A Thorough Review of Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous

i just got corona i got coronavirus uh and not only just corona i got the most deadly version the delta even though i'm vaccinated can you believe that [ __ ] but the symptoms were kind of mild so i imagine that's because of the vaccine if if it weren't for the vaccine well i'm pretty sure i'm supposed to be dead right now given my heart condition so that's good i'm gonna sound like [ __ ] through this video so i'm just gonna let you know up front um if i sound like somebody's holding my nose uh that's because uh snot is literally holding my nose so sorry for that but uh what am i here to do i had pathfinder pathfinder rather the righteous is like king maker's hotter younger smarter sister she does just about everything better than her older sister and she doesn't have as many mental disorders i should start this whole video off with a disclaimer and i'm sorry to alcat and metta up front i was offered a deal with owlcat to review the game i make a 10 minute video and they pay me four figures man let me tell you what when i got a 5 000 medical bill in the mail out of nowhere i was tempted i mean it was a fairly decent deal but something didn't sit right with me they required review to be fair and well fair means different things to different people i'll just say that and what i think is fair is absolutely not what most other people think is fair you guys make sure to remind me that on a daily basis that means that every time i went to criticize something i might stop and ask myself golly is what i'm about to say fair do i want to be asking myself that the whole time i'm right in this video no in the end i didn't take the deal because i didn't want anything to bias me or have been perceived to have biased me because i'm gonna spend a good amount of time praising this game as if it pulled my family out of a burning building and i really didn't want my comment section flooded with comments about me shilling because i'm not kidding when i say that this game is a massive improvement over king maker and it seems that the team over at alcat learned a lot from their previous game including how to reduce scale to a reasonable degree in order to provide a more even experience but is it all sunshine and lollipops and rainbows everywhere no absolutely not but before we get started a disclaimer this review is based on the experiences as of version 1.02 and just parts of 1.03 the experience may have changed now so keep that in mind as alcat has been diligently patching this game since release which you could see is a bad thing or a good thing depending on your perspective well let's dig in shall we the music's the kind of thing that when you leave the game running in the background to go cook some canned raviolis or ramen you'll be humming along and then two days later you'll be in the lobby of a clinic waiting for your rona diagnosis and the faces of miserable people sitting around you will remind you of that one song and you'll start humming it under your breath as if giving all those people their own theme songs the music's a definite highlight for me it's super varied and almost always fits the theme though they do tend to use their most intense themes at times when this intensity is not necessarily needed like i never looked at heroes of might and magic and thought to myself gee that battle sure is intense sound effects are pretty nice too the melee attacks have this ringing sound to them that helps you identify whether your character is hit or missed an attack and when they hit the sound of someone exploding in the chunks well that never gets old i could sit here and listen to people exploding all day the voice acting well it's it's weird evacuate the wounded the beasts are about to strike again use cloaks as stretchers not in a bad way see the the vo in this game is going through many iterations in the beta some characters had no voices and that was fine and some had amazing voices then they got changed like my boy reggie two more minutes left out in the open and neither you nor i will have any troops left to order about crusader see he had this no-nonsense dispassionate voice that really worked for his character and then they went and changed it to a voice that has a lot more character more texture but honestly i kind of liked his voice before and honestly when i heard the change i was like did they change his voice so i'm really not sure if they did at all or if i'm just hallucinating it or if i just imagined his voice to be something else and this is not on a voice actor playing him it's the voice is great it's just i don't know maybe i like the other voice better because it was the first time i heard him but like i could still hear the voice in my head when i read his dialogue that's how much it stuck with me and then there's darren which or dayrin or whatever it's am i would you look at this but why would you drag a wounded fighter into the middle of the festival square couldn't he be carted off somewhere else like oh i don't know an infirmary or an accommodating ditch i don't know some people on my twitch stream said they liked his voice but to me he sounded like he was younger than i got the impression he was and it was off-putting because when he didn't have a voice i imagine him to be much more like suave and charming but with a little bite to him you know again it's not that the voice acting is bad it's just a personal preference sort of thing like you'll probably listen to voices and be like strat you don't know what you're talking about and you know what you're right let's move on i love this game's difficulty settings i like the previous games as well but back then i was a stubborn bastard and playing on anything other than the core rules was like sacrilege for me well wrath of the righteousness firmly and perhaps permanently put me in my place in that regard my favorite being the option to have players get up from death after combat or heal status effects after rest i don't typically enable these but sometimes man sometimes this game just makes you do it you know level drain is a big thing here and while you can heal level drain with a restoration spell if you don't have a mid-level cleric or access to spell scrolls or potions this really screws you over because it lasts about 24 hours sometimes more and with the corruption mechanic it's very difficult to rest 24 hours every time you get one of these status effects and you get them a lot having this option allows you to get yourself out of jams that would normally require a restart or at least a reload a previous save they they also added an option to remove controlling effects after combat which is enabled by default on normal difficulty this makes it so you don't get stuck in webs like you did in a previous game and have to wait for the effects to wear off the other highlight of this screen is the ability to not only control how many enemies are in each battle but to control how hard their critical hits hit for and how strong or weak they are basically the weaker you set them to be the lower all their stats are to the point where you'll mostly be one-shotting demons which might be cool for a little power fantasy for you but the combat is kind of the highlight i just like this addition for those times when the game throws an entire army at you and spawns enemies directly on top of you and expects you to just deal with it yeah there's a bit of jank and we'll get to that in a minute that's why these settings are so important being able to get yourself through some of these difficulty spikes is sometimes the difference between throwing your mouse through your drywall and pushing through the game and enjoying yourself while doing it i normally play on the challenging difficulty or the difficulty just below that but i honestly don't recommend playing on higher difficulties first time through the game especially if you plan on using real time with pause unless your build is absolutely perfect because turn based is easier for many reasons the biggest reason being sneak attacks initiative and so on being able to get all of your attacks off first and possibly get a second round of attacks if you had a surprise round and all the while you aren't taking damage is a damn sight better than real time which has you taking damage as you're dishing it out one is clearly harder than the other so you will need to adjust your difficulty to fit your playstyle another highlight is the lost aslany mode it makes it so that you have access to only one game save slot and it saves the game on exit so this keeps you from saves coming through the entire game and sticking with the consequences of your actions it's a setting that will add a lot of depth to a second playthrough on a game menu there's a ton of options including a setting that allows you to increase or decrease the amount of quick saves and auto save slots from a total of 1 to 25 at max you can also turn on and off just about every tutorial screen in the game and go about things blind though i recommend maybe keeping a crusade tutorials on your first time through not that it actually matters because even if you turn off the tutorials they stay on nagging you like an ex-girlfriend that can't take a hint and for some reason this game doesn't come with controller support even though king maker currently does and i know it's sort of clunky but it was nice to have because my desk isn't exactly ergonomic and sometimes i like to lean back and use my controller when my shoulders start aching the kickstarter stated that the controller support would be available on release so where's the controller support dude there's also options to turn off gore and there used to be an option to turn gore into critters during the beta i'm not sure what happened to that option but i want it back god damn it or maybe i hallucinated that i i don't know it's been a [ __ ] with this covet [ __ ] anyway the real star of the show is the sheer amount of options you can find in the auto pause menu though i couldn't find an option to pause combat when a character is hit and that well that's unfortunate because that's one of those features that i always turn on whether i use real time with pause or not because it's not enough to pause the game when hp is critical especially when by that time it's usually too late to heal a character you know what would be even better if instead of pausing when a party member is critical maybe allow us to set up a health percentage threshold so we have way more control over when we start to heal or change up our tactics it's just a quality of life thing that would be really nice to have thanks daddy owlcat character creation has a ton of depth with lots of variety and at the moment of writing there are 25 main classes and 13 prestige classes and each main class can have up to seven or more subclasses though if you don't read the various class descriptions and ability plaques you might miss valuable information about the class that should have been clearly stated in the class description like for instance a cross-blooded sorcerer may seem like a ridiculously overpowered subclass until you find out that you get access to half the amount of spells of the normal caster there's also a difficulty rating on each class that tells you what classes are hard to play with for beginners and to be honest it's a great addition though i think someone over at alcat might be smoking some high grade crack because an alchemist is a difficulty of four out of five like are you nuts alchemists are like the best in the game bar none alchemist is always at the top of the tier list and best classes and usually the number one slot because well let's think about it i get access to bombs that explode in aoe that not only hurt my enemies and i can get alchemy which means that all my spells are now potions and i can use infusion to share those potions with my buds like jesus man and the medical discoveries are just amazing so take the difficulty settings with a grain of salt it seems they need some adjusting not to mention they don't rate the subclasses because the vivisectionist for example can't use bombs and acts more like a thief and less like a hybrid caster so it doesn't exactly play like an alchemist which means this difficulty would be different than the difficulty of the base alchemist from here you get to choose to go with either a pre-made build which if this is your first time through you might want to give it a try but i have a feeling you won't be sticking with it because i don't know about you but when i try a new class i like to find a playstyle that works with them then build my feats and levels around maximizing that playstyle classes that allow me to do that the easiest are the ones that i enjoy the most so pre-mades have never really appealed to me from here you get to pick your races and there's a ton here new additions include the furries and fisto the rock man each race grants different perks that can be used to synergize with skills granted to you from your class packages then from here you will assign your attributes your skill points and your feats and a nice little addition that wasn't available in king maker is the ability to not only search for keywords in the description feeds but to also sort the feats by category this makes looking for specific buffs so much easier and again thank you daddy owlcat you guys really do listen to the fans of your games and i personally can't thank you enough for that and tell you how refreshing it is to see at the end a very detailed rundown of your character is given that shows you basically every single detail about your character and if you hover over certain stats you'll see that they also give you a detailed breakdown of the final stat number where it comes from with a list of everything either derived from it that contributes to it i mean damn they really did it man they really did what about combat real time with pause combat is passable though the auto pause features are missing some quality of life features when you're playing on lower difficulties i highly recommend this mode for its speed or for when you're in large scale fights where a single round and turn base can take several minutes the combat is fairly smooth in this mode and everything works as you would expect it to except that problems that were associated with the previous title are all pretty much present so for instance companion ai still triggers attacks of opportunity without your input this is an easy issue to overcome so i'm not exactly sure why this is still here they figured this problem out in pillars of eternity too so you know but what this game does better in this department is that you don't have to stick with one combat style over the other throughout the whole game and in fact you can change from real time with pause to turn base in the middle of combat so if you find yourself getting your ass whipped in the middle of a fight pop on turn based if you find a fight is dragging on for too long turn on real time it's an option i wish i had in pillars of eternity too but then there's times where the game flips out and forgets that pause is a thing and you'll be in the middle of a tough encounter and suddenly you can't pause the combat to assign commands it just stops working and switching to turn based and then back to real time doesn't seem to fix the issue either you end up having to reload an earlier save to get things working as normal this happened enough that i figured i would mention it because it would be great if falcat could fix this because it seems to to me that once it happens once it just keeps happening until you exit the game and then restart and it's annoying to say the least and there's a lot of things that just don't work in general for instance cone and line attacks are unreliable as hell it doesn't matter if one of your companions is clearly out of the range of an attack if they are within a few feet of the range of attack you can be assured that your burning hand spell or your lightning bolt will probably hit your merc or your companions it's so dumb that i stayed away from using it a lot of the time especially when any of my companions were close by and by close i mean within a meter now a term based i sometimes wonder if the combat scenarios in this game were designed to be playing at this mode because a lot of these scenarios are nuts in real time like the enemies have way too many attacks in a single round and they can reduce your ap way too much before you can get off any heals and the sheer odds i just don't know how you're supposed to handle them in real time i mean there's always a way and nothing's impossible but damn but even these scenarios with crazy odds seem like a cakewalk when your tactics are good and you're playing in turn-based mode turn based is easy mode just about any encounter in this game is more than achievable if you have good tactics and you can take advantage of the inherent advantages granted to you by initiative and turnover just look at how this fight plays out in each different mode [Music] [Music] [Music] the spirits demand your blood [Music] [Music] you've crossed the wrong mongrel i wonder what lies you won't survive me esme [Music] oh [Music] granted i didn't get my heal off in time and it makes sense that most of my people died in real time but part of that is because i couldn't get my heal off before the enemy hit me in turn based combat there's really no worry about that unless you're using a spell within melee range the advantage is in the fact that you have an entire round to do whatever you want and the enemy cannot stop you or act in the middle of your turn save for a few exceptions like attacks of opportunity turn based combat is great but comes with some serious downsides that have been with the game since king maker like this charge bug where for some reason the game allows you to charge but if you do the character doesn't move and by not moving somehow uses up all its movement points another annoyance comes in the form of ui glitches the most common one is where this tool tip comes up while a turn is ending and then it'll stay up on the screen until the turn ends thus blocking everything in the middle of the screen it's stupidly annoying and it only seems to happen in turn based combat honestly i'd like to see if i could turn these things off entirely and use a key to bring up the tooltips instead because this [ __ ] is constantly getting in the way of what i'm doing and sometimes it happens in real time combat and gets you killed because you can't see the enemy in time to reassign your companion's new actions then there's times when an enemy will teleport in and even though they are technically on the battlefield they cannot be targeted or attacked until they've had a turn so even though they rolled low initiative you don't get the advantage against them you're supposed to because not only can you not target them ranged but you can't even target them with melee which is really bad when these guys teleport in and get three free attacks at a plus 13 attack bonus and not just that but get to target anyone on the battlefield including your back line because your front lines engaged super nice working as intended and yet another issue is the fact that some spells mostly touch spells won't go off in the same round you cast them even if you're within melee range i mean you could be standing right next to the person you're targeting the person will cast the spell but they won't use it and then you have to wait an entire round to heal somebody or use a shocking grasp like okay it's not because you used up all your movement points literally your turn starts right next to somebody you cast the spell but they just won't do the actual thing so you have to go and find the spell again click the spell cast it again target the person you're gonna cast it on and then they'll finally touch them they won't use up another spell slot but it's just like they forget what they're supposed to do in the middle of the damn thing it's really super annoying and if you screw yourself and you use the last spell that you have saved so like if you had three let's say uh minor uh healing spells right and you're on the very last one you can't cast that thing you got to wait until the next turn and hopefully you could cast it in the next turn but even sometimes then you can like i'm pretty sure this isn't intentional because sometimes it works fine and sometimes it doesn't and when it doesn't work it almost always gets a character killed but then there's the good bits of the system the small things that you may not notice or normally wouldn't have noticed or even thought to mention for instance when you're aiming at someone with a range attack through a doorway or a narrow hall corner in most turn-based systems a character will try for the least amount of steps towards the target until they have reached a spot where their line of sight is free and this usually means they have to breach the doorway or walk into the hallway and then they'll end up just like piling up in front of the doorway and blocking it so nobody else can get in it's really stupid but in wrath your character will actually try to stay in the hallway and shoot through the gap it's really nice in general the pathfinding has been improved drastically you're able to walk through your own people and that's an immediate improvement over having to take long convoluted ways around people to get to your target you know how i'm always banging on about how game companies never numbers well alcat did that and maybe they went just a tad bit overboard which i personally love the more info presented in a readable way the better and the simple act of them being more transparent has affected systems for the better in strange ways even affecting systems you wouldn't have thought would be affected by something this simple lock picking has been vastly improved over its predecessor in king maker you would click on a chest and half the time you wouldn't know if the chest was locked and then your character would walk over the thing try to lock pick it fail and if you didn't have anybody else that had trickery you were screwed this made the lost aslanty mode that much more horrible because you'd screw yourself at a really good loot that way they updated it so that when you click on a locked chest not only does it tell you that it's locked but it also tells you what your chance of succeeding is and gives you an option to use lock picks which are a new addition of the game which gives you a sometimes massive buff to your success chance depending on the quality of the lock picks which i squeezed when i saw this and then there's just all of the info that you get out of the ui of the game i mean if you hover your mouse over for instance over your ac numbers it actually gives you a very detailed breakdown of not only why your ac is what it is but what other items attributes and derived attributes contribute to the total number score so you might be wondering to yourself why it is that this scale male or something has a higher ac than the armor you currently have on and why your ac actually goes lower when you equip it and you might find out that an ability that you have is armor dependent and it's a really great way for you to actually learn how your classes work because this same level of detail carries over to everything including your attack bonuses and so on i mean it's really it's it's what i wish every single game that had rpg elements in it would do show me the numbers underneath the numbers people this is amazing the graphics have taken a huge leap forward from the previous game in wrath of the righteous it's possible to not only tell one character from another at scale but it's also possible to tell each individual armor piece at times and what weapon they're wearing because this game has taken cosmetics to another level even a character builder has many more options you can make an average boy a skinny boy or a beefy boy there's many faces to pick from skin tones hairstyles beards and so on but really the whole presentation has gotten a major overhaul the overall fidelity from the quality of texturing to the variation in environmental design for instance the environments may be based off of tiles but there are enough tiles that are unique and don't get reused that every area has less of that copy paste lego based feel of other iso rpgs and with clever use of prop placement debris and other detritus each area is unique looking enough that you can navigate by sight without the use of a map character designs are incredibly detailed and show off all the features of your character from land's half human half lizard sized body to ember's burnt skin and the fact that she never wears shoes yuck then there's armor and clothing details that are fantastic mage's robes have little spell scroll holders and alchemists have large backpacks with vials and potions hanging from various belts all of this detail comes at a cost however and that's a cost in our performance on a 2080 i7 i was getting about 40 to at the lowest 16 frames per second in certain areas and while this performance isn't a problem everywhere in places like the market square in canaabras and just about anywhere that's either large and sprawling or populated heavily or just has a lot of particle effects going the game slows to a friggin crawl and it does this even on the lowest settings for instance the highest frame rate i could get in the market square was about 40 on low settings 720p yeesh the game also hitches way more than it should though it appears to happen most when battle ends in turn-based mode speaking of equipment owlcat did another thing that i wholeheartedly approve of and that's changing how the magic equipment works i remember talking about how the equipment and king maker kind of felt uninspired and now well this [ __ ] is right out the window every piece of equipment aside from generic plus number items has a rider attached to it like enemy must pass a dc saving throw or become prone or get knocked backwards or become sickened or basically whatever you can think of there's on hit effects on attack defects there's crit effects even effects where that proc when the player has reached a certain level of health it's awesome it makes every new magic item that you get feel like you're opening up a new christmas present like seriously every time i pick up a new item i frantically open up my inventory to see what i've gotten it took a system that used to be a simple numbers improvement which was ho-hum and boring it made it into something really special and the other thing i really like is how it ties itself into the crusade mechanics see sometimes in a crusade you'll find not just enchanted items that you might end up using but you find items along the game and the crusade that used to be relics i think they actually call them relics and these relis can then be enchanted and put back together again in order to become new items that you can use so for instance i found an old lich's phylactery and i changed it into a ring so i put the remnants of this lich's soul into a ring and it ended up being a really awesome ring some items give you immense power but then take away a little bit of your power in the meantime it's it's like a trade-off i mean it's it's just fantastic i'm proud of you owlcat i give you a hug but i'm not allowed within 50 feet of your building anymore after the last christmas party all right we should talk about mythic path see when i used to play dungeon dragons sometimes we couldn't find enough people to get together with and me and my friend we'd get together and play solo missions just one character out there in the world doing things when you do these sort of campaigns sometimes we just do it freestyle well most of the time actually where we'd have like a world or a campaign setting and create a character and we just say have some fun you know sandbox style inevitably you get tired of wandering around dungeon diving assaulting towns stuff like that and you'd say who do i really want my character big mommy milkers to be now that doesn't sound like a question that would start an epic campaign but sometimes it would now say you're a sorcerer and you really wanted to get to know your dragon lineage and actually become a dragon why would you want to do that and why the hell not dragons are cool maybe you're a necromancer and you've dated other schools of magic and now you're ready to settle down with the dead boys it might be time for you to go out and hunt down those ingredients to create yourself a pimped out phylactery might be time you shuffled off this mortal coil and became a lich or an arch glitch or maybe you just want to create the most epic bastard sword that ever existed whatever your goals a single player campaign can accommodate them because you don't have a big old freaking group dictating what is happening you don't have to feel bad taking up all the dm's mental resources either that in a nutshell is what this game does and god damn does it feel good because you actually feel like you are seeking out the means to make these things happen instead of just being granted these paths because you played the game okay hang on uh you know what there's going to be spoilers ahead so i mean i don't spoil much but what i do spoil would be considered a spoiler so if you don't want spoilers i would imagine you just want to shut off the video now or you know go through with it i give you another warning later but this is just a minor spoiler as to a mythic path so if you don't want to hear anything turn off the video for instance to become a lich you have to find a lich's wand which was lost in a cave when smugglers decided to make off with it and once you do you'll be gifted the gift of undeath if you can find the resting place of this lich that the wand belongs to or a swarm that walks which is an awesome path that freaks out your companions so much that they're like hey you know you're cool and all but uh we're gonna go sit over there for a while while you and your locust-based clones go handle [ __ ] okay everything including you and your armies are replaced by the swarm and the swarm devours all god damn it feels amazing to play evil in this game from devils to demons to a literal witch oh yeah and he could be an angel if you're into that sort of thing the lich has an ability called repurpose and what this ability does is it infects the target with unlife and if the enemy dies while still affected by this spell they come back to life as your slave until you leave the map this even works on main characters though if they die in combat they cannot be brought back to life and you cannot get the items off of their corpse and i think this may be an oversight and if it isn't then they need to rework this because i could see how this could really screw up somebody's playthrough so unless they fix this don't use this ability on anyone that you want to loot i mean unless you've played the game a couple times it's not like you're gonna know who that is you know so in other words alcat please fix the other thing a lich can do aside from build a ziggurat and command huge armies of the undead is bring back long dead legendary characters to serve as your direct companions i [ __ ] you not this also works on main story npcs you've killed so if someone in particular is complaining that life sucks and they would welcome death give them what they want just not the way they want it the aeon is a bit of manipulation of time events and evening out the chants involved in luck and it seems to specialize in buffs and debuffs the aeon also has abilities that redeem certain irredeemable characters changing the outcome of certain important events there's also the golden dragon if you're a tank and you want to be a better tank then this is the path for you because not only do you get to turn into an actual dragon but you gain immunity to poison disease fear confusion paralysis and sleep as well as massive resistance to all energy all of your hit dice also get converted to d12 so god damn in short some paths change your class and make you overpowered in some change your class slightly but change a story dramatically like the trickster path with the trickster path you get access to the council of socot ben off which is an interesting side area and the ability to play literal tricks on people while also receiving a massive boost to your sneak attack damage and the ability to go stealth while in combat but honestly if you're not playing a lich then i don't know what to do for you it is objectively the best path in terms of both story and mechanics it adds the most to all aspects of the game it's not without guess what i'm about to say it's it's not without its problems first there's this permanent ability that you get in a crusade called necromancy it's supposed to replenish your armies with undead every time you win a battle but it just straight up didn't work for me in 1.2 at least that's how it might have seemed there's quite a lot of problems with the crusade system but one of them is the way adding units of the same unit type to a squad doesn't make them auto stack so let's say you have a squad that's at its unit limit you can add units to that squad but you need a second squad to do it because you cannot add same units to a squad when dragging them between squads so when you win a battle you don't get the zombies that you're supposed to because there's no free slots in your army even though you may already have a unit of zombies it needs a free slot to put them in now i believe that alcat has actually fixed this as of patch 1.03 it does exactly what i was going to suggest it do which is add a new unit that it then plops zombies into but i really don't understand why you can't just add the zombies directly to the squad that you're currently in if it has zombies in it it just doesn't make any sense is that too hard to code or is there some kind of like limitation that you're trying to impose because i gotta tell you the limitations annoying as [ __ ] lich can raise up an army of demons to fight for him with the repurposed skill and that's great but these things are absolutely brain dead and suicidal because their ai is the dumb basically you can't control what they do so they do things like run head first into traps or just stand there like idiots while you fight a horde of monsters or even worse stand outside a battle range and never know that you were even fighting a lot of this could be solved by allowing the player to take direct control over those specific minions because you want to keep them alive for as long as you can the other problem i have is well you lose the minions after you leave the map i mean i wish i could keep them and have a limit maybe of like four minions or as many minions as my charisma bonus allows or hell just let me have an army of the damn things that would be fine just take away my companions and let me have an army of undead huh that makes sense right if you're a lich then there's keeping them alive it would be easier to keep them alive if we were able to tell how many hit points they had out of battle that's a simple change that would add a lot of quality of life to the lich class right now as far as i could tell the only way to tell how many hit points they have at any given time is to heal them until you can't heal them anymore which means you end up wasting healing on them just so you can make sure they're at max there's also times when you'll lose your thralls during cut scenes like when you're teleported to another area on the map the thralls will remain where you used to be and not where you ended up and since you can't control them you have to go all the way back to get them then there's the fact that these standards use spells in the middle of the battle that will confuse not only the enemy but the party they don't give any consideration as to who they're gonna hurt and if that's in their best interest or not all the other stuff is one thing i can live with it but certain enemies certain demons can actually wipe your entire party with a spell so it makes the best thing about the lich class worthless it's extremely disappointing please alcat fix the lich it's the best thing about the game and it's a broken ass class most of its abilities are great but useless please think about decreasing the range of corrupted bloods explosion and maybe give the player direct control over the thralls we raise with repurpose maybe you could offset this by making it so a lich has no party members except those that they raise from the dead huh what do you think about that i'm just throwing out seeds and hoping to grow now how's the story on this [ __ ] well that's where we're going to run into most of our problems the game starts with you already lying dead in a stretcher a guy with a nasty looking scar comes over his name's hull run horan is a psychopath he's also a certified badass he's so badass that he's not only the leader of the inquisition but he's also the second in command under the queen herself wow what a dreamy guy you're healed by her tyrandelev a silver dragon is taken to form a human she is the designated defender of the city and i quite liked her but you don't stay attached to her because her head certainly isn't let the feast begin this big hunka hunka locust meat is the big bad man who's doing big bad things around the world and he finds your attempt to hurt him to be hilarious a mortal knack snaps its jaws at the lord of locusts there are many scripted sequences in the game and it helps to break up the monotony of slaying demons and being an absolute chad with a chin that can cut rocks and a pair of abs like a great bricks the story of the game is fairly simple but it has many interesting elements essentially you're a fantasy game neo you're touched by a god instead of filing a lawsuit you've decided to show the demons what being a prison [ __ ] is like the story is long but not too long unlike king maker you won't be investing a good portion of your mid-life trying to beat the main story but that also means that the story doesn't screw around a whole lot with like its previous game did there's not a whole lot of diversions in the main story just you going from one place to the next killing demons getting loot uncovering more the mystery of why you and having maritals with various women like girl who is spider girl who is demon and guy who leaves you presents for the same reason cats leave you dead birds now i'm about to get in the spoilers here so if you're like my wife and you want to skip to the end of books and read the last page before reading the first page then watch on if not is he gone screw that guy so what happens next is you're thrown into a cave with tweedledee and tweedle i wish i could romance you but i'm gonna be a lich so i won't have the equipment you can choose to help or dig the other woman out from under the rubble or you could choose to be a douche or you could choose to use your brains and create a system of pulleys and levers to get her out either way this is an example of how this game handles role-playing which is another way of saying it handles it pretty well further in is this woman standing over a corpse that she totally didn't create herself because she's totally not a psycho that you need to keep an eye on but she is and you absolutely should a little further in you'll be greeted by a couple of fries called mongrels which that's right see these two you're gonna have to make a choice here do you want to take this guy who can shootie a bow ten thousand times per round and probably hit once or do you want to take the sexy spider lady and make little spider babies with her on the reel though i've taken wendu on two playthroughs because she is hands down one of the best tanks in the game if you take that bow out of her hand and give her a real woman's weapon like a ball-peen dildo or a roller pin these two tell you that there's a sword of a fallen angel down here somewhere stuck in a rock and tell me if you heard this one before no one's ever been able to pull it out until you find it you have a vision about the angel that left it down here and i swear to you i keep spelling angel like angle and it's pissing me off here you get to make one of many decisions and this is where for me the game really shines these decisions you make they affect which mythic path you get later on and it really is the best thing about the role playing here this choice isn't all that important but it starts you down a path you're either going down a demonic route or the path of the angel the story goes from fighting a demon to fighting the demon's underling after powerful magic bursts from your chest like some kind of demonic care bear after the fight we get a taste of alcat's much improved writing the dialogue between wendu and lan is fantastic it's here when you get to make your final decision spider puss or lizard man after this she'll rise from the underground into the battlefield just below the ward stone which is this giant macguffin whose honor the big bug man wants to sully you'll get to meet this hot demon chick who doesn't have eyes because she's blind you might actually have a chance with her so be diplomatic oh how rude you're one to talk mortal with a face that even a mother would lose staunton sweetie you're not going to let your friends speak to me like that are you you'll fight on emerge from the battle and wake up in a tavern run around a big city map and try to undermine the cultists at every turn in fact there are two secret mythic paths here the golden dragon and a trickster path the trickster is by far my fave as i normally play a knife master vivisectionist build and the synergy is godly all you have to do is trick a bunch of cultists into blowing themselves up eventually you'll have a big brawl at a tavern and by brawl i mean a massive friggin fight but i have no idea how you're supposed to win without using a game genie now you don't have to win this fight in fact you might even be meant to lose it i mean it took me about four times to beat this on daring difficulty and even then i felt like i was cheesing the game with my tactics after the fight you'll spend some time doing side missions and there's this one side mission that stands out it's the mission to find the remaining worshipers of desna it stands out because it's a fine example of the game's writing leviatus is sure that he had never been to this place before and yet it feels so familiar it is the manifestation not of dreams or fantasies but of that special way of looking at the world that only children possess when a glint of light reflected off a piece of glass becomes a fallen star when an oddly shaped stone could be a remarkable artifact when every shadow or twist in a path promises mystery or incredible adventure a simple glance into the forest stream brings this feeling back after you find the various macguffins you'll be taken back to the great garrison to fight staunton's guma and you'll be given the power of ex machinas to explode the demon's hymen and then you'll be spit into the overworld map to get your first taste of the crusade system before i go any further with this story of this game i need to talk at length about why this system works and at times doesn't work i have mixed feelings about it and i want to point out what i actually think i have a problem with not only in this game but in the previous game as well see i'm not always in the mood to play a 4x game when i'm playing an rpg sometimes i like just playing the rpg and i don't want to have to worry about also playing heroes of might and magic as well the way the crusade system works is that every week your various forts will produce military units it's all rather complicated and deep for a game marketed as an rpg i'm not kidding like when i say this i'm not kidding at all this wasn't just tacked on it could have been its own bargain tier game let me see if i can express this depth properly first you start with a limited amount of soldiers archers and footmen at first as the story progresses you'll be faced with decisions which may give you access to more soldiers these armies are used to liberate these forts on the map as well as defeat various armies spread out all over the map when you beat these armies you'll be rewarded with supplies and sometimes you'll get powerful artifacts or items the forts once liberated will become settlements which you can use to either produce more of a specific type of unit or to produce more of a specific resource and you manage all of this while you manage diplomatic and logistical events into kingdom management as well as building structures to help you produce more soldiers or resources you see what i'm saying it can get a bit overwhelming if all you're looking to do is experience the story and honestly i recommend disabling the crusade the moment it starts to become too much for you because the story is the best part of this game and it should be experienced without all the clutter that comes from all the management stuff and i say that but i also know that turning off the crusade mode breaks a lot of things so listen on if you're interested to know more about that now that's not to say that you shouldn't play the crusade stuff because it actually adds a lot of value to the story when you get to see outcomes of your actions for instance there's a story mission later here where you have to decide if you're going to delay your campaign to liberate dresden by helping a group of hell knights who have been pinned down by a gargoyle attack if you decide to leave them to their fate goodbye hell nights if you decide to help them not only do you get one of the best characters in the game and i'll fight you if you think differently but if you have the crusade turned on you also get access to hell nights as units in your army and in this way unlike a lot of you know other rpgs you actually get to see the tangible effects of your choices which result in mechanical changes not just aesthetics and maybe a bit of dialogue but the combat in a crusade mode can be tedious in the early stages of the game even in the late stage of the game and actually due to the fact that you don't really have a whole lot of units to choose from and gargoyles have insanely high damage reduction thankfully they don't hit very hard but this combination of factors had me fighting these damn things for over 60 rounds 60 damn rounds turning down the difficulty mid-fight didn't seem to do anything to the crusade difficulty either so that sucks i like that you could turn the crusade mode to auto but for those of us that want to experience the entire story but really don't want to play heroes of might and magic maybe you can maybe have a separate difficulty setting for the crusade mode like the story difficulty in the main story so that we can experience the story with whatever difficulty we want while turning down the crusade to either be harder or easier due to our tastes another thing is you know how i complain endlessly about how slow the movement was on the overworld map in kingmaker well the movement is just as slow here except now you have several pawns to move on a map which makes traversal three times worse and time spent on a map [ __ ] around three times as long they did reduce the complexity of the paths and made most traversal happen on roads which is nice and it keeps units moving at a decent pace and they also increase the speed of the crusade units but only when you manually select the route you don't get the speed boost if you use the arrows to move so that's kind of dumb and it's not just this aspect that sticks in my teeth it's the way you combine and split up forces see because the crusade units have a strict limit on how many groups of soldiers you can have in any given squad when you try to split up units you can't if you've reached a limit so you have to create a new squad transfer the unit there and then split them in that squad then move the ones you want back if you're trying to combine units in the same squad inexplicably you cannot do that why you might ask i don't know again in order to combine units you need to either move the unit to a new squad with space or create a new squad it's unnecessary busy work especially in the late game when you get about 50 000 units that you have to micromanage thankfully you can name your squads and that seems to help figure out which squad has what units in it at a glance but i've honestly i never used it but the nail in the freaking coffin for me is that the game doesn't seem to take the general's power into consideration when raiding army strength because this douchebag here has an ability that will one shot a unit of 160 archers [Music] get the [ __ ] out of here [Music] [ __ ] you in this [ __ ] that's what this is you know satanic black magic and he can use it every single round and he does use it every single round his army was rated a six and mine was rated an eight i sure as [ __ ] don't think that's a fair rating in any general it has those abilities that can nuke you like no matter how many units you have i think that you should be able to check to see if those generals have those abilities before you go in but unfortunately there's no way to check so it's a total crap shoot every time you get into a fight with one of these generals most of the time you have to just keep reloading until you get lucky and the general doesn't attack your archers either way you'll lose far more soldiers than you want to because whenever you lose soldiers you have to ask yourself should i reload and try again because your soldiers replenish far too slowly and with wandering armies attacking forts if you lose a lot of people that means you could lose the game and have to reload a save from several hours back before the error occurred now i'm not sure what could be done here i mean first of all if a general has that powerful of an ability no way that army is rated a level six i don't care if the placard is red or not a general that can wipe out your whole army single-handedly should not show up a lower strength than you and come to think of it there shouldn't be a general ability that can be used to kill 160 people i mean think of this in terms of how destructive this would be a person is roughly shoulder to shoulder about 16 inches wide or about a foot and a third that means that the aoe if we're being generous and saying that these archers were grouped up into columns of four which they probably wouldn't be and that they are literally shoulder to shoulder with no space between them which they definitely wouldn't be that means that the aoe of this spell would need to be 60 damn feet but if we're being reasonable and giving the units a little space between them say about a foot then the aoe of the spell would need to be 93 feet this one general could win the entire war all by himself alcat too spicy please nerf i found all this out on my third playthrough and at this point i had already tried twice to get into the crusade and each time i turned off the crusade mechanics either out of frustration or because randomness of the wandering army screwed me over so badly that i didn't have a choice kingdom management is pretty much the same as it was in kingmaker except where you used to capture regions and set up towns now you liberate force in those forts you build resource generators or passive buff generators to make your army stronger all of that is fine but there's a bit of weirdness in the management part of the kingdom management first of all much of this is also the same you have events that pop up from time to time and you can do them for the most part in whatever order you want the difference here is that you don't need an advisor to do the task so doing these events is a lot more straightforward and less tedious than in king maker where you often had to wait upwards of 30 or more days to be able to reassign an advisor to another task this is a big improvement then there's decrees these are basically orders that you give to the kingdom and then the kingdom carries these out these work as expected most of the time but you'll start to see at some point that a lot of these decrees have no button to start them and they appear to have a red border around their name but in the description of the decree nowhere does it state why you can't pass them i had one of these decrees sitting in my queue for a while and some of them never got done and i had no idea why i now know that some of these decrees can only be passed by themselves but there's no way to tell that at a glance before passing another degree again alcat just add a description it's pretty easy then there's things that are just not just confusing but don't tell us enough like the rest of the ui gives you an abundance of info but the kingdom stat screen is confusing because it shows four stats that all seem to roughly correlate to a resource you need but they don't explicitly state what they do they give you a vague notion as to what they do so for instance diplomacy says that you get more willing foreign mercenaries joining you the higher that this is but that's all determined on story beats it seems like so once you reach a certain diplomacy you know you'll get a story beat that somebody comes in and says hey we're going to be working for you now you don't actually have any control over this you just have to rank them up i guess as quickly as you can which fine that's great but how do we know that we want to increase that over another stat when we make choices and events what does each rank grant us and moreover when are we able to take advantage of the rank because as you can see here i've been ready to level this [ __ ] up for a while but the option to rank it up is red with no explanation as to why and the reason being was that it needed to be passed by itself and because it didn't have the description you know what happened it's frustrating and worse yet it makes you feel like you're doing something that will potentially put your game at risk because you don't understand why you can't do something and you don't understand because the game isn't telling you morale is another system that i am not too sure how i feel about on one hand it's a system that adds another layer of depth to the combat on the other hand it's really easy to screw up your morale without knowing it the most common way i've screwed up my crusade is by spending too many days skipping days in kingdom management in order to pass decrees every day you pass is a day where the buffs to your morale you receive from taking down demon forts and demon armies falls off and when these things falls off you lose morale fast and aside from the occasional event in kingdom management the only way to raise the army's morale is to fight demons armies or take down forts if your morale is already low there's a knock on effect morale affects the following it increases or decreases the rate at which you can recruit forces for your army and the amount of resources you generate but it also affects how many times you your individual units can attack per round so if morale is low it's harder for you to win battles and if you can't win battles your morale drops lower which makes it harder to win etc etc sometimes around the mid point of chapter 3 i always end up turning off the crusade mechanics because they just end up frustrating me and dragging out what is already a drug out amount of time spent going from one place to another then when you turn off the crusade mechanics you find out that you haven't actually saved any time on the overworld map like you thought you would because you don't have to move any armies right natural to think that you would save some time there nope because now you can't sleep at forts to get rid of your corruption so now you have to walk back to dresden every single time you go out to do something because of the damn corruption mechanic see i like this mechanic in theory it's better than having us carry around 10 pound rations at limiting the amount of times you can rest in a dungeon but yo look could you limit the corruption to when we are in a mission in a dungeon or exploring an area because by the time you get to where you're going you're already halfway to the corruption point which means you're one rest max in the mission area before you take a massive penalty to wisdom and intelligence and after that it's shrink and dext like god damn yo you go out do a mission go all the way back to dresden to rest it sucks maybe make it so that we could still get forts we could still rest even if we turn off the crusade mechanic because this is far more than tedious it's a waste of time also this is something that the game never tells you but if you enable the auto crusade you'll be locked out of building your ziggurat uh yeah so uh good luck becoming a lich so when i found out the hard way i reloaded a save from several hours back and played through all the crusade stuff and story stuff that i had already done then ember got kidnapped again except this time in order to get through to her i needed to go through a level six or seven four i pulled up my army and went to work on these shield bearers for 48 friggin rounds now i want you to notice that the infirmary counter here on the side of the general's portrait this is an indication of how many of my soldiers i'll get back after battle when this meter fills up to the top i will no longer regenerate soldiers after battle now notice that it is clearly not filled up to the top yet well once the battle is over guess what you get get a fat dick in your butt you get a fact like a dick in your butt you want to get it in your butt in your butt you want to get it in your butt in your butt this sounds very gay like the game just straight up freaking lies to you throughout this video i have written the words about five times but enough about crusade mode let's talk about the story but every time i write those words this fache de gatso crusade mode finds a new way to screw me over and i end up having to write another 200 words about it stugats i think that you get the point i would love to play through this whole game someday maybe when it's feature complete but that day ain't today friends sorry it's just not it reminds me a lot of the state in which king maker released in but that game was clearly labeled early access so you knew what you were getting into at least that's how i remember it this game has no such warning is it a good game that's tough to say chief now you're going to hear my score and you're going to think i hate this game and that couldn't be further from the truth in fact i freaking love this game but every time i put it down due to a game breaking bug i usually pick it up again and wonder why i was so pissed off only to run into another annoying bug to be reminded with the alpha beta and release combined i have over 200 hours with this game in several playthroughs it's just that i haven't been able to get through a single goddamn playthrough yet without running into something that completely halted my progress be it a game breaking bug or accidentally screwing myself over with the crusade or turning off the crusade and finding it locks me out of progress with my character i wanted so badly to give this game a 9.5 because story-wise character-wise graphics sound production gameplay it's all top-notch but this game needs another year in development just for fixing bugs if it was called early access out of the gate i wouldn't be writing this review [ __ ] if a promoter hadn't tried to contact me to buy a review i wouldn't be writing this thing either so kind of ironic because this video would have been prey so when i say this game is a seven and i tell you to wait a few months to get it you know that i'm being serious it looks like they'll try to get into a working state as they have been pushing patches daily nice [ __ ] you not so i trust that they're at least iron out in the last in the next coming months but i said that about cd projekt red and i'm starting to look like an idiot so there's a lot to love here but there's also a lot of frustrations and in its current state i can't recommend it to anyone other than the absolute hardcorest of hardcore rpg fans in a couple months maybe i'll revisit this thing and see what it has to offer but for now i'm putting this thing to bed and this has been a rant from strategy now you heard it go play some games supposed to kill him on the spot [Applause] yes [Music]

Channel: Strat-Edgy Productions

Views: 141,297

Keywords: Pathfinder: Wrath of the righteous, analysis, owlcat games, pathfinder, pathfinder analysis, pathfinder review, review, strat edgy, strat edgy productions, wotr, wrath of the righteous

Id: LiOw8i9EoFg

Length: 58min 48sec (3528 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021