Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Updates, $1,162,755 and Counting

Over the last few days, Owlcat Games’ Kickstarter campaign for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous received a few juicy updates, and it is now sitting at $1,162,755 pledged, with over three weeks still to go.

Perhaps the biggest piece of news, update #14, revealed that the game will feature an optional turn-based mode that you’ll be able to enter on the fly. Now, that sort of thing didn’t work too well in Arcanum, but apparently Kingmaker had an unofficial mod that worked like that and people seem to like it.

Then, update #15 shared a Valentine’s Day love story, update #16 brought us an overview of the Witch class, and update #17 announced a new stretch goal – an additional archetype for every class. Here’s the latter:

Wow! Another stretch goal reached, and what a goal it is! Now we’ll be able to immerse you even more in the world of Golarion by adding more reactivity to our game! NPCs will react to your race, class, and even deity. You will experience the difference between being a noble aasimar paladin and a shady tiefling (what’s a person like that even doing on this glorious crusade?). Now we’re ready to reveal the next stretch goal…

One of the greatest advantages of the Pathfinder roleplaying system is the incredible amount of customization and possible character builds. There are several crucial elements that make Pathfinder’s character mechanics so rich and rewarding, one of the best being the archetype system, which allows the player to customize their chosen class even deeper. For Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, we had already decided to increase the number of archetypes to five per class. But now, with your incredible support, we may have an opportunity to increase this number even more, to six archetypes!

And that’s great news for us: when we were choosing the archetypes for Wrath of the Righteous, some of our favorites didn’t make the cut. For example, for the fighter class, we wanted to add not two, but three archetypes. The first was the dragonheir scion, a powerful warrior with draconic blood flowing through their veins, imbuing them with the might of the great wyrms, their vitality, resilience, and resistances. The second archetype was the armiger, a future Hellknight who chooses a Hellknight order at the outset of the game and trains to resist any attempts to affect their mind. The third was the mutation warrior, who harnesses their knowledge of alchemy to physically enhance their body with mutagens and alchemical discoveries. Sadly, the last of these had to be left outside the scope of development. But not anymore!

Some of you might ask, “Hey devs, there are no archetypes in the works for my favorite class! How about an archetype that’s all about divination, or one for underwater adventuring? These three just don’t work in a video game, they’re more about social encounters and investigations, you know? What am I gonna do?!” Fear not, crusaders! We have the solution to your problem, and that solution is… to create new ones. Yes, totally new ones. We’re going to create new archetypes from scratch to fill the gaps.

For example, the arcane enforcer: a slayer archetype who is a master of special arcane tricks similar to arcanists’ exploits. While they’re not a caster and don’t have their own spellbook, their understanding of arcane energies allows them to complement their martial capabilities with additional supernatural abilities. They can blast their enemies with various elements, strengthen their defense with shields, and even teleport around the battlefield, dealing strikes to the most important targets.

Every player takes their own unique approach to character creation: some decide on their character months before the game’s release, some try to find their ideal character through trials and tribulations (and, probably, through playing the first chapter of the game over and over and over), and for some, the “rule of cool” and beloved personal concepts are the way to go. But all players have something in common: we all want to make the perfect character, and the addition of new archetypes will bring us all closer to creating our ideal build.

To arms, crusaders!

Owlcats