Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - a great RPG that you sometimes want to strangle
Overall, I liked Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Enough that despite the huge number of questionable decisions, I still made it to the end and enjoyed the playthrough.
But I can't call it a well-polished RPG.
The irony is that this is exactly the word fans of the game use most often. After several dozen hours, I got the feeling that what is truly carefully developed here is primarily the progression system, and even that I would call meticulous rather than convenient. The game constantly runs into decisions that work on paper or in a tabletop system, but feel strange in a computer game.
The main problem is that the game too often requires you not to play, but to study it. The huge number of classes, subclasses, feats, bonuses, and conditions turns character creation into a separate discipline. If you want to put together a strong party, metagaming begins: you have to read dozens of descriptions and build characters around mathematical efficiency.
This hits the role-playing aspect hard. Strong builds often turn a character into a Frankenstein made from several classes, assembled for the sake of numbers. A hero may be an experienced hunter or warrior in the story, but mechanically turns into a mixture of completely different classes.
And this creates a conflict: the game tells the story of heroes fighting against the Abyss, but mechanically it periodically requires you to forget about the character's personality and optimize a spreadsheet of stats.
And that's where the problem with the mathematics begins.
Combat is built around huge defense values. I played on normal difficulty, which I also recommend to newcomers. Some ordinary demons have an AC above 40, which means the party can simply be hitting thin air for several rounds. At the same time, a story boss can sometimes die in one or two rounds.
The difficulty feels less like fighting strong enemies and more like the need to stack dozens of buffs. That's why I sometimes felt that I was fighting not so much demons as the mathematics of Pathfinder.
The transition from tabletop rules to a computer game doesn't always work, and this is probably the game's main problem. In a tabletop game, frequent misses at low levels can be justified, as the Game Master controls the composition of enemies and the difficulty. Here, however, an experienced paladin can miss a demon several times in a row.
Magic is even worse. At low levels, a mage has to pass several checks, overcome spell resistance, and actually land the spell just to deal a few points of damage. Meanwhile, archers calmly tear through enemies.
The environment also has almost no effect on combat. You can get hit by an enemy standing on a roof while you're standing underneath it, shoot through brick walls, and throw a fireball through a ceiling. Enemies walk through walls, while a character can't step over a tiny ledge.
The quest design is also quite sadistic. Pathfinder loves hidden consequences that only become clear several hours later. You can fail an ordinary lore check and, twenty hours later, discover that it was the first step of a hidden quest. Now the quest is closed along with its good rewards.
The game doesn't even always explain what happened. A single hidden check can close a companion's story branch without warning. As a result, a good playthrough requires not only attentiveness, but also knowledge of what's going to happen.
The most frustrating part is that there is often no way to fix the mistake within the game. Either you accept it or load an old save.
The quest journal is also inconvenient and looks more like a list of long texts. At some point, you stop understanding what you're supposed to do at all, and some quests are completed by accident simply because you happened to return to the right location.
The characters could be much more alive. Despite the large number of companions, they react far too rarely to the events around them.
You can save someone, lose someone else, find something important, and your companions will simply stand silently nearby. Even the death of a companion is sometimes barely acknowledged.
The technical side isn't impressive either. The graphics aren't bad, but they certainly don't justify the game's system requirements: simple models and textures, basic physics, and constant loading screens. Even within some scenes there are additional loading screens, which seriously breaks immersion.
So why didn't I quit the game?
Because the story here is genuinely good. The story itself kept me going even when the next mechanic started to seriously piss me off. The playthrough itself feels like climbing a mountain: difficult, sometimes unpleasant, and at times you want to stop and ask why you're even doing this. But when you finally reach the top, you get a genuine feeling of satisfaction.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - a good RPG with an excellent story, a huge amount of content, and a deep character progression system.
But I can't call it comfortable, well-polished, or player-friendly. It too often forces you to play by the developers' rules rather than as your character.
And yet I'm glad I finished it. For me, the good sides ultimately outweighed the bad ones. It's just that you literally have to squeeze the enjoyment out of this game yourself.
This isn't a game I played easily. It's a game I finished in spite of itself, and I was still satisfied in the end.
