Insanely cool CRPG, which I don't play a whole lot of because so many of them tend to drag. WOTR is long, and it's wordy, but the writing across the board is super compelling and the gameplay is great. Not nearly enough d20 adaptations attempt turn based combat faithful to the tabletops, and fewer still do it so well.
I think one of the most impressive aspects of the game is its reactivity in the mid and late game. It's a little railroady towards the beginning, and thematically much of the game pushes the player in a Lawful Good direction, but ultimately the choice is yours and I haven't played a game that made being this evil this much fun in a very long time. It might have the best tyrannical undead lord RP I've ever played, full stop. Choices have meaningful consequences in both the dramatic and mechanical sense, with many decisions influencing events far, far into the game in ways you don't always expect, which is just fantastic in a genre plagued with meaningless binary Paragon/Renegade dialogue trees. Even when going for a particular alignment, I found myself making a lot of value judgments based on my feelings because the characters and the plot had me emotionally invested in the goings-on. There aren't a lot of games that truly make me feel rotten and satisfied in equal measure for doing something evil, or so torn over figuring out the right thing to do.
The character writing is (mostly) top notch, with the worst examples just being sort of dull in comparison to the high notes. When the character writing hits the high notes, it REALLY hits the high notes. The companions, especially the neutral or evil-aligned ones, are filled with some real charmers. Daeran, your sassy gay evil aristocrat divine caster, is a treat. He carries a tragic backstory tinged with mystery, but ultimately his alignment is what it is simply because he is a hedonistic dickhead, and he's all too happy to explain this to you, no excuses. Then there's Woljif, tiefling thief and dumbass scoundrel, who's a hoot, but heralds a subplot about confidence and powerlessness that adds depth to the character you wouldn't expect. Camellia, half-elf shaman is... well, she's unforgettable. Wenduag, fucked up bloodthirster and half-spider mutant, is fascinating, seemingly puddle-deep when introduced but later revealing a remarkable complexity behind her backstabbing tendencies and might-makes-right philosophy. Regill, who is essentially Darth Vader in gnome form, might be the coolest companion in an RPG in decades. There are no hidden depths to Regill. He just rules. Even the side characters and antagonists are full of life. Areelu Vorlesh might be one of my favorite RPG villains since Irenicus, and in my opinion rivals the latter for complexity in character and motivation.
When these elements mix, when the themes meet the characters and the characters meet morality, this is where the game's writing really shines. There's a particular young priest, a farm boy of no more than 20, introduced close to the start of the game. For much of the early chapters he is a background character, you hear his story and get a feel for his personality by talking to him - he's meek and ineffectual, but some great courage in him inspired him to drop his plow, pick up a sword, and leave home to come fight the demons in Sarkoris. Later, he transitions to being an important merchant, developing his cleric powers and learning to heal your troops on the march. You get a sense that this boy is finding his wings, that one day he will lead a great and noble legacy as a hero of the crusade. Then chapter 3 happens. In a completely missable sidequest, after investigating the temple he has been put in charge of protecting, you discover that in his cowardice he has been harboring a group of cultists in the basement. Their leader placed a curse on him so that if anyone ventures into their base, a swarm of rats will eat him alive from the inside out. And so he lies to you. Deceives you. Tries to hide the truth from you. It's hard not to sympathize, but the boy's lack of responsibility is quite literally getting dozens, perhaps hundreds of people killed. In a flash, the game demonstrates to you with a moral dilemma just how evil your enemy truly is, how hellish this war and its consequences, how out of his depth this peasant boy has landed, how he should 100%, absolutely never have left his comfortable home and journeyed to this horrible place. After that, the choice is yours. Do you venture into the basement to find clues as to the cultists' whereabouts? Do you take mercy on the poor child and agree to overlook the den, perhaps at the cost of more lives? Maybe you're an evil necromancer and your character chastises the boy, enters the basement without a second thought and resurrects the corpse of a noble warrior from within to serve as your thrall, the only price you pay being a rotten feeling in the pit of your stomach when you come back up the stairs and find the boy devoured.
I have to stress here that at this point you have known this character for, at minimum, a dozen hours. You were given time to grow attached, to dream of his ideal future before the cruel reality of this war rears its head and you are given power over his fate. Wrath of the Righteous is littered with stories like this, great and small, starting early and carrying forward into the heart of the game dozens and dozens of hours in before reaching their conclusions, and every time the power to influence these events lies in your hands - but sometimes the influence you have may not be as great as you like. So you think about them. You think about them hard. You struggle over right and wrong, fair and unfair, and perhaps ultimately go against your own conscience simply to play a role - you roleplay. And then you understand what the term "RPG" truly means.
The game's most glaring flaw, undoubtedly, is the half-baked nature of the Crusade Mode metagame that crops up in chapter 2 and beyond. It's HoMM-inspired, but lacks critical elements that makes those games work and is absurdly poorly balanced. Your first battle with a spellcasting demon general WILL result in entire stacks of units being melted by lightning bolts that do infinite damage for some godforsaken reason. You can turn this off, but you miss out on some useful magical goodies and what I think are some genuinely interesting RP moments that ultimately contribute a whole lot to the fun of picking a mythic path. After all, why would you deliberately skip the part where your undead kingdom begins to annex its neighbors? The solution, universally agreed upon by the playerbase, is to cheat. Just install the toybox mod and cheat through the Crusade layer. You'll miss nothing, as the real meat and potatoes of the game lies in the Pathfinder stuff anyway.
As an aside, it really pisses me off that Backloggd won't let me make this my game of the year even though it's still being updated.
Anyway, great game, highly recommend. Areelu Vorlesh did nothing wrong.
I think one of the most impressive aspects of the game is its reactivity in the mid and late game. It's a little railroady towards the beginning, and thematically much of the game pushes the player in a Lawful Good direction, but ultimately the choice is yours and I haven't played a game that made being this evil this much fun in a very long time. It might have the best tyrannical undead lord RP I've ever played, full stop. Choices have meaningful consequences in both the dramatic and mechanical sense, with many decisions influencing events far, far into the game in ways you don't always expect, which is just fantastic in a genre plagued with meaningless binary Paragon/Renegade dialogue trees. Even when going for a particular alignment, I found myself making a lot of value judgments based on my feelings because the characters and the plot had me emotionally invested in the goings-on. There aren't a lot of games that truly make me feel rotten and satisfied in equal measure for doing something evil, or so torn over figuring out the right thing to do.
The character writing is (mostly) top notch, with the worst examples just being sort of dull in comparison to the high notes. When the character writing hits the high notes, it REALLY hits the high notes. The companions, especially the neutral or evil-aligned ones, are filled with some real charmers. Daeran, your sassy gay evil aristocrat divine caster, is a treat. He carries a tragic backstory tinged with mystery, but ultimately his alignment is what it is simply because he is a hedonistic dickhead, and he's all too happy to explain this to you, no excuses. Then there's Woljif, tiefling thief and dumbass scoundrel, who's a hoot, but heralds a subplot about confidence and powerlessness that adds depth to the character you wouldn't expect. Camellia, half-elf shaman is... well, she's unforgettable. Wenduag, fucked up bloodthirster and half-spider mutant, is fascinating, seemingly puddle-deep when introduced but later revealing a remarkable complexity behind her backstabbing tendencies and might-makes-right philosophy. Regill, who is essentially Darth Vader in gnome form, might be the coolest companion in an RPG in decades. There are no hidden depths to Regill. He just rules. Even the side characters and antagonists are full of life. Areelu Vorlesh might be one of my favorite RPG villains since Irenicus, and in my opinion rivals the latter for complexity in character and motivation.
When these elements mix, when the themes meet the characters and the characters meet morality, this is where the game's writing really shines. There's a particular young priest, a farm boy of no more than 20, introduced close to the start of the game. For much of the early chapters he is a background character, you hear his story and get a feel for his personality by talking to him - he's meek and ineffectual, but some great courage in him inspired him to drop his plow, pick up a sword, and leave home to come fight the demons in Sarkoris. Later, he transitions to being an important merchant, developing his cleric powers and learning to heal your troops on the march. You get a sense that this boy is finding his wings, that one day he will lead a great and noble legacy as a hero of the crusade. Then chapter 3 happens. In a completely missable sidequest, after investigating the temple he has been put in charge of protecting, you discover that in his cowardice he has been harboring a group of cultists in the basement. Their leader placed a curse on him so that if anyone ventures into their base, a swarm of rats will eat him alive from the inside out. And so he lies to you. Deceives you. Tries to hide the truth from you. It's hard not to sympathize, but the boy's lack of responsibility is quite literally getting dozens, perhaps hundreds of people killed. In a flash, the game demonstrates to you with a moral dilemma just how evil your enemy truly is, how hellish this war and its consequences, how out of his depth this peasant boy has landed, how he should 100%, absolutely never have left his comfortable home and journeyed to this horrible place. After that, the choice is yours. Do you venture into the basement to find clues as to the cultists' whereabouts? Do you take mercy on the poor child and agree to overlook the den, perhaps at the cost of more lives? Maybe you're an evil necromancer and your character chastises the boy, enters the basement without a second thought and resurrects the corpse of a noble warrior from within to serve as your thrall, the only price you pay being a rotten feeling in the pit of your stomach when you come back up the stairs and find the boy devoured.
I have to stress here that at this point you have known this character for, at minimum, a dozen hours. You were given time to grow attached, to dream of his ideal future before the cruel reality of this war rears its head and you are given power over his fate. Wrath of the Righteous is littered with stories like this, great and small, starting early and carrying forward into the heart of the game dozens and dozens of hours in before reaching their conclusions, and every time the power to influence these events lies in your hands - but sometimes the influence you have may not be as great as you like. So you think about them. You think about them hard. You struggle over right and wrong, fair and unfair, and perhaps ultimately go against your own conscience simply to play a role - you roleplay. And then you understand what the term "RPG" truly means.
The game's most glaring flaw, undoubtedly, is the half-baked nature of the Crusade Mode metagame that crops up in chapter 2 and beyond. It's HoMM-inspired, but lacks critical elements that makes those games work and is absurdly poorly balanced. Your first battle with a spellcasting demon general WILL result in entire stacks of units being melted by lightning bolts that do infinite damage for some godforsaken reason. You can turn this off, but you miss out on some useful magical goodies and what I think are some genuinely interesting RP moments that ultimately contribute a whole lot to the fun of picking a mythic path. After all, why would you deliberately skip the part where your undead kingdom begins to annex its neighbors? The solution, universally agreed upon by the playerbase, is to cheat. Just install the toybox mod and cheat through the Crusade layer. You'll miss nothing, as the real meat and potatoes of the game lies in the Pathfinder stuff anyway.
As an aside, it really pisses me off that Backloggd won't let me make this my game of the year even though it's still being updated.
Anyway, great game, highly recommend. Areelu Vorlesh did nothing wrong.