Posted on: March 23, 2022
masterinsan0
Games: 148 Reviews: 1
Unfortunate post-release spyware
Disclaimer: I originally purchased the game on another platform during a sale, where I refunded it after reading the EULA. This review exists to share what's in the EULA at the time of writing in a way most people will understand. So, as a passing fan of the previous Pathfinder game (Kingmaker), I was eagerly anticipating this sequel. I had to wait until it went on sale to pick it up, but I did right around the release of the latest (at time of writing) update - The Inevitable Update. Like most folks, I barely read the EULA these games make you agree to before clicking through to hurry up and start rolling characters, but I had seen a review that mentioned some issues with the conditions in it, so I decided to read this one. Needless to say, I refunded the game immediately. The TL;DR is that the game requires you to allow Owlcat Games the ability to download third-party software onto your computer. This external software is permitted to scrape your machine for data, including hardware specs and other installed apps. The data is supposedly anonymized, but is geolocated. The scraped information is then permitted to be used for marketing purposes with any of Owlcat's marketing partners. I believe this is called "spyware" and unfortunately, it seems as though Owlcat snuck this in. From what I can gather, a small update occurred shortly before the Inevitable Update which added this text to the EULA; it was not present before. For a game which had already been on the market several months, this is very shady behavior. Most current (and new, for that matter) users are just going to click through the EULA without reading it. So, unfortunately, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is (in my opinion) retroactively made spyware by one of the most recent updates, and I strongly recommend folks avoid it until Owlcat removes the text and offending code from their EULA and game. (For what it's worth, Kingmaker doesn't seem to have the same problem.)
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