Got back into Wrath after completing Baldur's gate 3 and this absolutely slaps harder than BG3. The Pathfinder system is far superior to DnD 5E and the sheer scale of the story is incredible.
The Evil Lich path is the best Evil Path I've ever played. Dark Urge is like loony toons in front of how evil I can be as a Lich which is also the best Undead/Necromancer playthrough I've ever had in any game. And you can be even MORE evil in other Mythic Paths like Swarm.
The mythic paths is the best system in a CRPG ever. The game feels wildly different depending on your Mythic Path. I've not played all of them yet but the amount itself is very good.
The combat is very good. I still have no idea how it ultimately works and while I like the feeling of uncertainty and freshness, many people might not like it. It's definitely far more complicated than 5E. The sheer amounts of Classes, Subclasses and abilities is also unparalleled. The easy switch between Turn based and realtime combat is pretty good when fighting hordes of trash mobs. I prefer Turn based myself but Realtime is very useful time to time.
You can definitely make mistakes with character creation and it's also more 'difficult' to respec characters compared to BG3 since they can only be respecced from the level they met you at.
The story is amazing. Imo it's better than the story of Baldur's gate 3. The characters are not as developed as Origin Characters in BG3 however which is somewhat of a downside. Also there is no full VA so reading is required and the writing is pretty good imo so it won't bore you.
The game definitely has pacing problems at multiple points through out the story. Enemy padding also gets really really bad by the end.
If you liked Baldur's gate 3 or any other CRPG, play this because it's superior.
Lmao I remember how rough that early game was in Kingmaker. I wound up restarting several times with different builds.
That was my first exposure to Pathfinder and as someone who spent entirely too much time theorycrafting character builds in D&D 3.5e it was both a nostalgia trip and a breath of fresh air compared to D&D 5e. Never got into wrath though, every time I picked it up I closed it without ever getting to any gameplay because the thought of playing even an improved variation of D&D just made all the will to engage with it drain away.
Levels 1-5 in 3.5 and PF1 campaigns just suck. You can't do anything fun, and it's just everyone auto-attacking until someone gets lucky. Level 17+ is rocket tag, but the middle there is
compared to how dumbed down 5E feels.