How long is the game?

[Witch ~]

I dont have a lot of freetime but I saw its on sale for a pretty good price

[Frostfeather]

I've seen estimates anywhere between 50 and 300 hours, with most closer to 100. So it's pretty long.

You also will likely need to spend many hours planning and researching builds and Owlcat specific mechanics, Feats, etc. So if you don't have a lot of time, it's probably not a good fit unless you want to turn down the difficulty and just blow through combat for the story.

[Radiac]

There's a ton of internet research on this game on YouTube and websites. I recommend looking at some of that. BringItDon did at least two runs through the whole game on YouTube. I think he managed to finish like 100 hour long episodes or so. I'd watch at least some of that.

The game mechanics are based on, and stick fairly close to the paper and pencil Pathfinder rules, but the game itself does not explain how those rules actually work, for the most part relying on people to have read and become familiar with that on their own.

[Witch ~]

I have to research WHAT

[Gresh]

A casual playthrough is probably ~100 hours. You can mitigate that by tweaking the difficulty settings and automating the kingdom management portion of the game.

It's definitely not a short game if you are stressed for play time... and the Pathfinder systems are like a more complicated version of D&D.

That said, it's a really good CRPG. Probably my favorite. And there's a rogue-like mode if you just want to jump in and play around with builds in quick dungeons.

[Radiac]

Originally posted by Witch ~:

I have to research WHAT

YOU don't have to research anything you don't want to research, I'm just saying there's TONS of other people who've done tons of deep dives on stuff you might be interested in knowing, like custom character builds for optimum performance, where all the loot is, what the guy in the place says when you say "Joe sent me" to him, etc. There are whole websites and like hundreds of hours of YouTube stuff on this game there for you, if you want to access any of it. If you don't that's your call. I think a familiarity with CRPGs in general helps, and having played any kind of d20 DnD system since DnD 3.0 would be of use. Ability scores, to-hit rolls, Feats, whether or not different bonuses stack, etc.

I OBSESSED over the game before and during my one successful run of it so far. You don't necessarily have to. That said, don't come crying to me when you get trapped in a dungeon and starve to death. The game assumes you'll reload from previous saves a lot. I personally recommend keeping a long backlog of old saves, just in case you get into trouble. Especially if you're not going to look up spoilers ahead of time.

[Invisible]

Depends on realtime vs. turn based. Turnbased takes far longer than 100h.

[Leeux]

I'm at 160hs just begun ch6, I recon it'll be around maybe 30 to 50hs more until I finish it, but I played the Varnhold's Lot DLC in the middle section before starting ch4.

I'm using mods for the kingdom management (Kingdom resolution mod) and also Bag of tricks to change some stuff I didn't like.

Also, I started one playthrough at first and decided to restart it when I realized I didn't like the choices I made on my character level up wise (didnt want to burn an in-game respec for that, as I didnt advance much in the story at that point,) so that also boosted my hours played a bit.

But I had some idea of how the game played, as I did watch someone else playing and explaining it first: I'd recommend Owlbear Charmer's completionist let's play, just the couple of first videos on his playlist should be enough to get you started... it's currently unfinished, but with just watching the intro videos, and a couple of the first gameplay videos on the series would be enough to get an idea on how the game goes.

Watching his LP whats made me start to play the game in the first place, as I had on my list for the longest time but I was kinda on the fence due to the complexity and unbalancedness of it all.

[Frostfeather]

OP, I guess you should first consider if this crunchy type of CRPG is really what you're looking for in the first place before worrying about the length. While you can ignore the mechanics complexity by turning down the difficulty, I would recommend many other games for the story first before this one.

Originally posted by Invisible:

Depends on realtime vs. turn based. Turnbased takes far longer than 100h.

Depends. If you max the speed, use hotkeys, regularly ambush enemies and build somewhat around having relatively high Initiative and damage, it's barely longer at all.

[Invisible]

Originally posted by night4:

Originally posted by Invisible:

Depends on realtime vs. turn based. Turnbased takes far longer than 100h.

Depends. If you max the speed, use hotkeys, regularly ambush enemies and build somewhat around having relatively high Initiative and damage, it's barely longer at all.

This sounds very boring. I love to think about every move, which spell could be the right one, what move could the enemy do.

But everyone likes it different.

[Frostfeather]

You still have to think about every move. Every spell, enemy saves, resists, etc, along with how it's best to ambush while keeping in mind resource management.

It also opens up different group compositions/strategies because you don't necessarily need a dedicated tank or healer. I think it's more boring to always have those roles or to always use certain classes/dips in every run.