I got obsessed enough with that series that I worked on the Ascension mod for Throne of Bhaal because I wasn’t ready to let go. Yet it was Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate that gave me an obsession for the genre, teaching me that the kind of games I loved were shared adventures with interesting characters. I’ve been playing CRPGs for decades, all the way back to Bard’s Tale. I'd also heard great things about Wrath of the Righteous (WoTR), particularly its mythic path system, so wanted to play that.

Yet I kept coming back as the game offers a compelling world to explore.

I bounced off Kingmaker (KM) a number of times, spending almost 70 hours across multiple playthroughs which never made it past act 1. I also wonder if those campaigns aren’t the reason for some of the problems I’ll get into. These games were subject to successful Kickstarter funding campaigns, though given their production positioning them as AA games, there was clearly publisher money involved at some point. In the first you have that feeling of fresh-faced adventure and wandering a world to encounter new challenges just like BG, while the sequel has a far more focused approach which pushes you ever forward, along with a chapter where the world opens up and a ton of side-quests appear in your log, just like BG2. You have two games using a well-loved system (Pathfinder 1st edition) in a real-time with pause (RTWP) engine with a not quite isometric camera. As I wrap up a 300-hour journey through these two games - one that started in November last year, but in reality started years earlier - I find myself drawn to comparisons to Baldur’s Gate (BG1) and Baldur’s Gate II (BG2).

Fortnite box fight map