I’m really enjoying it so far. I’m solidly in the middle of Act 2 and about to start The Winter March part 1.
I’m playing it on my Steam Deck and I’m really liking how I’ve got the controls set up. I grabbed a community template and made some additions of my own. I added a virtual menu for the left trackpad and changed the right joystick to handle scrolling long text and menus.
The story is good and I’m hanging in there on Easy. I figured I’d end up going down to the Story difficulty.
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Pillars of Eternity is very good. The writing is fun and I liked a lot of the classes. Especially Cipher.
I think the second one is better though. You get a ship! And the powers are per-fight instead of per-rest, so you don’t have to worry about camping much at all. Also multiclassing is fun. I wasn’t a heavy optimizer but my rogue/monk just punched stuff into chunks.
It’s on my Steam wishlist. Since I already have a copy of Tyranny I’ll probably play that before Deadfire, but I definitely want to play it! Hopefully Avowed will be good too whenever that comes out.
If you’re looking for similar games to move onto, Baldur’s Gate 3 is in its own tier, right at the top of the genre. Not only that but it’s a step forward mechanically and presentation wise for the whole genre as well. In this game I once threw an angry hyena at an enemy. Later just threw enemies at their friends.
Pathfinder Kingmaker and Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous are both excellent as well. Especially Wrath, though still with the aged style graphically speaking. You can cast touch spells through weapons! In the second one I became a lich queen with an army of undead, it might be my favourite CRPG ever because of that. It’s awesome.
Divinity Original Sin and its sequel are also brilliant, made by bg3 Devs Larian on their own ruleset. I’m currently replaying the second one with my sister (yep, it’s co-op), we are both playing undead. We are healed by poison and damaged by healing. Very cool.
This is my favourite genre, if you can’t tell.
When it comes to combat and character creation, I’d argue the Pathfinder games surpasses BG3. BG3 obviously looks better and has a more interactive world, but the combat is lacking compared to the builds you can do in Pathfinder. More races, way more classes, more intricate builds, higher level cap, etc…
For people that are more into combat and kiting out your characters, I think they’ll enjoy those games more. Not too say BG3 is bad or anything.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is incredibly detailed in combat though, so much so that it takes sometime to wrap your head around it. I’m addition to pushing and jumping, which both sound so simple but have a huge effect on gameplay, there’s also environmental things that you just don’t think of because in other games in the genre it isn’t an option. As an example, there’s a giant spider that wanders around on webs and summons smaller spiders from eggs, you can sneak around to destroy the eggs before combat to stop summoning and destroy the webs whilst the spider is on them to cause it to drop and take extreme damage.
So you’re right that character building may be better in Pathfinder - I really do love casting touch spells through weapons, it’s great - the combat in Baldur’s Gate 3 is far more interactive and dynamic. It’s also way more accessible.
Either is a good choice, but I give the edge to Baldur’s Gate 3 because, well, every single line is voice acted and motion captured, and the freedom you get in the story is astounding. It’s such a profound improvement, a night and day difference from the basically everything else in the genre.
the combat in Baldur’s Gate 3 is far more interactive and dynamic. It’s also way more accessible.
I agree, they also solved the “everything is on fire” problem that Divinity had with its element interactions. And it is what I hope the most Owlcat takes inspiration from.
It still feels like the game is lacking in the combat diversity department compared to Pathfinder. From the way you buff characters before a dungeon/combat to how you can specialise your characters. Some of it may just be product of how Pathfinder and D&D 5ed are, and some of it may be a product of trying to make it more accessible as you put it, at the cost of choice and complexity.
As an example, there’s a giant spider that wanders around on webs and summons smaller spiders from eggs, you can sneak around to destroy the eggs before combat to stop summoning and destroy the webs whilst the spider is on them to cause it to drop and take extreme damage.
Yeah, never got to fight that boss. Started (and ended) the combat by eldritch blasting the poor baby over the edge into the abyss when I first saw it.
No doubt BG3 is a better game for the general gaming crowd, but if combat and complex character building is your jam, I’d say Pathfinder might be a more enjoyable game.
I think it’s simpler character creation-wise because DND has gotten simpler in the same area, definitely seems much less complex than before.
Wrath is going to be my favourite for a very long time I suspect because of the Lich thing. I’ve always wanted that since playing DND games as a kid and it’s the only game that allowed it. Then it went above and beyond, I could reanimate almost anything, it was great.
Lich seems like they have some cool unique options for them. Did you go with all the undead companions?
So far only done Azata and Aeon runs, been thinking about doing a more evil mythic path later in the year when I got time.
Oh yeah, you’ve got to go full chaotic evil for the lich. I revived Staunton Vane (it’s been a while now, that’s the dwarf with the tragic backstory who works for evil woman whose name I’ve forgotten I believe) as an undead, I had a few lich only companions who were undead (they don’t talk much though, most of them whine about being controlled if I remember right), my city was dark and almost desolate, filled almost entirely with undead subjects. My councillors, the ones still alive, were a bit terrified and hopeless. By the end my Lich was so good at supporting the undead characters that I started to just go with a full undead party. Poor enemies must’ve been terrified.
It was incredibly macabre and grim, of course, but it was so damn cool.
As a soon potential buyer, how is the track pad for mouse central games? My biggest concern is playing old crpgs with anything like the control scheme on Switch. It was a waste of 30 bucks to get Baldur‘s Gate on Switch for the control alone in my experience.
I love it. The key is setting the triggers as the left and right clicks though. I find clicking the trackpad not great for precision. There is a certain level of tinkering/customizing that will be needed to get the most out of the controls.
I’ve played several 20 year old FPS games with absolutely no native controller support and completed them all. If you put in a little work in getting the controls how you like them it makes it hard to play stuff without all the Steam Deck options.
Trackpad mouse controls are great, even for strategy games. You can fine tune them even further if default is not for your liking.
Aside from the Steam OS I think the trackpads are the other big feature for me to choose SD over the competition.
What other crpg style games have you played and enjoyed? I’m trying to figure out if I should play it or give something else a shot
I think Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 are better gameplay wise but the world building and lore in Pillars is unmatched.
I wanted to check out Pillars because I think Avowed looks cool, but I do see Divinity Original Sin 2 on sale pretty frequently so I might pick it up. I’m still trying to take a big bite out of my backlog before buying more games I won’t end up playing for years. (I finally played GTA5 last month.)
Personally I was a huge fan of Tyranny. It’s built on the same engine as POE, but I liked the story, worldbuilding, and characters a lot more.
We need more villain-as-protagonist games. Tyranny giving you evil choices that were both meaningful, and reasonable, is so much better than the usual “I’m the hero, but I do enjoy kicking puppies on weekends” evil choices in most RPGs.
The thing is, it’s not really villain-as-protagonist. It’s more like “goon-as-protagonist”. You are just a cog in the real villain’s machine. That’s why the choices are so interesting. Because they are often trolley-problems constrained by the world Kyros has created. So you don’t get choices like “will you kill this baby or not” because then it’s easy to not be the bad guy. You get choices like “Kyros demands someone from this town is getting killed. You can choose this baby or this old person. You can also choose not to make a choice, but that would be shirking your job as a judge and omniscient daddy Tunon wouldn’t like it”
I also got that game for free from Amazon and I’m planning on playing that next! The premise is pretty cool!
BG3 runs like a dream on steam deck.
Until act 3 😬😬
I’m sure I’ll pick it up eventually. One of my friends had to have a talk with her husband about how much she was playing that game.
BG3 isn’t a bad game but it hasn’t really grabbed me.
On what settings? Mine mimics a jet engine every time I fire up BG3, no matter what settings or scaling I used so far and I already have the quieter fan in the SD.
The two Pathfinder games by owlcat are also great.
Torment: tides of Numenera plays similar to PoE, although I’m mainly recommending it because it was my gateway into the Numenera universe, itself more interesting than the OK game.
I loved the original Fallout games. Pillars is a lot like the original two Baldur’s Gate games and the other games like it. Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment. Though I haven’t really earnestly played any of them. I did play the Dark Alliance games when they were new and I was a kid, but those are action RPGs.
It’s good, but in the name of the Galaxy, those hour-long dialogues and exposition dumps!
I was enjoying it until I reached the first city. I hate city portions of RPGs.
I think I have this game on switch. I only played a little bit and gave up because I sucked so much. Maybe I should do exactly as you are, get it for cheap on deck and scale down the difficulty to story mode. I’ve heard it was a good game.
Glad you’re enjoying the CRPG. There’s plenty of older stuff that’s great in that vein too, one of my favorite older CRPGs that has a great story is Planescape: Torment.
