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Anonymous10/10/25, 15:05No.3856872Pathfinder: Cringe of the Righteous
The writing in this game is awful. It's cringy and written like a YA story or a fan-fiction. There is this constant insincerity to most of what everyone says mixed with a tonal whiplash of the seriousness of the plot and the way the characters react to it.
Just in the prologue alone, the whole city is attacked, you fall into a cave and the first person you meet is a character named Seelah and within minutes she's cracking jokes with this exact line: "To Summarize, there are three of us, five working legs, three pairs of decent hands, two clear heads and one made of wood. Underground monsters beware!" which is exactly the kind of line you'd expect to hear improving at a d&d table. It's cheesy and not that funny but it could be passable if you were just messing about with your friends but a writer actually thought that was the best line to use for the situation. It completely robs the moment of any sincerity and immediately sets the tone of "We're not *actually* taking this plot seriously, we're aware how silly it sounds".
The same goes for Lann who you meet only a few minutes later. And then in the Tavern you can meet Wjolf who is a cringy teenage-sounding thief who actually calls the jail guard a "Dum-dum".
Along with this there is heavy exposition in nearly everything they say. The sort of writing that goes "Hey, it's you! The one who did that recent thing! The one everyone's been talking about. I'm X, the one you were sent to meet by your quest-giver. Here's my backstory. Here's why I'm important to the thing you're currently doing."
Everything is a constant chore to read in a game where you're reading 80% of the time for 100+ hours.
If anyone feels similarly about this style of writing, can you point me to games that are well-written? I really wanted to like WOTR because mechanically it all sounded fun and looked great but I physically can't bring myself to play anymore because the writing is so horrific.
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Anon10/10/25, 15:08No.3856875
Sounds like you might like Pillars of Eternity, the first one at least.
There sure is exposition and lore dumps. But it takes itself serious and can be very dry about it. The occasional joke makes sense in-universe, it's something that feels natural for the characters to say.
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Anon10/10/25, 15:37No.3856886
Isn't the whole point of both Pathfinder games to emulate tabletop roleplay atmosphere, with both the good and bad aspects of it?
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Anon10/10/25, 15:41No.3856888
Somewhere in the 90's a dungeons & dragons player asked "But WHY are we entering the dungeon?" and the hobby was forever ruined.
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Anon10/10/25, 15:52No.3856896
Marvel Writing sure is a kick.
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Anon10/10/25, 16:11No.3856903
>Pathfinder: Cringe of the Righteous
Talking about quippy writing...lol
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Anon10/10/25, 16:27No.3856909
I can heap blame upon liberals but it's not completely fair: the reality is the entire fantasy genre has become so derivative this is what you get now.We might not even have so many liberals if fantasy held up to what it used to be.
Find me a description of a 'fireball' or 'adventurer' in something like Gene Wolfe and you'll see my point.Look at how Marvel handled Norse mythology vs. how Tolkien handled it, you'll see my point again.
Fantasy isn't just horns and tails tacked onto your coomer fantasy, it's the sense of mystique and portent that is as hard to build as a good horror atmosphere and harder than the drama you might find in a police procedural, that is why it's so rare, and everything is so hackneyed.
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Anon10/10/25, 17:07No.3856926
You're right but also pretty reductive, there are a lot of characters I don't remember doing out of place modern office worker humor. They definitely do fumble the intro though. I didn't buy into the reality of anything and a lot of it was the lame dialog.My guess is that it's just down to which writer is doing what part and a more universally valid complaint is just that it's very patchy.
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Anon10/10/25, 17:56No.3856942
>be me
>excited to roll up a crusader and kill six gorillion demons
>make a paladin of Iomedae
>meet Seelah, an illegal character because paladins are supposed to be humans only, not demihumans
>mfw
>”How do you do, fellow crusader of Iomedae?”
>”YOU’RE MY KIND OF CRAZY!”
>my smile and immersion… gone
>mfw
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Anon10/10/25, 20:20No.3857014
>tonal whiplash of the seriousness of the plot and the way the characters react to it.
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Anon10/11/25, 03:38No.3857163
My rpg companions have personalities? Oh noh !!
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Anon10/11/25, 08:51No.3857243
I don't know, I mash through the dialogue anyway. What I hate about it is the shit encounter design and the fact that there's only like three playstyles.
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Anon10/11/25, 12:45No.3857292
You forgot to mention Camellia and Nenio who also spend 99% of their dialogue trying to be funny, the former being a rich bitch who is toooooootally not evil and the latter being genuinely reddit incarnate. Then there's also Daeran who is just Woljif/Lann but more mean (this place will tell you he's the exception because they want to fuck him)
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Anon10/11/25, 15:04No.3857342
everything you said applies to your post lol!
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Anon10/11/25, 16:20No.3857367
Wenduag and Regill are based though
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Anon10/11/25, 17:32No.3857396
i tend to believe turn based combat correlates with bad writing.
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Anon10/12/25, 12:23No.3857645
I played a LG Angel and Regill and my character got along swimmingly. Just Lawbros knowing that they are there to do a job and not to waffle on about extraneous concepts that are born from a life of peace, where preference is king.
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Anon10/12/25, 14:00No.3857664
>He hasn't even met the worst character yet
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Anon10/12/25, 14:09No.3857666
>If anyone feels similarly about this style of writing, can you point me to games that are well-written?
Old games didn't have this problem, not because they focused on having good writing, but because they didn't focus on writing.
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Anon10/12/25, 14:34No.3857677
>good writing?
>bad writing?
>well written games?
You want a more serious tone. There.
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Anon10/14/25, 12:51No.3858490
one look at the companion rooster is enough to see it as the modern lol random experience
not for me
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Anon10/14/25, 13:46No.3858524
ITT: discord raiders and election tourists trash one of the few games keeping CRPGs relevant
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Anon10/14/25, 15:47No.3858585
>paladin trades away her family's holy sword for a gender-swap potion for her partner
>this happens in the dangerous lands of the Worldwound full of demons and shit
kill it with fire
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Anon10/15/25, 02:03No.3858825
The only good written game you'll find that I can remember is Planescape Torment
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Anon10/15/25, 06:26No.3858906
woke shit with the worst companions in the industry
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Anon10/15/25, 13:05No.3859089
Hilarious how these autists are having a meltdown about realism when the original point was that trannoids are just disgusting
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Anon10/15/25, 13:15No.3859099
Can't go wrong with the classics, BGTrilogy, PST, Arcanum. Even The Witcher 1(one).
My main recommendation would be Mask of the Betrayer though, especially if you play an evil character. You can safely skip the mediocre base game (read synopsis, it sounds better than it actually is).
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Anon10/15/25, 13:21No.3859100
WOTR's story is like parody of the genre and an excellent pleb detector.
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Anon10/15/25, 18:21No.3859243
Would you believe that Owlcats take on the campaign is actually quite good compared to the original version?
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Anon10/15/25, 19:44No.3859284
Yeah i found the writing to be a whole mixed bag in this game, on one hand it does have some moments that it pops off and some of the characters can be interesting to explore and relate to, BUT there is too much fat to trim, unironically the game biggest sin is its bloat, its bloat in gameplay, in rpg mechanics, in story, in trash mobs, in pacing, its bloatfest: the game.Speaking back on the writing i thought they raised the stakes too quickly, and its rushed, rushed pacing created this situation where i didn't give a single flying fuck about the world and what was happening because the game wants to bombard me with high stakes storytelling without earning it first by building it up, and speaking of characters, there is like 12 possible companions, and more than half of them are underdeveloped halfbaked and have shallow personality and arc.
The mythic paths have the same problem, some are given the care and attention and some are neglected and treated like an afterthought.Owlcat should've just fixed the game with updates instead of shitting out DLC after DLC but their dumb fans only care about size, for them quantity is king. The game still has thousands of bugs till this day ffs
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Anon10/16/25, 16:31No.3859727
Found the VA behind your goddess, Camelliafags. She's pretty attractive ngl and a singer on top of that. Seems pretty new to the whole VA thing though.
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Anon10/16/25, 17:26No.3859751
>child's toy has goosebumps tier writing
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Anon10/17/25, 00:44No.3859902
I just view that kind of idealist writing to be part of the classical RPG "vibe." I roll my eyes at it but I tolerate it.Last game I played had like three separate occasions at the end of the game where the entire party turned to me to praise me for making all of the right choices, similar feel
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Anon10/17/25, 11:39No.3860026
it's hilarious this wasn't derided for its writing, that's the only interesting thing about this game
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Anon10/18/25, 17:17No.3860697
character building is pretty good int this game
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Anon10/18/25, 21:47No.3860902
Yeah people who praise it for the story are legit low IQ or ESL. I just skip shit and skim. The worst sin of the game is the stat bloat. Just fucking terrible. The uninspired encounters with terrible AI are another thing.BG3 walks over this shit so hard just with the goblin encounters.
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Anon10/18/25, 22:47No.3860946
Could I get some build advice? I like making builds based on Warcraft 3, currently doing a blademaster but my next one I want to go archmage, the summons and elemental spells are pretty straight forward but how the hell do I get an armored horse early on without sacrificing any wizard levels?