I can't believe I paid this much for this game

[Ozark Rebel]

TLDR:

Old Man Sings To Clouds

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Wow. I'm absolutely blown away. I bought this on sale on a whim when is came up in my suggested games feed after briefly playing BGIII. I just couldn't get into that system. Not sure what it was? Maybe too generic?

For $3.99 what did I have to lose?

Nothing. This game is incredible. I was many years ago big into D&D. From the earliest days and then picked it back up again with the 2nd ed. as a young adult. Had a great group at the time and really was into it.

Fast forward 30 years of trying, and not caring for most, CRPG's along comes this one that has a following and that Ive never even heard of.

It captures the old school vibe that none of the others I've tried had. It seems likes most of the current systems dumbs down the experience. Classes abilities and races seemed too intermingled. Too samey. Everything too safe, and often times for the worst, misguided reasons.

Not so with wotr.

An overwhelming number of choices in character creation and development. An excellent story that has me doing something I sadly rarely did; enjoy the lore. The voice acting is a little stale, but honestly, I play this while my wife watches tv so I have the sound down and I read the text. Love the turn based aspect. I moved on from D&D and my love is complex turn based wargames so this feels very natural to me.

Love the various NPC's and a nice mixture of enemies. I do wish the encyclopedia would give a pic of the various enemies in the entry. God of War does a good job here.

The settings are very nice as are the spell effects. I do wish I had a better view of things and would have really liked a tilt of the camera and closer/further view. I find the camera controls to be the weakest part.

The campaign is very interesting even though Im not too far past the beginning of act 2. Not really sure what to do at this point. My army isn't very strong and I'm basically visiting locales around the map.

I hear many don't like the crusade element. I hope I do. If implemented decent, I'd be all about a dual layered story, especially considering my love of tabletop wargames. Sadly, I expect the actual combat to be too simplistic and repetitive in this mode.

I'm playing on normal difficulty and not changing my companions leveling up path. With that said, I can see several runs with endless options on builds. Not a min/max player, I'm fine with how it goes. So far I'd say if anything it's a bit too easy at this difficulty.

The length of the game so far is also impressive. The side quests have been interesting so far as well. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think the UI is just fine.

I don;t know the warhammer lore at all but I will gladly buy this developers next game. They've earned that much just with this game.

Whew. I don't really post much anywhere and I apologize for the long rant. I started this post just to briefly say what a good deal I got buying this and how I'd gladly pay full price.

I don't dare reread the convoluted thoughts I hammered out. I just don't have the will to edit into an articulate thought.

PS

Get off my lawn hippies

[HydraLord]

Hi there

Most enjoyable game indeed, one of my favourites if not the one.

Hope you enjoy the game
Have fun

[Kyutaru]

My gripes with it mainly come from the system itself. Unlike 5e, it doesn't exactly favor a smooth transition into endgame. Many times a build won't come online till lvl 6 or later and you end up feeling very mediocre till it does. Some builds rely on their mythic 8 unlocks... like that's just a lot of waiting around to get strong. And really, there's no reason for it. Spells could have scaled or been upcasted instead of making Sleep useless after the start of the game. Trap feats didn't have to be traps if they had effects that were still useful late game. And the missing, so much missing, really just a stat check to make sure you spent your resources buffing. Whenever a wall comes up, it feels like it's all down to one character, the guy who happens to have the right weapon and DR combo and everyone else supports them. Buffing everyone against sickness is too costly so exploits like baiting stinking clouds with a single delayed tank become the norm. It really makes it feel gamified rather than coherent.

Hopefully whatever game comes next utilizes PF2, which does a lot to control many of these problems.

[Ozark Rebel]

Thank ya Hydra.

Kyutara, maybe its because I'm not very far? You mention endgame. Maybe because I'm such a casual player where the story and a bit of luck is what I'm after? You mention buffing. Maybe its the difficulty? I rarely have to restart a save after a humiliating fight. Most of my second attempts are better tactics during the battle. So far I haven't had to change up what I bring into the battle, just utilize things different.

I don't doubt your concerns. They're probably very valid to a player such as yourself. I guess its my natural casual play and approach to it that allows me to just enjoy it. It may all be naivety. Perhaps I will discover what you attest to? Time will tell. I usually abandon games by now. Even ones I'm enjoying. Except for a few favorites, most just don't keep me for long.

[Crusader993]

Originally posted by Ozark Rebel:

Wow. I'm absolutely blown away. I bought this on sale on a whim when is came up in my suggested games feed after briefly playing BGIII. I just couldn't get into that system. Not sure what it was? Maybe too generic?

For $3.99 what did I have to lose?

Nothing. This game is incredible.

Any role-playing gamer who has even the slightest interest in classic cRPGs will agree with you on all points. ;)

It is also my personal favorite cRPG.

The best way to say thank you and support Owlcat is to buy as many parts of the game as possible at full price - you can do that after the fact if you think $3.99 is a joke for such a masterpiece. By the way, also for completely selfish reasons: the more profit Owlcat makes with its cRPGs, the higher the probability that Owlcat will bring similarly high-quality role-playing games onto the market in the future.

Don't misunderstand, I can understand everyone who buys on sale, I usually do that too, but with Owlcat I make the famous exception... and I don't regret a single cent. :)

Have fun with WotR! The first playtrough is always the best! :)

[fourfourtwo79]

You can tell somebody hasn't progressed past Chapter 2 when they're praising a mixture of enemies. Curious how this will go down by the end. Owlcat show a lot of promise.

However, they've been pumping out 150-200 hours campaigns plus numerous DLC plus Enhanced Editions in the space of just a couple years. That's an output that hasn't been seen in the genre since SSI, when production was far simpler. Let's say there's quite a bit of a quantity over quality mentality going on. Not sure they'd need that -- you could cut their games easily 30% short, iterate and polish the best bits, and they'd still be dwarving even CRPG classics of yesteryore in terms of length.

[Shahadem]

The Crusade element imo is very enjoyable if you cheat to give yourself the army you are supposed to have.

Although enemy spells are just way too damaging. You can easily lose an entire unit stack or multiple unit stacks and there is not a single thing you can do about it.

And the horrible morale system makes it unfun too. If you do poorly you snowball into a hole you cannot leave. At endgame when you have whipped the demons but need to wait for 8 months for a specific date to roll around you will have -100 morale and no way of actually raising it because your morale will fall by 5 every single day FOR NO REASON.

And when you have negative morale your income and recruitment is reduced to zero (or made negative) so you can't increase your army size and can't increase your morale, and your soldiers will run around randomly during battles and have their turn skipped.

This is not a realistic or logical system.

[Vertigo]

I think the game is a solid purchase that will offer many hours of entertainment for anyone loving that old school cRPG vibe. I have over 600 hours in it.

THe only thing I will say is that it is a good game that you will notice more rough edges with time. It could be a bug here, some questionable alignment/writing decisions, and some other design choices. Owlcat games also tend to start strong but start to putter closer to the endgame.

I would absolutely say it deserves the praise it gets, but I am sure some of this will make sense around your 3rd or 4th replay.

[Kyutaru]

Originally posted by Ozark Rebel:

Thank ya Hydra.

Kyutara, maybe its because I'm not very far? You mention endgame. Maybe because I'm such a casual player where the story and a bit of luck is what I'm after? You mention buffing. Maybe its the difficulty? I rarely have to restart a save after a humiliating fight. Most of my second attempts are better tactics during the battle. So far I haven't had to change up what I bring into the battle, just utilize things different.

I don't doubt your concerns. They're probably very valid to a player such as yourself. I guess its my natural casual play and approach to it that allows me to just enjoy it. It may all be naivety. Perhaps I will discover what you attest to? Time will tell. I usually abandon games by now. Even ones I'm enjoying. Except for a few favorites, most just don't keep me for long.

So it's not about the challenge, though difficulty settings do present more of it, I usually play on Core which has more dmg, more stats, more enemies in battle, and none of the protections against death and dismemberment. Rather the system encourages you to choose feats that are either suboptimal in the early game but create a stronger build late game or choose ones that are suboptimal late game but make your early game easier. Certain spells operate the same way, great early and bad late, yet on Core you can't respec them away from you if you're a spontaneous caster. You're stuck with your choices forever so you have to decide whether you want to build a bad early game character to make the endgame even easier. My sorcerer didn't even have much in the way of early spells because most of the slots were going towards endgame buff setups.

There are some other weird things like being exhausted only affecting physical stats (I can go days without sleep and my brain isn't too tired to cast magic) which strongly benefits a magical party or the fact that my animal companions don't have exhaustion themselves, so they can carry me if I buff them magically. Things like this lend towards playing a certain way that overall feels very exploitative. You can choose not to and all of that is a self-imposed restriction, but I just generally like when games don't have trap options or bad builds but allow a more freeform expression of what you'd like to represent. There are plenty of Feats in the game that you will never select in a million playthroughs because they simply suck compared to other feats and you already get too few feats as it is. Usually your feats are used to pigeonhole you into a very specific combo or playstyle per character, generalist feat spread are extremely bad. Even concepts like a paladin that can cure all maladies are beyond possibility because you're very limited by choice.

The game is still a cakewalk either way. People have even created harder difficulties for it. It just gets annoying playing over and over again feeling crippled until a magical point where suddenly your character is viable because all the pieces are finally in place. You don't really get that in something like Larian's games because your characters feel viable from day one to endgame. Part of that is just Pathfinder's 3e system demanding you hyperspecialize to stack buffs, but the more you specialize, the less options outside of your specialization become viable. Every character turns into a one-trick pony unless they're a prepared spellcaster who can swap strategies midgame.

You'll enjoy the game regardless but it's just a quirk I've noticed that irks me. New Pathfinder (2nd edition) thankfully does a lot to resolve some of this and really get you feeling like characters are strong throughout their progression.

[Triple G]

Originally posted by Ozark Rebel:

I hear many don't like the crusade element. I hope I do. If implemented decent.

It´s okay. Doesn´t have much depth, but i get that it´s basically a side element, even if the game is about the crusade.

It´s imho a nice little distraction.

Else Kyutaru and Vertigo already said what i could say. I think it´s a solid purchase, but there might be a few issues - some of which seem to be avoidable. Overall it´s a good game. But it´s perhaps the one which i find the most annoying, but still play. Sometimes it feels more like work than playing a game, because of the standard things to do, which could have been automated. Then again it´s nice to have some big CRPG in which choices matter.

Oh - and nobody said something about the riddles. Imho doing riddles is not the strength of Owlcat. They seem mostly random to me, and even if they provide hints sometimes - these aren´t of much use (usually). I would like to do some riddles - same as the crusade mode as distraction - but how they are presented in the game, i´d rather open the guide to finish them instead of doing trial and error till they are solved. While my guess is that these guides either also did that via trial and error, or looked into the code.

[Ozark Rebel]

Triple G, theres no doubting your passion for the game from the small bit of posts Ive read here so far. You'd not criticize something that wasn't worth your time in doing so.

TBH, not much of a riddle guy and that is one way Ill cheat. I just don't have the time to sit and figure them out. Or maybe its the desire? Brainpower?

Ill prolly keep playing this till I get bored, stuck, or frustrated.

Its summer starting in these hills in the ozarks and the rivers are already calling my name. In the meantime its this game that has my attention. Heck, I'm thinking about a restart now just to treat it more seriously. Might even try to get Toolbox(?) working if nothing more than to tinker around.

[anfindel13]

NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, plays Owlcat Pathfinder games for the puzzles and riddles. Well, maybe one or two sado-masochists out there do.

[ShallowGoddess]

I'd sooner flay my own flesh than play any of Nenio's questline, precisely because of all the puzzles involved.

All in all though, I'd say this game is good. It actually feels like an RPG unlike some other games out there *cough* Skyrim *cough* *cough* Starfield *cough*, and I can easily roleplay pretty much any character I can imagine, from the noblest paladin to the Lich from Adventure Time via being a servant of Rovagug who seeks the undeath mythic path in order to bring the silence of the grave to all as tribute to his chaotic master.