Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

Obviously recommend. It's a fantastic game, its all we had before BG3 and it is of equal depth. Owlcat has put much love and care into the world and the game itself. Yes there are some silly bugs here and there and there could be improvements, but thats a game that's gonna take over 160 hours from you and you're not even gonna notice. If you like ttrpgs, just go for it, you won't regret it.

Best CRPG I have played in a long time. Great story immersion. I really felt like my party was saving a huge part of the world.
I feel like it addressed each of my problems with Kingmaker and fixed them well.

Big Time thumbs up. I get lost in character creation, character leveling and the vast amount choices you get to make. The game is wonderful and very worth the time!!!

Very good game!!! I'm 116 hours in, but still in act 3! The game is very large, long and time consuming. I don't know how many hours i spend just to build & look for a guide to build my character.

i felt overwhelmed at first, there were so many classes and sub classes in creating a character and so much lore in the game. but after getting used to it, this is one of the best games i have ever played, we can decide what we wanted to be and the choices we make will have an impact on the world, which makes every playing session feel different. locations, interactions, details, etc. is incredibly impressive!

This was exactly the game I needed after Baldur's Gate 3 and after reading reviews for the latest Dragon Age game, which I did not purchase. This is a seriously solid RPG, though each chapter took some adjustments, and I'm already starting another playthrough after spending months getting through the first. The story and characters are classic and the amount of choices are staggering. Enjoyed the combat, including the ability to just let it run, though I often went turn based and micromanaged. Loved the puzzles and level design. Everything else you can tell from a little preview - it's isometric, complicated character building combat with a lot of reading. But also compelling and so fun to play. Would absolutely recommend.

Pathfinder: 0/10
Wrath of the Righteous: 10/10

Seriously, this gameplay made me sure I never would want to play Pathfinder on a tabletop either. You really need to rules lawyer absolutely every spell, because there are so many similar but actually completely incompatible terms, it's simply mentally exhausting, and on top of that it's all dice rolls anyway, so even if you rules lawyer perfectly you still get fucked half the time. Also the sorcerer has >100 spells by the end of the game, and there is no search function, so it really is very fiddly. I ended up spamming fireballs and later chain lightning up to the end of the game, figuring out the right spell to use among 5-page-long enemy character sheets is just not fun for me.

I played with auto-crusade, the world map mechanic was already frustrating enough having to control 1 unit, let alone if I had 10 platoons and an upgrade system on top, geez. Thankfully in the late game you get enough stealth to be able to always evade enemies even when exhausted, but during most of the game, traveling between places is full of interruptions by not very challenging battles, and managing the rest menu every screenful. It also conflicts with urgency in the story, since you can rest for 30 days with someone yelling "we have to go there NOOWWWW", not a big fan.

But the writing is worth it! It really is. Every time I rage quit from having a whole turn where all participants (enemies and teammates alike!) missing all attacks, I reopened the game 5 minutes later to continue exploring the world. The overarching story is the classic chosen one format, but the side quests and smaller moments are really really well executed. I'm not usually a side quest person, but this game's were the most fun part.

I've played these types of genre since Baldur's Gate 1 & Icewind Dale. Pathfinder WOTR so far is the best CRPG surpassing if not all in my opinion (on par with BG3 in their own flavor). The only thing that needs to be added is to have pre-autobuffs for any skill/spell option. These tons of buffs are very time consuming esp. for people w/ busy lives/career. I know there is a MOD for this but its best to integrate it. Hands down the BEST!!!

This game is awesome. Now that I'm 128 hours in, I'm finally done with character creation. I can't wait to see what the story holds.

Okay but in all seriousness, this is a great game with an enormous amount of depth. The sheer variety in itemization and customization is a thing that many contemporary games shy away from in the name of simplicity. I, for one, love to be treated as an adult with the ability to read. Enormously rewarding game. I managed to get it on sale for three bucks, and in retrospect this is probably one of the best values of any game I've ever played. I have committed to playing every available owlcat CRPG basically because this one is so great.

This game has a lot of good things going for it, but it is unnecessarily hard. Like, way too hard. I want to love it, but I have to reload so many battles that it doesn't feel worth the time sink most of the time.

Ember my dear ancient daughter I'll force all the gods to chill out and help people just for you.

A good game if you enjoy d&d tabletop and have a couple hundred hours to spend.

In the nomal/lower difficulties it's ok to let the system auto-level, but if you have to level manually, prepare to waste 30 minutes each time you level up reading/thinking your options.

I tried hard to like this game, but 75 hours of trying to look past the flaws with hope of a better time to only encounter more flaws is just too much.

The balancing in this game is shit. It is not a matter of being too easy or too hard, that is what the difficulty options are for. It's a matter of being too easy or too hard inconsistently. The crusade can be a grind, unless you use a mage general, in which case you win all fights before enemy gets to move. The actual party gameplay is mostly a comfortable breeze except for when you take a turn down unmarked fork in the road and encounter 'optional fight' that will slaughter you in one turn because the way to beat them is to know they are there and prebuff accordingly. I've kept track of how stupid these optional encounters were and so far, the most stupid I found is an enemy full *18* levels above my party with 14 permanent buff spells on them. It is immersion ruining to have to reload because of something you had no way to see coming.

Also default builds. Default builds can't beat default difficulty. I'm not asking them to be minmaxed destroyers of worlds, but when your most armored companion with best armor you can scrounge dies in one round, something is wrong.

Performance issues are absolutely unbearable.

Stuttering issues, frame loss, vsync doesn't even work correctly.

They attempted to make a custom script to "optimise" the game.

Added a bunch of useless features that obviously don't work at all.

Despite the fact that as a system pathfinder is maybe one of the most esoteric and unnecessarily complex TTRPGs on the market, the game is still fun. That does come with some caveats, pacing can feel off with some acts being too long and others too short, the last act is the most content bare and unpolished like most other CRPGs, and there are seemingly banal choices you can make that just make the game straight up less fun. Despite that the characters and aspects of the story are generally excellent, there is a bunch of content, and the moment to moment gameplay is more serviceable than in most CRPGs. This is also a game that requires a lot of reading so that is something to be aware of, though if that was a problem for you its unlikely you got to this point in the review anyways.

Kinda insane that this game is still getting updates. One of the best CRPGs on steam

honestly a massive failure of game design. Nothing in the game is intuitive, so unless you are a pathfinder nerd then enjoy spending 10 hours reading how anything interacts. Act 1 has some cool moments, but the hook isn't super great. Act 2 literally stonewalls you with some time gated tedious war mode where you have to manage units and your progression in the already dreary story is blocked. Great MORE menus for you to navigate and learn. Random DLC content shows up in act 2 that you cant even do unless you are already level 8+. Scaling in this game is comically out of control, some builds are tactical nukes, others are wet noodles. Enemies having 100000s of AC is not fun game design, cheese or don't win. Just like pathfinder kingmaker this is another failed entry from owlcat. If you really enjoy pathfinder I'm sure you can find a home here, but as an avid enjoyer of EVERY CRPG IVE PLAYED THAT ISNT AN OWLCAT GAME, I'd say it's a hard skip. Also, so many paid DLCs is a massive turn off when they add barely anything to the game. Hard skip this game if you value your time, because the devs sure don't.

I wish Steam reviews could be more nuanced, because this game is somehow one of the best games I've ever played while also being a slog that almost gave me burnout at 3 different points. Other reviews have already more aptly summarized the negative aspects (like prebuffing, difficulty spikes etc.), so

This review will not be concise, but rather address fantasy fans who are not diehard isometric RPG fans and are wondering if they'd like to sit through 70-130hrs of this.

(For an instant disclaimer, this game is as huge, grandiose and amazing as it is advertised. But you need to be the target audience, or you will get fatigued by the time the unpopular and semi-unskippable Crusade Mode rolls along in Act 3.)

Who is this game for?
Tabletop RPG fans, bookworms or buildcrafting minmaxers. This is an important measure of enjoyment. This game is intentionally designed to sometimes play like a boardgame experience rather than a 3D game about exploration, looting and epic fights. You get this too, but in a more bookish than cinematic way. Much like Pillars of Eternity, this game is for people who like lore and letting their imagination flesh out scenarios, less so gladiator types who like e.g. Skyrim.

The dialectical breakdown

We probably all love fantasy anyway, so it will come down to small gameplay mechanics, technical aspects and downsides to decide if ~100hrs of this game can be for you. Below are the things I liked about WOTR, listed in tête á tête to their counterpoints.

Perfection in adherence to the original Pen-and-Paper system - to a fault
WOTR implements the Pathfinder PnP system impressively and is the closest thing to actually playing a tabletop without the tabletop... or friends. I know comparatively little about DnD or Pathfinder and was mindblown by how intricately it can be realized in a video game. Pathfinder easily has the most subclasses in any game ever. However, the Pen-and-Paper was poorly streamlined into a videogaming experience - every difficulty beyond story mode requires repetitive pre-buffing, laborious minmaxing/micromanagement and a learning curve that is not everyone's playstyle (refer to Quantic Foundry's gamer profiling if interested). It's very hard towards newbies, or anyone coming from more intuitive combat systems like Divinity. The game tries to teach players, but there is still tons that is explained inadequately or not at all. Having to alt-tab constantly to google how every single debuff can be removed all the time is bad. In TTRPGs, it is normal to leaf in rulebooks while playing. But for a videogame (unless it ships a cool physical tome), that is bad. The problem is not even that the game is difficult (it can be easy, eventually!), the problem is that it requires more learning than the game provides, and that combat is rigged for quantity over quality.

Excellent writing - but too much of it
Right off the bat, I love reading. I love the Fighting Fantasy book series. Hell, if you don't like reading, literally cRPGs are not for you. However, WOTR is the kind of game in which important plot hooks are sometimes played out as choose-your-adventure text sequences instead of cinematics or even just animations. Whether this is anticlimactic or not is hugely dependant on your personal preference. From an editorial standpoint, the dialogue is not broken down well even though it deserved peak presentation. Classic RPGs of the 90's and 2000's had text walls that were accommodated for in bigger text boxes, but Pathfinder: WOTR uses Visual Novel-sized dialogue slabs that necessitate ugly scrollbars unless you manually decrease font size. (For reference, Pillars of Eternity or Divinity did the portioning better.) Important text is indistinguishable from less important text, with the result being reading fatigue and accidental skipping of interesting lines. All of this is unfortunate, because the writing truly is excellent imo.

Loading screens and lack of optimization
Every single location regardless of map size requires new loading, and game mechanics unfortunately facilitate savescumming, which results in even more loading. I'm currently clocking in 122hrs, but I bet 22 of those were spent on loading screens.
Something that is common for Unity engine games is also that this will *cook* your CPU temps. Setting the graphics to low settings (which has very little impact) and enforcing hard FPS caps in your GPU driver settings mitigates this greatly, but it's sad this has to be done in the first place.

Can be amazing - But with 3rd party mods
There is indeed such a thing as ethical cheating, and I'm so grateful to the community for their work. If I had left WOTR unmodded, I would have dropped it from burnout in Act 3. Unfortunately ToyBox became not just a QoL improvement, but a necessity for fixing minor bugs and frustrating quest oversights that are not necessarily the player's fault, and which would've required reloading saves from tens of hours ago in order to fix organically. (E.g.: Bismuth got randomly deleted out of existence and I had to "cheat" her back into the inventory. She's still bugged because of this.) Using ToyBox elevates the game closer to what it deserves to be. Also, automount my love.

I like XYZ, will I like Pathfinder?

◆Divinity: Original Sin: Very close in terms of partybuilding and visual design. Pathfinder has a lot less streamlined, accessible combat. If you prefer to "just play", it will be more frustrating, however it is perhaps still the closest thing to D:OS that exists.
◆Baldur's Gate 1/2: Despite the source material being more closely related, WOTR feels closer to Divinity or Shadowrun than BG. Systems are comparable in their complexity and will feel pleasantly familiar. Pillars of Eternity is closer to BG in terms of design.
◆Pillars of Eternity: Similarly interesting companions, story and map size. Pathfinder is the more modernized game and feels more like a beautiful 3D tabletop game than a classic, retrochic mouseclick cRPG like PoE. Similar build complexity possible.
◆Dragon Age: Unless you play on Story Mode, Pathfinder's pre-combat management might drive you crazy. Chances are good you'll like the WOTR characters if you thought DA1 was the worst DA. Neverwinter Nights is the better Bioware point of reference overall.
◆Skyrim: ...is Counter Strike in comparison. Chances are good you'll like Pathfinder if you liked Morrowind, though.

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The End:
Last but not least, I must stress again that I am listing all these gripes because it is a fantastic game of epic scale and immense replayability, and it deserves to be perfect but sadly isn't. Constructive criticism and openness in addressing real issues can hopefully help in bringing its successors closer to the perfection they deserve.

A wonderful treatise by Owlcat on how to screw up a potentially classic level crpg with the same level and encounter design you got sick of playing the first game. The same kind of fun characters, all stuck in a storyline going nowhere.

700 hours...haven't gotten past act 3. Game's not hard, I've just spent more hours in character creation planning builds than playing the actual game. Zero ragrets. Anyway, THIS run I'll actually play to the end... this is THE run I just know it...

Tedious, slow, and boring. World sucks, characters suck, writing sucks.
I thought it would pick up after the initial act and opening up Mythic paths but it only got even more tedious, slow, and boring. Most of the characters are awful, the voice-acting is outright horrendous, and a lot of the "chaotic" dialog options are lol-so-wacky Redditor RP. I hated Nenio on sight and dismissed her immediately, something I never do to companions in these types of games. Wenduag is cool, and I like that my healer was an evil jerk noble. Most of the allies suck though, and none of them made me want to delve into their backstories because that would mean reading more bad exposition dumps from them.
The awesome mechanical depth, cool lore, and sometimes clever combat is wasted on a world and story that tries its hardest at every turn to make me want to turn the game off and play something else. This is my first Owlcat game so maybe I just didn't vibe with this one as I still want to check out Rogue Trader and Kingmaker but WotR has definitely soured me on the studio.

I gave it 25 hours, I do not care what befalls the fate of this world. Let the demons take Golarion, hopefully they find something worth caring about in this land.

I have 40 hours into this and i want to love it, but imo, its is a bloated, poorly balanced mess. one of the first games i wont finish in a long, long time.

That being said i would reccomend picking it up on a sale if you're interested in it, a lot of people love the game, im just not one of them.

this game expects that you have played the game for at least 50 hours prior to actually playing the game

I convinced a guard in front of a bridge that his bear paws were hurting, so I could talk to his manager.
(the guard was not a bear)
Game has a lot of fun and interesting choices, but it isn't as detailed as say Baldur's Gate III. The scope is a lot bigger than Baldur's Gate III though, you're a leader of an entire crusade which you can control personally.
It's good

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.