Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous is the best CRPG ever
Got back into Wrath after completing Baldur's gate 3 and this absolutely slaps harder than BG3. The Pathfinder system is far superior to DnD 5E and the sheer scale of the story is incredible.
The Evil Lich path is the best Evil Path I've ever played. Dark Urge is like loony toons in front of how evil I can be as a Lich which is also the best Undead/Necromancer playthrough I've ever had in any game. And you can be even MORE evil in other Mythic Paths like Swarm.
The mythic paths is the best system in a CRPG ever. The game feels wildly different depending on your Mythic Path. I've not played all of them yet but the amount itself is very good.
The combat is very good. I still have no idea how it ultimately works and while I like the feeling of uncertainty and freshness, many people might not like it. It's definitely far more complicated than 5E. The sheer amounts of Classes, Subclasses and abilities is also unparalleled. The easy switch between Turn based and realtime combat is pretty good when fighting hordes of trash mobs. I prefer Turn based myself but Realtime is very useful time to time.
You can definitely make mistakes with character creation and it's also more 'difficult' to respec characters compared to BG3 since they can only be respecced from the level they met you at.
The story is amazing. Imo it's better than the story of Baldur's gate 3. The characters are not as developed as Origin Characters in BG3 however which is somewhat of a downside. Also there is no full VA so reading is required and the writing is pretty good imo so it won't bore you.
The game definitely has pacing problems at multiple points through out the story. Enemy padding also gets really really bad by the end.
If you liked Baldur's gate 3 or any other CRPG, play this because it's superior.
Wrath is so fucking crunchy I love it, it took a long time to get used to its many systems but there is so much build variety and the voiced characters, while still limited imo by the flat tropes of fantasy, had some surprisingly good moments.
Bg3 does not allow me to make a Sensei Monk front liner who does not attack but stacks dodge ac while buffing the party with bard songs, bg3 does not allow a sneak attacking ray caster who snipes people with ice beams, bg3 does not allow for anything as interesting as the constitution-based Kineticist caster.
Also at the end of the day Wotr is FUCKING LONG, while that is intimidating it means that if it clicks with you, you have a seriously HUGE epic of a campaign to enjoy
Yeah but it isn't as satisfying to me tbh, the sneaking itself is more fleshed out in bg3 of course but it doesn't have the staggering number of interaction with skills and effects that the introduction of sneak attacks in Pathfinder offers
I mean yeah but I find sneaking more fun in BG3 because of how open the gameplay is to experimentation. Sneaking Barrelmancy is literally the most powerful playstyle.
It's true, overall it's more functional than Pathfinder's stealth which barely exists beyond "flat footed" attacks. But the stealth was very similar in Divinity Original Sin and tbh I thought the overall combat of those games fit that stealth system better. In BG3 I often feel like barrelmancy kind of trivializes the rest of the combat systems and is just a test of whether or not you did a bunch of preparation/collection beforehand. It's fun but I didn't feel much compulsion to mess with it again after the novelty wore off.