KateMicucci
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2017
- Messages
- 1,676
Is resting an annoying and time consuming minigame like in Kingmaker?
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Pathfinder Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter Dishonoredbr
- Start date
ArchAngel
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2015
- Messages
- 20,868
I really tried but I cannot force myself to finish
EDIT:
EDIT2:
The Enigma. Fuck Nenio quest.
WTF, if you try to leave Nenio leaves your party....
I guess no loot for me since I had to reload a save before I entered it. I didn't find anything good anyways except that Singing Full Plate +5 that is useless for everyone.
ArchAngel
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2015
- Messages
- 20,868
From my experience for it to work you need to move a certain distance with your mount before hitting enemy, it is not enough to just charge.Brothers, how does Spirited Charge work? Or, does it work? I haven't played with mounted combat until now outside of giving Daeran a wolf to help with him being a lazy bastard, but now I'm trying a mounted build for Seelah. Thing is, I only saw it trigger once and I have no idea how. If I charge from outside of combat, it doesn't work, since Charge seems wonky, the horse attacks first, then Seelah waits to roll initiative then attacks and is no longer considered charging (still gets the AB bonus from charging, but no double damage). But if I charge while already in combat, it still doesn't trigger, from what I figure because of the way the rounds go, with Seelah generally getting her round after the horse. I'm trying to micromanage it so that she would get her attack before the mount, but not having much luck and, if that's the case, then it's a damn pain in the ass to get it right.
Whisper
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 29, 2012
- Messages
- 4,357
Yes, they no longer limit rest spamming.
All newbies and casuals rejoices, Popamole be with you.
With SR numbers like that, Spell Penetration is always concern in this game:
Delterius
Arcane
in wrath of the righteous the kobolds have 100 AC, spell resistance 60 and a touch ac of -17
Cryomancer
Arcane
And every single enemy in late chapters has 666 mythic levels. hu3hu3hu3
ga♥
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2017
- Messages
- 7,977
There is nothing worth there... exept the googles that increase the spell DC. And still, when you get it the game is basically already done.
I just finished enigma today, selling all the loot brought me to 4 milion gold and nothing to spend it on.
I think they had in mind a bigger chapter VI, than the corridor we got, and then they cut it.
It is shit, as everything.
If it would be shit, someone would make a review making fun of it. It's not shit, unfortunately. It's just an amazing RPG brought down to mediocrity because of the dicks and vaginas everywhere.
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2009
- Messages
- 10,061
You can't rest after every fight (which is the true rest spam as seen in stuff like BG2 and nwn2), but you do get to rest a whole bunch of times, especially in dungeons.
Resting still means assigning party members to roles, but the game saves who is doing what from last time, so 99% of the time you just hit rest and then accept, get a few lines of dialogue, and then you're done.
wait someone thought Kingmaker resting was time consuming wtf
Last edited:
Parabalus
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2015
- Messages
- 17,496
The unskippable dialogue is horrible, as are the multiple black screens, and the game going through the results one by one, again unskippably.
ArchAngel
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2015
- Messages
- 20,868
I don't know whether it helps you, but my problems with charging (not only mounted, but in general) were solved when I realized that this is a 2D engine that looks like 3D only by tricks. So every bump on the floor, every chair or something has infinite height and cannot be jumped over. Also, companions are much wider in combat than during exploration.
Now I can reasonably predict the chances of successful charge in RTwP.
This was the problem in Kingmaker with INT boosting items not affecting Kanerah - the Dark Elementalist - properly until the party rest. So maybe some issues with initialization remain in Wrath as well. I would reequip everything on the offending character after the game load and see if it helps.
Terra
Cipher
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2016
- Messages
- 915
Finally finished this, been playing it pretty solidly for the past couple of weeks, when the 200 hour mark was crossed, while I was still having fun, I was ready to wrap things up as the game had already sucked up enough of my christmas holiday time. Ended up at just over 220 hours, could probably shave a bit off for AFK and such but it's still a really lengthy game. Managed to attain both the normal and secret endings, then threw the Toybox mod on and
Various thoughts from my time with the game:
Act 1 stuff
Bugs/Niggles
Wokeness
I did find some early Codex appraisals that the game was a woke fest to be overblown, though raising awareness of the existence of activism among the dev team through publicising that reddit post boasting of the inclusivity/diversity/tranny nonsense (iirc there was a hidden tranny in Kingmaker or something and some dev on a reddit AMA was delighted the woke squad unearthed it) was praiseworthy and the studio certainly earned continuous scrutiny going forwards by courting those loons. That said, as far as in-game SJW stuff goes, I found it to be front-loaded almost entirely in Act 1, and even then, it's only really 2 characters.
If you played the Mass Effect games, and you noticed there was no real sjw nonsense in 1 & 2, but in 3 suddenly you had female Asari crying about how they are looking for the "female wife" in stage whispers whenever Shepard draws close, it's a tad like that. Irabeth/Anevia will remind you several times that they are indeed in a same-sex relationship. But that's about it as far as woke stuff that stuck out to me goes, and it drops off substantially, as do the aforementioned pair's role from Act 2 onwards. There is a buried, late-game (afaik) hard diplomacy check to discover that one of the pair was indeed a man, but it was hardly a Mizhena moment and I didn't find the dialogue preachy. If I hadn't been previously made aware of this beforehand, it probably wouldn't have stood out to me all that much, tbh, one could pretty easily go through the game and never discover this tidbit.
Crusade System
Companions
Won't go through them all, only those that stood out, story spoilers for this one obviously:
Improvements over Kingmaker
There was a much greater variety & amount of weapons encountered during my playthrough than what I saw in Kingmaker. I was short of decent composite longbows in the lategame though, but overall a big imrpovement over Kingmaker where Valerie was stuck with the Flaming Bastard Sword +1 for most of the game.
Tutorialisation was vastly improved over Kingmaker, imo. I liked seeing the game pulling examples of something not working well against a given enemy from what was actually unfolding onscreen, explaining the inspect mechanic and letting me examine & cross-reference the rolls myself alongside the tips it offered, definitely helped me out and will definitely help more people get into the game. I believe there were some things that weren't explained, I don't think metamagic had a tutorial and it also has a semi-unintuitive UI to boot.
Story notes (my experience - Aeon/Renegade)
Secret Ending & Secret Ending Unlock Conditions Rant
Nenio's Pyramid of Lulz - Enigma
Nenio's final pyramid dungeon - it's long/arduous not to mention irritating to gate the end of a companion quest till so late in the game. At that point, while I was still enjoying the game, all I had left was to go back to Drezen then onto Threshold, then I hit Enigma. You've already hit the level cap and got good gear so it's just a slog running around getting crystals while dealing with various goons and annoying puzzles. You'll have hours of fun (no joke) upon discovering you missed a crystal because you failed a perception check and didn't find a hidden wall, or that you missed the tiny antechamber veiled in shadow to the side of one room and have to trek through the whole place again to see what you missed. Coupled with the crusade starting back up in Act 5, it was poor way to wrap upo the Act. Nice boss fight at the end at least but I would not do this dungeon again.
Overall/Final Thoughts
Personally I thought this was a great game, certainly better than anything else I played this year (even just beating out Rance 8), I found the game & its story to be compelling and it kept me playing for over 200 hours. I'd love to play through this again and give those other Mythics a shot, but at 200+ hours, I can't really justify it when I already have a backlog of other games. Auto crusade + ignoring Nenio's pyramid would probably shave off a bit of time, but its still a big game and a serious investment of time (and I thought this was meant to be shorter than Kingmaker).
I will say that in concert with the Mythic path options, the amount of variables and apparent number of ways companion stories can seemingly branch out and resolve felt quite impressive; I found out too late that if I'd taken a different tact with Sosiel,
, likewise Wenduag seemingly has many variables involved. It felt like a step up from most other games where it's typically "do the companion's quest, and it resolves nicely in one way." While there were certainly a few frustrations, I think this approach and what Owlcat tried is commendable. There's a good amount of meat on the bone it seems to do a second playthrough, even with a single playthrough, that aspect comes across quite strongly.
Music was really good throughout, though I expected to hear a few more tracks given the game's length, hearing some of the tunes from Kingmaker along the way was nice too. Due to the Mythics, everything felt much larger than in Kingmaker, meeting with gods & demon lords and such just really kicked things up a notch.
Like with Kingmaker before it, I think Wrath could've benefitted from a post-big battle victory feast or similar, with final thoughts and whatnot from all the companions and big players. Although, this would be dependant on your ending, as it stands it's all over a little too quickly after beating the final boss and getting whisked through the ending slides.
Great game overall, highly recommended.
did full party ascension too.
Various thoughts from my time with the game:
Act 1 stuff
There were way, way too many overlong interactions in the Defender's Heart for an opening section of a game in Act 1; every companion (and there are many) has multiple nodes of dialogue, some of it pretty long & with subnodes, as do shopkeepers, lesbian Orc + company. I think it's just a bit too much to hit new players with immediately after starting the game. I honestly found the opening act a bit of a struggle to get through as I was spending what felt like a very disproportionate amount of time in this place just continuously reading dialogue. Oh, and then Storyteller showed up (but I found his story was far more interesting this time around and I enjoyed going through it)...
As far as Act 1 goes, the dialogue is not strictly bad, it's just too wordy and belaboured to make a single point. It's a little bit like the situation with Shadowrun Dragonfall>Hong Kong, probably not as bad as it was in HK, but it felt like it was getting there, just because you can have reams of text all over the place doesn't mean you should. There is value in brevity or just fucking spread the dialogue out a bit so it unlocks over the course of the game. I barely glanced at any of the books I was picking up early on as there was so much front-loaded companion/NPC dialogue. Throughout Act 1, I ended up breaking up the dialogue myself between return trips to the Defenders Heart to sell gear, going through a companion or two's dialogue per trip made it more bearable, but yeah, getting through this opening act took me way longer than it should. Learn from the mistakes of Torment: Tides, people. Worth noting that the dialogue evened out considerably from Act 2 onwards, and I encountered zero problems of this nature from Act 2 onwards. Hell, the whole game gets a lot better from Act 2 onwards.
First impressions weren't great if I'm honest, with the new fangled 360 degree camera, we have the opening cutscene with Deskari flying into town, and it didn't look great presentation wise to me - the last thing I want is Owlcat becoming another developer going the "cinemtic" route. I think this is probably the roughest "cinematic moment" of the game, and to be fair, they are few and far between.
As far as Act 1 goes, the dialogue is not strictly bad, it's just too wordy and belaboured to make a single point. It's a little bit like the situation with Shadowrun Dragonfall>Hong Kong, probably not as bad as it was in HK, but it felt like it was getting there, just because you can have reams of text all over the place doesn't mean you should. There is value in brevity or just fucking spread the dialogue out a bit so it unlocks over the course of the game. I barely glanced at any of the books I was picking up early on as there was so much front-loaded companion/NPC dialogue. Throughout Act 1, I ended up breaking up the dialogue myself between return trips to the Defenders Heart to sell gear, going through a companion or two's dialogue per trip made it more bearable, but yeah, getting through this opening act took me way longer than it should. Learn from the mistakes of Torment: Tides, people. Worth noting that the dialogue evened out considerably from Act 2 onwards, and I encountered zero problems of this nature from Act 2 onwards. Hell, the whole game gets a lot better from Act 2 onwards.
First impressions weren't great if I'm honest, with the new fangled 360 degree camera, we have the opening cutscene with Deskari flying into town, and it didn't look great presentation wise to me - the last thing I want is Owlcat becoming another developer going the "cinemtic" route. I think this is probably the roughest "cinematic moment" of the game, and to be fair, they are few and far between.
Bugs/Niggles
Across the game, previously read dialogue nodes frequently show up as unread if the root topic is reframed. So if you have a root topic of "tell me about X" which later becomes "tell me about X again", oftentimes all the sub branches appear as unread dialogue, even though you read them already. This is pretty widespread and annoying, sometimes, the root topic isn't even reframed, maybe the NPC moves locations or something and all of a sudden it looks like you have 9 new topics to talk about. I think this is a lingering technical oversight from Kingmaker but it's really annoying.
Aeon VFX highlights on characters was/could have been a cool(er) mechanic, it clues you in on lawbreakers and could potentially allow you to trip someone up or catch them in a lie. All too often though (especially early on) it's just presented as "haha, you broke the law, confess now!" and of course, they never do. Could be cool to see companions and advisors calling you out on basically being an almost super-SJW type figure, dredging up minor slights to the law which would/should be overlooked in wartime and how your dogged adherence to the lawful aeon tenets are undermining the crusade's goals. Definitely a nice juxtaposition of what the Aeon wants vs what's practical at least, oftentimes the lawful/true aeon path just left me feeling like a complete dick.
There are some instances where you stand to lose a large amount of loot when the map changes. Drezen is the main culprit here, there was so much plate armour and such dotted around you can't carry it all, all spread around multiple siege-exclusive maps, once you win Drezen, all those maps get replaced and anything on the floor is lost forever. I suspected it might happen but just couldn't be bothered lugging everything back to the vendor during the siege. Would be nice if it were all auto gathered up or something or you get compensated for it.
Some occasionally dumb moments in dialogue with no reactivity - Sosiel bitching about hellknights and how much he hates them and I'm just stood there, a hellknight and leader of the crusade, with no appropriate responses to give.
Poor optimisation. Low GPU usage in the Demon city, giving 30-50FPS and maybe 45% GPU usage tops. Game seems very CPU bound, will perform fine in smaller areas/interiors but in the bigger ones like Alushinyrra, especially in RTWP mode, with all the VFX and stuff going off, you'll feel the hit. Also performance will gradually decline over time, so a periodic relaunch is recommended. I have a 2700X/RTX 3070/32GB Ram for reference.
Act 4's stolen equipment (if your journey on the airship goes poorly, you get captured). Charting all the way back to Yuffie's materia theft in FF7, when a game steals all your equipment in a scripted sequence, then later gives you back ALL your equipment in one jumble, would it be so fucking hard to just re-equip everyone as they were. It is BEYOND fucking annoying having to go through 6 characters and sift through the mountain of equipment trying to remember exactly who had what. Such a waste of time, and for what, to throw the player in a cage for 5 minutes, then you toss a few summons outside said cage, one quick battle and you're back out. Ended up redoing the preceding book sequence and going with a route where I didn't get captured just to avoid this fuckery.
When you get back to Golarion in Act 5, all your armies are gone - seriously? Sure there's a story reason for this, but it's really just needlessly padding the game, requiring several weeks of in-game time to rebuild a good enough army to take Iz and the surrounding areas. The crusade minigame is a definite rough edge to the game and upon finally taking charge in Drezen again I saw I'd have to build up that army again (already 150+ hours in by this point) I wasn't impressed.
Can't equip headgear on Wenduag without her losing the hood, unless you use "display class equipment" which is a cop-out.
I was disappointed to encounter some bugs, google them and see they've been in since September, still unfixed now in mid-late December. Although people give Owlcat shit for the sheer number of patches, but when I cast my mind back to how many fixes you'd get from say BioWare/Beth, particularly for busted dialogue, if it wasn't accessible in the base game and wasn't some major showstopper, it pretty much never got fixed. I do like/appreciate the inclusion of the in-game bug reporting tool
Shrine of the Three fight - I understand I have Infinitron to blame for this debacle, so that's what I'm gonna do.
Aeon VFX highlights on characters was/could have been a cool(er) mechanic, it clues you in on lawbreakers and could potentially allow you to trip someone up or catch them in a lie. All too often though (especially early on) it's just presented as "haha, you broke the law, confess now!" and of course, they never do. Could be cool to see companions and advisors calling you out on basically being an almost super-SJW type figure, dredging up minor slights to the law which would/should be overlooked in wartime and how your dogged adherence to the lawful aeon tenets are undermining the crusade's goals. Definitely a nice juxtaposition of what the Aeon wants vs what's practical at least, oftentimes the lawful/true aeon path just left me feeling like a complete dick.
There are some instances where you stand to lose a large amount of loot when the map changes. Drezen is the main culprit here, there was so much plate armour and such dotted around you can't carry it all, all spread around multiple siege-exclusive maps, once you win Drezen, all those maps get replaced and anything on the floor is lost forever. I suspected it might happen but just couldn't be bothered lugging everything back to the vendor during the siege. Would be nice if it were all auto gathered up or something or you get compensated for it.
Some occasionally dumb moments in dialogue with no reactivity - Sosiel bitching about hellknights and how much he hates them and I'm just stood there, a hellknight and leader of the crusade, with no appropriate responses to give.
Poor optimisation. Low GPU usage in the Demon city, giving 30-50FPS and maybe 45% GPU usage tops. Game seems very CPU bound, will perform fine in smaller areas/interiors but in the bigger ones like Alushinyrra, especially in RTWP mode, with all the VFX and stuff going off, you'll feel the hit. Also performance will gradually decline over time, so a periodic relaunch is recommended. I have a 2700X/RTX 3070/32GB Ram for reference.
Act 4's stolen equipment (if your journey on the airship goes poorly, you get captured). Charting all the way back to Yuffie's materia theft in FF7, when a game steals all your equipment in a scripted sequence, then later gives you back ALL your equipment in one jumble, would it be so fucking hard to just re-equip everyone as they were. It is BEYOND fucking annoying having to go through 6 characters and sift through the mountain of equipment trying to remember exactly who had what. Such a waste of time, and for what, to throw the player in a cage for 5 minutes, then you toss a few summons outside said cage, one quick battle and you're back out. Ended up redoing the preceding book sequence and going with a route where I didn't get captured just to avoid this fuckery.
When you get back to Golarion in Act 5, all your armies are gone - seriously? Sure there's a story reason for this, but it's really just needlessly padding the game, requiring several weeks of in-game time to rebuild a good enough army to take Iz and the surrounding areas. The crusade minigame is a definite rough edge to the game and upon finally taking charge in Drezen again I saw I'd have to build up that army again (already 150+ hours in by this point) I wasn't impressed.
Can't equip headgear on Wenduag without her losing the hood, unless you use "display class equipment" which is a cop-out.
I was disappointed to encounter some bugs, google them and see they've been in since September, still unfixed now in mid-late December. Although people give Owlcat shit for the sheer number of patches, but when I cast my mind back to how many fixes you'd get from say BioWare/Beth, particularly for busted dialogue, if it wasn't accessible in the base game and wasn't some major showstopper, it pretty much never got fixed. I do like/appreciate the inclusion of the in-game bug reporting tool
Shrine of the Three fight - I understand I have Infinitron to blame for this debacle, so that's what I'm gonna do.
Wokeness
I did find some early Codex appraisals that the game was a woke fest to be overblown, though raising awareness of the existence of activism among the dev team through publicising that reddit post boasting of the inclusivity/diversity/tranny nonsense (iirc there was a hidden tranny in Kingmaker or something and some dev on a reddit AMA was delighted the woke squad unearthed it) was praiseworthy and the studio certainly earned continuous scrutiny going forwards by courting those loons. That said, as far as in-game SJW stuff goes, I found it to be front-loaded almost entirely in Act 1, and even then, it's only really 2 characters.
If you played the Mass Effect games, and you noticed there was no real sjw nonsense in 1 & 2, but in 3 suddenly you had female Asari crying about how they are looking for the "female wife" in stage whispers whenever Shepard draws close, it's a tad like that. Irabeth/Anevia will remind you several times that they are indeed in a same-sex relationship. But that's about it as far as woke stuff that stuck out to me goes, and it drops off substantially, as do the aforementioned pair's role from Act 2 onwards. There is a buried, late-game (afaik) hard diplomacy check to discover that one of the pair was indeed a man, but it was hardly a Mizhena moment and I didn't find the dialogue preachy. If I hadn't been previously made aware of this beforehand, it probably wouldn't have stood out to me all that much, tbh, one could pretty easily go through the game and never discover this tidbit.
Crusade System
Getting secondary Crusader Armies off the ground and into fighting shape can be a hassle. The game likes to throw tiny units at you that you can't reinforce (until much later in the game at least). So you end up with little clusters of 3xEarth golem that you can't do much with. Even beefing up a regular army with basic hires is more arduous than it needs be, but there's so many enemy units with a general whose attacks can just one-shot units, I found I needed hard hitting ranged units alongside a good general to avoid a casualty spiral.
The salient points of the system are simply this:
- Don't allow your casualty bar to max out, always ensure it isn't maxed when ending a battle and you will recover any lost troops. Provided you protect your "main" army in this way, you won't lose.
- Ranged units behind a meat shield beats most things, provided you can heal and survive a double Balor fireball, a big stack/pair of marksmen can shed most enemies before they get near you. Hellknight Signifiers great fireball also makes a great supplement if you can get a good stack of em going
Ultimately, the Crusade side of the game feels a bit unfinished, but servicable. If I were to play the game again, I'd be strongly tempted to disable the crusade system, it's not that it detracts from the game, it's just a significant timesink.
The salient points of the system are simply this:
- Don't allow your casualty bar to max out, always ensure it isn't maxed when ending a battle and you will recover any lost troops. Provided you protect your "main" army in this way, you won't lose.
- Ranged units behind a meat shield beats most things, provided you can heal and survive a double Balor fireball, a big stack/pair of marksmen can shed most enemies before they get near you. Hellknight Signifiers great fireball also makes a great supplement if you can get a good stack of em going
Ultimately, the Crusade side of the game feels a bit unfinished, but servicable. If I were to play the game again, I'd be strongly tempted to disable the crusade system, it's not that it detracts from the game, it's just a significant timesink.
Companions
Won't go through them all, only those that stood out, story spoilers for this one obviously:
Wenduag is a brilliant companion, throughout the game you can catch her (and optionally choose to confront or not) in various forms of deceit, some of these instances are quite clever in that you don't know who she's actually planning to trick betray - you or her former master or even both of you. The only meta-gamey aspect that undermined this was if you directly confront her and she has no way to wriggle out of it, she auto-betrays you and teleports off, if that hadn't been a thing, they'd have pulled this off brilliantly.
Regill had a great arc, I don't usually go for gnome characters in CRPGs, often they are made to a certain mould, but Regill defintiely stood out, really great Lawful Evil Hellknight and I liked the culmination of his personal quest where you gained his respect.
Arushalae's arc & her romance weren't what I was expecting. Initially at least, the whole thing seemed far more... simplistic & idealistic than I was expecting, particularly as Arushalae's problems are all primarilly internal. However I feel like both her arc & romance really came into their own when you reach Alushinyrra, she has lots of dialogue there and unique perspective to add throughout the area that definitely added nuance to her character. I also liked how they were able to tie in her early game backstory into the temple of Desna at the start of the game and at least as far as the good ending for her character goes, she has quite a nice, "soft" ending to her arc. However, were I to do another playthough, I would probably opt to romance Wenduag as I think she's a more complex character than Aru.
Ember, I never really "got" what her deal was, or what the secret to her character was tbh, beyond just being some kind of crazy prophet/preacher I guess. I didn't take her with me very much.
Daeran was another good snarky Evil companion. We got off to a rocky start when that Steam achievement popped early on ("One of you companions is interested in you!") following on from a seemingly innocent choice on my part. Luckily, Daeran became my main healer I enjoyed both his snark & backstory/quest as it unfurled over the course of the game.
Seelah was mainline frontliner/tank alongside my MC I guess. Pretty simple story, quest and character. The twists for her quest with the jewellery were pretty neat, but I wouldn't say she was an exceptionally interesting or uninteresting character.
Camellia - the moment of her reveal in the abandoned building was very well done I thought. I recall just getting back to Drezen and shit was already hitting the fan and then you catch her. Yeah, I didn't get to see this one all the way to its conclusion as she left my Aeon later in the game, but it poses an interesting question of what you're willing to overlook in order to count on the continued support of a companion. Should've been an option there to arrest and off her or at least hunt her down, maybe you could have pre-arranged a contract on her life with Greybor on the sly that if she ever ran away, he could kill her.
Nenio added some levity to the game, I definitely preferred her look pre-change. I'll never do her companion quest again though.
Regill had a great arc, I don't usually go for gnome characters in CRPGs, often they are made to a certain mould, but Regill defintiely stood out, really great Lawful Evil Hellknight and I liked the culmination of his personal quest where you gained his respect.
Arushalae's arc & her romance weren't what I was expecting. Initially at least, the whole thing seemed far more... simplistic & idealistic than I was expecting, particularly as Arushalae's problems are all primarilly internal. However I feel like both her arc & romance really came into their own when you reach Alushinyrra, she has lots of dialogue there and unique perspective to add throughout the area that definitely added nuance to her character. I also liked how they were able to tie in her early game backstory into the temple of Desna at the start of the game and at least as far as the good ending for her character goes, she has quite a nice, "soft" ending to her arc. However, were I to do another playthough, I would probably opt to romance Wenduag as I think she's a more complex character than Aru.
Ember, I never really "got" what her deal was, or what the secret to her character was tbh, beyond just being some kind of crazy prophet/preacher I guess. I didn't take her with me very much.
Daeran was another good snarky Evil companion. We got off to a rocky start when that Steam achievement popped early on ("One of you companions is interested in you!") following on from a seemingly innocent choice on my part. Luckily, Daeran became my main healer I enjoyed both his snark & backstory/quest as it unfurled over the course of the game.
Seelah was mainline frontliner/tank alongside my MC I guess. Pretty simple story, quest and character. The twists for her quest with the jewellery were pretty neat, but I wouldn't say she was an exceptionally interesting or uninteresting character.
Camellia - the moment of her reveal in the abandoned building was very well done I thought. I recall just getting back to Drezen and shit was already hitting the fan and then you catch her. Yeah, I didn't get to see this one all the way to its conclusion as she left my Aeon later in the game, but it poses an interesting question of what you're willing to overlook in order to count on the continued support of a companion. Should've been an option there to arrest and off her or at least hunt her down, maybe you could have pre-arranged a contract on her life with Greybor on the sly that if she ever ran away, he could kill her.
Nenio added some levity to the game, I definitely preferred her look pre-change. I'll never do her companion quest again though.
Improvements over Kingmaker
There was a much greater variety & amount of weapons encountered during my playthrough than what I saw in Kingmaker. I was short of decent composite longbows in the lategame though, but overall a big imrpovement over Kingmaker where Valerie was stuck with the Flaming Bastard Sword +1 for most of the game.
Tutorialisation was vastly improved over Kingmaker, imo. I liked seeing the game pulling examples of something not working well against a given enemy from what was actually unfolding onscreen, explaining the inspect mechanic and letting me examine & cross-reference the rolls myself alongside the tips it offered, definitely helped me out and will definitely help more people get into the game. I believe there were some things that weren't explained, I don't think metamagic had a tutorial and it also has a semi-unintuitive UI to boot.
Story notes (my experience - Aeon/Renegade)
Minagho served as a decent first antagonist, initially threatening, yet slowly becoming a Team Rocket esque parody villain in future appearances. Catching up with her was always entertaining, though her last appearance was a bit meh, I let her run away in the Demon City as it was pretty fun repeatedly humiliating her. Next time, she's just randomly in the besieged Drezen (the 2nd time), has a single line and goes down without much fanfare .
I wasn't able to stick it out as a true aeon, too many decisions that the mirror aeon wants you to make just undermine the cursade or are just flat out stupid given your role as the crusade leader, to such an extent you could probably make an argument that doing everything the mirror aeon wants would have a good chance of the crusade failing. While I'm sure this is intentional to at least some degree, it's nowhere better exemplified than in Act 5's Triumph of Justice, which would essentially see you kicking out like 90% of Drezen's occupants (a city you've just liberated a 2nd time, mind, and you have limited forces) over minor infractions. The whole thing was very 'uphold the law, ignore the context of the huge demonic horde invading the land'. Really started to feel like I was the twitter outrage mob, persecuting and tearing people down for tiny perceived slights that occurred years ago and damned be the consequences. Camellia is certainly right to be worried, but she's hardly the only one that should be, True Aeon just seems to be completely at odds with the goal of the crusade and I guess I'm surprised/disappointed that more wasn't made of it; maybe an atmosphere of paranoia should pervade throughout Drezen over the Commander will arrest next. Feels like True Aeon would/should end up with just themself in Drezen (which I'm guessing is how swarm ends up).
Wenduag's ultimate betrayal of me to Savamelekh in Act 5 was a bit of a surprise. Naturally, I knew it was coming in some form, but I'd caught her out on most of her scheming, I think (looking at the notes, it seems I missed her tavern event, but caught her as Dyra's killer, forced her to kneel in front of her little army and found her in Savamelekh's mansion in Alushynrra. Kept Lann alive too after their duel) Also passed any dialogue checks. She sounded like she'd side with me when approaching her quest's climax, but no, she turned on me at the last minute. Maybe I missed a step or said the wrong thing somewhere. She was behaving like I didn't witness her secret meeting with Savamelekh in the mansion but I'm pretty sure I did, maybe I chose wrong when speaking with her back at the Nexus... Ended up not killing her though as she was a key party member and I didn't want to lose her, but letting her stick with the party after that felt a little hollow. Good character, wish I had enough time to justify a second playthrough and try and do everything right, but I don't. Or does she always betray you regardless? Seemed like it was all set up to culminate in her deciding that actually, you're the better bet. Oh well.
I wasn't able to stick it out as a true aeon, too many decisions that the mirror aeon wants you to make just undermine the cursade or are just flat out stupid given your role as the crusade leader, to such an extent you could probably make an argument that doing everything the mirror aeon wants would have a good chance of the crusade failing. While I'm sure this is intentional to at least some degree, it's nowhere better exemplified than in Act 5's Triumph of Justice, which would essentially see you kicking out like 90% of Drezen's occupants (a city you've just liberated a 2nd time, mind, and you have limited forces) over minor infractions. The whole thing was very 'uphold the law, ignore the context of the huge demonic horde invading the land'. Really started to feel like I was the twitter outrage mob, persecuting and tearing people down for tiny perceived slights that occurred years ago and damned be the consequences. Camellia is certainly right to be worried, but she's hardly the only one that should be, True Aeon just seems to be completely at odds with the goal of the crusade and I guess I'm surprised/disappointed that more wasn't made of it; maybe an atmosphere of paranoia should pervade throughout Drezen over the Commander will arrest next. Feels like True Aeon would/should end up with just themself in Drezen (which I'm guessing is how swarm ends up).
Wenduag's ultimate betrayal of me to Savamelekh in Act 5 was a bit of a surprise. Naturally, I knew it was coming in some form, but I'd caught her out on most of her scheming, I think (looking at the notes, it seems I missed her tavern event, but caught her as Dyra's killer, forced her to kneel in front of her little army and found her in Savamelekh's mansion in Alushynrra. Kept Lann alive too after their duel) Also passed any dialogue checks. She sounded like she'd side with me when approaching her quest's climax, but no, she turned on me at the last minute. Maybe I missed a step or said the wrong thing somewhere. She was behaving like I didn't witness her secret meeting with Savamelekh in the mansion but I'm pretty sure I did, maybe I chose wrong when speaking with her back at the Nexus... Ended up not killing her though as she was a key party member and I didn't want to lose her, but letting her stick with the party after that felt a little hollow. Good character, wish I had enough time to justify a second playthrough and try and do everything right, but I don't. Or does she always betray you regardless? Seemed like it was all set up to culminate in her deciding that actually, you're the better bet. Oh well.
Secret Ending & Secret Ending Unlock Conditions Rant
On the one hand I really like the secret ending, getting to put the pieces together then ultimately perfect Areelu's Transformation method, whilst sticking it to various demon lords and gods is a neat way to end things. Plus, I like that the ending isn't handed to you on a platter and you actually have to put some work into it & pay attention - I'm glad there's a CRPG developer out there doing this. But on the other hand, man is it convoluted.
The secret ending guide on Steam is a bit... engrishy; it's poorly worded in such a way as to potentially be confusing at times (in its effort to avoid some spoilers), needs a thorough rewrite by a native speaker and rechecking of various elements to determine what affects the ending. At the moment it's all very "some dude on Reddit said X, so that might be a thing. Or not." But following it will net you the ending at least.
I got so close to the secret ending when I first finished the game, but it turned out that I missed Hepzamirah's ghost in the Inelectable Prison on my first run, and that screwed me out of it. Luckily I had a save from right at the end of the Prison, so I reloaded, slapped Story difficulty on and quickly blasted through to the end of the game once again. Word to the wise - Hepzamirah's ghost is not discoverable near the place where you fight the worms until you've beaten the boss end of the area (there's only a hint that you hear someone breathing there initially), you then have to backtrack and she'll be there. This is why I say the secret ending guide is a bit poorly written - Hepzamirah's ghost is described in a very non-spoilery way in the guide, to such an extent that you have no clue who it is you're looking for and the description of where to go is equally opaque. I'll be glad if somebody writes a guide in something approaching consistently coherent english personally, both with and without spoilers.
As for the secret ending requirements and discovering them naturally, I think everything prior to Act 5 is stuff you could feasibly figure out for yourself/stumble upon, heck I only started referencing the guide from Act 3 onwards and it turned out I'd done everything up to that point correctly. Act 5 has a lot of really out of the way things you need to find/trigger though, it certainly seems much more veiled than Kingmaker's secret ending was. But, there's still enough leeway there that you could probably at least get onto the secret ending conversational branch with Areelu at the end and fathom out that there's something more there, thus informing a second playthrough. It's very much the sort of game where a second playthrough will see you making a lot of connections yourself, lots of "ah ha" moments, based on knowledge from your initial playthrough; most of the hints are there, like with the midnight bolts.
Lastly, there comes a point in Crusade mode in Act 5 when you've basically won, you will own all the regions and I personally just had one mega-army sat at one chokepoint to stop the new demon armies that spawned from causing any trouble. But this still means that you will be plagued with 1-2 demon army battles every few turns as they spawn infinitely from Iz. Would be nice for the game to just recognise it's a done deal by that point and not keep wasting the player's time. This is mainly a problem due to the unlock condition of the secret ending needing the current in-game date to be between two very specific dates; which can mean a lot of time is spent skipping days, and having pointless 10 second army battles every 20 seconds. Fun. It's possible that turning on auto-crusade at this point might work, but who knows if it'd mess anything else up.
Can't help but think back to the end of Throne of Bhaal with the secret ending and honestly, despite liking the ending - where were the companion opinions on EVERYTHING involved in the secret ending? Nobody questions the fact that you're about to ascend, nobody questions you letting Areelu off the hook, there's no discussion about whether your companions even want to become little demigods alongside you? Sure, some companions can technically refuse to ascend with you in the ending slides, but I didn't like everyone's silence in the final exchange as your (crazy) plans were laid bare.
Small bit of confusion in the ending slides - Arushalae has a house that I sometimes visit her in, but we're both gods so why do we have some random house somewhere, lol?
The secret ending guide on Steam is a bit... engrishy; it's poorly worded in such a way as to potentially be confusing at times (in its effort to avoid some spoilers), needs a thorough rewrite by a native speaker and rechecking of various elements to determine what affects the ending. At the moment it's all very "some dude on Reddit said X, so that might be a thing. Or not." But following it will net you the ending at least.
I got so close to the secret ending when I first finished the game, but it turned out that I missed Hepzamirah's ghost in the Inelectable Prison on my first run, and that screwed me out of it. Luckily I had a save from right at the end of the Prison, so I reloaded, slapped Story difficulty on and quickly blasted through to the end of the game once again. Word to the wise - Hepzamirah's ghost is not discoverable near the place where you fight the worms until you've beaten the boss end of the area (there's only a hint that you hear someone breathing there initially), you then have to backtrack and she'll be there. This is why I say the secret ending guide is a bit poorly written - Hepzamirah's ghost is described in a very non-spoilery way in the guide, to such an extent that you have no clue who it is you're looking for and the description of where to go is equally opaque. I'll be glad if somebody writes a guide in something approaching consistently coherent english personally, both with and without spoilers.
As for the secret ending requirements and discovering them naturally, I think everything prior to Act 5 is stuff you could feasibly figure out for yourself/stumble upon, heck I only started referencing the guide from Act 3 onwards and it turned out I'd done everything up to that point correctly. Act 5 has a lot of really out of the way things you need to find/trigger though, it certainly seems much more veiled than Kingmaker's secret ending was. But, there's still enough leeway there that you could probably at least get onto the secret ending conversational branch with Areelu at the end and fathom out that there's something more there, thus informing a second playthrough. It's very much the sort of game where a second playthrough will see you making a lot of connections yourself, lots of "ah ha" moments, based on knowledge from your initial playthrough; most of the hints are there, like with the midnight bolts.
Lastly, there comes a point in Crusade mode in Act 5 when you've basically won, you will own all the regions and I personally just had one mega-army sat at one chokepoint to stop the new demon armies that spawned from causing any trouble. But this still means that you will be plagued with 1-2 demon army battles every few turns as they spawn infinitely from Iz. Would be nice for the game to just recognise it's a done deal by that point and not keep wasting the player's time. This is mainly a problem due to the unlock condition of the secret ending needing the current in-game date to be between two very specific dates; which can mean a lot of time is spent skipping days, and having pointless 10 second army battles every 20 seconds. Fun. It's possible that turning on auto-crusade at this point might work, but who knows if it'd mess anything else up.
Can't help but think back to the end of Throne of Bhaal with the secret ending and honestly, despite liking the ending - where were the companion opinions on EVERYTHING involved in the secret ending? Nobody questions the fact that you're about to ascend, nobody questions you letting Areelu off the hook, there's no discussion about whether your companions even want to become little demigods alongside you? Sure, some companions can technically refuse to ascend with you in the ending slides, but I didn't like everyone's silence in the final exchange as your (crazy) plans were laid bare.
Small bit of confusion in the ending slides - Arushalae has a house that I sometimes visit her in, but we're both gods so why do we have some random house somewhere, lol?
Nenio's Pyramid of Lulz - Enigma
Nenio's final pyramid dungeon - it's long/arduous not to mention irritating to gate the end of a companion quest till so late in the game. At that point, while I was still enjoying the game, all I had left was to go back to Drezen then onto Threshold, then I hit Enigma. You've already hit the level cap and got good gear so it's just a slog running around getting crystals while dealing with various goons and annoying puzzles. You'll have hours of fun (no joke) upon discovering you missed a crystal because you failed a perception check and didn't find a hidden wall, or that you missed the tiny antechamber veiled in shadow to the side of one room and have to trek through the whole place again to see what you missed. Coupled with the crusade starting back up in Act 5, it was poor way to wrap upo the Act. Nice boss fight at the end at least but I would not do this dungeon again.
Overall/Final Thoughts
Personally I thought this was a great game, certainly better than anything else I played this year (even just beating out Rance 8), I found the game & its story to be compelling and it kept me playing for over 200 hours. I'd love to play through this again and give those other Mythics a shot, but at 200+ hours, I can't really justify it when I already have a backlog of other games. Auto crusade + ignoring Nenio's pyramid would probably shave off a bit of time, but its still a big game and a serious investment of time (and I thought this was meant to be shorter than Kingmaker).
I will say that in concert with the Mythic path options, the amount of variables and apparent number of ways companion stories can seemingly branch out and resolve felt quite impressive; I found out too late that if I'd taken a different tact with Sosiel,
his brother Trever could have survived
Music was really good throughout, though I expected to hear a few more tracks given the game's length, hearing some of the tunes from Kingmaker along the way was nice too. Due to the Mythics, everything felt much larger than in Kingmaker, meeting with gods & demon lords and such just really kicked things up a notch.
Like with Kingmaker before it, I think Wrath could've benefitted from a post-big battle victory feast or similar, with final thoughts and whatnot from all the companions and big players. Although, this would be dependant on your ending, as it stands it's all over a little too quickly after beating the final boss and getting whisked through the ending slides.
Great game overall, highly recommended.
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2016
- Messages
- 6,430
Maybe your horse has Animal Growth, while you're normal sized?
you gotta be a heavy rester to have ever noticed that shit
ga♥
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2017
- Messages
- 7,977
I disagree about the amount of dialogues in the first act, it's also the first time I hear someone complaining about it Terra.
Btw Wenduag does not always betray you, I did 2 playthrough and she never betrayed me, so no idea about the conditions.
Agreed that the enigma is a bad designed dungeon which should not even be in chapter V, but probably in chapter III, while I personally enjoyed a lot the ineluctable prison (even though it makes no sense you can exit from it lorewise, or if it does i missed how you can do it).
Btw Wenduag does not always betray you, I did 2 playthrough and she never betrayed me, so no idea about the conditions.
Agreed that the enigma is a bad designed dungeon which should not even be in chapter V, but probably in chapter III, while I personally enjoyed a lot the ineluctable prison (even though it makes no sense you can exit from it lorewise, or if it does i missed how you can do it).
Delterius
Arcane
The Enigma is the House at the End of Time, except this time it's optional so you'll suffer through it of you own volition. It's genius. A commentary on the nature of the player. Sheer brilliance.
ga♥
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2017
- Messages
- 7,977
House at the the edge of time is better than the enigma under every aspect, encounter design, enemies, loot, and placement in the timeline.
HATEOT is a good dungeon, actually now that I think of it, Kingmaker dungeons were all pretty good.
HATEOT is a good dungeon, actually now that I think of it, Kingmaker dungeons were all pretty good.
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Delterius
Arcane
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