Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

Be aware - I just ran into a bug on Linux that prevents the loading of saved games.

I refuse to play this game until they change the name to Queenmaker or until there is big sell on it.

Sounds like the game got serious bugs, especially with save games as mentioned.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

I refuse to play this game until they change the name to Queenmaker or until there is big sell on it.

But in this fictional historic setting, queens didn't exist!! /facepalm

Razgon wrote:

Really, really impressed with this - Its a massive D&D game, with tons of options, and I don't mean that lightly- literally a LOT of options. Both for gameplay, classes and so on, but also just the difficulty setting.

I can't get through the beginning because there are so many class options and I can't commit and I dont understand how to build characters in PF nearly as well as I thought I did. I need class guides!!!

On that note, what are people building for their first run through?

I am thinking of a Magus Sword Saint for a good run and I previously thought I was going to go Draconic Sorc for an evil run but I am rethinking that.

Kehama wrote:

I'm definitely hoping for some feedback soon as I'm taking some time off soon and was thinking about picking this up to play in my downtime.

My impressions from playing this afternoon:

- It pretty much smacks you in the face with the whole Pathfinder system right from the start, especially if you create your own character. If you already know that system, like I do, this is great. If you don't it's a bit of a steep learning curve ... except that there is the option to let the game handle things automatically, which is pretty cool. If you don't know Pathfinder well, I'd recommend that option at first (you can turn it off later).

- They don't pull any punches with combat. I played on Challenging, which is the standard ruleset, and people can go down just as fast as tabletop - one nasty crit is all it takes at low levels. My first TPK was to a tiny spider swarm because I couldn't hit them and they kept poisoning my guys. I love it, but if that's not your cup of tea dial down the difficulty.

- The encumbrance system is love / hate for me. I like that it's there, and that there's a limit to what you can carry. On the other hand, the limit is annoying, because it makes you move slowly on the maps. The game also encourages you to pick everything up because you desperately need money and heavy stuff is generally worth decent cash ... so what ends up happening is you slowly crawl across the map lugging all your loot until you can get somewhere to sell it. Not fun. I did see a Bag of Holding in a shop though, so it's likely it can be mitigated.

- I like the strategic map movement. There's not a lot of wasted map space like PoE, the strategic map graphics are pleasant, and it has a very tabletop-like feel to it. It very much feels like the computer is the DM and you are the player.

Ouch. I really really hate encumbrance in games.
I might not be able to keep rolling saving throws against this game for much longer anyhow.

Is the combat fun? Is it any similar to PoE, or more old school Baldurs Gate etc?
Are the character customization mostly when creating the characters or does it continue throughou levels? (new skill choices or similar).
I have absolutely zero knowledge of the Pathfinder systems.

I'm going to wait for reviews to pick this up. I want to see how it plays long term. It is worrying that there were no review copies sent out.

Yeah, really bad. That is the main reason I haven’t bought it so far. Feels like you want to hide something then.

Shadout wrote:

Yeah, really bad. That is the main reason I haven’t bought it so far. Feels like you want to hide something then.

Agreed! Hopefully that isn't the case, but I want some long-term perspectives of the game from beginning to end. This is a pretty ambitious project and it could easily fall apart the longer the game goes.

Shadout wrote:

Is the combat fun? Is it any similar to PoE, or more old school Baldurs Gate etc?

It's a mix. It's pausable realtime action like PoE, but with Pathfinder / D&D 3.5 rules - feats, skills, saving throws versus spells, crit by rolling 20 on a d20, armor class, etc. Honestly the PoE combat is so skewed by damage resist that this ruleset is quite refreshing - fast attacking rogues actually work. There's far more spell and feat options, far more class options (there's about 20 different classes, and 3 or 4 subtypes in each class). Many more crowd control options. Oh, and I enjoyed what little of it I got to do before my party got wiped by the spiders and I couldn't load the saved game.

Eh, perhaps I'm simply not in the mood at the moment. The act of character creation was fun, the first few times, but execution feels.. there. Hard to lay a finger on the lack of spark. Overall it's tickling my brain about as much as watching a blue pinwheel flail in the direction of another pinwheel. The other pinwheel is different though cause, oh look... it's red. To be fair, lvl 1 chars in BG1 wouldn't be much better. Also, to be fair, the first three companions in this should give up their adventuring day jobs and take up a new line of work: boat anchors.

NathanialG wrote:

On that note, what are people building for their first run through?

I am thinking of a Magus Sword Saint for a good run and I previously thought I was going to go Draconic Sorc for an evil run but I am rethinking that.

I can't help myself from playing as a fighter in these games. Chaotic good.

In my mind I always think I'll pick another class the next time I play the game, but then I rarely do since they are usually story driven.

This has hooked me more than Pillars of Eternity ever did, so that's a good sign from the start. Although I think a big part of that is that this is BASICALLY the same character creation system that Neverwinter Nights used so I got straight into it with no fuss, i didn't have to learn a whole bunch of new obscure fantasy names for things.

Needs more portraits though. Or a means of adding custom portraits. The artwork is GREAT but the selection is severely lacking and looks like there are a lot of overlaps with in-game NPCs.

The art team did a great job making everything look attractive. I mean everything, the character sheets and help windows that pop up. As I mentioned above it even looks good on the low graphic settings and I was getting 50-70 fps on my not so great laptop. I switched the graphics to medium and my frame rate is in the 20s. Not sure I notice a huge difference if I don't examine things closely, so maybe I'll go back to low.

The alignment wheel in the character sheet is a thing of beauty.

Oooo, I'm going to have to approach this one a little differently.

Spoiler:

I didn't think anything about breaking into the armory - loots always there to be taken! There was no warning about I'm doing something bad. There was no red hand when I took something I shouldn't. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong, especially because they spelled out that maybe taking the money would be bad (which I didn't do). So maybe I'll have to just be a bit more careful about what I do.

So who decided to follow you into the Stolen Lands? For me it was Linzi, Harrim and Miri.

Not sure if I missed a pause setting. Is there one that will pause whenever an ally or enemy completed their attack / action? I don't like it when I have to stare at the log because then I'm not watching the battle unfold. But I also don't like when too many things get added to the log between looks because then it is more difficult to tell what is new and to see what happened.

Random thoughts after ~5 hours:

- I am missing something somewhere about how to play this effectively. Encounters are either super easy or TPKs, very little in between.
- There are a number of places where you need to pay close attention (and make some rolls) or things will turn out badly. Which I like, makes the world feel lived in.
- Related: save early, save often
- Speaking of the world, so far it feels concrete enough and yet a little gamey. Which is not a bad thing, it keeps things from being too grimdark.
- So many options to be made in the game! I am still tweaking pause settings.
- Encumbrance sucks and feels like the game is sending a mixed message: here's all this really cool loot, and you can get it all if you are willing to have your party travel at a snail's pace.
- The interface is very well done, from the character sheets to the world map, the game presents a lot of information in a succinct way and interacting with it feels good.
- Sadly, the voice acting, not so much, I may turn that off, almost every time a character talks it is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
- So far the quests have been mostly fun and engaging and not too much like busywork although a number of them are convoluted. Luckily the journal is good enough to keep me informed on what to do next.

I have not run into too many bugs yet *knocks wood*, the game performs very well and looks great. It does seem to be driving my 1080Ti harder than I would expect. This is the first game I have played where I actually heard the fans on that card. I do have everything maxed. I have not looked into it at all yet, I assume it might be MSAA settings.

Overall, I've been having fun but am thinking of starting over with a new character.

tboon, i think you can switch off the encumbrance in the difficultly menu.

Heh...

When I glanced by this on steam maybe and the blurb just said a recreation of the table top game I thought it was based on the AH game about the war of the roses.

NathanialG wrote:

tboon, i think you can switch off the encumbrance in the difficultly menu.

I'll have to look for that. I like the idea of encumbrance, carrying anything that is not tied down should incur a penalty (these are the Stolen Lands not the To Be Completely Looted Lands after all). And I do have a personal "filter" for picking up stuff - anything worth < 10GP gets left behind. Maybe I should increase that to 50 or 100GP.

I do think the game punishes the player a lot for over-indulging though. The characters move so sloooowwwwllllyyyy when just over medium encumbrance it makes getting anywhere a slog. The game seems to want you to loot everything (Hey guys, before you go, here's all the stuff on this map you missed! And we have a ton of useless stuff that is just for selling off, make sure you pick all that up!) but then turns around and severely penalizes your time if you do. Just feels like a weird design choice.

By replacing Wisdom with Charisma, and having dragon powers the Scaled Fist monk is the perfect Iron Fist.

Well it won't load on my computer.
It downloads and when I click play it loads the title screen and the progress bar gets stuck at like 5%

fangblackbone wrote:

Well it won't load on my computer.
It downloads and when I click play it loads the title screen and the progress bar gets stuck at like 5%

:(

Before it loads, the game models the world's plate tectonics and evolution in real time. Takes a while.

How. The Fudge. Do I kill teeny spider hordes. D:

pyxistyx wrote:

How. The Fudge. Do I kill teeny spider hordes. D:

Lots of fire? Works in real life.

Wow... The character options... OMG!

Thankfully I understand D&D 3.5
But it took me a while to settle on divine guardian that I'd love to have dual wield spiky shields. (Love the spiky shield weapon focus!)
Do I want to go with grenadier, vivisectionist, any of the myriad summoner classes, bard variants, my god!
Plus the super cool race options that look to be the real deal, not just on paper.
It would be better than premades to have a walk through. Where it asks you questions: what weapon, what spells, do you want a pet, are you sneaky, etc and then give narrowed down options.

Sydhart wrote:
pyxistyx wrote:

How. The Fudge. Do I kill teeny spider hordes. D:

Lots of fire? Works in real life.

I have greek fire and acid bombs but it seems to do nothing.

pyxistyx wrote:

How. The Fudge. Do I kill teeny spider hordes. D:

Sounds like this is entirely in keeping with the tabletop game. Interesting.

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2q8sz?De...

They should have a stop, drop and roll maneuver

I love the text adventure parts!

Also, I prefer the writing in this compared to Pillars of Eternity, which was sometimes too flowery and showy,