Released in September 2018, funded by a crowdfunding campaign, Pathfinder: Kingmaker from the Moscow studio Friv2Online Studio made gamers talk about two revivals at once - the revival of the classic CRPG genre, forgotten after the heyday of the Millennium, and the revival of the Russian gaming industry, which also reached its heyday by the mid-2000s, but has since fallen into decline.
With all the controversial moments of Kingmaker, the game was a success - not least thanks to the fans of the genre who were hungry for new products. The sequel was only a matter of time, and today we are pleased to welcome Wrath of the Righteous, designed to build on the success of its predecessor.
The new Pathfinder was also funded on Kickstarter and raised over $2 million against a stated goal of $300,000. Not the largest budget by modern standards, but it was not spent on Hollywood actors either. Therefore, in the end, it turned out, albeit again not without flaws and controversial points, but worthy of developing the ideas of the classics and at the same time an original game that you can be proud of without exaggeration.
FOR FAITH AND LIGHT
The plot of Wrath of the Righteous takes place in the same universe as the action of Kingmaker, but is not a direct continuation. This time instead of the Stolen Lands we are waiting for Mendev, called the "crusading kingdom". This state, led by the queen-paladin Golfri, stands guard over Golarion from the World Plague - a gap between dimensions into which demons poured from the Abyss, one of the so-called planes of existence (layers of reality) of this universe. It is noteworthy that the Abyss and Hell are completely different concepts in the context of Pathfinder.
And there are a lot of such nuances in the game, as any good RPG should be. Thanks to the solid tabletop roots and the high-quality work of the scriptwriters, the setting and lore of the game are simply superbly worked out and are revealed literally in everything - dialogues, descriptions of objects, surrounding objects and, of course, books and notes. Many of the concepts mentioned in the texts and dialogues are highlighted in the style of Wikipedia, as was done, for example, in Tyranny. You can hover over and get a quick help.
Returning to the setting and history, Mendev, under the leadership of his queen, has been waging a constant war with demons for many years, arranging crusades with varying success, of which there were already four at the start of the game. Losing people, and sometimes entire cities. The Fifth Crusade is yet to begin, and our hero, wounded and unconscious, arrives in the city of Kenabres, which is almost on the border of the World Plague, one of the strongholds of the fight against the demonic threat. Accurately on the day of the city - war is war, and the party is on schedule.
Naturally, had this party gone according to plan, it wouldn't have been a fantasy RPG . Having healed from the dragoness guardian of the city, we only have time to drink a couple of mugs of beer and take part in some entertainment, after which a sudden blow of demonic forces falls on the city, led by Lord Deskari himself - a giant insect-like demon capable of killing even a dragon - which he, in fact, does .
Scattered defenders hastily retreat to more or less safe enclaves, but hope is not lost yet - after all, there is a hero who can turn the tide of battle and play a key role in the Fifth Crusade, driving the demons back into the Abyss. As they say, guess who.
From all of the above, it is easy to understand that the plot as a whole is quite heavily saturated with typical fantasy clichés. Here you have “chosenness”, and a suddenly disrupted holiday, and doom with a bit of hope - almost a complete set. Surprisingly, despite the rational understanding of this fact, the game does not feel worse at all. Perhaps it's the little details that make Golarion's world stop looking like black and white in the spirit of "high" fantasy and seem much more fresh, real and alive.
Of course, this is not a gloomy world like Ravenloft, not an all-out war without uniquely positive heroes, as in Warhammer, and not a mundane "dark fantasy" a la Game of Thrones. But things are far from smooth in Mendeva.
The rich, despite the demonic invasion, arrange parties with dances on naked tables, local criminals use the existing mess for robberies and looting, the inquisitors, who care for business and order, are ready to execute without trial and investigation at the slightest suspicion, and even the queen herself, the viceroy of the good goddess Iomedai, prolongs her youth with expensive potions, the cost of which can easily feed almost everyone in need educators .
Developers through the mouth of their characters are not afraid to break off a strong word or raise sharp questions such as social inequality and racial prejudice, and this is done very beautifully and elegantly, without a “message” that has set the teeth on edge. There are even LGBT characters here, but God forbid they see some kind of propaganda in them.
NOT IN BREADTH, BUT IN DEPTH
Perhaps someone will not like it, but the role-playing system and the combat of Wrath of the Righteous do not carry any significant innovations. This is still the same derivative of the third edition of D&D with some differences in details, which globally is not very different not only from Kingmaker, but also from most serious CRPGs in general. Classes, races, attributes, attack, defense, spell slots, saving throws - any fan of the genre will shed tears from familiar words, but it will be very difficult for a beginner to understand all these subtleties.
And not only for a beginner - even for me, with a completely completed Baldur's Gate series and a couple of years of playing a wide variety of Neverwinter Nights modules behind my back, after a long break, it was difficult to figure it out. I could almost physically feel the imaginary gears spinning in my head. Fortunately, in this case, the game provides flexible settings for the level of difficulty and automatic leveling of characters. From "acquaintance with the plot" to full hardcore. There is also a detailed tutorial here.
But the lack of new global ideas is compensated by excellent implementation. The developers perfectly succeeded in transferring the board rules to a computer format - and without too much fanfare, as it was stated in Baldur's Gate 3 . There are 25 character creation classes alone (twenty-five!), each of which has 6-7 subclasses, plus 13 additional ones with certain requirements that can be used for multiclassing.
Perhaps for the first time in isometric RPGs, mounted combat mechanics have been implemented - we have been waiting for this almost since the first Neverwinter Nights. And there are not just a lot of such details, but a lot - it is not possible to fit them into one article. To do this, there is an encyclopedia built into the game.
BALDUR'S GATE OF MIGHT AND MAGIC
The gameplay of Wrath of the Righteous can be described in three words - it's just "the same RPG". Everything is very similar to Kingmaker, but now we have a rotating camera, which really helps a lot - different angles allow you to see different details. Combat is real time with a pause, similar to the same Kingmaker, Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny. If you wish, you can turn on the turn-based mode in the style of "two actions per turn" with some nuances. Board roots are manifested in periodic skill checks in dialogues, interaction with environmental objects, and even text quests.
This is probably what the new Baldur's Gate would look like if Obsidian made it. A party with different satellite options, a sea of dialogue, side quests, formations, different ways to complete quests, the impact of actions on the worldview, semi-free movement around the game world - even the cursor of the end point of movement looks exactly the same, causing bouts of nostalgia. Of course, there are also differences related to convenience and some conventions for the sake of the so-called "quality of life" - for example, general inventory or instant collection of trophies after leaving the location.
But there are also unique mechanics here that develop the ideas embodied in Kingmaker. Each rest, we assign responsibility for guarding, camouflage, alchemy combined with cooking , and writing scrolls. Dishes can be prepared according to different recipes, each of them gives its own bonuses for the next day. And the presence of a war with demons in the setting led to such a moment as Corruption of the Abyss - resting in unsafe places (outside the city and the camp of one’s forces) increases a special scale, which, upon reaching a certain level, begins to give fines to parameters. To reset it, you need to, you guessed it, rest in a safe place.
But perhaps the most unusual and at the same time controversial mechanics of Wrath of the Righteous were the crusades, which replaced the management of the kingdom from Kingmaker. It is even difficult to call it mechanics - in fact, this is a separate game, but also not an invention of the developers, but a transfer of tabletop mechanics. Pazio, the creators of the original Pathfinder, are very fond of saturating their modules with management elements. In a computer implementation, this resulted in the creation of almost a special subgenre, which I would call "global RPG".
In terms of gameplay, the crusades look like building cities and forts, hiring units with a weekly increase, moving armies around the global map and turn-based tactical battles on a field lined with cells, where the general in command of the army gives him bonuses and can use spells, and the units themselves are indicated by a model with a number indicating their number. Doesn't it remind you of anything? However, this is not surprising - in Friv2Online Studio there are people from Nival who worked on the fifth "Heroes".
Perhaps someone will find this approach interesting and relevant to the original source, and he will be right in his own way. But in my opinion, an attempt to “attach” a global strategy to a CRPG looks somewhat overloaded and overly complicated. Of course, this is a matter of taste, but I would prefer a "pure" role-playing game.
THERE IS ROOM TO GROW
Let's touch on the technical part a bit. Judging it too harshly, perhaps, is not worth it - nevertheless, Wrath of the Righteous frankly falls short of the level of the AAA project, and compared to its analogues, everything is done very nicely. Although, for my taste, in terms of graphics and location design, the new Pathfinder is still inferior to the latest Divinity and Baldur's Gate 3 , but these are still players in a slightly different league.
The soundtrack is simple and unobtrusive, the voice acting, despite the Russian origin, is in English. And the game itself, most likely, was also made not in Russian - at least in the test version, I came across obvious translation flaws that were corrected in the final one. Now the Russian text is almost perfect, and the remaining shortcomings will almost certainly be fixed in the next patches.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous review - A new step towards rebirth and glory
But what Wrath of the Righteous is really worth scolding for is the interface and bugs. If everything on the game screen is more or less tolerable and relatively intuitive, then when considering the inventory, character screen, diary and other similar elements, the developers decided to return to the origins of the classic CRPG - or rather, leave them unchanged again, since in Kingmaker everything was exactly the same. And instead of laconic multi-window systems in the spirit of Divinity or Neverwinter Nights, the interface resembles old Infinity Engine D&D games, looking somewhat cumbersome and overloaded by modern standards.
Bugs will also be fixed for sure, and I didn’t notice any particularly critical and “game-breaking” among them, but annoying little things like characters suddenly freezing on a horse ( to solve the problem you have to dismount and move the hero and the horse separately - then everything is fine), sticking in narrow aisles (which is especially ironic when called Pathfinder) or the inability to sell goods are very annoying.
VERDICT
Wrath of the Righteous turned out to be the perfect sequel - developing the ideas of Kingmaker, it became better than its predecessor in literally everything. The game is certainly mandatory for all fans of not only the first part, but also the CRPG genre in general, especially in the current "lack of fish". When all Divinity, Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny have already been completed, and the full release of Baldur's Gate 3 is unclear how long to wait, the new Pathfinder is more than ever welcome.
Get ready to devote dozens of hours of your life to her. Perhaps more than once - the replay value here is quite significant. But be indulgent to the bugs and the difficulty of mastering. This game is clearly not for everyone, but if you give it a piece of your heart and mind, it will definitely repay you in return. And recently, the developers shared another great news - March 1, 2022 is scheduled for release on consoles.