It has been over two months since Owlcat Games released cRPG Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, the indirect sequel to the studio’s previous project Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The game thrusts players in the middle of a century-long conflict with the demons and tasks them with gathering a ragtag party of adventurers and leading a massive Crusade against the Worldwound, the rift between Golarion and the Abyss.
We had the pleasure of chatting with Alexander Mishulin, the creative director of Owlcat Games, and asking him a few questions about the game.
Gamespace: Please introduce yourself and tell our readers what your position is at Owlcat Games.
Alexander Mishulin: Hello, my name is Alexander Mishulin and I am the creative director at Owlcat Games. My job entails making all gameplay decisions as well being in charge of the concept and the vision of the project.
Gamespace: How does the team feel about the level of support and love the game received from the community both during the Kickstarter campaign and in the two months since release? How does it feel that Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous was nominated for the Golden Joystick PC Game of the Year category?
Alexander: We are grateful, first of all, both for how much the community supports us as well as the huge amount of feedback that players send our way. It allows us to make the game much better.
We also feel pride in how the game turned out to be – we planned it as a large-scale epic adventure, but the result surprised even ourselves with how much bigger the game has become as a result and how many options it provides players with.
Gamespace: As a team, what is your overall favorite improvement from Kingmaker?
Alexander: The main difference from Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the addition of the Mythic Paths feature that served as one of the main reasons for choosing this particular Adventure Path for the game. It provided an opportunity of becoming a super-powerful creature: Angel, Lich, Demon, etc.
This allowed us to make the story deeper and more varied, and choices – more meaningful while also providing players with more options for character development. Mythic Paths’ progression is added on top of the usual one and can be combined with it, creating an even greater variety of interesting character builds.
Gamespace: Did you specifically look for tabletop modules with extra gameplay hooks like the Kingdom Management system in Kingmaker and Mythic Paths in Wrath?
Alexander: I partially touched on this in the previous question. Yes, not all campaigns can easily be adapted into great cRPGs, this requires the story to provide players with a variety of choices. The plot must be open enough to allow players to have quite a bit of freedom in their decisions.
We also prefer to choose stories that can be easily integrated with strategic elements such as the Kingdom in Kingmaker and the Crusade in Wrath. These features allow us to make the story deeper and show companions not only as loyal friends but also as capable leaders, reflecting their values and approach to management. Of course, Mythic Paths in Wrath of the Righteous allowed us to develop and expand both the RPG system and the approach to narrative.
Gamespace: My Angel playthrough and my friend’s Trickster playthrough have almost nothing in common. It’s like we are playing two different games by the time Act 5 begins. How hard was it to implement so many branching narratives, choices and increased world reactivity?
Alexander: Thank you! We tried to make it happen just so! When we just started the development and realized that we wanted to follow this path, we allocated a portion of the budget just for the Mythic Paths and everything related to them. We try to approach any unique feature that sets the game apart this way.
Therefore, we immediately assumed that each Mythic Path-specific story will have its own additional locations, specific ways events can play out, and completely unique mechanics… However, we did not take into account just how many options and reactions it would generate when it comes to the text of dialogues and decision trees.
At the time of writing of the detailed script for Chapter 5, the writers would repeatedly say that they are going to go insane putting all these lines together so that they would look both reactive enough to players’ decisions and still stay logical. But in the end they did it perfectly, if you ask me. We had to very carefully write everything we needed into our plans, and even expand the team to get a decent result.
Gamespace: What is the feature you are most proud of? What didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped?
Alexander: I will answer the same here: Mythic Paths. We had to spend a lot of effort on this feature, but it was worth it. Second such feature is the way Alushinyrra looks and works (a little bit more about that below).
The Crusade system did not turn out to be as exciting as it was imagined, but we are currently working on changes and hope that these will make it as exciting as we wanted it to be.
Gamespace: Was the team surprised by players’ most picked choices in terms of Mythic Paths, favorite companions and romances? Or did it pan out as you expected?
Alexander: Yes and no 🙂
During the development process, we were showing game iterations to the players who supported us on Kickstarter. We are very grateful for all the information they provided us with. In particular, for each version of the game, we conducted polls that covered various topics, including Mythic Paths, companions and romances.
After each major version, we specifically worked on the least popular picks to make them better. But on the release of the game the rating of favorites changed somewhat, and we were slightly surprised by this fact.
Gamespace: With that question, what are your favorite Mythic Paths, companions and romances either individually or collectively at Owlcat Games? 🙂
Alexander: We have people with very different tastes, and that’s one of the things that allows us to better create a variety of choices and options. Therefore, it’s impossible to choose the favorites of the team because they simply don’t exist 🙂
Each Mythic Path has its own developer that likes it, who is also responsible for making it as good as possible. Each companion has the writer that would be fighting to the bitter end to ensure the character is brought to life the way they were intended (or even better).
My own favorites… I am always a little embarrassed to answer such a question because there will always be people who will say “Well, it makes sense that this character/class/Mythic Path is the way it is, because the creative director liked it”. Therefore, the “correct” answer would be: “I like them all, because together they make the game the way we imagined it, giving players a whole variety of options”.
But to be honest, like everyone else, I have my own preferences. And for me it is the Aeon Mythic Path and Regill as my favorite companion. In many media (books, movies, games), I like stories and characters that revolve around duty, honor and following the law – and sometimes coming in conflict with morality. In Pathfinder it is codified as Lawful.
Gamespace: Has the setting and/or overall storyline greatly constrained writers when it comes to writing “evil” Mythic Paths and choices since you still had to justify the protag being the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade and going through certain narrative points?
Alexander: There is no definite answer. On the one hand, coming up with interesting events and decisions for evil playthroughs is about as difficult as it is for all others. On the other hand, there were certain difficulties with the reaction of the surroundings and companions to such actions since we could not afford to change even more aspects of the story and create even more content for it.
We also tried not to deprive players of their companions without a very strong reason. So the companions would only leave the player character after the choices that are completely incompatible with their worldview. After all, evil companions can travel with good protagonists – and so it should work the other way as well.
Also, the setting of the Wrath of the Righteous is generally dark and gloomy, and therefore evil paths and related choices can lead to quite unpleasant and even uncomfortable stories for some. Generally speaking, such stories are difficult and psychologically exhausting to write for a majority of authors.
Gamespace: How did you come up with the idea of the changing landscape of Alushinyrra and how hard was it to implement mechanically?
Alexander: We wanted to make the city of demons look completely different from the ordinary human settlement to give players an immediate impression that it is inhabited by alien creatures and the space that is convenient for them would not be so for mortals.
We tried several ideas:
- making the city more vertical
- making some parts that can only be accessed through teleportation – after all, all more or less decent demons possess this ability and can use it at will
- having very few doors – why bother when you can teleport? Maybe only use them for servants
- having even fewer stairs – once again, teleportation, and many demons know how to fly on top of it
But in the end, those changes did not give a striking enough difference, and we started looking for a more noticeable solution. The current version was proposed by the lead level designer Evgeny Sanin during a brainstorm. The team immediately liked his idea, and started to discuss how it can be implemented in specific places of the city. There were doubts about the technical realization.
Evgeny made the first prototype in a week and proved that it was technically possible with some limitations, and we set to work. The second major difficulty was its usability – how to make it obvious that the landscape can be changed in certain locations and how to ensure that players wouldn’t spend a long time looking for the changes.
We are still working on this feature. We have released a major update after the launch of the game to address the backlog of issues and are currently looking at what can be improved further to make the feature more obvious.
Gamespace: What kind of feature do you think can beat Mythic Paths narratively and mechanically? It might be hard to top taking on actual deities or becoming one yourself. Or do you believe the setting can be much more low-stake and the story more personal as long as features fit in and favorably emphasize narrative and gameplay to provide greater player immersion?
Alexander: You are right. It all depends on the kind of story we want to tell in a particular game. We do not have the task of making each subsequent game more epic than the previous one. We have the initial idea of what kind of game we want to make and what kind of narrative we want to tell, and we select game features and their implementation to fit that idea.
Gamespace: Wrath featured a secret ending similar to that of Kingmaker in that we seduce one of the Big Bads to our side. Does the development team like to provide players with an opportunity for a redemption arc for a seemingly irredeemable character, and why?
Alexander: I wouldn’t say that the secret ending of Wrath of the Righteous is about redemption. It’s more about a mother finding her lost child and protecting them from all threats. She did not regret what she was doing, on the contrary, she was quite sure that she did everything right and got the desired result.
Whereas the story of Nyrissa and its completion was about the option to return her ability to love and thus being, in my opinion, much closer to a redemption arc.
We like to make secret endings that give a deeper look at the story and provide a bit more content for those who follow the plot closely and try to get to the bottom of everything.
Gamespace: We really appreciate the opportunity for this interview. Is there anything you’d like to add?
Alexander: Once again, I’d like to say a big thank you to all our players for their love for our game, for their patience and support.
