A Long Road Together - Building the Game with our Community

“We’ve walked a long road together. Do you remember how it all started?” — A Dance of Masks trailer.

Pathfinders!

With the development of Wrath of the Righteous all but complete, it’s about time we pause, take a deep breath, and reflect on everything this journey has been.

Enough to say, this was as much of an adventure for us, the studio, as it was for you, the players. With this chapter of our story finally coming to an end, we wanted to share how it felt to shape this magical world together with our players.

Make yourself comfortable, grab your favorite drink, and prepare for a trip down memory lane - this is going to be a long read!

Kingmaker Times


The crucial role of our community in the development of our games began to take shape from the moment we announced Pathfinder: Kingmaker way back in 2017.

You guys have been with us since the first days of Kickstarter. Throughout all of Kingmaker’s active development and updates, you supported us with your undying enthusiasm, held countless conversations, and gave us tons of priceless advice and feedback. In return, we provided interesting insights into the development process, answered your questions, addressed your concerns, implemented new features based on your wishes, and always did our best to remain open and honest with you (and ourselves).

That led to the beautiful symbiosis that is still here many years later.

Some of you may remember (or at least have heard stories) that the launch of Kingmaker was… turbulent. With the project being so big and ambitious, unfortunately, we overestimated our capabilities, and the release was riddled with bugs and technical issues.

It was only thanks to your patience and faith in us that we were able to recover, learn from our mistakes, and repair what was broken. If you hadn’t given us the benefit of the doubt back then, we’d probably never be where we are now.

Thank you. We will never forget it.

Wrath of the Righteous Kickstarter
Time passed, and in February 2020, we announced the Kickstarter campaign for the indirect sequel, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

The reception for the campaign was very warm. People were so excited that we literally ran out of stretch goals! The team even had to quickly brainstorm some more just to keep up with the campaign’s progress.

Actually, that’s how you guys got dinosaurs — they weren’t originally planned:



Another fun fact — after every stretch goal was revealed, the very top few pixels of the name of the next one would be visible on the scroll below. By the end of the campaign, you guys had trained your eyes so well that it took you MINUTES to figure it out!





This also coincided with the community’s first major input into the second game. One of the stretch goals was a new race of your choice — Ratfolk, Catfolk, or Kitsune. Only one would make it into the game, and it was up to the community to decide which it would be.

Even if you weren’t there, you can easily imagine how intense that battle was!



As you can see today, the foxes emerged victorious. Sorry, cats and rats! History could have taken a completely different turn here, and characters such as Nenio or Lady Konomi might have never happened if the community had decided differently.

Sometimes implementing new races yields unexpected results. This Kitsune Lich bug from one of the early builds was particularly hilarious. Have you met Foxich?



There were a lot of calls inside the studio to keep the bug, but it was sadly fixed.

Feedback Analysis


One part of our relationship with the community that we’re especially proud of is our approach to feedback analysis.

Besides constantly monitoring our social media for your ideas, thoughts, and suggestions, after each major release (including the Alpha and Beta launches) we always conduct massive surveys where we ask you guys to comment and rate literally every part of the game.

After we collect the results, we always come together for a series of roundtable sessions where representatives of all the teams involved sit together for hours, discussing what turned out well, what not so much, and how we could improve. Narrative, combat, strategic systems, companions, UI, any other systems and elements — everything is evaluated and analyzed, with teams later presenting plans on how to deal with the issue in question.

We did this multiple times for Wrath of the Righteous. It would be difficult to count how many times we made alterations to the game based on these surveys.

We continue to use this method for all our games, so whenever you see a survey from us — please take a few minutes of your time to participate! We take them very seriously — your voice matters and may directly affect the future of the game in question.

Wrath of the Righteous Release


On September 2, 2021, Wrath of the Righteous finally saw the light of day. Even bigger and more ambitious than Kingmaker, the second game surpassed its predecessor in both length and the number of branching options, learning from its mistakes and expanding on its legacy.

A lot of the elements in the second game were heavily influenced by the community’s feedback.

The most notable was probably the turn-based mode. With the explosive success of the mod that introduced turn-based mode for the first game, we realized just how much you enjoyed it, and not only implemented it in Kingmaker officially, but also included it in Wrath of the Righteous from the very beginning.

Another element was definitely the timers. You guys were quite vocal after Kingmaker that being unable to explore at your own pace and losing to the clock was frustrating, not fun. We agreed with you, and completely moved away from a timer-based design in Wrath!

While we were at it, we also made swarms less annoying to deal with (the amount of pain they caused in Kingmaker, oof!), and added the ability to cancel spell effects, the option to skip cutscenes, and many, many other QoL features you asked us for.

The release of Wrath of the Righteous went smoother than Kingmaker. Not completely without technical issues, but this time we were better prepared, and it wasn’t anywhere near as disastrous.

While working on fixing bugs, we also kept our eye on the things that were highly desired by players. A good example was the Aeon Mythic model. Originally, it only had a spinning black hole and a star around the character’s head, but the authentic pauldrons and cowl from the portrait were absent.

You guys expressed a lot of frustration about the lack of this visual aspect, so we summoned our artists, and in one of the subsequent updates, Aeon got what it deserved!



There have been many other visual improvements over the years. Trickster’s Beer Elementals actually look like beer these days (they originally used the water elemental model), we updated the models for the Gold Dragon, Lich, and Swarm-that-Walks, and added a lot of new spell visuals, customization options, animations, and more.



In one of the final updates, we even added stunning new looks for the Sword of Valor and unique Mythic weather in Drezen for every Mythic Path!



Wrath DLCs — Season Pass 1
DLCs for Wrath of the Righteous have come a long and turbulent way. Per aspera ad astra, you could say.

Shortly before release, we already had a number of ideas about where we wanted to take the game next, so the first Season Pass was announced instantly on release.



After the acclaimed launch of the main game, our hopes were really high. But the launch of our first DLC, Inevitable Excess, struck us with terrifying Overwhelmingly Negative reviews on Steam and a massive wave of negative feedback from players across all social media. As shocked and frustrated as we were, we went to investigate how it could have happened:



From the perspective of our current experience and knowledge, well… it was inevitable (pun intended).

Too focused on updating and fixing the main game, we failed to notice that the first DLC had turned out to be somewhat… removed from player expectations. Between the surveys from the Alpha and the Beta not reflecting the full picture, the post-launch survey being conducted too late for its results to be used in the first DLC, and some chaos caused by post-release team reshuffling, the DLC team didn’t receive the feedback in time. As a result:

• The community perceived the DLC as a long-anticipated post-game adventure, while it was in fact more of a side story in parallel with the last dungeon of the campaign. We failed to correctly highlight that, and that led to a lot of dashed expectations.
  
• The reactivity to player decisions from the main game was not the main focus and proved to be too sparse — and as we know today, that’s one of the main things you guys value most in our games.
  
• The DLC had a heavy emphasis on puzzles. It seems obvious today, but back then we were not as aware that obligatory puzzles are not something you guys are very fond of.
  
• As if that wasn’t enough, the DLC itself was released in a rather poor technical state, with the major patch alongside it introducing serious progression-blocking bugs into the main game — which were attributed to the launch of the DLC.

With all that in mind, it’s no surprise that the ratings plummeted.

We rapidly diverted our development efforts to deliver a free update that introduced additional reactivity, changed the puzzles to be less frustratingly difficult, and patched the technical issues out as fast as possible. This improved the situation, but, unfortunately, the damage had already been done.



Our second DLC, Through the Ashes, was rated higher than the first, yet still didn’t quite hit the mark, launching with Mixed reviews on Steam. A lot of players enjoyed the low-level adventure vibe they had missed since Kingmaker, liked the new characters, and praised the interactions with the environment introduced in DLC 2, but many also complained about its nature as a side story, its minimal impact on the main campaign, the lack of new content for the Commander, and the cliffhanger ending.



By the release of The Treasure of the Midnight Isles, we already had the feeling that we were doing something fundamentally wrong, but hoped that new roguelike mechanics and a deeper level of integration with the main campaign would make players happy.

Alas, that clearly wasn’t enough. The DLC found its audience and was better received than the first two, but the ratings were only slightly higher than before, still in the Mixed zone. Complaints about the lack of story impact and content for the Commander remained largely the same.

Enhanced Edition


About a month after the release of The Treasure of the Midnight Isles DLC, the game received its Enhanced Edition.

With the reception of the first three DLCs below expectations, we had hopes that this major free update would brighten things up. We put a lot of work into it, introducing a shiny new quest for the Legend Mythic path, a number of highly anticipated QoL features, including controller support, coloring and reforging armor, inventory search, photo mode, using potions until fully healed, animal companion health bars, and many other minor updates and improvements.

These were all player-requested features, and nothing could go wrong, right? Right?



To our disappointment, it could. The reception of the Enhanced Edition was mediocre, and on some social networks, outright negative.

But why? We spent quite some time analyzing your feedback to figure that out, and we think we can outline the majority of the reasons now:

• We had set quite a high bar for ourselves with the Definitive Edition from Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It introduced something as gargantuan as turn-based mode, and was generally richer on features. The Enhanced Edition felt smaller in comparison, with its features not altering the game so drastically.
  
• Just a few weeks before the EE, we released a major update with hundreds of changes, which made the patch notes for the EE look short and mundane in comparison.
  
• The game didn’t feel stable and complete enough to be called the Enhanced Edition yet. There were still a lot of issues not addressed and features that felt unfinished.
  
• Players criticized our priorities — they expected us to produce updates to the Mythic Paths, as well as new narrative, reactivity, and additional gameplay content for the less fleshed-out late Acts of the game, before working on features they perceived as secondary, such as Photo Mode.
  
• One of the biggest disappointments for the community was the lack of updates to the Gold Dragon and Devil alongside the Legend update. These two Mythics were universally agreed to be the ones with the least content, and updates to them were naturally expected. Not only did we not deliver that in the EE, but we also made the mistake of teasing work on the Devil and then being forced to scrap it halfway due to budget constraints. With players already having datamined some of the new dialogue lines about corrupting Queen Galfrey, the reaction to it getting cut was absolutely brutal. They felt robbed!

While the reaction was a bit disheartening, given how much effort had gone into it, it helped us better understand our audience and better set our priorities. With the fate of Season Pass 2 now hanging in the balance due to this series of mishaps, we realized we needed to make a significant change in our approach and turn to our community for guidance.

We scrapped the previous plans for Season Pass 2 and held a series of urgent meetings where we brainstormed over 20 DLC concepts that were based on a more recent understanding of our audience’s wishes.

Then we straight up went and asked you guys directly what you wanted.

That’s how the survey you know as DLC of Your Dreams came to be. With the opinions of over 30,000 people guiding us, the direction was clear.

We finally confirmed that, above all else, you guys enjoy the narrative, reactivity, new characters, new mechanics, and areas to explore, all of it preferably at the same time, and of course, integrated into the main story!

Starting from this moment, the tide began to turn.

Wrath DLCs — Season Pass 2
With the course now set, this is what we arrived at in regard to Season Pass 2:

The originally planned concept of DLC 4, The Last Sarkorians, appeared to contain exactly what players wanted — a major narrative component integrated into the main story, along with a cool new romanceable companion and a new class. It was deemed to fit the renewed Season Pass 2 vision without any major alterations, and we went forward with it as is:



DLC 5 — The Lord of Nothing didn’t exactly fit that vision, but it had to happen because we were committed to continuing the story of Through the Ashes. Originally, we planned three parts for that adventure, but it became clear that we didn’t want to drag it out any longer.

Because of that, it underwent a major redesign that introduced higher stakes (‘mythic’ abilities), a deeper level of integration with the main campaign, and a large chunk of mechanical content in the form of 15 new archetypes, for the part of the audience not interested in the side stories:



DLC 6 was the most affected. The original idea revolved around setting up custom encounters in arenas across Golarion. Not only did that not blend in well with the narrative of the main story and partially collided with the niche of DLC 3, it was also completely out of step with players’ expectations. It literally ended up at the very bottom of the list in the survey, just above the puzzle DLC joke option! We didn’t think long before swapping it for what later became known as A Dance of Masks — a nostalgic celebration with your companions, heavy on story and companion content. To make it even more exciting, we also decided to experiment with making all the dialogues in it fully voice acted:



Did it work out? Absolutely! You could even say that somewhere between the Enhanced Edition and the launch of The Last Sarkorians is when the game slowly began to enter its golden age.

The Last Sarkorians became the first DLC for Wrath of the Righteous with very positive reviews on Steam, The Lord of Nothing was released to only slightly lower ratings, and A Dance of Masks is the best received DLC of all time for the game, sitting at 88% positive reviews at the time of writing!



And let’s not forget to mention the free mini DLCs that we released as gifts to our audience over this time: Paint of War, A Visitor from Distant Lands, Love Beyond Death, and the recent Visitors from Morta. We hope that these have expanded your experience and entertained you while we were going through this steep learning curve!



Continued Support
What has all of the above taught us? That it is important to stay in contact with our audience at all times and to adjust our plans sooner if they don’t seem to align well with the expectations of the community! That took a while to figure out, but at least, judging by the Void Shadows DLC for Rogue Trader and its Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, it looks like we are in a better place now! :)

With most of the technical issues eradicated, mutual understanding with our playerbase established, and the DLCs refocused based on player feedback, we moved into the era where the team could focus on gradually adding more and more things to make the players happy.

And there were a lot of them.

Mythic Armor and Shield feats for the heavy armor classes. Assassin updates to make the class capable against demons. New high-level Mythic Spells. Swarm-that-Walks updates. Autobattles and sped-up animations in Crusade. Chaotic alignment for Drunken Master. Rat and Tiger forms for the Shifter for all the Catfolk and Ratfolk lovers. And so much more. This was all added based on your feedback!

Yet something was still missing. Until…



Old Debts Repaid
…we finally had the chance to make up for our previous mistakes!

By May 23, 2024, we had finally completed and released the Devil quest that was originally supposed to be released with the Enhanced Edition. Better late than never!

We should point out that your constant jokes on social media about the forgotten Devil played their part! There were a lot of arguments inside the studio that it was too late to repair the damage, that you had moved on and forgotten all about it. Yet these recurring memes and comments kept popping up, year after year, which demonstrated that you guys still cared, and in the end led to the resources being allocated!



Suffice it to say, you guys absolutely loved this update. The amount of excitement was beyond anything we could have expected. The Steam reviews exploded with happiness and praise, and the ratings jumped up.



We are really grateful for that wave of Steam reviews — it was a great sign that we were doing the right thing. That also secured the next big update. With the Devil rightfully upgraded, there was only one Mythic remaining with no updates — the Gold Dragon.

With the launch of the Game of the Year Edition, we have settled our final debt — and you can now enjoy the expanded and renewed Gold Dragon Mythic Path. And wow, the article is currently the most liked article of all time on the Wrath of the Righteous Steam page!







How do we feel about it?

Happy, of course — all of the Mythics are now whole, and it was great to be able to put the last remaining piece of the puzzle in place. Relieved — this burden had been bothering us for years, and it’s great to finally get rid of it. And sorry — for taking so long.

A Small Surprise
We’ve already said that we don’t plan any more major content updates for Wrath of the Righteous, but we have one small surprise for all our fans before we move on.

After the November release of the legendary Wrath of the Righteous metal song made by Skar Productions and Kristin Starkey, we have heard many requests for it to become a part of the game’s soundtrack:



Well, we discussed it… and decided that it was a great idea! The song provides an amazing recap of everything Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous was, and players who have at least one save with a completed playthrough in their game directory will now be able to hear it on the credits screen in-game in the upcoming update!

Don’t Call It a Farewell


There were a lot of things we wanted to share, and probably even more that we have forgotten to tell you about, but this is probably enough for now. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

But before we finish, we want you to know one last thing:

All of this was only possible because of your unbelievable engagement, dedication, and feedback!

Not only did it keep us refueled with enthusiasm and passion through these years, but it also helped us shape the game into what it is today, steering and directing the course of development. This journey is as much yours as it is ours, and it will remain so for all the future aspiring Commanders — your input is forever imprinted as a part of this experience.

For that, we sincerely thank you. We are grateful for every bit of your support, guidance, and trust you have given us over these years.

But with this chapter coming to an end, do not call it a farewell. Let us look boldly into the future — new stories and new worlds await us!

Best regards,
Owlcats