and don't mind playing on story or casual difficulty then you will enjoy this.
If you intentionally punish yourself with difficult games then you will enjoy the sudden difficulty spikes.
If you are looking for a progressive difficulty increase as you play and sensible AI then I'm afraid you should look elsewhere.

If you, like me, wanted a game to scratch that BG3 itch after you replayed it to death, look elsewhere.
I tried, I really tried. I spent at least an hour watching videos explaining how this game works, I made it through the prologue, I did a couple missions. Then the game stuck me into a tower defense battle with a ratio of npcs to pcs of about 10 to 1. When I died after an hour of smacking spacebar to speed up the npcs performing the same animations over and over again, I uninstalled the game. But this review is not after that. This review is after I decided to go back and muscle through it. After another hour, I finally killed the enemy that killed all my pcs the first time, I was down to 2 out of 5 characters, but surely, after THIRTY ROUNDS OF COMBAT MOSTLY CONSISTING OF ME WATCHING NPC ANIMATIONS AT 2X SPEED it would soon end,,, Then I saw an even bigger enemy rock up to the gates and I knew there is absolutely nothing in this game that could be worth sitting through this snorefest.
It's also incredibly complicated and not anywhere near clear enough about its systems, but that's an afterthought compared to the sheer boredom it makes the player sit through.

It’s an amazing game with great storytelling. If you have played Owlcat’s Kingmaker game, it surpasses it fully.

Wrath of the Righteous has great graphics, an awesome story and lots of playability and branching choices.

Great game, great narrative and awesome combat

I just finished this game and I have so many comments, so let's just dive into it:
Pros:
- The dialogue between the companions is hilarious and there were constant moments throughout the game that were just really hilarious dialogue wise.
- The battle style is nice, running auto but you can also have it be turn-based if you wanted.
- The paths and options to choose what you want your mythic to be is really neat. I went Aeon my first playthrough and it was a good challenge.
- There is a sprawling map and so much to do and so much to explore

Now, for the cons:
- The Abyss is terrible. Awful. I felt the story really sagged and I was extremely bored and confused trying to navigate the Abyss. Having to look right to get anywhere was really stressing me out and it took me twenty minutes to figure out the camera system to get into Battlebliss.
- IT DOES NOT TELL YOU WHEN A QUEST IS THE END OF AN ACT. I put off major quests because I was really worried that they would be the end of the act, and they weren't. I really wish that this was more noted, and that any PERMANENT decisions were made known to the player.

Neutral:
- The Crusade campaign is also very tedious. You can place it in auto, and if you do, and you go to your world map and hover over the enemy forts, it will tell you how many days before it falls. This was a nice addition and I felt I could enjoy a lot more of my quests and running around the map.

All in all, I really loved the game and it is definitely recommended that you buy it.

I tried to like this game, but it's just so boring to play. The writing isn't nearly as good as I was hoping for and the gameplay/combat is incredibly tedious. I'm not experienced with PF 3.5 but I know 5E well. I think there is a good reason 3.5 fell out of favor - even once you get past understanding its unnecessarily complicated rules, it sucks to play. Sitting there watching people repeatedly fail rolls is just boring. Not to mention traveling on the map is annoying - it's not clever to make me roll for traversing terrain and lose 3 hours for failing, or forcing SO MANY ENCOUNTERS when I'm trying to do other quests. The gameplay mechanics time and again just feel like you're being frog-marched through nit-picky dice rolls that don't add anything to the experience and instead waste your time. The voice acting is inconsistent, both in terms of the performance and when it seems to actually trigger instead of making you read everything. Nothing felt like it flowed well so that I could get caught up in the story. Honestly so disappointed.

It has it's problems, but if you like Pathfinder the tabletop, you will enjoy this.

Generally the game is good. Its based on the tabletop campaign which is one of the best the series has to offer, so it's kind of impossible for things to go wrong storywise. However after Baldurs Gate 3 has come out you cant pretend like that game doesnt exist with the innovations and quality of life imporvements it gives to the crpg genre. Owlcat should just copy paste simple things like jumping, trap interactions, throwing objects and enemies, etc for their future games. So heres a list of good and bad things for the game starting with the good.
-Amazing story, great voicelines, fun character questlines
-Seemingly endless build options. This is true for pathfinder builds in general but with mythic progress it takes it to a whole new level.
-Good thing you can rotate your camera to see whats happening. You couldn't in Kingmaker.
Bad things
- You cant jump. Very simple yet a very fun game mechanic as seen in BG3
-When turn order is on, sometimes you give a character a command to attack for example and they walk up to the target and just sit there and lag in frustration unable to do anything even if they clearly reach the target. This mainly happens when other friendlies are next to the character but its pretty damn clear that my character can attack.
-Customization options are so many, it can be scary for new players. Personally i just have like 20 tabs open with guides when I play for all my companions. Don't get me wrong its better to have a great number of build options than not but I'm just stating the fact that it can be hard for a new player to get into the game.
-Traps. The only way you can interact with traps is either disable or walk on them. You cant jump over them, you cant throw an enemy on them, enemies walking past them don't activate them. Seems like a missed opportunity for more fun to me.
-Finally on a more personal note. Can we just bend the pathfinder rules a little and make our characters able to move after taking a standard action? Is it really THAT game breaking? I mean who cares?
Anyway thats all from me, I love the game and the series and hope future releases look on BG3, steal the fun stuff from it, and become masterpieces.

Yatzy is a more fun dice rolling game than whatever this game is trying to be.

Goated CRPG, first introduction to Pathfinder and Owlcat superiority

I tried to like this game, I really did, especially since I was decently into the prequel. But Pathfinder WOTR is just too much of everything. Too much written dialogue without voice acting, too much combat with too many enemies and too many builds to choose from. Last time I dropped the game at around act 5, which is, ironically, just when it "gets good" because the whole game's gimmick is you pick a mithic path and that changes your whole playthrough, and I thought it was because of their terrible army management part of the game, so I came back with it turned off and... no, fatigue once again set in and I just couldn't bring myself to continue past act 3 this time. There's good to be found here, but it's buried in a mountain of text, mechanics and having to bring 6 companions and understand all their builds. It's exhausting. If you want a good Pathfinder game experience, play Kingmaker, the prequel.

While Wrath of the Rigtheous manages to captivate with its stories, lore, and characters, the gameplay quickly becomes a drag. This game was clearly made for hardcore Pathfinder fans - which is fair, since they funded it on Kickstarter. Still I cannot bring myself to recommend this to most others, due to the amount of meaningless and repetitve combat encounters that are thrown your way. While the combat system is very complex (and seems to be faithul to the tabletop) it just isn't very fun. The amount of skills, spells and abilities is absolutely overwhelming, but mastering these systems rarely feels rewarding since you spend most of your time slaying runts. Bossfights are fun but losing them to dice rolls isn't.

Unfortunately lowering the difficulty and just playing the game for the story wouldn't really work either, since you'd still have to slaughter your way through hundreds of boring encounters.

Visually stunning with an intriguing story, but way too long due to repetetive fights. Not at all surprised that only roughly 10% of players reached the ending.

Very good game. Difficulty settings can be a HUGE issue and really depends on you knowledge of the pathfinder systems. Once you understand it though there's tons of replay value in this game. I'd recommend "Normal - Core" for new players and also look up some youtube builds on a specific class you like to help you get started.

More fans of Baldur's Gate 3 need to be playing this as well. Amazing story, choices that matter and great companions. If you're new to the Pathfinder system I recommend using turn based mode and the inspector a fair bit to start with to get a better idea of the mechanics.

Insane rollercoaster, not even sure where to begin.

Firstly the amount of content in the game is insanely overwhelming. At the start of the game you would think: okay so the game takes place in this Kenabres city. And after Act 1 you're hit with a big ass map and countless amount of locations (though, some of them are quite Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V-ish). And once you reach Act 3 you're like: damn, this game never cease to amaze. I was geniunly surprised how the game changed its pace, not letting me stay in my comfort zone.

Character creation is so variable to the point that I remember spending over 3 hours just reading about the classes and their abilities. Later in the game you can become one of these extremely OP godlike entities which takes the game to a whole new level. To my memory, it is something that has never been done before in any RPG (usually, in this "chosen" trope the writers choose the origin of the protagonist, but in WotR you choose the origin for yourself and there are about 10 Mythic Paths you can choose from). You can literally become a freaking dragon in this game and have a full gameplay experience as a dragon.

The compainos feel real, they have their own agenda, alignments, their own thoughts about your decisions, their own secrets. Some of the characters might be too archetypical (Woljf, Greybor, Seelah), but that doesn't make them less charming. This game intoduced me to Regill, one of the best and most badass character ever. If you adopted a Lich Mythical Path then some of your enemies can become your puppet-compaions. However, they are not just mindless undead, they still provide interesting commentary from their "undead-foe-willing-to-cooperate" point of view, which I fould extremely amusing.

The dialogues are extremely well-written. The game gives you plenty of dialogue choices and decisions, while staying away from the primitive good/bad options. I mean, they are there but, there are also "grey" options. Some provoke reflections on morality as a social construct, not being subject to cosmic balance. Some made for shits and giggles. I also liked the "Morrowind feature", where you can read about lore-related stuff that was mentioned in the dialogues simply by clickning on the highlighted word. It spares the game from unecessary question dialouges that are so common in CRPG games (which are basically a giant exposition dump). I always hated dilogues that contained questions about the basic principles of the universe/lore as if your character is senile and doesn't know these things.

I also liked the fact that you can avoid torturing yourself with long turn-based combat battles and switch to real-time fights with tactical pause, like in Pillars of Eternity or Dragon Age Origins. Not saying that the turn-based combat is trash, I just enjoy following the story more.

The amount of choices you can make in this game still amazes me. From minor choices of cheering somebody up or bully them into Abyss to the timeline-altering choices as a Commander of the Crusade. Your decisions MATTER in this game, each time you make a choice you make an impact on the world and the people in it, and it shows.

This game have a HUGE replayability. I just finished my first run of 100 hours and I feel that I barely scratched the surface.

Now the things that disappointed:

1. The thing that caused the biggest butthurt for me is the Crusade Mode. This goddamn thing is just straight up broken. I'm sorry, there is no way around it. At first I was having fun creating my own army and battelling demons in this sort of Heroes of Might and Magic mechanics. But ffs, the morale system is just trash, it PUNISHES YOU FOR BEING A SUCCESSFUL GENERAL Like what? In Act 3, I was so invested in this mode that I managed to defeat every demon army and capture every fortress. After that, the morale simply starts to decrease because you no longer have any demon armies to kill and no fortresses to capture. WTF is this? Why is it decreasing? Occasianally a demon army will spawn, however, that doesn't impact the morale in the slightest. I mean sure, if there are enemies on the battlefield it is only logical that in order to keep the morale high you need to battle enemies and defeat them. However, wtf am I supposed to do if there are no enemies and I defeated them all? I feel like I'm LITERALLY the lyrical protagonist for the Dj Khaleed's album Suffering from Success.

Moreover, in the late Act 5, after you defeated literally EVERY demon army/captured every fortress. WHY ARE THE DEMONS KEEP SPAWNING? Like fr I don't undertand, it just distracts you from the main gameplay. And while yes, you can put the Crusader Mode on autopilot in the game settings, I think that is a bad decision as you will be excluding a great portion of gameplay from your run.

Also, CASTER GENERALS. They are OP to an insane point, once you unlock fireball it's over. I have won every single fight with the most trash fighters using only fireball.

2. The game has a weird economy system. I finished my run with over 1 million of gold in my pockets. You know why? Because there is no point in spending it. You always find the best loot in dungeons or get it from bosses. The main source of my spendigs was the Crusade Mode when I needed extra resources for buying mercs.

3. Puzzles. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good puzzle, but this game? I have only one sentence for you: Nameless Ruins – NEVER AGAIN. Dunno, maybe I'm just stupid, but puzzles in this game are unnecessarily difficult to the point that you cannot help but look up solutions for it on the web.

4. As I mentioned, some of the locations feel very copypasted and feels like they were added for the sake of "this one interaction with this particular character". Odd, but understandable.

5. Some classes in the game are just useless and weak and it is no secret. The Assassin class was a big disappointment for me.

6. The fights can be incredibly challenging if you play on medium or higher difficulty. I love a good challenge, I finished plenty of CRPG games on high difficulty, however, WotR was too much for me.

Final thoughts

I feel like if the devs took a bit more time balancing the crusade mode, added a more detailed face-creator with lots of options for haircuts, facial features etc for your character; Voiced every character, including the narrator, and did motion captured cutscenes/dialogues, then this game would have been a freaking God Tier GOTY quadruple A type game that even Baldur's Gate 3 would look like Knack 3 in comparison. Just sayin.

I like it, 6.5/10. The problem is Core difficulty is unforgivingly brutal. As in, if you mess up any of your character's builds, you have to restart the game.

Also, having to go bankrupt to resurrect characters isn't fun, it just means you mash F5 and F8 a lot.

And if you're thinking "Oh, just bump it to Normal if its too hard". I did, it was too easy. :S

Good, but for the love of god can they stop with the "I'm just gonna watch something I could clearly interfere with" cut-scenes.

So many events could've been countered by a realistic reaction to seeing something you wanna fight. Even Bethesda lets you cut someone off with a fireball sometimes. They need more options to interrupt people in their games.

A good improvement from Kingmaker especially when it comes to pacing. I'm not in a rush to do anything and can take my time exploring every inch of the map. I hated the kingdom management in Kingmaker and dreaded getting into wotr because of the crusade mechanic, but it's been chill and even a little fun. I also made the mistake of challenging Blackwater at level 10...never doing that again :)

Also, shout out to my man Regill for letting me live out my lawful fantasy!

Additional note: Iomedae bless the creation of teleportation circles <3