I decided to release this video early TODAY to help draw attention to the NEW Pathfinder 2nd Edition CRPG whose Kickstarter launches today, DRAGON'S DEMAND! www.kickstarter.com/projects/ossianstudios/pathfinder-the-dragons-demand Also check out the free PF2e CRPG Quest for the Golden Candelabra: store.steampowered.com/app/2381160/Quest_for_the_Golden_Candelabra/ And its excellent sequel Dawnsbury Days: store.steampowered.com/app/2693730/Dawnsbury_Days/
Gameplay issues aside, owlcat introduced me to and led me to end up falling in love with the world of Golarion which eventually led my group adopting pf2e full time, for which I’ll be forever grateful.
yeah they're not perfect games by any means (though I think they've very good examples of the style of game they're trying to be), but I doubt I'd even know what Pathfinder was without them. and pf2e rocks, corrects a lot of the shortcomings in 1e that pop up in the owlcat games.
i think it being Real time with pause instead of turn-based means the focus is more on prep (character builds, buffs, etc.( instead of moment to moment tactical desicions. Turn based IS an option but RTwP is clearly the "normal" way to fight. PF 1e is also an issue but thats like complaining that Baldurs gate 1 doesnt use 3.5e...it didnt exist at the time. If some insane modder wants to do a full conversion to 2e i wish them luck and much interest from me :D
They start out okay, but at some point the whole idea of "encounter design" breaks down. In WotR it's somewhere in act 3, where it just starts being "kill yet another pack of demons". By act 5 they've given up completely except for a few setpiece fights. "Yeah, just paste more demons into the map. Don't worry about where. We have to ship the game!"
@@RobertDeCaire Yeah. Even when there is a attempt at more interesting encounter design (of of the top of my head Xanthir and most DLC bosses) they're better but do often feel like you're still better off just prebuffing to the max and rushing in. Blackwater has probably the most interesting enemy gimmick because it's a whole dungeon instead of a single pack (so instead of dying or already knowing what to do you can actually learn) but even then, knowing their weakness those enemies are still very overtuned. I think RTWP can work on games (pillars of eternity 2 Deadfire is genuinely great and is best played RTWP), but imo they have to be built for it. With more complex games (and Pf1e is much more complex action economy wise than the ADnD the infinity engiens games ran on) that are played turn based on the TTRP i think RTWP struggles a lot. And unfortunately since the game was balanced for RTWP trying to do only TB is a real slog.
Yeah really the only reason I can't make it through the owlcat games is having to prebuff the party before encounters. The idea of walking forward until you see a red circle, then standing 30ft away, then casting a bunch buff spells before starting the fight just doesn't feel fun.
Honestly you can play without pre buff in core difficulty just fine in rtwp mode like old baldurs gate 1 & 2 used to be, pre buff is only a thing when you playing turn based and action economy and let's be frank you don't do that shit when playing tabletop.
Even without the immersion breaking issues of pausing to buff before you know you'll trigger an encounter, at high levels the buffing process itself became a horrible drag for me. That's not really Owlcat's fault, it's a fundamental problem with PF1/3.x, just exacerbated by having to click all the spells in the right order and right timing for each character and then wait through all the animations, rather then just say which buffs you put up as you would in tabletop. And even in tabletop, high level 3.x/PF1 buffing is a burden.
This is completely unconfirmed and I heard this from, like, ONE comment a few years back so take it with a grain of salt. I heard that one of the head guys at Owlcat is a grognard who doesn't really care to adapt PF2e. That said, I think more recently someone in the company said that remaking KM and WotR with PF2e rules wasn't out of the question.
I played BG3 for Larian and not for DnD. The 5E system really held them back in terms of mechanics design. If you haven't tried it already, I would recommend their game Divinity: Original Sin 2; with it, you can see what Larian is capable of when they aren't shackled by 5E. I'm glad they broke away from DnD and have high hopes for their next game.
Yep. The PF2 system is much more in line with the Larian style. Though PF2 would still benefit from a little freedom in tweaking it for a video game format. Most direct translations of a rules set from TT to VG just feel a bit stale.
I'm kind of glad something shackled Larian. I'm not a huge enjoyer of DOS encounter design, because with their system it feels almost impossible not to accidentally abuse the AI even if you're trying not to. Totally get if you love it, i mean the basic concept of creativity is awesome, but it's like the encounters can't keep up with it. BG3 also has that to an extent here and there, but it's a bit more grounded for me.
How, in your view, did 5e hold BG3 back? Having played DOS1, a bit of DOS2, and BG3, I think 5e actually benefitted it quite a bit. First of all, the fact that magic items bonuses max out at +3 means that I actually kept my items long enough to get attached to them, and every upgrade felt meaningful. Whereas in DOS1, I was swapping out items all the time, and none of them felt special. Second, the "flat math" of 5e means you can explore more freely without worrying too much if you're in the right area for your level. Admittedly, this wasn't actually that much of a problem in DOS1, but that's because, past a certain point, almost all challenge went away. However, I hear it was a pretty big issue in DOS2. Now, there are some ways that 5e does negatively affect BG3, like the attritional combat and resting system working against any sense of urgency in the story. However, that would be just as much of a problem if they used Pathfinder.
@@benl2140 To me, I found the combat being based in 5e made the same issues I had as a GM pop up. So many combats became unwinnable for me in BG3 because too many random enemies got involved, and the maths just doesn't work for balancing encounters when there's so many enemies. Boss fights felt balanced, but that damn dwarven cave thing completely nuked my enjoyment of playing it. No way to make the fight fun or even, it's just a slugfest. At least in DOS2, you can do interesting spells and stuff in those situations
Encounter balance is tough in Kingmaker... Until you realize the AI isn't smart enough to avoid the pit spells (Create Pit, Acid Pit, etc). So it's trivially easy to get half or more of an encounter trapped (and taking damage with the later ones) while you defeat those that made their save. And while the rest eventually save, that means they're emerging one or two at a time, already injured, into your waiting arms (and often get sucked back in after a round or two). It doesn't trivialize _all_ the fights (major bosses are pretty resistant) but does spare a lot of tedium from the day-to-day encounters.
I remember playing pathfinder 1st edition and spending hours combing through books perfectly optimizing my characters path from level 1 to 20. I did this with physical books that I bought. Then i actually got to play the character only to be outshined by a brand new pf1 player who google searched his build. I like pathfinder 2 now.
The thing is, WotR is good, with a huge BUT. The "but" is - you have to play it as you would have a TTRPG, meaning - you play what is interesting to you and minimize the bullshit. So... Enter ToyBox, the GM-like power at your fingertips, turning 15 minutes of pre-buffing before every combat into not doing that and enjoying the game. I mean, you can just not start on unfair, but the options to skip crusades or just set x10000 durations for your minutes/level buffs makes this game infinitely more palatable. And for those who are about to say "wah waah, you're cheating and that damages my fragile ego, based on my ability to grind a single player game!" - I hear you, brothers and sisters, and I have beaten it solo on unfair+. And I still prefer the QoL over CnB torture that is playing WotR vanilla.
I had to immediately install a bunch of mods to both games in order to begin enjoying them. Instant-kill trash combats, adjustments to bring the rules in-line with the TTRPG, teleportation to avoid meaningless clocks and map traversal...
This! Playing the game the way that brings you the most enjoyment isn't cheating, it's curating the experience. The only real currency is time so don't waste it.
@@waterslethe The thing is, the most QoL mod ever for me was Camera Unlock, in both BG3 and Owlcat Games stuff. I can't imagine finagling the camera to loot at WHAT I WANT without being able to just rotate it freely. I know it is set at an angle to hide some missing backdrops and stuff, but, the convenience of being able to just LOOK at all the beautiful stuff that's already in the game is a totally gamechanging experience.
I think if you're just after an authentic experience, you absolutely shouldn't play on Unfair anyway. It's just there for those that enjoy maths and using it as a challenge slider. You can get a comparable challenge by not buffing as much and running a lower difficulty. I completely agree though that the games are what you make of it yourself there, you can scale the difficulty a lot by setting your own limits whether by mods or by rules.
As someone who walked into the Owlcat games with next to no Pathfinder experience, I really enjoyed my romp through the game on Normal/core. Obviously Kingmaker isn’t for everyone, but WotR does a great job improving upon Kingmaker, and definitely deserves playtime until you reach the Mythic path selection! Obviously enjoyment is subjective, but I’d 100% encourage hopping back into WotR with some adjusted settings to at least reach Mythic rank 3 to enjoy the best jump in quality the game has to offer.
I will say with the Kingmaker encounters, I think Pathfinder as a system doesn't do well with those sorts of "open world" games. With how proficiency scales (especially in PF2E with the Kingmaker 2e adventure) it's very easy to wander into a place where you struggle or even have no chance. Players are generally averse to running away, and there's a mentality of "It's in front of me, that means we can beat it." An unbeatable monster, such as a troll that is higher CR than expected, can easily lead to death. I really like the idea of Hexploration, but as I run a Hexploration campaign for my own players I find places where the system seems to grind against it.
A random encounter was slavers who were higher level than us and we had to fight them... Played the fight ten times before we won, and we didn't get nearly as much XP as we deserved.
games should fight against crappy cultural mindsets, not further entrench them. forcing players to run away, to avoid a wall, or to cut their losses is an important part of more open adventures. not that i think either pathfinder did that well, you had to reload if you wandered into a killing field as there was no way to flee, but they should add the chance to run instead of just making it a frustrating trap.
Part of that is a generational shift. In OSR games, it was fairly frequent for GMs to throw "Impossible enemies" at their parties. We called it Gygaxian realism. Players of that era learned quickly that running away was often your best answer, if you could get away at all. It was also an era when describing how was as important as what your PC was doing. Checking for traps? You better be using a 10 ft pole and announce you are looking at the ceiling too. You might run a foul of GMs telling you that you failed, because you didn't say you look up. I'm not saying that was a better era in TTRPGs, quite the opposite. I don't enjoy adversarial gaming. However, it explains why some encounter designers/games like to have those situations. They grew up with "RUN AWAY!" as a frequent mantra.
@@Seth9809 I mean thats on the dm for not meriting out xp then unfortunately unless they are using milestones. When I run my campaign in 2e and design encounters and puzzles I give bonus xp depending on how well they do it within character or if the ideas are neat and inspiring. PF2 encounters have really low xp rewards especially with the higher xp track that makes it cost more. I would sit down with your dm and ask them if they are awarding general xp for in character roleplaying/ingenuity and if not would they consider giving it. Even the adventure paths have less encounters than it would take to actually level your character in terms of xp.
Any game with permanent loss can't really do open world random challenging encounters well, it's just a problem with any game based on the party winning every fight (or being able to successfully run away, which is not guaranteed!)
2 pieces of info for you, Ronald. First up, Owlcat seems to also see this conundrum, they significantly changed up difficulty dynamics in 40k Rogue Trader when compared to PF games even though the selection seems the same on face value. Kingmaker was their first game after all. Secondly, they already started to address some of these things in Wrath with Mythic Abilities. For example, if one of the things that puts you off from playing Wrath is the tedium of prebuffing (that encounters often REQUIRE), that you think will be the same as in Kingmaker, it's not the case. Main buff character(s) can get Enduring Spells at lvl 5 and Greater Enduring Spells at lvl 8 which pretty much eliminates it. Personally I think it was inevitable with how PF 1E would translate to solo CRPG play, so it's hard to just fault Owlcat here. Faithful translation of the mechanics, which they did, brings way, way too many options that are just plain better than the alternative. You said yourself in this video that 1E was very hard to design encounters for, well that's for a group of real people who each have their own concept and more non-combat needs. When the whole party is under control of a single person, there's a "unity of direction", so if the person uses these option, they'll use it on all the characters, which exasperates the problem and forces encounter design further. Moreover, I heard a lot of people say 5E games like BG3 are also a boring slog combat wise - late game, encounter balance breaks apart there as well. So I don't know how justifiable it is to say they're just better on that front without finishing either of the games.
I mostly agree. Though, I think Owlcat preserved some of the utility spells and abilities not providing real opportunities to use them. At the same time, they abandoned some of the most useful stuff on the cleric's list, to give an example. This is not only an Owlcat problem but sneaking and scouting are also virtually useless in their games. But what bothers me most is the relatively poor AI of enemies. Aside from that (and 'campaign mode'), I prefer Kingmaker over BG3 all the way.
Agree, I also think ongoing support to add more archetypes and races, etc was an opportunity missed for both games. PF1 had so much to cherry pick from that could have translated well, e.g. the Court Bard, a DEBUFFING bard. They have to pay for the developer I get it but they could have done so much more.
Man, those “PF2E casters miss more than half the time” folks confused the crap out of me… Where does this idea even come from? The vast, vast, vast majority of spells in the game get their comparable effects more often than Skills and Strikes do! It is so easy to demonstrate both with playtesting and with math, and I demonstrate it all the time too! Yet this myth continues. Agreed with all the rest. I gave up on WOTR because I kept hearing how prebuff heavy it gets at higher levels and I was off it (I hadn’t SEEN it yet to be clear, I only just hit level 2). I love long duration buffs, I use them all the time in BG3 and in PF2E, but when taking a 10 minute prebuff break before every encounter becomes mandatory, the “illusion” shatters and it feels like a spreadsheet rather than a game.
Probably a combination of bad save targeting, high-level enemy overuse, the framing of "the enemy succeeded" rather than "I got my effect off," and negativity bias. I've had this weird backwards experience from the community where my bad luck always hits hardest if I'm running a martial (especially when I solo-play PF2), but I at least recognize it as wild bad swings in luck rather than the standard experience of playing a martial.
PF2E casters have their spells Succeeded against more than half the time on equal level enemies. That's the stance but both for people for and against this view, reducing it to "Spells miss half the time" is snappier and catchier. It's not a myth. Doing something in a success is alright, but just that, "Alright".
@@AragoRn-g1e Calling it a miss is a myth. You are still getting effects out. A miss having literally no effects happen whatsoever. What martials do attacks can do. Every combat.
@@AragoRn-g1e Well, reducing “half effect on a success” to “just alright” and then dismissing “just alright” as “basically a miss” is two whole levels of reductive. A caster getting a success effect is no different than a Fighter making two attacks, seeing one of them hit (but not crit), and the other miss.
There is a mod (bubblebuffs) that allows you to set up a button you can use to apply all your buffs in one click. It is still a bit tedious because you need to set that up, and update it each time you level up or prep different spells, but it does make the game playable because that's a lot less often than every fight. If you are not interested in using mods or playing on a low difficulty, I would honestly say don't play the game. (Also, even if you're playing the normal game mode on a harder difficulty, I strongly recommend putting the crusader game mode on easy).
I also do not like the encounter design in the Owlcat games, not because it's too difficult, but because it is very obviously balanced around being a video game where saving and loading is always an option. I have yet to have an encounter that challenges me, but I've had plenty where I died once, realized what the game expected me to do and then just do that thing and win.
yeah, the amount of times I went "oh, I guess this is the part where I up my lightning resistance" and then win without issue was staggering in these games
Full Disclosure from a min-maxer: Beating the game at character creation might actually be the truest representation of PF1E as a whole. The difference between a power gamer and the guy who just wants to roll dice is wild. Not to say one way or the other is more right or wrong. They are just different experiences.
Uh oh! Kingmaker wasn't an interesting campaign to me, and I hated the city management portion. I love WotR (except, again, the crusade management), but that's very much in spite of it being PF1. I bounced off D&D 3E pretty quickly when it released, and was very happy to have any number of non-D&D games during that whole era.
Yeah the gameplay can be a bit lackluster, but these are geniunely some of the best written cRPGs in decades IMO. The characters are lightyears ahead of the DnD games. I guess it depends on what you appreciate more
which characters exactly, got an example? Because some of owlcats writing is genuinely cringe-inducing not to mention very trope-heavy - although that is something due to it being written now I like WotR's gameplay arcs a lot, in terms of fascilitating fantasies i.e. lich, swarm-that-walks or legend. But I genuinely don't remember much about the characters beyound the general concept-theme of the characters - hero or villain. Only characters that stand out to me are Woljif and maybe Linzi. No Irenicus. No Durance. No Kreia. No Viconia. Hell, not even a Khalid. I love the owlcat game, but their strength is the campaign-setting they adapt. Not their own character writing. Kinda like roguetrader. The character in that were the weakest link aswell as you never get a real indepth examination of what the character is about. You know exactly how they are gonna behave - or evolve if they even have an arc - from the tirst rew moments you encounter them. Maybe I'm just jaded. Most Pillars characters have a more interesting concept and explore those deeper and in a less rushed and predictable way, imo.
I very much do like Areelu Vorlesh though. Another standout character from WotR. Though I'm pretty sure she's also a staple of the Paizo AP. Love my demon-witch mommy ❤
@@TheEpitaphNO In the end its always up to personal preferences. But one of my fave things about Owlcats characters is that they don't have a fear of making them into bad people. Characters like Camellia or Daeran you don't see a lot in RPGS. I don't feel like going super deep into it in youtube comments, but Areelu from the OG AP was way more one-note and boring. What Owlcat did with her was truly masterful character writing.
Not to dispute your general point, for the game is indeed ruthless and that style is not for everyone. Heck, it was an acquired taste for me! (Or is it Stockholm syndrome?) But I wanted to say that the first example you gave was not really fair. You say the game "invites" you to rest at a campsite, and then kills you with a unbeatable monster. That would have to be the campsite that is surrounded by a lot of skeletons, and that at that time is placed in an active warzone. And you decided to rest there. ... Yeah! That's a decision you can make. And the game punished you for it. What the game fails to do is to set that expectation clearly. Other games don't do this stuff. So when us gamers see a campsite we consider whether it is a good time to rest now or later, not whether this is a good place to rest. Kingmaker is not afraid to punish you when you don't pay attention. It likes to give you tough choices. And I love it for it!
Both of the Will O the Wisps encounters he mentioned are all but announced with neon warning signs! Yes, both those areas are incredibly difficult, and you’ve been given warnings in what to expect for both of them!! Having said that, I did run in to other encounters I could not beat (mainly because I’m dumb and ran out of camping supplies), but I just turned down the “damage to party” option so I could keep on keeping on with the game. Look, I’m mid-40s, I don’t have time to grind like I did when I was young!
@@bjheims4594 You are absolutely right that the encounters are telegraphed. Whether the Wisps or the Linnorm, you have lots of time or warnings to walk away. The issue with the wisp is that there is literally nothing you can do if you miss the signs or chose to try to see what happens. Save scumming aside, if you aren't leveled enough and/or don't have party members with Magic Missile, Resist energy and remove fear, you basically can't win that fight. There's no clever opportunities to prime the camp with bombs, or prepare a trap to give you time to run away. You basically can't run away (without sacrificing someone). Even when you are properly leveled (5+) and buffed, the reward is sadly disappointing for both loot (none that I remember) and exp.
yay Quest of the Golden Candelabra mentioned! Its such a nice little showcase of the devs prowess, and I am so glad that they continued developing it into Dawnsbury Days. The Setting of Dawnsbury is also quite interesting.
I don't know if I can agree with negativity about "winning at character creation screen" being necessary a bad thing. For every RPG to be called an RPG choices in character build must matter otherwise we are just playing strategy or a board game with random dice.
I got bogged down in Kingmaker by the spiders. Literally. Spider swarms don't get hit by alchemists fire by touch AC and are basically immune to non casters, and then the second time when I found out the web traps last for FIVE IRL MINUTES and have an insane DC, guaranteed to snag at least one character there for all of it.
tbf, I believe they nerfed the spiders in that cave since you played it last. As for the web traps, yeah... Valerie just has too bad of a reflex save to be useable.
In defense of the Owlcat games, as you pointed out, it's Inherent to PF1 that optimal and organic characters are wildly different in power. So they made sure the was a difficulty for each style of character building. Don't think of it as "changing the rules" but rather the GM adjusting the encounters for the party. Which a good GM should be doing.
Those encounters just are game stoppers for unoptimal builds… i have no problem for game have a challange mode that is super hard even to optimal builds. But if you make unoptimal build, don`t use Buffs… then even normal difficulty can be too much.
@@haukionkannel there's a super easy difficulty level for people who want to play bad builds for RP reasons or whatever. I think the issue is people want to play on the harder difficulties to show how elite they are but don't want to put the time into making good builds (or just copying something from online I guess)
@@Iridescence93 There's a vast gulf between TPK machine that requires perfect play and mindless cakewalk. A lot of people don't want their gameplay to be mindless, but they don't want to have to spend hours theorycrafting, preplanning against specific bosses or looking up guides. I found trying to tune WotR to where I wanted the difficulty to be incredibly tedious.
@@0freeicecream956 Yes but one of the strengths of these games is that the difficulty is the most customizable of any game I have ever seen. It may take a bit of understanding of the game mechanics or the PF system before hand but you can really create exactly the level of challenge you want in the settings.
@@Iridescence93 I finished WoTR in full with no prior Pathrinder experience (had only DnD experience). The issue is not some kind of static difficulty. The issue is the massive difficulty swings. I had no trouble, playing normally without looking up builds, with 95% of encounters. I used buffs, potions, planning, all that. But then there was the 5%, like the jumpscare Archdevil that I simply could not damage, at all. Or some random powerful demon in a lab, again, could not damage at all. Or a random world map encounter with 3 enemies that each had the combined HP of my party. That is just a game design mistake. You should not effortlessly beat most enemies, only to hit a stonewall and have to rebuild all characters just to stand a chance. I also played Elden Ring. That game consistently beats you up, you expect it, you are always prepared for pain. Even weak enemies kill you in a few attacks. And that is better, because you prepare yourself and your character build for that. WoTR just gives you a nice time, then suddenly kicks you in the nuts for no reason at all. Unless you follow OP character builds, then of course the game becomes a joke all the time in terms of difficulty.
I played both games to their conclusion. But in both cases, I reached an emotional state where I just earnestly wanted the game/story to END. >_< I just wanted to play a faithful interpretation of PF1e. What I got (in WotR's case) was a game that thought it was okay to give quadruple-digit hitpoints to one-note enemy NPCs. Even Cthulhu doesn't have that many hitpoints! I know! I've checked! >:U
That's a problem with D&D 3E/PF 1E in general. You pretty much have to plan out your entire character from levels 1 to 20 before you ever start playing. Then the whole time you feel like you're just waiting to finally get to your completed character.
This comment is WAY LATE and isn't meant to discount anything you said. And I want to state for the record I like PF2e and am currently running Abomination Vaults for my group ATM. That said. What You've described here mirrors my experience playing a spellcaster in PF2e. It feels like they are balanced around the most heavily optimized players. I played a spellcaster in my groups first game, we were all fairly new to the game other than the DM. I picked options that felt flavorful or cool and I ended up feeling completely useless, worse than useless like I was dragging down the group with how often I was getting downed but never contributing anything of value, I felt like I had lost at character creation. There were certainly a lot of builds online I could follow, but I felt like I had to either choose between flavour/utility and actually being worthwhile in battle, while the martials in the group got both. I think I stuck it out 2 levels but begged my DM to let me switch Characters and played a Kineticist which felt like it got all the utility and flavour of being a caster while also being able to contribute on the same level as the rest of they party.
I find that unbalanced encounters isn't a unique problem to the Owlcat games, though. I've played throughout all of Baldur's Gate 1, 2 and Throne of Bhaal, which while critically acclaimed games for their time, also suffer from this same difficulty issue with unbalanced encounters. I've also had a fair amount of frustrating encounter difficulty spikes with Baldur's Gate 3 and DOS1 that have made me drop those games for awhile. I don't think I've ever played any game of this genre without having to do some tedious amount of encounter save reloading. I think the fundamental problem for these kinds of programmed games is that having an entire world and campaign with statically pre-defined encounters is incredibly hard to balance against ever diverse possibilities of party makeups and varying player and party member level progression. While on the other hand, playing in an actual tabletop campaign with a human DM/GM can avoid this problem easier as encounters can be adjusted between game sessions to be tailored around the party's growing strengths and weaknesses.
I should probably add - Dragon Age is another critically acclaimed rpg for its time, and offers an incredibly balanced character class and leveling system. However, in my playthroughs it still seems to suffer from unbalanced encounters as well
Wrath of the righteous is my favorite game of all time, but it is not for everyone. I love spending 10-20 minutes on each level up and character creation is my favorite part of crpgs. You do not want to start with higher difficulties in the Owlcat games.
My problem with 3E-based games is that I feel a need to optimize and to an extent I enjoy it, but it is extremely frustrating how much you have to do, how much that limits your choices, and how much work you need to put in to figure that out.
i cant disagree with you that the owlcat combat is skewed, part of this is because the combats are designed around Real time w/ pause (RTwP) instead of turn based so theres alot of "trash" fights and even the "boss" fights assume you wont be fully controlling your PCs so its more about the prep than the turn to turn actions/tactical decisions hence the reliance on going into combat fully buffed. That said I'd still say their still worth a play, ive beaten kingmaker and im more than half way through Wrath and with several mods improving combat for me and tweaked difficulty options (seriously just LOOK at how much you can change, its nuts) im loving it, im even planning to get Rogue Trader despite knowing very little abour Warhammer. I'm also excited to try out the other mythic paths (later, gonna try something else fist). Oh and for the record I play both 1e and 2e Pathfinder, 1e def fixed alot of 3.5e issues but its still hella flawed despite my love for it.
Rogue Trader is a much more approachable system. I think people are understimating how many of the issues are ultimately down to PF1E being a very mechanically dense system.
@@Llortnerof No, it's down to the CRPG being a completely unfaithful adaptation of the system. PF1 is a system that lets you stack a lot of stuff and the devs *still* made things that weren't typeless on tabletop stack just to further inflate the list of buffs you need. You have to remember that Wrath is a notoriously easy AP, nothing in real Pathfinder is like Owlcat's games.
@@arachnofiend2859 Hyperbole much? If that's completely unfaithful, what do you call the Abomination Vaults ARPG? Also most of those were actually bugs. That have since been fixed. Meanwhile, the Mythic paths in Owlcats game are simultaneously more narratively interesting and less overpowered.
@@Llortnerof An ARPG isn't making any claims of being tabletop faithful so not sure how that's relevant. The superior narrative impact of the Owlcat mythic paths isn't relevant either. I wouldn't have finished Wrath if I didn't think the Aeon path was as interesting as it was. My criticisms are purely mechanical.
I completely agree that the Owlcat Pathfinder games are tuned to be too difficult, by quite a lot honestly, but you can definitely get through them without looking up builds without too much trouble. I mean, that's what I did at least, and I would not consider myself a powergamer in the slightest when it comes to Pathfinder. In both games I feel like the early game is EXTREMELY rough, due to small health pools, but it slowly gets more and more manageable, and once you're past the mid-game you have so many tools at your disposal, that most encounters aren't too bad.
I played through WoTR and I can definitely agree with the complaints regarding difficulty. My background is no Pathfinder experience, but experience with DnD. The problem for me was not a static difficulty, but just how hard difficulty spiked at some points. I could beat 95% of encounters with my common sense builds. Then there is the 5% with absurd AC and Spell Resistance, that act as a stone wall unless you optimize or know some fancy trick in advance. This 5% was not even bosses most of the time, I only struggled with one boss. It was just random enemies with absurd stats. I think there would be much less issue if the game was consistent with its difficulty. Rather than giving you an easy time, only to suprise you with absurd stat bloat you are unprepared for. If you want to be hard, be hard all the time, so I can prepare for it and react on an ongoing basis.
Playing Owlcat PF games is like playing *against* a GM that knows the system, doesn't like it, doesn't like *you* for asking to GM it and wants to make you suffer for it.
Been playing through the PF1e adventure path Rise of the Runelords with a group of friends, and a lot of the issues TRL mentioned with the Owlcat games are definitely present in tabletop as well. If you don't have your buffs up pre-battle, you are at a significant disadvantage, period. If you get ambushed by a boss monster, you are in TPK territory because you simply don't have the time(aka in game rounds) needed to bring your party on par with the boss' strength and combat it effectively. Having varying levels of strength based on decisions made during character creation is also very much present. There is a noticeable difference between the in combat power level of characters who have specialized for being strong in combat and characters that try to bring utility to the table. We're still having fun with it, but encounter balance has been something of a nightmare for the DM as they try to find the right balance between "make something that doesn't get one rounded by the guy who consistently deals 30+ damage per hit and attacks 3 times per round" and "make something the rest of the party can meaningfully interact with". That's not to say that the Owlcat game's encounter designs are flawless within the confines of Pathfinder 1e (Viscount Smoulderburn anyone?), but the wide amount of variance in the power level of any given PF1e character makes encounter balance extremely hard.
You don't really have to power build in wrath, at least up to core difficulty. If you play unfair you probably are going to have to. I beat the game as a all 20 levels in sage sorcerer azata. It's strong, but it's not like 1 level dip in vivisectionist 1 level dip in scale fist monk..... etc Also I didn't have any mercenaries to get like... brown fur transmuter or skald buffs or whatever
Currently playing WOTR and it’s very much a love hate relationship. Big negatives are the 1e ruleset with all the myriad types of bonuses, Crusade mode, and the huge amount of useless combat.
Encounter balance is a hard thing to manage. Do they make a game that is winnable by characters made of flavour options? Design for power gamers or somewhere in between. That is the downfall of CRPG's, the designers have to pick a lane and stick to it, the live GM can adjust session to session or round to round if necessary. As for builds, there are plenty of those out there for every video game, and honestly plenty for PF2e even, certainly D&D 5e. It's nothing new, and while helpful, not something that you are forced to engage in.
1. Be lvl 2 party, encounter Technic Legue, die for 10+ times, reload to avoid them, no matter where i go they always catch me on map so i can't even gain level. 2. Be a Fire Kineticist, encounter THAT SPECYFIC type of Trolls, no Acid dmg in team ,party is useless in combat. That sums up my expirience in Kingmaker...
Very spicy title, but i can understand. Owlcat did good, but a lot of their encounters and design feels like I require metaknowledge to play, either from online guides or by failing before. They also squeezed in too many content imo, without considering how it contributes to the overall theme. In Kingmaker, I feel more like I am forced to play Civilisation halfway, than being an adventuring party, and sadly either system didn't really contribute to the other (being good at kingdom managing didn't add much to my adventurers, and vice versa)
I've tried many times to play the owlcat games, but every time I get bored with the combat. I like dawnsbury days because it actually feels like pf2e. I really want to like the owlcat games. I've just never can get into it.
@@Seth9809 I started off in PF2e I haven't played PF1e besides some tabletop games so keep that in mind. Part of it is the Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 style of play, the real time and turned based I don't like, I just want the turn based style. In low levels which is all I've played casters best choices are ranged weapons and there's feat taxes to make that actually useful. Cantrips aren't good early game if at all. It just doesn't seem at tactical as PF2e is now maybe that's just how PF1e ran idk. Maybe it gets better later on but I really like the 3 action system and degrees of success\failure that's in 2e with that missing I get bored. As far as the flashy animations I think WoTR and Kingmaker has really nice graphics that are on par if not better than BG3 and they are much better than Dawnsbury Days that I really like so no that has nothing to do with why I don't like the Owlcat games.
I bought both Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous when they were on sale. Gave up on KM almost as soon as the Kingdom stage began. It wasn't fun anymore. In Wrath, the story stays good, but I still had to set the difficulty to roughly Story mode. And then even on story mode, there's been a few dungeons and some random encounters where the enemies have ACs 30 points higher than my best Attack.
Couldn't agree more. Also PF1 (and most TTRPGs) were designed with the idea that you'd be having a few battles per game day. And in WotR and Kingmaker you have tons of them back to back. Which means playing in turn based mode takes ages, and spellcasters are usually not doing much because cantrips don't heighten in PF1.
Idk. They're great games for their target audience. Which is 1e players looking for a challenging strategy game. If you're not and then also refuse to turn down difficulty while refusing to play optimally then like idk man... that's on you? You tell someone complaining about 2e that their GM can scale difficulty down for them but refuse to do so yourself in a game where there isn't a GM to do that for you is weird? Don't get me wrong kingmaker made some BAD decisions. Lots of those are fixed in WotR (no forced blindfight feat, buffs can last 24 hours, turn based mode without a mod, etc.). But all the other TTRPG games I've played feel like shit for character creation in comparison. Its why I play 1e and why I love those games. But idk man it just rubs me wrong see people talk down on a small studio who made a game on par with much larger studios like Larian. Like if Owlcat/WotR was as big as Larian/BG3 I could see the hate but... its not.
Fair. I love Wrath of the Righteous in spite of its encounter design because the story and role-play options are so excellent. I can 100% understand not wanting to play because of the encounters.
I found my enjoyment of the combat encounters increased a lot when I played in turn based mode. It seemed to make pre-buffing less critical and also made caster classes more viable. That said, having a party of 6 carefully designed custom characters vs you plus the random story companions really does highlight the massive difference in difficulty based purely on character creation / selection alone. I think your comments are very fair!
I recently became reinvested in trying to beat wrath of the righteous after I downloaded a mod that incorporates the O-Matic bonus progression system into the game
You totally nailed it for me. I do enjoy their games overall but the problems you list hold them back from greatness. I will say the bubble buff mod made the game 5x better for me because you can press a button and handle all the buffing at once. Still, far too many encounters.
I’ve spent a collective 100 hours on wrath of the righteous and always quit in act 3. I cannot stand having to apply buffs before every fight, even with a mod that does it automatically. Reminds me why dnd 5e’s concentration system was so crucial to fixing prebuffing in dnd 3e/pf1e.
As a GM, I've really come to detest the word "build" when used to describe the players effort to win at character-creation. I will go on-record to take the strong stance that min-maxing is malignant because, if one person does it, everyone has to or else the game is ruined pretty quickly.
@@zac4668 I definitely have crossed over... but my players and I frequently reminisce and lament, because we really liked PF2e but the munchkin "infection" ruined it for us.
I cleared both the owl cat games without having played pathfinder 1st edition, without looking up guides and without respeccing my character even a single time. Did it take me a long time? Yeah, but it was perfectly doable.
Hey guys, pro tip. Play kingmaker with a friend or 5. Download parsec and play on turn based mode. Take turns controlling the party or let the baron control. It's a fun time.
I love the owlcat games, but you basically gotta spend a lot of time pre-buffing before potential encounters or entering some dungeons in order to make it through some of them. And it does happen more often than in other crpgs I've played, in the old Baldur's gate games I usually only had to consider pre-buffing before boss fights.
My issue with them is absolute necessity of buffs and debuffs. Turns a lot of fights into an episode of Overlord where Ainz casts like 80 spells for 5 minutes before doing anything.
I feel this way about optimizing in any system. Before I even start rolling dice or grab a sheet, I'm thinking about the character concept, their past, their possible arc and etc.
I tried the game once to learn the lore a bit. But then I ran into the split fight in the First World, and lacked the right counters. It would have been an hour to change my group. So I choose not to play anymore.
I will never forget when I rested somewhere in Kingmaker and it just dropped a floating lightning skull on me that just wiped me with no effort cause it had 1-shot AOE attacks while all my stuff just missed. Lost so much progress since apparently I should have saved *before* resting while the game always autosaves *after* resting (when the skull kills you)
I quickly realised the combat in Wrath of the Righteous was gonna be insufferable so I think I turned all the difficulty settings to minimum within the first hour, the game basically just became an auto-battler at that point. But I'm really glad I did because I would've missed out on so much great story and characters. I'm tempted to try the same with Kingmaker.
I'm running Kingmaker right now for PF2E and it's our first introduction to PF2E. Party wiped in the prologue during the very final encounter. This game is tough!! (most players do not min-max or even, uh, use their basic abilities half of the time). The axe-lady (volo-whatever) respects the party for getting as far as they did. So the swordlord lady is dead and the PCs are getting recruited by the Black Tears! No idea how this is going to progress with the kingdom building/settling/etc, or the overall story, but this is why I love TTRPGs more than video games - the game can and does run off the rails sometimes. Having a blast.
One thing not mentioned is how almost every enemy in WotR has elemental resistances so your damaging spells don’t come online until Mythic 1 and you are required to take Ascendant Element. The amount of buffs and level of optimization required to deal with enemies is pretty insane with melee classes dipping into Witch to get a 2AC from the class-specific ring And then there’s the whole crusade management BS
THANK YOU! I had this video shared with me when I complained about how the loading screen says to use control spells, but my spell DC is like, 23-25, and a lot of enemies I'm fighting have saving throws of +22-28
Fair criticism across the board on gameplay. Funnily, both games have rogue-like dungeon dive DLCs that really shine for the type of CRPG gameplay that they designed. I also want to highlight your first statement. Their story, writing, and mechanical scope are all staggering. With PF2 having better balance baked in, I hope that they have the opportunity to make a game with that system.
I really love the Owlcat games but I also strictly prefer BG3, I have yet to play Solasta. My complaints are pretty much 1:1 re: Owlcat, I don't want to have to MinMax to play Pathfinder, even as a player for PF1, I didn't have to "win at character creation"(going to refer to this as WACC'ing onwards) to be a functional member of my party. Tangent. That being said, it was still pretty much rocket tag; my GM and I (we both GM'ed often/primarily) converted the Book of Nine Swords to PF1 to bring the Martials up to snuff with casters. There were still pretty swingy moments in combat but it really added to the charm. End tangent. Unfortunately Owlcat's games are considerably overtuned at base rules with highly inflated stats; my friend (my former GM) and I shared notes on what we had to do to overcome the early level areas and honestly, we came to the same conclusion. Which was painfully sad for us, we didn't want to have to give our characters compensation bonuses via mods to give us the actual PF1 experience, we were just expecting it out of the box 😅😓
Buffing is required WOTR especially on the hard difficulties. Bubble buffs mod is huge QoL Improvement as it automates the buffing process. They are applied instantly without animation, all required resources are consumed and it can't be used in combat by default.
I have to say Pathfinder POTR has amazing story, but I do say that needing to constantly min-max had reduced the replayability for me. Especially because up until Act 3 it can be exhausting going through the encounters
I have been trying to figure out why I haven't been able to get invested in these two games. I never realized they were heavily optimized towards power builds and kept trying to make the suboptimal characters I enjoy playing in Pathfinder.
I am proud that I beat both games in normal or harder difficulty (without checking online guides besides how resolve plot related obstacles than fight/build guides cause bugs), but I agree that constant pre-buffing can get tedious. So thus why example in Wrath I favor using extend metamagic and mythic powers to make even basic buff spells last hour or even 24 hours and cast them once when entering large map. Also before introducing turn based combat kingmaker combat was intense cause I played casters a lot so needed line spells and place them rapidly in the fight. So ending up favoring using magic missile a lot cause it can't miss and hits for solid dmg and open combat with chain AoE's and easy targeting spells during main combat.
Hey Ronald, love your content and I appreciate that you are always willing to share your opinions whether people like it or not. Totally understand the frustration with the Owlfinder games. Personally I love them but that has taken time and a willingness to overlook some of the design flaws, including some of what you mentioned here. Fwiw, Kingmaker is a bit rougher with the gotcha moments; I feel they eased off a bit in Wrath but they're still present. I also don't enjoy having to constantly buff before every fight, and in particular some early areas in KM are brutal to the unprepared due to the sandbox setup. That said, I absolutely adore the writing in these games, and some of the companions are among my favorites in all gaming. I agree many encounters aren't designed in a satisfying way but I still argue WotR at least is worth getting through if you can. KM kinda falls apart in the final stages due to various bugs and whatnot. Weirdly, I'm having a very hard time getting into BG3. It's a gorgeous game and the voice acting is great, but it just isn't hooking me for some reason that I can't quite identify.
i hear you. i play these games on easy mode for a reason. i found a functional concept for my main character and have everyone else on auto-level. bosses were still challenging and i didn't have to think too much about my choices.
The issue with the Owlcat Pathfinder games, they were made as RTWP. Turn-based modes came as either an afterthought or as second banana in the design. Meaning, you have all these constant fights in turn based mode which take forever and tend to be fairly meaningless. In real time, they're over in a snap but if not - it saps your will in what is already a very long game. Can anyone address if the Warhammer Rogue Trader addresses this? It was made turn-based from the ground up.
Owlcat games got me into DnD and Pathfinder, so while there are some balance issues, and prebuffing does get tedious, I still love them. Rogue Trader is also much better about the buffing side of things.
Thanls a lot for the recommendations. I also love Solasta btw, even more than BG3, the looting system in Solasta is very well designed, looting is for me one of the most tedious things in games.
Understand your feeling. I personnally finished Kingmaker on challenging without online builds, and I am quite proud of it. But it indeed took a lot of time, time I don't have anymore (that's why I never finished my secondary runs or WotR act II for that matter)
Personally, I love the Owlcat games because they capture that absolute mess of balance that 1e was and they have incredibly customizable difficulty. I do definitely think they needed a bit more time in the oven, in particular the lack of macros absolutely sucks, especially on console. The games are definitely more of an acquired taste in that regard, as you have little in a comfortable medium between the quick save overwhelming options experience versus the Easy/Storymode game does most of it for you, but on those two ends, it’s plenty great. As for a full 2e CRPG, it’ll have three major issues to overcome for balance worries. Prebuffing, major encounter foreknowledge, and team synergy. The first two are pretty simple, prebuffing warps encounter balance a ton but it’s very awkward to manage in open areas (and forcing encounter starts on casting still allow for cheese). Major encounter foreknowledge means you can build the counter options (Wrath of the Righteous in particular had the issue where certain options were incredibly more useful due to enemy types), so you can take the spells, gear, and consumables to deal with encounters. And the last, while 1e let you win on the character sheet, 2e has incredibly strong party synergy potential, so a knowledgeable player can build an incredible party to still warp the balance. While 2e makes the baseline much simpler to design around, the CRPG design problems still risk being a large issue.
Yeah, that pretty much matches my experience with them, though resetting my kineticists burn an buffing every single time I rested just became tendious to me
This was a great review of P:KM! I tried to get into this game, like you did from the experience with PF and DnD, but ran into almost the same issues as you. Increased stat blocks on monsters and the game not explaining this (and then the developer having to go back and patch options for difficulty) left a bad taste in my mouth, as I really wanted to get into this game. The original Neverwinter Nights is still one of my top 3 CRPGs and I was hoping this would fit the bill for PF, but no dice (pun absolutely intended). No hate to the people that love the game, but there are too many issues with stat bloat for enemies, bad launch with horrible bugs, etc. That I could never get drawn into it. Shame, as I think the potential was there but never realized as it could have been.
encounters in kingmaker and more so wrath sort of just have the problem of being 1e pathfinder games. What I mean is, that combat just breaks down after some time. It's really not even a roleplay vs powergaming thing, at a certain point you will just have to embrace the wargamy nature of that system and have your party assume really rigid roles - for example, armor class just does not scale as much as attacks if you are not entirely focused on it, thus you can basically ignore the AC of any non-tank character because the difference between an AC of 17 and 29 is 0 if your opponents got a +30 to hit. So if your duelists or rogues or magi want to be in the frontline you automatically have to drop greater invisibility on them, your spellcasters will need to prebuff delay poison / mindblank / protection from energy / death ward on every partymember and in any encounter you will have to make use of a pretty much pre-set number of actions with very little room for switching it up mid-combat. It's a strategy game, specifically one that rewards preparation over adaptation, so encounters are more of a puzzle than a test of skill. In the end your builds determine which set of actions you will perform, and your degree of min-maxing determines how succesful these actions are but every party composition has some sort of action set they will need to perform or die. THAT is the main problem of 1e combat, in the tabletop version this is somewhat mitigated by the absolute freedom of the medium to break up that monotony and the fact that you don't get to reload and learn an encounter's mechanics, but on a computer all you have is the wargame and if you don't enjoy this trial and error aspect you will hate the owlcat games.
I love PF1e and the Owlcat games, but I also love PF2e, for very different regions. PF1e (and by extension the Owlcat games) was fun for theory-crafting and heavily rewards system mastery (e.g. knowing every rule and how they interact). PF2e, meanwhile, is a vastly better system in terms of balance, and thus honestly better for storytelling, because one can build a character to fit the story, rather than having to build a story to fit the mechanics. Both styles of play, and thus both game systems, have their place. From a story perspective, I would strongly suggest that you give the Owlcat games a try (even if you opt for Story Mode). They are vastly superior in scope and level of variability than (your cited) Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 really only has 3 endings (excluding different varieties of death), whereas Wrath of the Righteous has dozens - not counting companion epilogues, of which, again, WoTR has twice as many companions and far more ways they can interact with the many ways the PC can choose to end the game. Even as an avid PF1 character optimizer, I opted to switch to easier modes for (some of) my (many) replays of WoTR just to experience all the many branches the story can take. So no shame down-tuning to a difficulty that's right for you.
A thing I really don't like is how high the AC and saving throws get for monsters with higher difficulties. Scaling HP and damage sure, but AC scaling affects martials too heavily while save scaling makes save spells practically worthless for casters. WotR in late game basically just devolves into prebuffing and then attacking to kill everything as quick as possible. There's also the shitty optimization of WotR past Act 3. Game can barely run 30 fps despite being silky smooth before then.
I have and hate both. After how much I hated Kingmaker, I was foolish to he Wrath of the Righteous. My steam account is a graveyard of games that just didn't do it for me.
I can enjoy an RPG that demands a min-max or even munchkin approach to character building to successfully complete. I quite like games that involve a management aspect with tight deadlines, forcing me to make decisions that involve some level of sacrifice. But Kingmaker was both of those concepts at once and I found that a bit too exhausting to deal with, so it's one of the few CRPGs I own that I've never completed.
I'm currently playing through Kingmaker for the first time and it's really apparent they balanced the game for trial and error, especially in the early game, where you are more limited in what you can counter. You have no idea if you need to prepare for invisibility, poison, specific status effects, damage types or resistances, until you find the first encounter that kills or cripples you. Owlcat also loves their ambushes. There's that example of the camp, foreshadowed by the corpses lying around, but you have no idea if you can deal with it or not. But then there's looking down a well and being ambushed by invisible, lightning-shooting enemies that instantly outright kill my casters before combat starts. With the experience I have with CRPGs at this point, and understanding the system, building characters is not that complicated - at least to keep them viable. I don't do any of those fancy builds, I just keep my characters specializing in what they're good at and combat gets progressively easier. I'm now at a point where combat is really easy, but it's the kingdom-managing side that is causing problems - another unbalanced mess. Still, because I'm enjoying the story and characters, and perhaps a bit out of spite as well, I keep fighting on. Ultimately the game is kinda fun, despite being a mess.
When I tried to play through the owlcat games, I basically nerfed combat difficulty into the ground anyway because the games are massive and it was the only hope I had of getting through them. Still didn't finish either of them X_X The encounter balance on my first few runs (before I lowered the difficulty) did seem a bit wack, though I attributed that partially to the OG Kingmaker AP. Making low level characters fight swarms is just mean in PF1!
I love building and optimizing characters and I still have the same issue with the Owlcat games; encounters being built around an assumption of arbitrary stat buffs significantly limits build diversity. There are a ton of options that ARE completely fine in a normal game of PF1E that don't work in WotR because they don't bring any of the stat buffs you need to hit the enemy at all.
The only thing I really disagree with that Bg3 doesn't have the same "you beat the game at character creation" problem. It absolutely does. Insert your Tavern Brawler doing 150 damage a round at lvl5 while locking every enemy down and being impossible to kill due to support they have. Everything else is valid though, even though I love the owlcat games.
I haven't played Kingmaker in a year, because I missed a companion quest. This would mean re-doing the whole of Pitax, which was very discouraging. In WoTR I got to act II and haven't progressed since. It doesn't help that none of the build suggestions on neoseekers speak to me. The only Owlcat game I've beaten is Rouge Trader, only because it's easy to stumble into a broken build.
you do you Ron. you're 100% entitled to your opinion. i just find it fascinating how different our 2 experiences seem. when approaching a new crpg i tend to chose options for flavour (2nd and 3rd playthroughs are generally for the inner power gamer) i generally let the game lead me along as I'm playing because I wish to see the story as close to the vision as possible. played on almost the exact difficulty you described (as I too come from a deep understanding of PF1) and, well ... I had a blast. I should note however, I'm talking just WotR. I still haven't picked up Kingmaker. Largely due to the fact that I cannot put Wrath down. I get the impression that Kingmaker was a warm-up development-wise. it's a shame that you've let a few objections that are easy to overcome keep you from experiencing this story. but then again, if you've played the table top adventure paths, you already have. and like you said, there are a lot of other games out there ;oD
Not based on a TTRPG system, but I enjoyed the way Grim Dawn (and other Diablo-likes) handle character building and game balance. On a regular playthrough, you don't really have to think too hard and can basically pick anything you want. As you turn up the difficulty, you still have lots of options but you have to make sure they actually synergise somewhat. Then in end-game, they have optional content that really requires you to optimise. I initially just enjoyed playing the game almost casually, but when I reached the end-game it was a surprising amount of fun to solve the 'puzzle' of how to adjust my build to function against otherwise unfair enemies.
I actually don't mind 5e in general, but its exhausting to deal with players who watch online character builder videos that attempt to max out their power and then get mad at me when I create scenarios that meet their power level. I've been told that "cheating" like they WANT to win at character creation. I'm sorry, but its no fun at a DM/GM to build up an epic BBEG only to have then drop before its even their turn. So I make my encounters relative to the table. A medium encounter is a medium encounter for THAT party and a deadly encounter is a DEADLY encounter for THAT party. This also means that when I play with beginners I tone down the baddies just a little (or have them make sub-optimal choices). PF2e isn't perfect, and I do have issues with some mechanics, but it does solve the power-gamer issue for the most-part.
Kingmaker has more poignant and very old school classical computer game issue. As number of NPC's in the encounter drops, hit rate of those remaining ones goes up. In simple terms, game is fixing the dice during the encounter. This is old school bad handling of AI. EA used to do this a lot 20-25 years ago - one old NBA title had overriding three point shot for AI in last seconds if player has 1 or 2 point lead, that wouldn't kick in if the condition isn't met, one FIFA had guaranteed header scoring after a corner shot near the end of the game if you have less than 2 goals lead etc. Old Bg2 had a lot of dying before you figure out all the right buffs, but it never cheated on dice rolls. Probability held up. Current version of Kingmaker starts having reproducible unprobable streaks of high roles and critical hits. You can game the encounter to avoid those (once you figure out all the trigger conditions), but you shouldn't have to in the modern games. All AI in games cheats. But we're far past being so obvious about it.
You don't really need optimized builds to play Kingmaker on true-to-tabletop difficulty. The save-scumming and pre-buffing is real though, 99.99% of "hard" fights are "I knew what was coming and pre-buffed specifically for it so now it's not hard but if I hadn't it would have been automatic TPK".
I decided to release this video early TODAY to help draw attention to the NEW Pathfinder 2nd Edition CRPG whose Kickstarter launches today, DRAGON'S DEMAND!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/ossianstudios/pathfinder-the-dragons-demand
Also check out the free PF2e CRPG Quest for the Golden Candelabra: store.steampowered.com/app/2381160/Quest_for_the_Golden_Candelabra/
And its excellent sequel Dawnsbury Days: store.steampowered.com/app/2693730/Dawnsbury_Days/
Gameplay issues aside, owlcat introduced me to and led me to end up falling in love with the world of Golarion which eventually led my group adopting pf2e full time, for which I’ll be forever grateful.
yeah they're not perfect games by any means (though I think they've very good examples of the style of game they're trying to be), but I doubt I'd even know what Pathfinder was without them. and pf2e rocks, corrects a lot of the shortcomings in 1e that pop up in the owlcat games.
The world and lore of pathfinder is so good. Genuinely enjoy it a lot. Its a great world to get absorbed into, glad you found it :D
Ouch, Golarion is the worst part of Pathfinder. I find the rules useful, and everything else utter trash.
Yeah. I do actually like the Owlcat games but encounter design and balance for them is kind of terrible.
i think it being Real time with pause instead of turn-based means the focus is more on prep (character builds, buffs, etc.( instead of moment to moment tactical desicions. Turn based IS an option but RTwP is clearly the "normal" way to fight. PF 1e is also an issue but thats like complaining that Baldurs gate 1 doesnt use 3.5e...it didnt exist at the time. If some insane modder wants to do a full conversion to 2e i wish them luck and much interest from me :D
100% balancing is horrid. It threw things at me I wouldn't even consider as a GM.
They start out okay, but at some point the whole idea of "encounter design" breaks down. In WotR it's somewhere in act 3, where it just starts being "kill yet another pack of demons". By act 5 they've given up completely except for a few setpiece fights. "Yeah, just paste more demons into the map. Don't worry about where. We have to ship the game!"
@@RobertDeCaire Yeah. Even when there is a attempt at more interesting encounter design (of of the top of my head Xanthir and most DLC bosses) they're better but do often feel like you're still better off just prebuffing to the max and rushing in.
Blackwater has probably the most interesting enemy gimmick because it's a whole dungeon instead of a single pack (so instead of dying or already knowing what to do you can actually learn) but even then, knowing their weakness those enemies are still very overtuned.
I think RTWP can work on games (pillars of eternity 2 Deadfire is genuinely great and is best played RTWP), but imo they have to be built for it. With more complex games (and Pf1e is much more complex action economy wise than the ADnD the infinity engiens games ran on) that are played turn based on the TTRP i think RTWP struggles a lot.
And unfortunately since the game was balanced for RTWP trying to do only TB is a real slog.
That is Path one though....smh
Having every Steam achievement in Slay the Spire is a crazy flex bro
Yeah really the only reason I can't make it through the owlcat games is having to prebuff the party before encounters. The idea of walking forward until you see a red circle, then standing 30ft away, then casting a bunch buff spells before starting the fight just doesn't feel fun.
There is a mod for that
Honestly you can play without pre buff in core difficulty just fine in rtwp mode like old baldurs gate 1 & 2 used to be, pre buff is only a thing when you playing turn based and action economy and let's be frank you don't do that shit when playing tabletop.
@PagemanX exactly, and I always try to play these games in turn base, and just not as fun as it could be.
That Is Path 1st....it bothers me as well. That is why I love Path 2.
Even without the immersion breaking issues of pausing to buff before you know you'll trigger an encounter, at high levels the buffing process itself became a horrible drag for me. That's not really Owlcat's fault, it's a fundamental problem with PF1/3.x, just exacerbated by having to click all the spells in the right order and right timing for each character and then wait through all the animations, rather then just say which buffs you put up as you would in tabletop.
And even in tabletop, high level 3.x/PF1 buffing is a burden.
I do hope Owlcat transitions to 2e for their games going forward, i love pf1e, but even I can admit that it has a multitude of flaws.
This is completely unconfirmed and I heard this from, like, ONE comment a few years back so take it with a grain of salt. I heard that one of the head guys at Owlcat is a grognard who doesn't really care to adapt PF2e.
That said, I think more recently someone in the company said that remaking KM and WotR with PF2e rules wasn't out of the question.
@@TheAmateurCreatorKaan Owlcat more recently said that they are seriously considering moving to PF2e after their next Warhammer 40k game
@@thason3304 Oh hell yeah
@@thason3304 Do you mean after Rogue Trader, or are they doing another 40k game? A source on that would be appreciated
@thason3304 great news indeed!
I played BG3 for Larian and not for DnD. The 5E system really held them back in terms of mechanics design. If you haven't tried it already, I would recommend their game Divinity: Original Sin 2; with it, you can see what Larian is capable of when they aren't shackled by 5E. I'm glad they broke away from DnD and have high hopes for their next game.
Yep. The PF2 system is much more in line with the Larian style. Though PF2 would still benefit from a little freedom in tweaking it for a video game format. Most direct translations of a rules set from TT to VG just feel a bit stale.
a PF2 based Larian game would kick ass
I'm kind of glad something shackled Larian. I'm not a huge enjoyer of DOS encounter design, because with their system it feels almost impossible not to accidentally abuse the AI even if you're trying not to. Totally get if you love it, i mean the basic concept of creativity is awesome, but it's like the encounters can't keep up with it. BG3 also has that to an extent here and there, but it's a bit more grounded for me.
How, in your view, did 5e hold BG3 back? Having played DOS1, a bit of DOS2, and BG3, I think 5e actually benefitted it quite a bit.
First of all, the fact that magic items bonuses max out at +3 means that I actually kept my items long enough to get attached to them, and every upgrade felt meaningful. Whereas in DOS1, I was swapping out items all the time, and none of them felt special.
Second, the "flat math" of 5e means you can explore more freely without worrying too much if you're in the right area for your level. Admittedly, this wasn't actually that much of a problem in DOS1, but that's because, past a certain point, almost all challenge went away. However, I hear it was a pretty big issue in DOS2.
Now, there are some ways that 5e does negatively affect BG3, like the attritional combat and resting system working against any sense of urgency in the story. However, that would be just as much of a problem if they used Pathfinder.
@@benl2140 To me, I found the combat being based in 5e made the same issues I had as a GM pop up. So many combats became unwinnable for me in BG3 because too many random enemies got involved, and the maths just doesn't work for balancing encounters when there's so many enemies. Boss fights felt balanced, but that damn dwarven cave thing completely nuked my enjoyment of playing it. No way to make the fight fun or even, it's just a slugfest. At least in DOS2, you can do interesting spells and stuff in those situations
Encounter balance is tough in Kingmaker... Until you realize the AI isn't smart enough to avoid the pit spells (Create Pit, Acid Pit, etc). So it's trivially easy to get half or more of an encounter trapped (and taking damage with the later ones) while you defeat those that made their save. And while the rest eventually save, that means they're emerging one or two at a time, already injured, into your waiting arms (and often get sucked back in after a round or two).
It doesn't trivialize _all_ the fights (major bosses are pretty resistant) but does spare a lot of tedium from the day-to-day encounters.
Alternatively... grease gaming, or doing that until you get pits.
Got Pathfinder: Kingmaker for free. When I think of it, I mostly recall how much that game pissed me off. But my recorded playtime is 336 hours...
Exactly, I judge a games greatness by the amount of time I've played them. Easily, both pathfinder games have stolen 150 hours each.
I remember playing pathfinder 1st edition and spending hours combing through books perfectly optimizing my characters path from level 1 to 20. I did this with physical books that I bought. Then i actually got to play the character only to be outshined by a brand new pf1 player who google searched his build. I like pathfinder 2 now.
What can I say, Google-fu issue
Why didn't you use d20pfsrd or arhives of nethys?
The thing is, WotR is good, with a huge BUT. The "but" is - you have to play it as you would have a TTRPG, meaning - you play what is interesting to you and minimize the bullshit. So... Enter ToyBox, the GM-like power at your fingertips, turning 15 minutes of pre-buffing before every combat into not doing that and enjoying the game. I mean, you can just not start on unfair, but the options to skip crusades or just set x10000 durations for your minutes/level buffs makes this game infinitely more palatable.
And for those who are about to say "wah waah, you're cheating and that damages my fragile ego, based on my ability to grind a single player game!" - I hear you, brothers and sisters, and I have beaten it solo on unfair+. And I still prefer the QoL over CnB torture that is playing WotR vanilla.
I had to immediately install a bunch of mods to both games in order to begin enjoying them. Instant-kill trash combats, adjustments to bring the rules in-line with the TTRPG, teleportation to avoid meaningless clocks and map traversal...
This! Playing the game the way that brings you the most enjoyment isn't cheating, it's curating the experience. The only real currency is time so don't waste it.
@@waterslethe The thing is, the most QoL mod ever for me was Camera Unlock, in both BG3 and Owlcat Games stuff. I can't imagine finagling the camera to loot at WHAT I WANT without being able to just rotate it freely. I know it is set at an angle to hide some missing backdrops and stuff, but, the convenience of being able to just LOOK at all the beautiful stuff that's already in the game is a totally gamechanging experience.
I think if you're just after an authentic experience, you absolutely shouldn't play on Unfair anyway. It's just there for those that enjoy maths and using it as a challenge slider. You can get a comparable challenge by not buffing as much and running a lower difficulty. I completely agree though that the games are what you make of it yourself there, you can scale the difficulty a lot by setting your own limits whether by mods or by rules.
As someone who walked into the Owlcat games with next to no Pathfinder experience, I really enjoyed my romp through the game on Normal/core. Obviously Kingmaker isn’t for everyone, but WotR does a great job improving upon Kingmaker, and definitely deserves playtime until you reach the Mythic path selection! Obviously enjoyment is subjective, but I’d 100% encourage hopping back into WotR with some adjusted settings to at least reach Mythic rank 3 to enjoy the best jump in quality the game has to offer.
I will say with the Kingmaker encounters, I think Pathfinder as a system doesn't do well with those sorts of "open world" games. With how proficiency scales (especially in PF2E with the Kingmaker 2e adventure) it's very easy to wander into a place where you struggle or even have no chance. Players are generally averse to running away, and there's a mentality of "It's in front of me, that means we can beat it." An unbeatable monster, such as a troll that is higher CR than expected, can easily lead to death. I really like the idea of Hexploration, but as I run a Hexploration campaign for my own players I find places where the system seems to grind against it.
A random encounter was slavers who were higher level than us and we had to fight them...
Played the fight ten times before we won, and we didn't get nearly as much XP as we deserved.
games should fight against crappy cultural mindsets, not further entrench them. forcing players to run away, to avoid a wall, or to cut their losses is an important part of more open adventures. not that i think either pathfinder did that well, you had to reload if you wandered into a killing field as there was no way to flee, but they should add the chance to run instead of just making it a frustrating trap.
Part of that is a generational shift. In OSR games, it was fairly frequent for GMs to throw "Impossible enemies" at their parties. We called it Gygaxian realism. Players of that era learned quickly that running away was often your best answer, if you could get away at all. It was also an era when describing how was as important as what your PC was doing. Checking for traps? You better be using a 10 ft pole and announce you are looking at the ceiling too. You might run a foul of GMs telling you that you failed, because you didn't say you look up.
I'm not saying that was a better era in TTRPGs, quite the opposite. I don't enjoy adversarial gaming. However, it explains why some encounter designers/games like to have those situations. They grew up with "RUN AWAY!" as a frequent mantra.
@@Seth9809 I mean thats on the dm for not meriting out xp then unfortunately unless they are using milestones. When I run my campaign in 2e and design encounters and puzzles I give bonus xp depending on how well they do it within character or if the ideas are neat and inspiring. PF2 encounters have really low xp rewards especially with the higher xp track that makes it cost more. I would sit down with your dm and ask them if they are awarding general xp for in character roleplaying/ingenuity and if not would they consider giving it. Even the adventure paths have less encounters than it would take to actually level your character in terms of xp.
Any game with permanent loss can't really do open world random challenging encounters well, it's just a problem with any game based on the party winning every fight (or being able to successfully run away, which is not guaranteed!)
2 pieces of info for you, Ronald.
First up, Owlcat seems to also see this conundrum, they significantly changed up difficulty dynamics in 40k Rogue Trader when compared to PF games even though the selection seems the same on face value. Kingmaker was their first game after all.
Secondly, they already started to address some of these things in Wrath with Mythic Abilities. For example, if one of the things that puts you off from playing Wrath is the tedium of prebuffing (that encounters often REQUIRE), that you think will be the same as in Kingmaker, it's not the case. Main buff character(s) can get Enduring Spells at lvl 5 and Greater Enduring Spells at lvl 8 which pretty much eliminates it.
Personally I think it was inevitable with how PF 1E would translate to solo CRPG play, so it's hard to just fault Owlcat here. Faithful translation of the mechanics, which they did, brings way, way too many options that are just plain better than the alternative. You said yourself in this video that 1E was very hard to design encounters for, well that's for a group of real people who each have their own concept and more non-combat needs. When the whole party is under control of a single person, there's a "unity of direction", so if the person uses these option, they'll use it on all the characters, which exasperates the problem and forces encounter design further.
Moreover, I heard a lot of people say 5E games like BG3 are also a boring slog combat wise - late game, encounter balance breaks apart there as well. So I don't know how justifiable it is to say they're just better on that front without finishing either of the games.
I mostly agree. Though, I think Owlcat preserved some of the utility spells and abilities not providing real opportunities to use them. At the same time, they abandoned some of the most useful stuff on the cleric's list, to give an example. This is not only an Owlcat problem but sneaking and scouting are also virtually useless in their games. But what bothers me most is the relatively poor AI of enemies. Aside from that (and 'campaign mode'), I prefer Kingmaker over BG3 all the way.
Agree, I also think ongoing support to add more archetypes and races, etc was an opportunity missed for both games. PF1 had so much to cherry pick from that could have translated well, e.g. the Court Bard, a DEBUFFING bard. They have to pay for the developer I get it but they could have done so much more.
Man, those “PF2E casters miss more than half the time” folks confused the crap out of me…
Where does this idea even come from? The vast, vast, vast majority of spells in the game get their comparable effects more often than Skills and Strikes do! It is so easy to demonstrate both with playtesting and with math, and I demonstrate it all the time too! Yet this myth continues.
Agreed with all the rest. I gave up on WOTR because I kept hearing how prebuff heavy it gets at higher levels and I was off it (I hadn’t SEEN it yet to be clear, I only just hit level 2). I love long duration buffs, I use them all the time in BG3 and in PF2E, but when taking a 10 minute prebuff break before every encounter becomes mandatory, the “illusion” shatters and it feels like a spreadsheet rather than a game.
Probably a combination of bad save targeting, high-level enemy overuse, the framing of "the enemy succeeded" rather than "I got my effect off," and negativity bias. I've had this weird backwards experience from the community where my bad luck always hits hardest if I'm running a martial (especially when I solo-play PF2), but I at least recognize it as wild bad swings in luck rather than the standard experience of playing a martial.
PF2E casters have their spells Succeeded against more than half the time on equal level enemies. That's the stance but both for people for and against this view, reducing it to "Spells miss half the time" is snappier and catchier. It's not a myth.
Doing something in a success is alright, but just that, "Alright".
@@AragoRn-g1e Calling it a miss is a myth. You are still getting effects out. A miss having literally no effects happen whatsoever. What martials do attacks can do. Every combat.
@@AragoRn-g1e Well, reducing “half effect on a success” to “just alright” and then dismissing “just alright” as “basically a miss” is two whole levels of reductive.
A caster getting a success effect is no different than a Fighter making two attacks, seeing one of them hit (but not crit), and the other miss.
There is a mod (bubblebuffs) that allows you to set up a button you can use to apply all your buffs in one click. It is still a bit tedious because you need to set that up, and update it each time you level up or prep different spells, but it does make the game playable because that's a lot less often than every fight. If you are not interested in using mods or playing on a low difficulty, I would honestly say don't play the game. (Also, even if you're playing the normal game mode on a harder difficulty, I strongly recommend putting the crusader game mode on easy).
I also do not like the encounter design in the Owlcat games, not because it's too difficult, but because it is very obviously balanced around being a video game where saving and loading is always an option. I have yet to have an encounter that challenges me, but I've had plenty where I died once, realized what the game expected me to do and then just do that thing and win.
yeah, the amount of times I went "oh, I guess this is the part where I up my lightning resistance" and then win without issue was staggering in these games
Yep. Pretty much every single "puzzle" encounter in Kingmaker amounts to "do you have foreknowledge that your character couldn't possibly have?"
larian games do this too. DOS2 just kills you sometimes. it really breaks the immersion.
Full Disclosure from a min-maxer: Beating the game at character creation might actually be the truest representation of PF1E as a whole. The difference between a power gamer and the guy who just wants to roll dice is wild. Not to say one way or the other is more right or wrong. They are just different experiences.
Uh oh!
Kingmaker wasn't an interesting campaign to me, and I hated the city management portion. I love WotR (except, again, the crusade management), but that's very much in spite of it being PF1. I bounced off D&D 3E pretty quickly when it released, and was very happy to have any number of non-D&D games during that whole era.
Yeah the gameplay can be a bit lackluster, but these are geniunely some of the best written cRPGs in decades IMO. The characters are lightyears ahead of the DnD games. I guess it depends on what you appreciate more
which characters exactly, got an example? Because some of owlcats writing is genuinely cringe-inducing not to mention very trope-heavy - although that is something due to it being written now
I like WotR's gameplay arcs a lot, in terms of fascilitating fantasies i.e. lich, swarm-that-walks or legend.
But I genuinely don't remember much about the characters beyound the general concept-theme of the characters - hero or villain.
Only characters that stand out to me are Woljif and maybe Linzi.
No Irenicus. No Durance. No Kreia. No Viconia. Hell, not even a Khalid.
I love the owlcat game, but their strength is the campaign-setting they adapt. Not their own character writing.
Kinda like roguetrader. The character in that were the weakest link aswell as you never get a real indepth examination of what the character is about. You know exactly how they are gonna behave - or evolve if they even have an arc - from the tirst rew moments you encounter them.
Maybe I'm just jaded.
Most Pillars characters have a more interesting concept and explore those deeper and in a less rushed and predictable way, imo.
I very much do like Areelu Vorlesh though. Another standout character from WotR. Though I'm pretty sure she's also a staple of the Paizo AP.
Love my demon-witch mommy ❤
The kingmaker characters and balders gate 3 characters are equally good in writing.
@@TheEpitaphNO In the end its always up to personal preferences. But one of my fave things about Owlcats characters is that they don't have a fear of making them into bad people. Characters like Camellia or Daeran you don't see a lot in RPGS. I don't feel like going super deep into it in youtube comments, but Areelu from the OG AP was way more one-note and boring. What Owlcat did with her was truly masterful character writing.
Owlcat is really good at writing gnomes, I found. Jubilost and Regill are both incredible characters.
Not to dispute your general point, for the game is indeed ruthless and that style is not for everyone. Heck, it was an acquired taste for me! (Or is it Stockholm syndrome?)
But I wanted to say that the first example you gave was not really fair.
You say the game "invites" you to rest at a campsite, and then kills you with a unbeatable monster.
That would have to be the campsite that is surrounded by a lot of skeletons, and that at that time is placed in an active warzone.
And you decided to rest there.
... Yeah! That's a decision you can make. And the game punished you for it.
What the game fails to do is to set that expectation clearly. Other games don't do this stuff. So when us gamers see a campsite we consider whether it is a good time to rest now or later, not whether this is a good place to rest.
Kingmaker is not afraid to punish you when you don't pay attention. It likes to give you tough choices. And I love it for it!
Both of the Will O the Wisps encounters he mentioned are all but announced with neon warning signs!
Yes, both those areas are incredibly difficult, and you’ve been given warnings in what to expect for both of them!!
Having said that, I did run in to other encounters I could not beat (mainly because I’m dumb and ran out of camping supplies), but I just turned down the “damage to party” option so I could keep on keeping on with the game.
Look, I’m mid-40s, I don’t have time to grind like I did when I was young!
@@bjheims4594 You are absolutely right that the encounters are telegraphed. Whether the Wisps or the Linnorm, you have lots of time or warnings to walk away. The issue with the wisp is that there is literally nothing you can do if you miss the signs or chose to try to see what happens. Save scumming aside, if you aren't leveled enough and/or don't have party members with Magic Missile, Resist energy and remove fear, you basically can't win that fight. There's no clever opportunities to prime the camp with bombs, or prepare a trap to give you time to run away. You basically can't run away (without sacrificing someone). Even when you are properly leveled (5+) and buffed, the reward is sadly disappointing for both loot (none that I remember) and exp.
yay Quest of the Golden Candelabra mentioned! Its such a nice little showcase of the devs prowess, and I am so glad that they continued developing it into Dawnsbury Days. The Setting of Dawnsbury is also quite interesting.
I don't know if I can agree with negativity about "winning at character creation screen" being necessary a bad thing. For every RPG to be called an RPG choices in character build must matter otherwise we are just playing strategy or a board game with random dice.
I got bogged down in Kingmaker by the spiders. Literally. Spider swarms don't get hit by alchemists fire by touch AC and are basically immune to non casters, and then the second time when I found out the web traps last for FIVE IRL MINUTES and have an insane DC, guaranteed to snag at least one character there for all of it.
tbf, I believe they nerfed the spiders in that cave since you played it last. As for the web traps, yeah... Valerie just has too bad of a reflex save to be useable.
In defense of the Owlcat games, as you pointed out, it's Inherent to PF1 that optimal and organic characters are wildly different in power. So they made sure the was a difficulty for each style of character building. Don't think of it as "changing the rules" but rather the GM adjusting the encounters for the party. Which a good GM should be doing.
Those encounters just are game stoppers for unoptimal builds… i have no problem for game have a challange mode that is super hard even to optimal builds. But if you make unoptimal build, don`t use Buffs… then even normal difficulty can be too much.
@@haukionkannel there's a super easy difficulty level for people who want to play bad builds for RP reasons or whatever.
I think the issue is people want to play on the harder difficulties to show how elite they are but don't want to put the time into making good builds (or just copying something from online I guess)
@@Iridescence93 There's a vast gulf between TPK machine that requires perfect play and mindless cakewalk. A lot of people don't want their gameplay to be mindless, but they don't want to have to spend hours theorycrafting, preplanning against specific bosses or looking up guides. I found trying to tune WotR to where I wanted the difficulty to be incredibly tedious.
@@0freeicecream956 Yes but one of the strengths of these games is that the difficulty is the most customizable of any game I have ever seen. It may take a bit of understanding of the game mechanics or the PF system before hand but you can really create exactly the level of challenge you want in the settings.
@@Iridescence93 I finished WoTR in full with no prior Pathrinder experience (had only DnD experience). The issue is not some kind of static difficulty. The issue is the massive difficulty swings. I had no trouble, playing normally without looking up builds, with 95% of encounters. I used buffs, potions, planning, all that. But then there was the 5%, like the jumpscare Archdevil that I simply could not damage, at all. Or some random powerful demon in a lab, again, could not damage at all. Or a random world map encounter with 3 enemies that each had the combined HP of my party.
That is just a game design mistake. You should not effortlessly beat most enemies, only to hit a stonewall and have to rebuild all characters just to stand a chance. I also played Elden Ring. That game consistently beats you up, you expect it, you are always prepared for pain. Even weak enemies kill you in a few attacks. And that is better, because you prepare yourself and your character build for that. WoTR just gives you a nice time, then suddenly kicks you in the nuts for no reason at all. Unless you follow OP character builds, then of course the game becomes a joke all the time in terms of difficulty.
I played both games to their conclusion. But in both cases, I reached an emotional state where I just earnestly wanted the game/story to END. >_<
I just wanted to play a faithful interpretation of PF1e. What I got (in WotR's case) was a game that thought it was okay to give quadruple-digit hitpoints to one-note enemy NPCs. Even Cthulhu doesn't have that many hitpoints!
I know! I've checked! >:U
That's a problem with D&D 3E/PF 1E in general. You pretty much have to plan out your entire character from levels 1 to 20 before you ever start playing. Then the whole time you feel like you're just waiting to finally get to your completed character.
This comment is WAY LATE and isn't meant to discount anything you said. And I want to state for the record I like PF2e and am currently running Abomination Vaults for my group ATM.
That said.
What You've described here mirrors my experience playing a spellcaster in PF2e. It feels like they are balanced around the most heavily optimized players. I played a spellcaster in my groups first game, we were all fairly new to the game other than the DM. I picked options that felt flavorful or cool and I ended up feeling completely useless, worse than useless like I was dragging down the group with how often I was getting downed but never contributing anything of value, I felt like I had lost at character creation. There were certainly a lot of builds online I could follow, but I felt like I had to either choose between flavour/utility and actually being worthwhile in battle, while the martials in the group got both. I think I stuck it out 2 levels but begged my DM to let me switch Characters and played a Kineticist which felt like it got all the utility and flavour of being a caster while also being able to contribute on the same level as the rest of they party.
I'm sure once they release more stuff the utility spells will become better and is a problem a lot of systems that not just 2e has.
I find that unbalanced encounters isn't a unique problem to the Owlcat games, though. I've played throughout all of Baldur's Gate 1, 2 and Throne of Bhaal, which while critically acclaimed games for their time, also suffer from this same difficulty issue with unbalanced encounters. I've also had a fair amount of frustrating encounter difficulty spikes with Baldur's Gate 3 and DOS1 that have made me drop those games for awhile. I don't think I've ever played any game of this genre without having to do some tedious amount of encounter save reloading.
I think the fundamental problem for these kinds of programmed games is that having an entire world and campaign with statically pre-defined encounters is incredibly hard to balance against ever diverse possibilities of party makeups and varying player and party member level progression. While on the other hand, playing in an actual tabletop campaign with a human DM/GM can avoid this problem easier as encounters can be adjusted between game sessions to be tailored around the party's growing strengths and weaknesses.
I should probably add - Dragon Age is another critically acclaimed rpg for its time, and offers an incredibly balanced character class and leveling system. However, in my playthroughs it still seems to suffer from unbalanced encounters as well
They have some problems, but nothing nearly as dramatic as WotR.
Wrath of the righteous is my favorite game of all time, but it is not for everyone. I love spending 10-20 minutes on each level up and character creation is my favorite part of crpgs. You do not want to start with higher difficulties in the Owlcat games.
My problem with 3E-based games is that I feel a need to optimize and to an extent I enjoy it, but it is extremely frustrating how much you have to do, how much that limits your choices, and how much work you need to put in to figure that out.
i cant disagree with you that the owlcat combat is skewed, part of this is because the combats are designed around Real time w/ pause (RTwP) instead of turn based so theres alot of "trash" fights and even the "boss" fights assume you wont be fully controlling your PCs so its more about the prep than the turn to turn actions/tactical decisions hence the reliance on going into combat fully buffed. That said I'd still say their still worth a play, ive beaten kingmaker and im more than half way through Wrath and with several mods improving combat for me and tweaked difficulty options (seriously just LOOK at how much you can change, its nuts) im loving it, im even planning to get Rogue Trader despite knowing very little abour Warhammer. I'm also excited to try out the other mythic paths (later, gonna try something else fist). Oh and for the record I play both 1e and 2e Pathfinder, 1e def fixed alot of 3.5e issues but its still hella flawed despite my love for it.
Rogue Trader is a much more approachable system. I think people are understimating how many of the issues are ultimately down to PF1E being a very mechanically dense system.
@@Llortnerof i look forward to it than :D
@@Llortnerof No, it's down to the CRPG being a completely unfaithful adaptation of the system. PF1 is a system that lets you stack a lot of stuff and the devs *still* made things that weren't typeless on tabletop stack just to further inflate the list of buffs you need. You have to remember that Wrath is a notoriously easy AP, nothing in real Pathfinder is like Owlcat's games.
@@arachnofiend2859 Hyperbole much? If that's completely unfaithful, what do you call the Abomination Vaults ARPG?
Also most of those were actually bugs. That have since been fixed.
Meanwhile, the Mythic paths in Owlcats game are simultaneously more narratively interesting and less overpowered.
@@Llortnerof An ARPG isn't making any claims of being tabletop faithful so not sure how that's relevant. The superior narrative impact of the Owlcat mythic paths isn't relevant either. I wouldn't have finished Wrath if I didn't think the Aeon path was as interesting as it was. My criticisms are purely mechanical.
I completely agree that the Owlcat Pathfinder games are tuned to be too difficult, by quite a lot honestly, but you can definitely get through them without looking up builds without too much trouble. I mean, that's what I did at least, and I would not consider myself a powergamer in the slightest when it comes to Pathfinder.
In both games I feel like the early game is EXTREMELY rough, due to small health pools, but it slowly gets more and more manageable, and once you're past the mid-game you have so many tools at your disposal, that most encounters aren't too bad.
I played through WoTR and I can definitely agree with the complaints regarding difficulty. My background is no Pathfinder experience, but experience with DnD. The problem for me was not a static difficulty, but just how hard difficulty spiked at some points. I could beat 95% of encounters with my common sense builds. Then there is the 5% with absurd AC and Spell Resistance, that act as a stone wall unless you optimize or know some fancy trick in advance. This 5% was not even bosses most of the time, I only struggled with one boss. It was just random enemies with absurd stats.
I think there would be much less issue if the game was consistent with its difficulty. Rather than giving you an easy time, only to suprise you with absurd stat bloat you are unprepared for. If you want to be hard, be hard all the time, so I can prepare for it and react on an ongoing basis.
Playing Owlcat PF games is like playing *against* a GM that knows the system, doesn't like it, doesn't like *you* for asking to GM it and wants to make you suffer for it.
Been playing through the PF1e adventure path Rise of the Runelords with a group of friends, and a lot of the issues TRL mentioned with the Owlcat games are definitely present in tabletop as well. If you don't have your buffs up pre-battle, you are at a significant disadvantage, period. If you get ambushed by a boss monster, you are in TPK territory because you simply don't have the time(aka in game rounds) needed to bring your party on par with the boss' strength and combat it effectively. Having varying levels of strength based on decisions made during character creation is also very much present. There is a noticeable difference between the in combat power level of characters who have specialized for being strong in combat and characters that try to bring utility to the table. We're still having fun with it, but encounter balance has been something of a nightmare for the DM as they try to find the right balance between "make something that doesn't get one rounded by the guy who consistently deals 30+ damage per hit and attacks 3 times per round" and "make something the rest of the party can meaningfully interact with".
That's not to say that the Owlcat game's encounter designs are flawless within the confines of Pathfinder 1e (Viscount Smoulderburn anyone?), but the wide amount of variance in the power level of any given PF1e character makes encounter balance extremely hard.
You don't really have to power build in wrath, at least up to core difficulty. If you play unfair you probably are going to have to.
I beat the game as a all 20 levels in sage sorcerer azata. It's strong, but it's not like 1 level dip in vivisectionist 1 level dip in scale fist monk..... etc
Also I didn't have any mercenaries to get like... brown fur transmuter or skald buffs or whatever
Currently playing WOTR and it’s very much a love hate relationship.
Big negatives are the 1e ruleset with all the myriad types of bonuses, Crusade mode, and the huge amount of useless combat.
Encounter balance is a hard thing to manage. Do they make a game that is winnable by characters made of flavour options? Design for power gamers or somewhere in between. That is the downfall of CRPG's, the designers have to pick a lane and stick to it, the live GM can adjust session to session or round to round if necessary.
As for builds, there are plenty of those out there for every video game, and honestly plenty for PF2e even, certainly D&D 5e. It's nothing new, and while helpful, not something that you are forced to engage in.
1. Be lvl 2 party, encounter Technic Legue, die for 10+ times, reload to avoid them, no matter where i go they always catch me on map so i can't even gain level.
2. Be a Fire Kineticist, encounter THAT SPECYFIC type of Trolls, no Acid dmg in team ,party is useless in combat.
That sums up my expirience in Kingmaker...
Very spicy title, but i can understand.
Owlcat did good, but a lot of their encounters and design feels like I require metaknowledge to play, either from online guides or by failing before.
They also squeezed in too many content imo, without considering how it contributes to the overall theme. In Kingmaker, I feel more like I am forced to play Civilisation halfway, than being an adventuring party, and sadly either system didn't really contribute to the other (being good at kingdom managing didn't add much to my adventurers, and vice versa)
I've tried many times to play the owlcat games, but every time I get bored with the combat. I like dawnsbury days because it actually feels like pf2e. I really want to like the owlcat games. I've just never can get into it.
same here. i like the story, not the gameplay.
Why is the combat boring if there is more options than balders gate? Lack of flashy animations?
@@Seth9809 I started off in PF2e I haven't played PF1e besides some tabletop games so keep that in mind. Part of it is the Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 style of play, the real time and turned based I don't like, I just want the turn based style. In low levels which is all I've played casters best choices are ranged weapons and there's feat taxes to make that actually useful. Cantrips aren't good early game if at all. It just doesn't seem at tactical as PF2e is now maybe that's just how PF1e ran idk. Maybe it gets better later on but I really like the 3 action system and degrees of success\failure that's in 2e with that missing I get bored.
As far as the flashy animations I think WoTR and Kingmaker has really nice graphics that are on par if not better than BG3 and they are much better than Dawnsbury Days that I really like so no that has nothing to do with why I don't like the Owlcat games.
I bought both Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous when they were on sale. Gave up on KM almost as soon as the Kingdom stage began. It wasn't fun anymore. In Wrath, the story stays good, but I still had to set the difficulty to roughly Story mode. And then even on story mode, there's been a few dungeons and some random encounters where the enemies have ACs 30 points higher than my best Attack.
Couldn't agree more.
Also PF1 (and most TTRPGs) were designed with the idea that you'd be having a few battles per game day. And in WotR and Kingmaker you have tons of them back to back. Which means playing in turn based mode takes ages, and spellcasters are usually not doing much because cantrips don't heighten in PF1.
planescape torment is, and will stay the best ttrpg crpg experience in history.
Then again, BG3 isn't D&D 5th edition really, either.
Just like most D&D 5th edition with some homebrew
Idk. They're great games for their target audience. Which is 1e players looking for a challenging strategy game. If you're not and then also refuse to turn down difficulty while refusing to play optimally then like idk man... that's on you? You tell someone complaining about 2e that their GM can scale difficulty down for them but refuse to do so yourself in a game where there isn't a GM to do that for you is weird?
Don't get me wrong kingmaker made some BAD decisions. Lots of those are fixed in WotR (no forced blindfight feat, buffs can last 24 hours, turn based mode without a mod, etc.). But all the other TTRPG games I've played feel like shit for character creation in comparison. Its why I play 1e and why I love those games. But idk man it just rubs me wrong see people talk down on a small studio who made a game on par with much larger studios like Larian. Like if Owlcat/WotR was as big as Larian/BG3 I could see the hate but... its not.
Fair. I love Wrath of the Righteous in spite of its encounter design because the story and role-play options are so excellent. I can 100% understand not wanting to play because of the encounters.
I found my enjoyment of the combat encounters increased a lot when I played in turn based mode. It seemed to make pre-buffing less critical and also made caster classes more viable. That said, having a party of 6 carefully designed custom characters vs you plus the random story companions really does highlight the massive difference in difficulty based purely on character creation / selection alone. I think your comments are very fair!
I recently became reinvested in trying to beat wrath of the righteous after I downloaded a mod that incorporates the O-Matic bonus progression system into the game
You totally nailed it for me. I do enjoy their games overall but the problems you list hold them back from greatness. I will say the bubble buff mod made the game 5x better for me because you can press a button and handle all the buffing at once. Still, far too many encounters.
I’ve spent a collective 100 hours on wrath of the righteous and always quit in act 3. I cannot stand having to apply buffs before every fight, even with a mod that does it automatically. Reminds me why dnd 5e’s concentration system was so crucial to fixing prebuffing in dnd 3e/pf1e.
As a GM, I've really come to detest the word "build" when used to describe the players effort to win at character-creation. I will go on-record to take the strong stance that min-maxing is malignant because, if one person does it, everyone has to or else the game is ruined pretty quickly.
Then you should play games where you can't have a build, like OSR or Traveller. The most popular rpgs might not be for your style of play.
@@zac4668 I definitely have crossed over... but my players and I frequently reminisce and lament, because we really liked PF2e but the munchkin "infection" ruined it for us.
I cleared both the owl cat games without having played pathfinder 1st edition, without looking up guides and without respeccing my character even a single time. Did it take me a long time? Yeah, but it was perfectly doable.
Hey guys, pro tip. Play kingmaker with a friend or 5. Download parsec and play on turn based mode. Take turns controlling the party or let the baron control. It's a fun time.
I love the owlcat games, but you basically gotta spend a lot of time pre-buffing before potential encounters or entering some dungeons in order to make it through some of them. And it does happen more often than in other crpgs I've played, in the old Baldur's gate games I usually only had to consider pre-buffing before boss fights.
My issue with them is absolute necessity of buffs and debuffs. Turns a lot of fights into an episode of Overlord where Ainz casts like 80 spells for 5 minutes before doing anything.
I feel this way about optimizing in any system.
Before I even start rolling dice or grab a sheet, I'm thinking about the character concept, their past, their possible arc and etc.
The flipside is if you don't scale a video game to prebuffing, then prebuffing makes the game trivial.
I tried the game once to learn the lore a bit.
But then I ran into the split fight in the First World, and lacked the right counters. It would have been an hour to change my group. So I choose not to play anymore.
I will never forget when I rested somewhere in Kingmaker and it just dropped a floating lightning skull on me that just wiped me with no effort cause it had 1-shot AOE attacks while all my stuff just missed. Lost so much progress since apparently I should have saved *before* resting while the game always autosaves *after* resting (when the skull kills you)
I quickly realised the combat in Wrath of the Righteous was gonna be insufferable so I think I turned all the difficulty settings to minimum within the first hour, the game basically just became an auto-battler at that point.
But I'm really glad I did because I would've missed out on so much great story and characters.
I'm tempted to try the same with Kingmaker.
I'm running Kingmaker right now for PF2E and it's our first introduction to PF2E. Party wiped in the prologue during the very final encounter. This game is tough!! (most players do not min-max or even, uh, use their basic abilities half of the time).
The axe-lady (volo-whatever) respects the party for getting as far as they did. So the swordlord lady is dead and the PCs are getting recruited by the Black Tears! No idea how this is going to progress with the kingdom building/settling/etc, or the overall story, but this is why I love TTRPGs more than video games - the game can and does run off the rails sometimes. Having a blast.
One thing not mentioned is how almost every enemy in WotR has elemental resistances so your damaging spells don’t come online until Mythic 1 and you are required to take Ascendant Element. The amount of buffs and level of optimization required to deal with enemies is pretty insane with melee classes dipping into Witch to get a 2AC from the class-specific ring
And then there’s the whole crusade management BS
THANK YOU! I had this video shared with me when I complained about how the loading screen says to use control spells, but my spell DC is like, 23-25, and a lot of enemies I'm fighting have saving throws of +22-28
Fair criticism across the board on gameplay. Funnily, both games have rogue-like dungeon dive DLCs that really shine for the type of CRPG gameplay that they designed.
I also want to highlight your first statement. Their story, writing, and mechanical scope are all staggering. With PF2 having better balance baked in, I hope that they have the opportunity to make a game with that system.
I really love the Owlcat games but I also strictly prefer BG3, I have yet to play Solasta.
My complaints are pretty much 1:1 re: Owlcat, I don't want to have to MinMax to play Pathfinder, even as a player for PF1, I didn't have to "win at character creation"(going to refer to this as WACC'ing onwards) to be a functional member of my party.
Tangent. That being said, it was still pretty much rocket tag; my GM and I (we both GM'ed often/primarily) converted the Book of Nine Swords to PF1 to bring the Martials up to snuff with casters.
There were still pretty swingy moments in combat but it really added to the charm.
End tangent.
Unfortunately Owlcat's games are considerably overtuned at base rules with highly inflated stats; my friend (my former GM) and I shared notes on what we had to do to overcome the early level areas and honestly, we came to the same conclusion.
Which was painfully sad for us, we didn't want to have to give our characters compensation bonuses via mods to give us the actual PF1 experience, we were just expecting it out of the box 😅😓
Buffing is required WOTR especially on the hard difficulties. Bubble buffs mod is huge QoL Improvement as it automates the buffing process. They are applied instantly without animation, all required resources are consumed and it can't be used in combat by default.
I have to say Pathfinder POTR has amazing story, but I do say that needing to constantly min-max had reduced the replayability for me. Especially because up until Act 3 it can be exhausting going through the encounters
It's like you read my mind. You've articulated my problems with these games even better than I could.
I have been trying to figure out why I haven't been able to get invested in these two games. I never realized they were heavily optimized towards power builds and kept trying to make the suboptimal characters I enjoy playing in Pathfinder.
Bro noone in entire video games history has ever put so much love into taking tabletop rules to the video game. They did it brilliant
I am proud that I beat both games in normal or harder difficulty (without checking online guides besides how resolve plot related obstacles than fight/build guides cause bugs), but I agree that constant pre-buffing can get tedious. So thus why example in Wrath I favor using extend metamagic and mythic powers to make even basic buff spells last hour or even 24 hours and cast them once when entering large map.
Also before introducing turn based combat kingmaker combat was intense cause I played casters a lot so needed line spells and place them rapidly in the fight. So ending up favoring using magic missile a lot cause it can't miss and hits for solid dmg and open combat with chain AoE's and easy targeting spells during main combat.
Hey Ronald, love your content and I appreciate that you are always willing to share your opinions whether people like it or not. Totally understand the frustration with the Owlfinder games. Personally I love them but that has taken time and a willingness to overlook some of the design flaws, including some of what you mentioned here.
Fwiw, Kingmaker is a bit rougher with the gotcha moments; I feel they eased off a bit in Wrath but they're still present. I also don't enjoy having to constantly buff before every fight, and in particular some early areas in KM are brutal to the unprepared due to the sandbox setup. That said, I absolutely adore the writing in these games, and some of the companions are among my favorites in all gaming. I agree many encounters aren't designed in a satisfying way but I still argue WotR at least is worth getting through if you can. KM kinda falls apart in the final stages due to various bugs and whatnot.
Weirdly, I'm having a very hard time getting into BG3. It's a gorgeous game and the voice acting is great, but it just isn't hooking me for some reason that I can't quite identify.
i hear you. i play these games on easy mode for a reason. i found a functional concept for my main character and have everyone else on auto-level. bosses were still challenging and i didn't have to think too much about my choices.
The issue with the Owlcat Pathfinder games, they were made as RTWP. Turn-based modes came as either an afterthought or as second banana in the design. Meaning, you have all these constant fights in turn based mode which take forever and tend to be fairly meaningless. In real time, they're over in a snap but if not - it saps your will in what is already a very long game.
Can anyone address if the Warhammer Rogue Trader addresses this? It was made turn-based from the ground up.
Owlcat games got me into DnD and Pathfinder, so while there are some balance issues, and prebuffing does get tedious, I still love them. Rogue Trader is also much better about the buffing side of things.
Gotta say, I could NOT get into Solasta. It was so silly. I did laugh out loud when I got a random encounter with a black dragon at level 3.
Thanls a lot for the recommendations. I also love Solasta btw, even more than BG3, the looting system in Solasta is very well designed, looting is for me one of the most tedious things in games.
Understand your feeling.
I personnally finished Kingmaker on challenging without online builds, and I am quite proud of it.
But it indeed took a lot of time, time I don't have anymore (that's why I never finished my secondary runs or WotR act II for that matter)
Personally, I love the Owlcat games because they capture that absolute mess of balance that 1e was and they have incredibly customizable difficulty. I do definitely think they needed a bit more time in the oven, in particular the lack of macros absolutely sucks, especially on console. The games are definitely more of an acquired taste in that regard, as you have little in a comfortable medium between the quick save overwhelming options experience versus the Easy/Storymode game does most of it for you, but on those two ends, it’s plenty great.
As for a full 2e CRPG, it’ll have three major issues to overcome for balance worries. Prebuffing, major encounter foreknowledge, and team synergy. The first two are pretty simple, prebuffing warps encounter balance a ton but it’s very awkward to manage in open areas (and forcing encounter starts on casting still allow for cheese). Major encounter foreknowledge means you can build the counter options (Wrath of the Righteous in particular had the issue where certain options were incredibly more useful due to enemy types), so you can take the spells, gear, and consumables to deal with encounters. And the last, while 1e let you win on the character sheet, 2e has incredibly strong party synergy potential, so a knowledgeable player can build an incredible party to still warp the balance. While 2e makes the baseline much simpler to design around, the CRPG design problems still risk being a large issue.
The first Will o Wisp/Ghost (in the old tree area) in Kingmaker can be a TPK.
Yeah, that pretty much matches my experience with them, though resetting my kineticists burn an buffing every single time I rested just became tendious to me
This was a great review of P:KM! I tried to get into this game, like you did from the experience with PF and DnD, but ran into almost the same issues as you. Increased stat blocks on monsters and the game not explaining this (and then the developer having to go back and patch options for difficulty) left a bad taste in my mouth, as I really wanted to get into this game. The original Neverwinter Nights is still one of my top 3 CRPGs and I was hoping this would fit the bill for PF, but no dice (pun absolutely intended).
No hate to the people that love the game, but there are too many issues with stat bloat for enemies, bad launch with horrible bugs, etc. That I could never get drawn into it. Shame, as I think the potential was there but never realized as it could have been.
encounters in kingmaker and more so wrath sort of just have the problem of being 1e pathfinder games. What I mean is, that combat just breaks down after some time. It's really not even a roleplay vs powergaming thing, at a certain point you will just have to embrace the wargamy nature of that system and have your party assume really rigid roles - for example, armor class just does not scale as much as attacks if you are not entirely focused on it, thus you can basically ignore the AC of any non-tank character because the difference between an AC of 17 and 29 is 0 if your opponents got a +30 to hit. So if your duelists or rogues or magi want to be in the frontline you automatically have to drop greater invisibility on them, your spellcasters will need to prebuff delay poison / mindblank / protection from energy / death ward on every partymember and in any encounter you will have to make use of a pretty much pre-set number of actions with very little room for switching it up mid-combat. It's a strategy game, specifically one that rewards preparation over adaptation, so encounters are more of a puzzle than a test of skill.
In the end your builds determine which set of actions you will perform, and your degree of min-maxing determines how succesful these actions are but every party composition has some sort of action set they will need to perform or die. THAT is the main problem of 1e combat, in the tabletop version this is somewhat mitigated by the absolute freedom of the medium to break up that monotony and the fact that you don't get to reload and learn an encounter's mechanics, but on a computer all you have is the wargame and if you don't enjoy this trial and error aspect you will hate the owlcat games.
I love PF1e and the Owlcat games, but I also love PF2e, for very different regions. PF1e (and by extension the Owlcat games) was fun for theory-crafting and heavily rewards system mastery (e.g. knowing every rule and how they interact). PF2e, meanwhile, is a vastly better system in terms of balance, and thus honestly better for storytelling, because one can build a character to fit the story, rather than having to build a story to fit the mechanics.
Both styles of play, and thus both game systems, have their place.
From a story perspective, I would strongly suggest that you give the Owlcat games a try (even if you opt for Story Mode). They are vastly superior in scope and level of variability than (your cited) Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 really only has 3 endings (excluding different varieties of death), whereas Wrath of the Righteous has dozens - not counting companion epilogues, of which, again, WoTR has twice as many companions and far more ways they can interact with the many ways the PC can choose to end the game. Even as an avid PF1 character optimizer, I opted to switch to easier modes for (some of) my (many) replays of WoTR just to experience all the many branches the story can take. So no shame down-tuning to a difficulty that's right for you.
A thing I really don't like is how high the AC and saving throws get for monsters with higher difficulties. Scaling HP and damage sure, but AC scaling affects martials too heavily while save scaling makes save spells practically worthless for casters. WotR in late game basically just devolves into prebuffing and then attacking to kill everything as quick as possible.
There's also the shitty optimization of WotR past Act 3. Game can barely run 30 fps despite being silky smooth before then.
I have and hate both. After how much I hated Kingmaker, I was foolish to he Wrath of the Righteous. My steam account is a graveyard of games that just didn't do it for me.
I really hope Owlcat makes a 2e game, I get the complaints but no one else is making Pathfinder games of that scale yet
The only reason I haven't beaten WotR is bc I keep restarting to jack up the difficultly lol. I also enjoy power gaming in crpgs though
I can enjoy an RPG that demands a min-max or even munchkin approach to character building to successfully complete. I quite like games that involve a management aspect with tight deadlines, forcing me to make decisions that involve some level of sacrifice. But Kingmaker was both of those concepts at once and I found that a bit too exhausting to deal with, so it's one of the few CRPGs I own that I've never completed.
I'm currently playing through Kingmaker for the first time and it's really apparent they balanced the game for trial and error, especially in the early game, where you are more limited in what you can counter. You have no idea if you need to prepare for invisibility, poison, specific status effects, damage types or resistances, until you find the first encounter that kills or cripples you. Owlcat also loves their ambushes. There's that example of the camp, foreshadowed by the corpses lying around, but you have no idea if you can deal with it or not. But then there's looking down a well and being ambushed by invisible, lightning-shooting enemies that instantly outright kill my casters before combat starts.
With the experience I have with CRPGs at this point, and understanding the system, building characters is not that complicated - at least to keep them viable. I don't do any of those fancy builds, I just keep my characters specializing in what they're good at and combat gets progressively easier. I'm now at a point where combat is really easy, but it's the kingdom-managing side that is causing problems - another unbalanced mess.
Still, because I'm enjoying the story and characters, and perhaps a bit out of spite as well, I keep fighting on. Ultimately the game is kinda fun, despite being a mess.
When I tried to play through the owlcat games, I basically nerfed combat difficulty into the ground anyway because the games are massive and it was the only hope I had of getting through them. Still didn't finish either of them X_X
The encounter balance on my first few runs (before I lowered the difficulty) did seem a bit wack, though I attributed that partially to the OG Kingmaker AP. Making low level characters fight swarms is just mean in PF1!
I love building and optimizing characters and I still have the same issue with the Owlcat games; encounters being built around an assumption of arbitrary stat buffs significantly limits build diversity. There are a ton of options that ARE completely fine in a normal game of PF1E that don't work in WotR because they don't bring any of the stat buffs you need to hit the enemy at all.
The only thing I really disagree with that Bg3 doesn't have the same "you beat the game at character creation" problem. It absolutely does. Insert your Tavern Brawler doing 150 damage a round at lvl5 while locking every enemy down and being impossible to kill due to support they have.
Everything else is valid though, even though I love the owlcat games.
I haven't played Kingmaker in a year, because I missed a companion quest. This would mean re-doing the whole of Pitax, which was very discouraging.
In WoTR I got to act II and haven't progressed since. It doesn't help that none of the build suggestions on neoseekers speak to me.
The only Owlcat game I've beaten is Rouge Trader, only because it's easy to stumble into a broken build.
you do you Ron. you're 100% entitled to your opinion.
i just find it fascinating how different our 2 experiences seem.
when approaching a new crpg i tend to chose options for flavour (2nd and 3rd playthroughs are generally for the inner power gamer)
i generally let the game lead me along as I'm playing because I wish to see the story as close to the vision as possible.
played on almost the exact difficulty you described (as I too come from a deep understanding of PF1)
and, well ... I had a blast.
I should note however, I'm talking just WotR. I still haven't picked up Kingmaker. Largely due to the fact that I cannot put Wrath down.
I get the impression that Kingmaker was a warm-up development-wise.
it's a shame that you've let a few objections that are easy to overcome keep you from experiencing this story.
but then again, if you've played the table top adventure paths, you already have.
and like you said, there are a lot of other games out there ;oD
Not based on a TTRPG system, but I enjoyed the way Grim Dawn (and other Diablo-likes) handle character building and game balance. On a regular playthrough, you don't really have to think too hard and can basically pick anything you want. As you turn up the difficulty, you still have lots of options but you have to make sure they actually synergise somewhat. Then in end-game, they have optional content that really requires you to optimise.
I initially just enjoyed playing the game almost casually, but when I reached the end-game it was a surprising amount of fun to solve the 'puzzle' of how to adjust my build to function against otherwise unfair enemies.
I actually don't mind 5e in general, but its exhausting to deal with players who watch online character builder videos that attempt to max out their power and then get mad at me when I create scenarios that meet their power level. I've been told that "cheating" like they WANT to win at character creation. I'm sorry, but its no fun at a DM/GM to build up an epic BBEG only to have then drop before its even their turn. So I make my encounters relative to the table. A medium encounter is a medium encounter for THAT party and a deadly encounter is a DEADLY encounter for THAT party. This also means that when I play with beginners I tone down the baddies just a little (or have them make sub-optimal choices). PF2e isn't perfect, and I do have issues with some mechanics, but it does solve the power-gamer issue for the most-part.
Kingmaker has more poignant and very old school classical computer game issue. As number of NPC's in the encounter drops, hit rate of those remaining ones goes up. In simple terms, game is fixing the dice during the encounter. This is old school bad handling of AI. EA used to do this a lot 20-25 years ago - one old NBA title had overriding three point shot for AI in last seconds if player has 1 or 2 point lead, that wouldn't kick in if the condition isn't met, one FIFA had guaranteed header scoring after a corner shot near the end of the game if you have less than 2 goals lead etc.
Old Bg2 had a lot of dying before you figure out all the right buffs, but it never cheated on dice rolls. Probability held up. Current version of Kingmaker starts having reproducible unprobable streaks of high roles and critical hits. You can game the encounter to avoid those (once you figure out all the trigger conditions), but you shouldn't have to in the modern games.
All AI in games cheats. But we're far past being so obvious about it.
You don't really need optimized builds to play Kingmaker on true-to-tabletop difficulty. The save-scumming and pre-buffing is real though, 99.99% of "hard" fights are "I knew what was coming and pre-buffed specifically for it so now it's not hard but if I hadn't it would have been automatic TPK".