Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

This is a review for the game Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is based on the pen-and-paper Pathfinder RPG, which is itself based on the standard D&D ruleset. The game is a traditional CRPG, similar to the likes of Baldur’s Gate or the more recent Divinity: Original Sin. It’s developed by Owlcat Games, a relatively new studio formed in 2016.

Pathfinder is an incredibly ambitious game. There are 25 classes, each with about 5 sub-classes. There are hundreds of unique spells and items. My first playthrough took 102 hours, with most side-quests completed. The game world has an impressive amount of reactivity to your choices. The game has such an expansive scope, but I’ll do my best to cover all of them.

Character creation

I spent over an hour on character creation. There are so many interesting classes and character archetypes to choose from. This is not your typical RPG where everyone can learn anything and the the class is largely superficial. For example the Witch class is one of the caster archetypes, but the Hagbound sub-class has you slowly evolve into a Hag as you level up. The Hagbound starts to grow claws, and eventually becomes a full Hag.

Apart from classes, the character creation has you choosing your character’s race, background, starting alignment, and cosmetic appearance. The game’s cosmetic customizability isn’t as deep as: Divinity Original Sin.

You can respec your main character and companion characters throughout the game, so don’t feel like you’ll be forever locked into your initial choice. I’m glad the game includes respecs. With the sheer number of options available and the typical playthrough length, the ability to respec gives the player peace of mind.

Character builds

You get one main character and five companions with you on your party. You may have more companions back in town, but only can choose five when venturing out. Each character can get 20 regular levels, and 10 mythic levels. At each level you choose stats, Feats, and Abilities.

The sheer number of options can be overwhelming. For my first playthrough I just let the game level up my companions for me, going with the default builds for them. My main character was the only one I built myself. The default builds chosen by the game are certainly more than capable of beating the game on Normal difficulty.

Multi-classing is a thing as well, and fantastic for role-playing. You don’t have to restrict yourself to one class or sub-class. With 20 levels to work with, you could put 10 levels as a Druid and 10 as a Barbarian if you wanted to. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend multi-classing for a first playthrough, maybe on subsequent ones instead.

On top of classes, your character has multiple mythic paths to choose from. The Angel path seems to be the canonical one, with the most tie-ins to the story. Other paths include Demon, Lich, Trickster, and more.

The amount of flexibility in character builds adds a lot of replayability. My first playthrough was a shapeshfting Druid on the Angel mythic path. For my second one I’m considering a caster archetype since I’m more familar with the spell system now.

Difficulty

This is not an easy game. I would say the Normal difficulty is similar to Hard or Very Hard in other CRPGs. The game does expose a lot of options for tuning the difficulty. If combat is too difficult, you can easily scale the damage down by 10% for instance.

My advice is not to get hung up on difficulty purism. Turn the difficulty down if you have to. Difficulty purism only leads to optimization, and that comes at the cost of role-play. If you want to build a non-meta character, just decrease the difficulty to a comfortable level.

There are some systems that I just found annoying. There are some debuffs that can only be dispelled via certain spells, or by resting in a safe location (a town). This is consistent with pen-and-paper Pathfinder mechanics, but I just found it annoying in-game. Thankfully there’s an option to remove all debuffs after resting in the field, without having to travel back to a town to rest.

I played on Normal difficulty, with some quality-of-life tweaks like dispelling debuffs on rest.

Story

I found the story very captivating. It’s not mindblowing, but I think it’s as good a story as can be presented by the gaming medium. I don’t think games really lend themselves to complex stories the same way a book does. It’s folly to place the same expectations on a game.

There was at least one twist I did not see coming, though in hindsight should have been fairly obvious. I think people used to D&D systems will see it coming a mile away, others might be blindsided.

Throughout the game you get to make decisions, and these decisions can have a large impact on your story. A character you save early on might play a critical role in a future conflict. A character you kill early on could lock you out of a certain branch later on. The game makes it clear early on that your decisions can have repercussions, which gives weight to those decisions you make.

There’s a secret ending, which is basically impossible to organically reach. Don’t concern yourself with it on your first playthrough. The default ending is satisfying by itself; you don’t need the secret ending to get a “good” ending.

Lack of consolidated wiki knowledge

The game doesn’t have a authoritative source of quest information available online, as opposed to more popular RPGs like Skyrim.

I think this is in large part due to the amount of possible branches the story can take. As mentioned before, the game features lots of impactful decisions. Whenever I’ve had to Google some quest related thing, I found conflicting information from different people, based on how their game has branched from the decisions they made. Other games like Skyrim have the benefit of being mostly linear.

It’s quite annoying to find information. The fextralife wiki is autogenerated from data mining, and only contain very basic information. Most of the time the wiki is useless, and trying to find information involves reading Reddit and forum posts. The posts are filled with conflicting information, so you have to filter through them to figure out what you need.

Crusade management

The game has an army management strategy layer. You build up an army to conquer regions on the world map. I’m not a fan of the crusade management, but I don’t think it’s as bad as other reviews make it out to be.

Your enjoyment of the crusade management comes down to three crucial choices:

1. Pick a spellcaster general
2. Pick the Fireball feat when it’s offered to you
3. (Less importantly) Gather lots of archers

While there are technically no wrong choices in the crusade management, there is certainly a right one. You can get by with a martial general, but be prepared to spend many turns just clicking monotonously.

Jank and “bugs”

A common theme you’ll read in reviews is that the game is buggy. I think this sentiment might be a holdover from the launch period. I didn’t experience any game-breaking bugs in my playthrough.

However the game does have quite a lot of jank to it, which may be getting misreported as bugs. For instance:

• There’s a resource leak where after 2 or 3 hours the game starts to stutter in large battles. I only noticed it in the very end-game, but I suppose the issue has always been present. The larger end-game battles probably made the issue more noticeable.
• Framerate is not great. I’m using a GTX1070 and Ryzen 5 3600, and the framerate hovers around 60fps. Drops to 30fps is not uncommon. I would expect to get a steady 120+fps for a game of this fidelity.
• The camera is quite janky at times. During turn-based combat the camera jumps between units performing their turn, which can be quite jarring if there are many units.
• The janky camera sometimes makes movement awkward. The camera can clip through walls, and sometimes causes you to put a move marker in a completely wrong spot.
• Level design is sometimes confusing. On one occasion I spent about half an hour convinced that my game was bugged because an item didn’t drop. It turned out there’s a very missable door in an awkward location only visible if the camera is rotated a certain way.
• There’s a series of convoluted (but optional) puzzles. Puzzles in RPGs are not ideal, because it’s pretty immersion breaking (who guards a room with a puzzle?). However I think puzzles are still ok if it’s reasonably solvable. Unfortunately the puzzles in Pathfinder are anything but. The puzzle rules are not well-explained, so it ends up being an exercise in trial-and-error simply to figure out what the rules are, let alone actually solve it according to those rules. The interface to interact with the puzzles is janky as well, which adds to the frustration.
• At one point I had a bug where NPCs were rendered about a meter below where they were supposed to, so they were all underground. Re-entering the zone or reloading a save solved the issue.

This is a game that succeeds despite all of its jank. Take a look at the Steam reviews and you’ll see similar sentiments. Personally I think the game has surprisingly few actual bugs when compared to how large its scope is.

Do note there is a mod called Toy Box that can be used to modify the game state to fix any issues that crop up. It’s not just for fixing bugs either; but you can use this mod to customize your game outside of the boundaries set by the developers. It’s an role-playing game after all; role-play however you wish.

Overall

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is an incredibly ambitious game. Considering its sheer scope, the game is executed really well, even if it is a little janky. I strongly recommend this game for any fans of CRPGs.