Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

"Something's wrong 'cause my mind is fading

Ghetto-blasting, disintegrating

Rock'n'roll, know what I'm saying?                                          - no Beck, seriously, nobody ever knew what you were on about!

Everywhere I look there's a devil waiting"

Beck - Devil's Haircut

 

Among Owlcat Games' quirks, they appear to hold up as their greatest source of inspiration, their aspirational peak of design, Neverwinter Nights 2's main campaign. As far as duplicating the centering effect of an edifice like Crossroad Keep on a roleplaying campaign this is all well and good. However, the NWN games are frequently referenced for some very solid reasons as a lull of mediocrity between the Infinity Engine series and the later DA:O / PoE1 revival of tactical, plot-based cRPGs. My last Pathfinder post dealt with the infuriatingly, insultingly simpleminded companion roster, but that's not the only aspect of Wrath of the Righteous giving me flashbacks to 2006.

 

The subdivision into official, discrete acts is more pronounced than it was in Kingmaker, Wrath's immediate predecessor, though this mostly facilitates spotting development sinks. Though Act 3 logically embodies the main thrust of your crusade into the Worldwound, Act 4 obviously ate up more than its share of graphics, dialogue and encounter design (to admittedly memorable effect) leaving Act 5 noticeably threadbare after it. And, just as with Kingmaker, Owlcat's desperation to market an epic-length campaign litters Wrath with obvious timesinks. Enemies' sky-high stats (especially armor) over-emphasize D&D's fundamental over-randomization to force reloads depending on critical success. Some of the adventure maps (Drezen, Lost Chapel) are designed for time-consuming backtracking. Worst of all, while the time constraints of Kingmaker's barony management were unnecessarily (and obtusely) punishing, Wrath's lack of deadlines is under closer scrutiny an excuse to eat up the player's time trying to amass three or four large stacks of barely trickling troop reinforcements.

And then there's the classes.

On one hand, the literally dozens of new classes and sub-classes make for a wide gamut of minimally divergent replayability, should you be so inclined. On the other hand, where introducing a new class used to imply some shift in baseline function (barbarians, bards) the new idea seems to be just slapping some ludicrously overpowered free feat/spell (like my witch of the veil's infinite swift action casts of combo teleportation / invisibility) on an existing class and calling it new. Or endless more variation of sorcerous lack of foresight in not preparing spells. Or duplicating (and therefore obviating) existing prestige classes like arcane tricksters as core classes like the eldritch scoundrel. I was annoyed enough by swashbucklers and spirit shamans in NWN2 and multiplying that redundancy and imbalance twenty-fold isn't helping matters. The D&D class system desperately needs a full revamp.

 

NWN2 was also a laughably easy game which moreover boosted the player to level 3 before even the first quest. At first glance Wrath would seem the exact opposite. You spend quite a bit of time at low levels fighting vastly more powerful demons with highly frustrating immunities and resistances. You're not showered with full sets of gear from the start as you would be in games from the past couple of decades. You'll certainly learn to appreciate cantrips in Act 1. On the other hand, instead of sedate low-level survival, this mostly amounts to overblown dramatics. By level 2 you're already getting moderate healing potions as loot and finding legendary artifacts. By level 5 you're deciding the fate of hordes of angels. Low levels don't feel low, and the entire campaign begins to look like some meta-commentary on level scaling, pitting you against nonsensically overpowered enemies then just handing you nonsensically overpowered freebie "mythic" abilities like Last Stand and Shake it Off to compensate. The overblown badassery degrades the campaign's potential to mostly a tween power trip.

Which is not to say it's all bad.

Compared to Kingmaker's infamous bugginess, Wrath plays much smoother and improves quality of life quite a bit with a functional turn-based mode (which occasionally bugs out and needs to be toggled on and off when characters freeze) bonus overlap warnings and more tooltips reminding you of spell availability to various characters when making your level-up selections, mounted combat and even wider pet variety, wider gear availability and better choreographed fights against mixed melee/range/fighter groups. On the other hand, it trips once again over its desperation to overwhelm munchkins with awesomesauceness in everything from conflicts to character models to spell effects. Not that it isn't hilarious seeing my reducepersoned hobbit next to my enraged pet glabrezu:

I am literally the size of a toe.

- and I'm pleased to see demons acting... demonic, truly evil instead of so many games' kid-friendly wishy-washy walking-on-the-grass Bowdlerised heck-devilry:

 

 - but quite often you're stuck waddling the screen back and forth trying to see what's happening under the slather of glitz:

There's a ghost under there somewhere. Good luck finding it.

- and the lack of a grid not only trivializes positioning for things like flanking but yields some... unintuitive melee engagement:

As usual though, writing suffers even worse. Alignment shifts provide opportunities to reinforce any of the four axes (and never combos) almost every single time, with some painfully forced interpretations. An evil dialogue option, for instance, should not mention control unless it's also acknowledged as lawful evil, and the CHAOTIC Evil demons spend entirely too much time and energy enforcing slavery. Though thankfully it can no longer be accused of laziness (as Kingmaker's) the texts could've used a couple more passes for redundant verbiage and repeatedly fall into the trap of ordering the player how to react... and missing the mark.

By that point in the campaign I hadn't seen the mook in question for two acts, had rebelled against his queen's leadership, and my sole remaining interest in him would've been to zombify his corpse. To be sure, Owlcat even snuck some commentary into the game on the exasperating impossibility of pleasing everyone, in (ironically) one of the more pleasing bits of flavor text:

- but this is a bit hard to swallow from a company whose reach constantly exceeds its grasp. Maybe instead of implementing fifty classes poorly they could've limited themselves to fifteen more balanced ones. Maybe instead of padding the campaign out to 150 hours, 75 would do. Maybe instead of nine mythic paths you could do with five and spend more time looking for writers capable of making them memorable instead of infuriating (Trickster) or paid more attention to awkward, mis-worded quest prompts, descriptions, etc. For instance a line in the Ineluctable Prison: "You sense a familiar undead spirit that is doing its best to hide from you." cannot be solved by the obviously indicated True Seeing spell or by any amount of perception buffs or by sneaking in while invisible (don't look at me like that, I was stumped) or by lifesense (yes I know it said undead; stumped!) but automatically progresses after you clear the dungeon, not that anything whatsoever you do along your way indicates it might be revealing sneaky ghosts.

 

Again, I don't want to sound like I'm completely bashing Wrath of the Righteous. I wouldn't have spent so much time on it were that the case. It's actually refreshing to play a themed campaign instead of most games' Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny approach, and some of the dungeons (like the Ineluctable Prison) do a better job of mixing ongoing plot, episodic encounters, trash mobs, traps and nuisance / boredom factors to keep things fresh. That halfway through Act 5 I could have my ass saved by a humble little Remove Sickness spell speaks highly of Wrath's ability to keep you on your toes.

In fact, looking at various forum threads and walkthroughs, Wrath does seem to have cashed in at least some of its potential for replayability and player customization. Aside from my own witchy lichdom my party, as is my wont, was relatively lightweight and heavy on support casters. Fights requiring burst damage gave me no end of grief, like Chorussina who would've been impossible without a scroll of Create Pit I had squirreled away, or the demodand cabal in Alushinyrra. But, from their complaints, others had far more trouble than I did with the Pathetic Quasit, Playful Darkness, Shadow Dragon and Eternal Guardian, where my large bag of tricks let me exploit their weak points. (hint: you can polymorph Playful Darkness... and repurpose it)

I wholeheartedly approved of the neat little solution offered by my lichdom to the final decision. And hey, some of the characters are interesting enough, like Areelu, Zacharius or the Storyteller... but the better moments are constantly undercut one scene later - e.g. when you do finally discover the (rather trite and predictable) event which set off the villain's rampage, a pop-up message informs you "now you know" the better to sap the grand reveal of any possible gravitas. Owlcat tried much too hard to appeal to shitheaded tweens, from the gratuitous high-level enemies and gratuitous "mythic" freebie feats to the simpleminded characters strutting through overstated world-shaking events, a world in which there are no big actors, only big roles.

 

Though Wrath of the Righteous has its good points, the main reason to play Owlcat's games remains a lack of meaningful competition in story-based, tactical cRPGs.