D&D 5E I was right about Aasimar in Baldur's Gate 3.

[Henadic Theologian]

Aasimar are one of my favourite races, so having Aasimar in BG3 makes me very happy

 

[Scribe]

Having played Wrath of the Righteous and BG III EA, I could not disagree more. BG 3 in EA is much better to me than Wrath is in full so far.
While I enjoyed Wrath I have partially burnt out at act 5 and have yet to finish. BG III I have enjoyed going through multiple times and am anxious for the full game.

Really? Thats interesting. I played through the EA several times as well, but ultimately found it extremely shallow in terms of the gameplay, and until we get the rest of the story I see no point in continuing to play it.

With Larians focus on all this stuff that is either irrelevant or (subjectively) cringe as hell, I just cannot be bothered.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Aasimar can have big fluffy wings, with the right feat in 3.5e your Aasimar got big fluffy wings, and AL allows you to choose an Aasimar version of the the Winged Tiefling, trading your subrace features for big fluffy wings.

You know this is 5E, not 3.5E right?

As for "AL allows", um, does it? That's wild. I can't find any evidence at all of a permanently winged "Winged Aasimar" subrace in any official products. Which is it in?

Plus the Fallen Aasimar's black feathered skeletal wings aren't "spectral" either

Or, more likely, that's not an Aasimar. I mean, most people seem to think it's not.

Serious the spectral wings thing isn't as important as folks think it is.

It's literally the only way Aasimar can have wings that's actually in an official WotC sourcebook that I'm aware of, so it kinda is.

The male voice is a villian of somekind, although their has been a datamined male narrator as well as origin character narration.

Interesting.

Having played Wrath of the Righteous and BG III EA, I could not disagree more. BG 3 in EA is much better to me than Wrath is in full so far.
While I enjoyed Wrath I have partially burnt out at act 5 and have yet to finish. BG III I have enjoyed going through multiple times and am anxious for the full game.

Despite having a better system in theory, the combat gameplay in BG3 is flatly worse than Wrath of the Righteous. The encounter design is far worse - in every possible way - particularly. BG3 is:

A) Far easier to cheese. Trivial even. Stealth is completely broken OP, let's not even start on barrels.

B) Far easier to break accidentally. Some of this is "EA" stuff but encounters that have been in since the start of EA still break all the time. I broke one of the most basic goblin encounters with a single cast of Cloud of Daggers just last week.

C) Less tactically interesting - in large part because enemy behaviour is seemingly randomized in a way that means you can't really predict anything and enemies often choose to do something profoundly dumb. Wrath is a lot more predictable but also more threatening.

D) Far less balanced and less interestingly designed in terms of anything but terrain.

BG3 also has far more "puzzle" encounters which just means an too-high-level encounter with an easy way to win from the terrain or the like. These are only ever interesting once.

The smaller party size really doesn't help here.

The writing in BG3 is also really variable. None of the companions so are far are particularly charming unless you're super-horny for English vampires who look, act and sound like Tory MPs. I mean I get the "I can fix him", but this dude looks and sounds an MP who was in cabinet for a couple of months but got kicked out because he was taking bribes and cocaine lol. Most of them are some species of "what a jerk", though I admit they've been toned down from the early releases where they were NUCLEAR jerks.

There are a lot of weird and annoying quirks with the rules. For example, Larian don't understand D&D's armour system. They seem to think Heavy armour is a "special reward" that's "just better" than other armour. They don't seem understand that all three armour types are approximately balanced. Therefore the only heavy armour from level 1 to level 5 is Ring Mail (AC14 heavy, no dex), whereas inexplicably Scale Mail is abundant (AC14 medium, +2 Dex), and the very first companion you meet is wearing Half-Plate (AC15 medium, +2 AC, the best medium armour in the game). And classes meant to start the game with Chainmail (AC16 heavy, no dex) start with Scale Mail instead.

Wrath certainly has flaws - the biggest of which is the war campaign, which is one of the worst annoying chores I've ever seen in an RPG - and putting it on "auto-win" could break the game last I played. It also doesn't allow as many or as interesting alternate solutions to stuff as BG3.

Of course now BG3 added Paladins and the way the oaths behave is hilariously bad. Oaths break instantly (explicitly not meant to happen in 5E), but can be fixed for 2000gp (just bribe your way out of it!), and they fail to break for really serious transgressions (murdering people, lying massively as Devotion, for example), but randomly insta-break for stuff like "defending yourself from a goblin who attacked you". I'm sure most of that will get fixed, but bloody hell, what a thing to add at the last possible minute. Larian also seem confused about the difference between Ancients and Devotion Paladins.

I will say I think BG3 has the potential to be vastly better than Wrath of the Righteous.

But the quality of Acts 2/3 will need to be stellar for that to be the case.

I think what'll actually happen is, based on DOS1/2, Acts 2/3 will be a bit of a mess on release, lacking content compared to act 1, full of bugs, and generally not great, but in like 2025 we'll get an Enhanced Edition that fixes everything to an acceptable degree. Hope I'm wrong but...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Having played Wrath of the Righteous and BG III EA, I could not disagree more. BG 3 in EA is much better to me than Wrath is in full so far.
While I enjoyed Wrath I have partially burnt out at act 5 and have yet to finish. BG III I have enjoyed going through multiple times and am anxious for the full game.

A lot of this comes from the problems with the 3rd edition/Pathfinder ruleset. They rely heavily on using spells to pre-buff before the fight. Which is boring, and only gets worse at high level. Add in controlling six party members in real time (with pause) and the gameplay becomes a matter of "did I remember to cast Death Ward on everyone?"

So far BG3 doesn't feel as railroady as Wrath, in that it gives the the PC a strong incentive to follow the plot.

Wrath: "I don't want to attack the Grey Garrison!" "I don't want to be Knight Commander!" "I want to steal a horse and ride south as fast as possible!"

 

[Paul Farquhar]

As for Aasimar, they are very low hanging fruit indeed for adding to character creation! So colour me unimpressed.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

They rely heavily on using spells to pre-buff before the fight. Which is boring, and only gets worse at high level. Add in controlling six party members in real time (with pause) and the gameplay becomes a matter of "did I remember to cast Death Ward on everyone?"

Yeah this is another major issue with Wrath. Honestly I hope they consider moving on to PF2 or something after the 40K RPG they're doing, because I'm not sure I can take another PF1 game with all that buffing (maybe they can build an in-game manager for it like the mods though).

And quite right re: railroad, whilst I don't think that's a huge issue with Wrath because the motivation is likely to align for about 90% of PCs, BG3 in act 1 allows for you to do stuff like just straight-up side with the obvious baddies, and I understand it's full-on, not half-assed too.

Still rather have Daeran in my party than literally any BG3 companion so far though! If you're going to give me "I can fix him!" badboys, at least let them be genuinely funny ones.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Still rather have Daeran in my party than literally any BG3 companion so far though! If you're going to give me "I can fix him!" badboys, at least let them be genuinely funny ones.

I think the idea is Creative Writing 101: give the character an arc (especially as they are potential PCs). Or in this case, two arcs, one for hero and one for villain. Which means they all have to start out as an uncommitted-to-anything hot mess.

Of course, everyone loves Minsc, and he is as one-dimensional as it's possible to be.

But, whilst Daeran is an excellent character, Wrath has a share of bad characters too, such as Camellia and Nenio.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Of course, everyone loves Minsc, and he is as one-dimensional as it's possible to be.

I don't. I never have. I've always been vexed by him. I suspect the Matt Mercer/Larian version may be less awful though.

But, whilst Daeran is an excellent character, Wrath has a share of bad characters too, such as Camellia and Nenio.

Bloody Nenio. What is even supposed to be the point? Camellia I don't think is too bad, I mean she's just Shadowheart with a lot less random sass. But Nenio ugh. I will say this for Owlcat though, Nenio is a huge step up in writing from Jubilost. With Jubilost, he thought he was incredibly clever and was really rude to the PC, and you were literally weren't allowed to fire back. Didn't matter how high your INT, CHA, social skills etc. were, he automatically talked circles around you, and you were only allowed dunce responses. That's terrible writing. Sure he softens later on, but the damage was done. Nenio, is also rude (albeit more in a "extremely neurodiverse-but-also-a-dick" way than Jubilost's "YouTuber" vibe) and also thinks they're so much smarter than you, but this time, if you have the right skills/stats and make the right checks, you can be like "Uh-huh, Nenio, I get it". Of course they did bring in a new "highly slappable gnome" in the form of Regill, to help make up for that...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't mind Regill, but Camellia, I always end up killing her.

I'm not a fan of "I want to be a swashbuckler but my class is better suited to standing at the back casting spells" characters anyway. I suppose Wyll has a bit of this affliction...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think the idea is Creative Writing 101: give the character an arc (especially as they are potential PCs). Or in this case, two arcs, one for hero and one for villain. Which means they all have to start out as an uncommitted-to-anything hot mess.

Of course, everyone loves Minsc, and he is as one-dimensional as it's possible to be.

But, whilst Daeran is an excellent character, Wrath has a share of bad characters too, such as Camellia and Nenio.

While I certainly think that having a character arc is important...I don't think having an arc requires the description you give here. Hence, the bad writing is still there, it's just been pushed back one step.

A character arc should start from a point where the character is already compelling to some degree. Consider Prince Zuko, to bring out the perennial Avatar comparisons. Zuko is a compelling figure almost immediately, even though he's brash, moody, foolish, and plagued with mental health issues (many of them caused by his abusive father.) He shows up almost immediately, and doesn't actually become a "good guy" until halfway through the last season, but he's absolutely a compelling character for that entire span.

It's particularly frustrating because I found nearly all of the playable characters in Divinity: Original Sin 2 interesting (even though, as I'm sure everyone expects, I defaulted to playing the Red Prince.) It's just really confusing why Larian would have difficulties writing compelling, non-infuriating characters with BG3. I very much hope that things get better by release, but the stuff I hear has been Very Not Good. That's a very serious issue when "has good companion stories" is one of my favorite things in many CRPGs.