Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Interview

With Owlcat Games poised to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous in a couple of weeks, we get this massive PCGamesN interview with a couple of the game’s developers. The interview covers a broad range of topics, including Owlcat’s new approach to QA, the slight possibility of there ever being an official turn-based mode for Wrath of the Righteous, the game’s tabletop origins, some of its new features, and more.

A few sample questions:

Kingmaker had real-time combat with pause. Are there any plans to make Wrath of the Righteous turn-based?

AM: We really love that the community made turn-based mods that allowed a lot more players to enjoy our game. And we do see its popularity, but right now we’re focusing on making real-time with pause the best we can for Wrath of the Righteous, with a lot more tweaks and fixes. So right now we’re not doing anything for turn-based.

That’s an interesting choice – we saw a lot of excitement when Pillars of Eternity 2 announced its turn-based mode, and it follows logically from the tabletop.

Andrey Tsvetkov: I will add to Alex’s answer that we’re not denying that we might end up working on this in the future. [Turn-based] is a really nice feature and we understand why parts of the community ask for it. And the mods were really cool – we’re glad there are people who actually do this. We might consider it later in development, but for the moment, as Alex said, we are focused on our creative vision, which is real-time with pause, as in Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

We’re listening to our community, and I believe this is why our fans love our studio. We are people-driven, and we listen to our fans what they want. So we know there is an amount of people that actually want this and we will think about it, but we cannot confirm that the decision is made either positive or negative at the moment.

[…]

What points of differentiation would you highlight at a mechanical or gameplay level between Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous, and other rival CRPGs on the market?

One of the great differentiators is mythics, and how they affect everything in the game. So at a certain point of your adventure, you will be able to become not an epic hero but a really mythic hero, with the ability to gradually change into very powerful entities. Right now I can reveal the angel, demon, and trickster, but there will be more.

These change a lot of your experience from the game: they change some parts of the storyline, your progression, your companions. They change you mechanically, giving you new abilities and disabilities. It’s really different from the usual Pathfinder mechanics, especially so for trickster.

Tricksters don’t trick other people, but the world itself. At a certain point, a trickster understands the laws that put this world in motion – that it is actually governed by dice. Say they roll a critical failure, a one on the dice. They’re able to change it instantly to natural 20, transforming critical failure to critical success. You will be able to see the dice changing the results right before your eyes.