lackblogger
SasqWatch
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021)
I quite enjoyed Pathfinder: Kingmaker, so it was natural that I would pick the sequel up at some point. However, I only lasted about 60 hours in Wrath and found myself uninstalling early on in Act 2.
The main problem was that there was just too much stuff in the game, and that no one particular aspect of any individual stuff was interesting enough to keep me engaged.
And that all this stuff was very haphazardly paced, so that the pacing of the game was overall just too disjointed to ever get into any kind of enjoyable rhythm while playing.
For example, you enter the tavern for the first time and you are presented with a whole legion of NPCs to engage with on a 'chatty' basis. Even trying to read quite quickly and at half an hour per NPC, there's hours of gametime being chewed up by this one single monotone activity.
And you get to this tavern by completing the tutorial dungeon, which is almost entirely one long non-stop, locked-in dungeon that relentlessly presents you with very similar enemies in very similar environments.
And this format was then replicated throughout the game.
Both are mitigable. You can reduce the difficulty to reduce the numbers and time spent killing the repetitive mobs. You can speed read and mostly skip the dialogues if you so desire, but, in both cases, it feels like just quitting anyway.
As in, if I'm not enjoying the two main meats of the game, what am I even playing for? What's left?
Well, the primary feature of the game is the build variety. And, wow, is there some amazing choice of builds. This game probably has the most varied and numerous build varieties of any cRPG ever created.
This is a good thing, right? How can this possibly piss you off?
Well, because it's a companion-based game. You can only pick one character for your first run through the game. And each time you replay it. And also since it's a companion-based game, it mostly doesn't matter what you pick anyway, because your companions will do most of the fighting anyway and likely do most of skill checks.
So it's a case of vastly expanding an aspect of the game that is mostly redundant in the first place.
You can mitigate this in two ways. Firstly, you can hire mercenaries and not use the companions, but, just as with the 1st game, you can't create your party from scratch at the start of the game, for story reasons, you can only gradually buy them later in the game, and then they are then limited to 20 point buy stats.
But then why would anyone do this the first time out? You'd be, essentially, making a decision that you don't like a large aspect of the game, all the effort put into companions.
The other way to mitigate it is to level-up your companions however you want. But this is, again, not particularly optimal for signaling that you're enjoying the intended content, and dialogues will soon not match the build and such like and you've already been narrowed by their initial levels, etc.
Where the game doesn't have many options is exploration. The game has massively retracted from any sense of adventuring in comparison to it's predecessor. And the open exploration was one of the primary features which made Kingmaker overall enjoyable despite it's flaws.
Wrath plays more like a corridor shooter like DOOM, just in an isometric perspective than it does an adventurous RPG as you are funneled through endless linear corridors of non-stop demon encounters. Even the 'optional' side missions are quite short and unengaging affairs that still tend to involve, heh, more demons. Maybe some undead if you're particularly lucky.
This lack of exploration is then compounded by a hyper-inflation approach to levelling up. In that, when you are, for example, level 3, you tend to get faced by enemies that are more ideally suited to level 6 parties. In order to mitigate this, the game allows you access the spells and equipment more suitable to a level 6 party.
So you don't really have any level 3 adventuring at all, you are adventuring at level 6 when you are level 3. When you do get to level 6, the mythic levels are introduced, which add even more inflation as they, for example, give you the option to double the amount of your spell slots. At the same time there's a vendor selling very high level spell scrolls.
So the game can now offer you level 12 appropriate encounters, because you are, essentially, capable of being level 12 equivalent adventurers. By this point any sense of levelling is completely out the window and it's become much more of a puzzle game, where the key to easy progress is no longer simply using what's available to your natural level, but rather an exercise in combining obscure items from various sources to produce the means to easily progress to the next puzzle.
And it means that the process of leveling up has become much more time consuming as you now have a second layer of level-up screens to read and decipher. So now there's a third aspect of the game that can take hours to complete all in one chunk of playtime.
In most games, levelling up is quite an exciting process. Hearing that chime of level-up is supposed to be one of the best dopamines in gaming, but in Wrath I really started to dread it. Like, 9 characters levelling up at once with 2 layers of levelling each. Oh well, bang goes this morning's session time.
Again, there are ways to mitigate this, such as only having XP gain for active party members, as I used in Kingmaker, but that was one of the drawbacks of Kingmaker. Because sometimes the plot requires you to take characters you haven't levelled because your main choice had gone off to do some story related solo adventure or because you wanted to do the unused character's companion quest, it just turns into an escort mission. Yuk.
Another way to be able to cope with so much nonsense a cRPG throws at a player is itemisation. Neverwinter Nights is a good example of a game where you can have quite a flawed general experience, but be constantly thrilled enough by itemisation that even the worst gameplay can feel at least quite rewarding.
I felt Kingmaker's itemisation was pretty good generally, not great, but it did enough to keep you interested with plenty of interesting baubles and attire to make exploring and looting worth the effort.
Wrath, on the other hand, left me with precious little in the way of interesting treasure, with the only genuinely exciting items coming from extremely obscure optional content, such as a +2 Mithril Shield. But then, this particular item was too much. I'd gone from a regular shield all the way to a +2 Mithril in one fell swoop. There's that hyper inflation again.
Meanwhile, nothing really in the way of weapons, belts, helmets, boots, cloaks, etc etc for pretty much every inventory slot. The only belt I found was a +2 Dex belt, which isn't particularly interesting for a Heavily Armoured crusader cleric specialising in Longswords. And, nope, no interesting Longsword drops. None whatsoever. I guess you could class Radiance as special, but only in name at this stage of the game.
Your primary reward for doing anything seemed to be random special weapons, mostly two handed items. Which is hilarious considering none of the companions are two-handers in act 1.
So it was very hard for me to get any kind of enjoyment-hook that would motivate me to continue. My gameplay loop was virtually non-existent.
I was dreading the next "tell me about yourself", I was dreading the next corridor demon bashing crawl, I was dreading the next level-up, and I wasn't getting any kind of mitigating pleasures from either exploration or looting.
How about the overall story? Did I care that I was the special one who had to save the world? Well, not really. The superpower the main character gets is really quite underwhelming and doesn't change or add much to the process of completing the 1st act and is mostly something that just gets the odd aesthetic mention in the odd cut-scene.
The build-up to the reveal about the wardstone is mostly non-existent and when you get the choice about what to do with it, I was, like, meh, whatever, I've no doubt whatever I click here it's going to result in some stupid bullshit. And, yes, it was all quite underwhelming.
I've no doubt this gets gradually expanded on the further you get in the game, but the game isn't offering me anything to keep me going that long. It's akin to sitting through a 3 hour movie because someone's told you it has a really good last half hour in that regard. At this point in time it's just more 'stuff' and stuff that isn't really thrilling me.
Every other story beat is just people being traitors.
And then the game introduces the strategic layer of King's Bounty/HOMM and I just roll my eyes.
Like so many franchises and game endeavors, it's a case where the first game has really drawn me in, but the sequel has decided to double down on the worst aspects and generally remove all the aspects I kinda liked. And you start to wonder if it's even the same people making the game anymore.
It's like the Dragon Age 2 to Dragon Age Origins. The sprawling landscape and all it's varied encounters have been replaced by repetitive copy-pasted waves of boredom. The situational conversations have been replaced by relentless banal meaningless gibberish. Where the 1st game was only just bordering on the enjoyable, but just managed to stay on the flip side of good, but the 2nd just goes full nope.
Still, I got 60 hours out of my limited time, which is a full game's worth in many cases, so I can at least quit where I did an just imagine the game ends at the end of act 1 and I can move on now, so that's at least a positive, and I'd give the game at this point a 4/10, which is still better than Dragon Age 2.
Oh, and if you think this review is a bit long, which it is, please be aware that I've skipped an awful lot of issues I have with the game for the sake of brevity.
I quite enjoyed Pathfinder: Kingmaker, so it was natural that I would pick the sequel up at some point. However, I only lasted about 60 hours in Wrath and found myself uninstalling early on in Act 2.
The main problem was that there was just too much stuff in the game, and that no one particular aspect of any individual stuff was interesting enough to keep me engaged.
And that all this stuff was very haphazardly paced, so that the pacing of the game was overall just too disjointed to ever get into any kind of enjoyable rhythm while playing.
For example, you enter the tavern for the first time and you are presented with a whole legion of NPCs to engage with on a 'chatty' basis. Even trying to read quite quickly and at half an hour per NPC, there's hours of gametime being chewed up by this one single monotone activity.
And you get to this tavern by completing the tutorial dungeon, which is almost entirely one long non-stop, locked-in dungeon that relentlessly presents you with very similar enemies in very similar environments.
And this format was then replicated throughout the game.
Both are mitigable. You can reduce the difficulty to reduce the numbers and time spent killing the repetitive mobs. You can speed read and mostly skip the dialogues if you so desire, but, in both cases, it feels like just quitting anyway.
As in, if I'm not enjoying the two main meats of the game, what am I even playing for? What's left?
Well, the primary feature of the game is the build variety. And, wow, is there some amazing choice of builds. This game probably has the most varied and numerous build varieties of any cRPG ever created.
This is a good thing, right? How can this possibly piss you off?
Well, because it's a companion-based game. You can only pick one character for your first run through the game. And each time you replay it. And also since it's a companion-based game, it mostly doesn't matter what you pick anyway, because your companions will do most of the fighting anyway and likely do most of skill checks.
So it's a case of vastly expanding an aspect of the game that is mostly redundant in the first place.
You can mitigate this in two ways. Firstly, you can hire mercenaries and not use the companions, but, just as with the 1st game, you can't create your party from scratch at the start of the game, for story reasons, you can only gradually buy them later in the game, and then they are then limited to 20 point buy stats.
But then why would anyone do this the first time out? You'd be, essentially, making a decision that you don't like a large aspect of the game, all the effort put into companions.
The other way to mitigate it is to level-up your companions however you want. But this is, again, not particularly optimal for signaling that you're enjoying the intended content, and dialogues will soon not match the build and such like and you've already been narrowed by their initial levels, etc.
Where the game doesn't have many options is exploration. The game has massively retracted from any sense of adventuring in comparison to it's predecessor. And the open exploration was one of the primary features which made Kingmaker overall enjoyable despite it's flaws.
Wrath plays more like a corridor shooter like DOOM, just in an isometric perspective than it does an adventurous RPG as you are funneled through endless linear corridors of non-stop demon encounters. Even the 'optional' side missions are quite short and unengaging affairs that still tend to involve, heh, more demons. Maybe some undead if you're particularly lucky.
This lack of exploration is then compounded by a hyper-inflation approach to levelling up. In that, when you are, for example, level 3, you tend to get faced by enemies that are more ideally suited to level 6 parties. In order to mitigate this, the game allows you access the spells and equipment more suitable to a level 6 party.
So you don't really have any level 3 adventuring at all, you are adventuring at level 6 when you are level 3. When you do get to level 6, the mythic levels are introduced, which add even more inflation as they, for example, give you the option to double the amount of your spell slots. At the same time there's a vendor selling very high level spell scrolls.
So the game can now offer you level 12 appropriate encounters, because you are, essentially, capable of being level 12 equivalent adventurers. By this point any sense of levelling is completely out the window and it's become much more of a puzzle game, where the key to easy progress is no longer simply using what's available to your natural level, but rather an exercise in combining obscure items from various sources to produce the means to easily progress to the next puzzle.
And it means that the process of leveling up has become much more time consuming as you now have a second layer of level-up screens to read and decipher. So now there's a third aspect of the game that can take hours to complete all in one chunk of playtime.
In most games, levelling up is quite an exciting process. Hearing that chime of level-up is supposed to be one of the best dopamines in gaming, but in Wrath I really started to dread it. Like, 9 characters levelling up at once with 2 layers of levelling each. Oh well, bang goes this morning's session time.
Again, there are ways to mitigate this, such as only having XP gain for active party members, as I used in Kingmaker, but that was one of the drawbacks of Kingmaker. Because sometimes the plot requires you to take characters you haven't levelled because your main choice had gone off to do some story related solo adventure or because you wanted to do the unused character's companion quest, it just turns into an escort mission. Yuk.
Another way to be able to cope with so much nonsense a cRPG throws at a player is itemisation. Neverwinter Nights is a good example of a game where you can have quite a flawed general experience, but be constantly thrilled enough by itemisation that even the worst gameplay can feel at least quite rewarding.
I felt Kingmaker's itemisation was pretty good generally, not great, but it did enough to keep you interested with plenty of interesting baubles and attire to make exploring and looting worth the effort.
Wrath, on the other hand, left me with precious little in the way of interesting treasure, with the only genuinely exciting items coming from extremely obscure optional content, such as a +2 Mithril Shield. But then, this particular item was too much. I'd gone from a regular shield all the way to a +2 Mithril in one fell swoop. There's that hyper inflation again.
Meanwhile, nothing really in the way of weapons, belts, helmets, boots, cloaks, etc etc for pretty much every inventory slot. The only belt I found was a +2 Dex belt, which isn't particularly interesting for a Heavily Armoured crusader cleric specialising in Longswords. And, nope, no interesting Longsword drops. None whatsoever. I guess you could class Radiance as special, but only in name at this stage of the game.
Your primary reward for doing anything seemed to be random special weapons, mostly two handed items. Which is hilarious considering none of the companions are two-handers in act 1.
So it was very hard for me to get any kind of enjoyment-hook that would motivate me to continue. My gameplay loop was virtually non-existent.
I was dreading the next "tell me about yourself", I was dreading the next corridor demon bashing crawl, I was dreading the next level-up, and I wasn't getting any kind of mitigating pleasures from either exploration or looting.
How about the overall story? Did I care that I was the special one who had to save the world? Well, not really. The superpower the main character gets is really quite underwhelming and doesn't change or add much to the process of completing the 1st act and is mostly something that just gets the odd aesthetic mention in the odd cut-scene.
The build-up to the reveal about the wardstone is mostly non-existent and when you get the choice about what to do with it, I was, like, meh, whatever, I've no doubt whatever I click here it's going to result in some stupid bullshit. And, yes, it was all quite underwhelming.
I've no doubt this gets gradually expanded on the further you get in the game, but the game isn't offering me anything to keep me going that long. It's akin to sitting through a 3 hour movie because someone's told you it has a really good last half hour in that regard. At this point in time it's just more 'stuff' and stuff that isn't really thrilling me.
Every other story beat is just people being traitors.
And then the game introduces the strategic layer of King's Bounty/HOMM and I just roll my eyes.
Like so many franchises and game endeavors, it's a case where the first game has really drawn me in, but the sequel has decided to double down on the worst aspects and generally remove all the aspects I kinda liked. And you start to wonder if it's even the same people making the game anymore.
It's like the Dragon Age 2 to Dragon Age Origins. The sprawling landscape and all it's varied encounters have been replaced by repetitive copy-pasted waves of boredom. The situational conversations have been replaced by relentless banal meaningless gibberish. Where the 1st game was only just bordering on the enjoyable, but just managed to stay on the flip side of good, but the 2nd just goes full nope.
Still, I got 60 hours out of my limited time, which is a full game's worth in many cases, so I can at least quit where I did an just imagine the game ends at the end of act 1 and I can move on now, so that's at least a positive, and I'd give the game at this point a 4/10, which is still better than Dragon Age 2.
Oh, and if you think this review is a bit long, which it is, please be aware that I've skipped an awful lot of issues I have with the game for the sake of brevity.
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