Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Tactical Combat Update and Interview
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With merely three days left in the Kickstarter campaign for Owlcat Games’ Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, we get a new update that announces quite an interesting stretch goal. Once the campaign reaches a total of $1,710m pledged, the developers will start working on a tactical combat system reminiscent of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Here’s more on that:
Huzza! Thanks to your support, we have reached another stretch goal and now you will have more options to choose from. Every race will get a unique archetype, available only to it, with racial feats and alternative traits to spice the things up during character creation.
And now to the next goal... Tactical Battles for Armies
Hello, my name is Alexander Gusev, and I am a lead mechanics designer in Owlcat Games.
Long ago, when I was younger and games had more daring ideas but far fewer pixels per inch, I was looking at RPGs and thinking – why none of them feature battles of armies, similar to strategies? After all – the hero leading troops is a widespread trope in fantasy, and many heroes of fiction had donned the general's mantle in the course of their adventures. Yet the genres remained mostly separated – yes, some strategies like King's Bounty concentrated more on a singular hero. Yes, some RPGs had simplified strategic modes. But playing Heroes of Might and Magic III (as you may have heard, playing them is a mandatory rite in Russia) I couldn't stop thinking why no classic RPG featured combat similar to HoMM III.
The answer is – because they weren't foolhardy enough. We will be. Even before this stretch goal, we were planning that army combat in the crusade will look much more than a dry combat log of an auto-combat and that it will allow you to select targets for your units to attack. But will only that be enough?
No, we want to add more. We want you to feel like a proper commander, to allow you to move those units on the tactical battlefield. We want to achieve the grandeur of an epic fantasy battle by giving you access to powerful spells that can be used in mass combat. To trash the enemy army with a fireball (its tactical version, that), to burn multiple enemies with your squadron of dragons, to block the enemy advance with your units and then riddle the enemy with arrows from afar. And, of course, we long for a variety of mechanical features this battlefield will allow us to introduce into units.
Of course, you will always be able to dedicate yourself to strategic planning only, leaving the groundwork to your troops and getting only the reports of their glorious victories. We have no wish to force this upon you, and of course, there will be different difficulty levels for this mode too. But we hope that there are people who share our passion for the tactical turn-based mass combat similar to Heroes of Might and Magic and Master of Magic. And we hope that you agree with how fun and cool an addition it will be to our game.
There are those of you who might read this update and consider us perhaps a tiny bit too ambitious there – but they should remember that this stretch goal will not force us to make a whole another game. This stretch goal is only about adding a tactical layer to the whole another game that we were already making. You know, huh, weren't we overly ambitious already? Anyway, it would be best if you also remembered that we might have a couple of people in our studio that worked on a game of a similar genre. Specifically, on Heroes of Might and Magic V. And that our studio is full of Russian people that are, of course, required to play Heroes of Might and Magic III for at least a thousand hours before being considered an adult.
To arms, Crusaders! Your armies await your commands!
P.S. Of course, I should note that a requirement to play HoMM 3 at least a thousand hours before being considered an adult in Russia is a joke. Not everyone here is forced to play Heroes of Might and Magic III – you can, for example, present documents that prove your belonging to Heroes of Might and Magic II community, or request a trial by combat instead.
And if you’d like to learn more about the game, you can now also check out this recent WCCFTech interview with Alexander Mishulin, the game’s creative director. A couple of sample questions:
Can you talk about the degree of involvement with Chris Avellone on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous?
Yes, we're happy to work with Chris on another project. He's a big fan of the Pathfinder universe. He led some adventures back at Obsidian and he is helping us with the main storyline. He's writing one of the companions. His role is pretty much the same as the first game.
Looking at the alignment system in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, how dynamic is it? How much will your alignment change during gameplay?
It will be a little bit different from Pathfinder: Kingmaker. In Kingmaker, you could shift your alignment from, for example, being good to being evil and back to being good throughout the game without the use of spells like Atonement.
In Wrath of the Righteous, it will be less dynamic. Part of that is because of the Mythic paths. If you're going down a mythic path, there are some quests involved that support the behavior of a chosen path. Say you want to become a Lich. To do that, you're going through several tasks and most of them require some evil actions. Becoming undead and preparing a ritual - probably there are some things that are not really good. It will pull your alignment towards becoming evil. The same goes for Angel and others that will be pulling you towards good, or different spectrums of good. Because of that pull, we expect that most of the players will gravitate into the alignment of a particular mythic path. There are some options within it as well, but it will be less common than in Pathfinder: Kingmaker.
