Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

What a huge disappointment this game turned out to be. After having a blast with Kingmaker and after taking a break to not burn myself out I jumped into this game. Just like many other sequels that don't live up to the previous title this does the same thing. [h1]The good:[/h1] Didn't know I needed Arueshalae in my life, but now that I experience her dialogue, the awesome quest, the funny party banter, the romance and the ending slides I have to say that they knocked it out of the park with this character. I will be holding this developer to this standard moving forward with their newer games. I loved to play the angel mythic path, loved the interactions I got from the NPCs during the main and side quests. [h1]The bad:[/h1] Again with the quality of the companion quests being inconsistent. Just like in the first game some characters get a good story arc while others are begging for scraps, Camellia and Wenduag have bad or non existing personal quests. Literally every other companion has 10/10 personal quests. I can guess why one of the two had such a bad character quest, it was because the writers had to take time to somehow write Jubilost into the story for a short encounter because why not. Again just like the first game, this one felt a bit too long with too much padding added to the game. The army/crusade parts were boring and somehow a downgrade compared to the kingdom management. The whole mythic path feels like an after though even with how intertwined the system is with the story. I hate the fact that they added the possibility of having a mount and locked it behind wasting a skill on animal companion if you even have that skill in your class repertoire. [h1]The really bad:[/h1] Chapter 4. Yeah, no wonder why it's hated. The camera gimmick was annoying, the fights were way too frequent and with too many enemies. I wish they put as much effort as Larian did with their redo of act 3 & 4 of Original Sin 2. Bugs have become synonymous with Owlcat and their lack of interest in patching them after they release the first and second season passes. Maybe in the future we will see a third, fourth and a fifth season pass. They love to add DLCs to the game, either by putting a new character in the early chapters and forcing you to replay the game or some badly written side stories that go nowhere. More isn't always better, especially when talking about Owlcat and DLCs because they introduce new bugs and never fix existing ones. I don't hate puzzles, but I do hate badly implemented puzzles and Inevitable Excess delivered only bad puzzles. At some point the game forces you to play turned based. It was not fun since I played the whole game real time. If you give me the option to choose how to play the game then don't take it away for some stupid arbitrary reason. [h1]Conclusion:[/h1] After reading this review you would wonder why I recommend this game. I wouldn't outright say don't buy the game, just buy it on a sale and don't expect too much from it. It's an ok game, but don't expect it to be another BG 3 like people make it out to be.

not to be dramatic but I think I hate this game. allow me to explain why I have 100 hours on it. It pulls you in with an action-packed beginning to the narrative and a dazzling array of class options. but as the game drags on, both aspects fail. the story becomes mind-numbingly repetitive with no meaningful developments over time. and the combat gets exposed for how deeply flawed it is the more you play it Story: can be easily summarized in one sentence: you fight demons. that's it. there is no meaningful development at any point of the story that changes anything in an interesting way. the one perhaps creative spin is that the writers both want demons to be ontologically cartoonishly evil who do evil stuff only for fun and who you can slaughter in hordes without any remorse BUT ALSO be redeemable characters with depth and complexity. this underbaked attempt at moral complexity both undermines the otherwise decently compelling evil of the demons and cheapens the redemptions of the "good" ones if it was short I wouldn't mind such an underthought narrative but this game is painfully long Gameplay: the crusade mode is garbage and that's uncontroversial so I won't say much about it what frustrates me the most is the combat system the combat system issues can be categorized as: 1. Owlcat uses many slop combats. i.e. combats that do not advance the plot, or tell you anything about the world/characters, or introduce new enemies, or challenge you tactically in some unique way. Your tactics are the same almost every time. Abuse a chokepoint, attack until the enemy is dead. This would maybe be fine if it wasn't so tedious, but that brings me to my next point: 2. Owlcat thinks tedious gameplay is the same as tactically interesting gameplay. By act 4 you may be casting 50+ buff spells on your party members before every fight. Just one of those abilities requires 40+ key presses to apply to the whole party (protective luck & cackle/chant). It is seriously baffling. This gets worse the more you level up as you get more and more buffs. This brings me to my next point: 3. Owlcat thinks the more spells/abilities a player can choose from, the better. They hardly consider balance or redundancy. Almost never did my level up options present me with an option that meaningfully changed my tactics. The best level up abilities were typically a +1 bonus becomes a +2 bonus and so on. The spell system is so wildly bloated that for debuffs enemies have a paragraph of immunities that you have to closely read through to cross-check with your 20+ abilities statuses AND keywords. If you miss something from these staggeringly long lists and try to use something an enemy is immune to then your turn and resource are both fully wasted. You can also check enemy feats/abilities of which they have dozens by act 4 with lengthy descriptions. Most of which are irrelevant to how you fight enemies, some of which are crucial to note. There are also many different types of numerical bonuses but the same types don't stack so you must carefully cross-check ability descriptions, spell descriptions, feats and gear before stacking buffs. Again, all this is point 2. all of these issues get worse the more animal companions you take with you and it is always extremely optimal to have as many animal companions as possible. by the start of act 4 in an active group I had 10 party members & animal companions and this is all made further worse by the fact that the game uses a long rest system with little to no limitations, incentivizing resting after every single fight as I said, these all get even worse the more you level up, but for 100 hours I was hoping that wasn't the case. the tipping point for me was the act 4 fleshmarkets fight which was so comedically unbalanced I just gave up on the game entirely I can forgive the bad story and meh characters but all of these issues taken together reveal a game so poorly designed it honestly feels insulting to the notion of game design itself overall I'm kind of astounded that this game is so highly praised. I think this many positive reviews exist because Owlcat pulls a sleight of hand by overwhelming the players with so many options for classes and spells and abilities and feats and mythic routes that they get the impression of a well-designed game with an amazing number of masterfully developed customizability options this illusion holds up at normal & lower difficulties but is fully exposed as fraudulent at higher difficulties when you're forced to pick optimal choices and interface more closely with the combat system as you replay the same difficult fights over and over. it seriously is baffling how something like this could be so poorly designed. is this the result of upper management pushing the developers to produce as many spells/abilities/feats as possible while rushing them too quickly to consider uniqueness & balance? regardless, this was regrettably the biggest disappointment of game design that I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing

Ich habe ziemlich lange gebraucht, bis ich mich an Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition herangewagt habe. Irgendwie hatte ich die Sorge, dass es mich am Ende enttäuschen könnte, vor allem weil ich schon viel Gutes darüber gehört hatte. Als ich dann angefangen habe, war ich auch nicht sofort komplett begeistert. Die ersten Stunden haben etwas gebraucht, bis ich wirklich im Spiel angekommen war. Je länger ich gespielt habe, desto mehr hat mich das Spiel aber gepackt. Die Geschichte wird immer interessanter, die Begleiter wachsen einem ans Herz und man merkt, wie viel Liebe zum Detail in der Welt steckt. Besonders gefallen hat mir, dass sich Entscheidungen oft wichtig anfühlen und man seinen eigenen Weg gehen kann. Auch wenn das Spiel anfangs etwas überwältigend sein kann, hat sich das Dranbleiben für mich absolut gelohnt. Irgendwann wollte ich einfach immer wissen, wie es weitergeht, und habe deutlich mehr Zeit darin versenkt als ursprünglich geplant. Rückblickend bin ich wirklich froh, dem Spiel eine Chance gegeben zu haben. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition hat sich für mich zu einem der besten Rollenspiele entwickelt, die ich in den letzten Jahren gespielt habe.

Broadly, I can't recommend this. More narrowly, if you're looking for a hardcore, numbers and spreadsheet driven, difficult, sometimes obscure to a fault, but very rewarding story-rich experience, sure. Just be prepared to read. A lot. Do not expect to like this just because you liked BG3. The story is quite good and engaging, and the progression in power from no-one to endgame is really satisfying. Many of the core characters in the game are interesting and well written. There seems to be a LOT of variety in how things play out with the mythic paths and character choices, but I don't have it in me to go back through and see more of them. All the companions were very interesting and I enjoyed them as well. The crusade is not fun. Oh and it's not just one crusade segment. The UI is functional at best but it falls short more often than not. There's a lack of QOL in many areas, the crusade being the most notable. P1e ruleset is just a convoluted and bloated mess beyond even the most complicated older D&D rulesets, if you aren't prepared for that, good luck. Many of the puzzles suck, and one of the companion quests can go to hell. The amount and pacing of side content at times was overwhelming, to the point where you can easily rack up too many side quests at once and good luck keeping track of all of it. Especially with the game doing it's damnedest to pull you in every direction all at once. IF I ever work up the will to do another playthrough, the crusade is getting disabled/automated immediately and companions I don't plan to use are getting ignored. For me, the gameplay in Wrath was more of an obstacle than a complement to the great story, which is tragic because there are moments where the story and gameplay worked well together, but it wasn't often.

具有杨短避长，手工搓屎的匠人精神：巨大多堆怪/毫无游玩体验的圣教军模式/弱智小游戏/神必解密/稀烂的回合制体验/无意义的空地图/无捷径反复跑图。这些屎点均匀分布，属于是打开即吃了。

Amazing game. Dont be discouraged by character creation. Pick whatever sounds cool and play on normal for your first playthrough. RP mechanics are one of the best in genre.

TL;DR: I got this bloated buggy mess with all DLC for about 10 dollars and I got ripped off at that price. My hours played and this being a negative review should tell you everything. The game starts you off small and weak and takes you through a journey that ends with you and your party gaining awesome power and interacting with some of the strongest characters in the setting. The problem is that every element of the game fights you in your attempt to enjoy that journey. I am writing this review before I beat the game, but I feel this is appropriate because the developers might also never finish this game. Pathfinder is based on a version of Dungeon and Dragons that was later simplified. Wrath of the Righteous uses the first version of Pathfinder remixes it in their own way. WotR does such a poor job of explaining how everything works together that you would think they came up with something else entirely! It is worth mentioning that both DnD and Pathfinder have both become much simpler over time because of the absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bloat of rules and interactions they ended up creating. This game inherits and wallows in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bloat but calls it "deep" and "flexible". Your very first choices (race, starting bonuses, class) seem so deep and varied that you might spend hours here just trying to find something that fits what you have in your head. Tons of classes and subclasses to do things in ways you don't expect, so you spend tons of time reading up on what is available. Do you really need all of these choices? For a new player, there is simply so much that it will overwhelm them. However, these choices are not that meaningful at all! They don't even change much over the first few hours. You see, this game depends on stat inflation for it's difficulty, so you will be stacking buffs and googling guides for half of your play time until you decide to continue a suboptimal run or start over because you won't know you've made a mistake until much later on. Couldn't a better tutorial explain things and save you the trouble? There's no way to look ahead so what's the point of choices when you don't know what you're getting down the line? There's a respec option but it's not ideal, and it is there as a band-aid over bad design. Then you're plopped down onto this fantasy world (with strange, US West Coast 21st century urban liberal politics, ethics and views on gender among other things) and soon enough you are in combat. Why are there two combat modes? You have a choice of Real Time with Pause (RTwP) and Turn-based, but they don't function in exactly the same way. Turn-based runs every character turn separately (with a "bar" that shows your time and actions remaining) but RTwP is just an action-rpg with cooldowns between certain actions. These are two very different ways of presenting the gameplay! Can someone at Owlcat make up their mind and choose one game to make instead of fitting two of them together? I know someone gave them that advice, because they didn't try anything this dumb with Rogue Trader. This game throws at you all of these buffs that become mandatory, class interactions that give you more and more actions, and all of it melds together into a goo of big numbers in the middle of a mosh pit; so why was real-time even an option? This obviously should have been a turn-based game! Why would anyone deny themselves the tools of the very system they chose to use for this game? At the very least you can swap between the modes at any time, which is itself a strange thing to be able to do mid-game since it drastically alters the difficulty. Speaking of which, you can also dynamically change the difficulty mid-game, which would've been a great feature had that menu not been a mess as well. This game runs badly and it is proud of it. Plenty of lag, inconsistent (and frequent) load times, tooltip words that aren't highlighted and elements don't respond to mouse clicks. Your characters will spin in place, freak out when you click to move or attack, and the game will simply freeze and lag with no real reason. My first character is a gendarme, and for the life of him, he can't stay on that horse to do anything. When it's time to open a door, my character spins rapidly in place (probably to escape to another game) and the door stays shut. I have to move them (and the party) back and forth a few times or select another character before trying to open the door again. I have this and similar issues with every other interactable item, so looting corpses, containers, disarming traps, talking to others, everything comes with all these rough, repetitive and buggy wastes of time. These are old complaints that will never get a fix. The design of the combat encounters and the stages and areas you visit also sucks. The game is divided into major acts that vary greatly in the freedom you have in moving around the world. Some acts you move in a party of up to 6 characters + pets and in others you additionally control armies on a large world map. I will focus on this second "Crusade" mode first: The army combat, part of the game's story involving a war with hordes of demons, seems to be a holdover from a phone game the devs never released (/s) because all you need to beat it is one busted gacha character (shoutout to Setsuna Shy). Your armies can have generals, and a couple of the generals have abilities so powerful it doesn't really matter what army they are leading because their magic is strong enough to wipe everything out. The entire (boring) loop of building up forts, moving armies around, recruiting troops, it's all meaningless because of these uber-powerful generals. Who designed this part of the game? Did they talk to anyone else? These generals trivialize everything in a game that is already rough around the edges and too big for it's own good. A couple of these generals can run around and mop up the whole demon invasion, deflating any tension you might have felt. Back to the regular combat encounters: there's simply too much! Some dungeons have puzzles and others have tidbits of lore, but you always feel like they could've been smaller and more densely packed instead of being big and full of trash. You revisit some of these areas after they have been cleared out the first time and you spend so much time just walking everywhere. Remember my mounted knight character? He gets dismounted randomly between scene transitions and conversations, and he needs a straight clear path to do his signature charge but the maps and fights aren't designed for that. He's dismounted randomly too because the game loves to set up fights as 900 IQ conversation-ambushes. Instead of becoming memorable encounters and areas, these drawn out sections turned to frustration with the game's own systems and design choices. It's just too much game too poorly designed. I could talk about the itemization, the DLC, the music and visual presentation of the areas, but it's always the same flaw: they bit off more than they could chew and it shows. The last thing I want to talk about is the plot and the characters: this game is based on an existing and playable adventure path put out by Paizo and I think Owlcat must have messed up the adaptation somehow because so many characters are just dumb and make insane decisions. I am not going to spoil anything here but the least I can say is that the world should have been more reactive to your choices and not willing to let anything slide. It would have created unique and more varied playthroughs if everyone wasn't just going along with whatever you want until the very end of the game, and I include villains and companions in this. It's just not finished, like everything else to do with this game, but it at least had some promise in the first two acts.

This is a great game with some caveats. The story is solid and the world is great. The caveats are pretty big though : 1. It is a complex game. This may or may not appeal to you. The amount of depth in the rule system can be overwhelming. It makes the combat very tough if you don't understand the mechanics. There are multiple difficulty levels in the game and outside of the easiest few you really need to understand how to build a character. For many people this is a key attraction to the game - just be aware of this. 2. The world map side of things is better than Kingmaker but some people really hate it. (I am one of those). The kingdom management / campaign management side of things in both the Pathfinder games for me is nothing other than a distraction. It is possible to scale back how important this is but for me I would personally prefer it just wasn't there at all. The DLC is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of it is awful and some of it is great. Certainly worth picking up the complete GOTY edition though.