Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

This is the most fun I have had playing a game of this genre. And I don't normally like this genre. I loved the characters, the story and presentation. I even like being the Baron / Barroness. This is a labour of love done right in my opinion. You can almost hear the dice rolls in the back. Many seem to dislike it for various reasons. I am assuming most issues have been fixed over the years. But one constant complaint is the difficulty. While I would agree (normal is too hard for me), in my opinion there is NO shame in reducing the myriad of difficulty setting to suit your ability. My only serious complaint is that it seems to require a lot of GPU (graphic card) rersources. My GPU runs hot playing this. A minor issue is that you cannot save during battle. Some battles can run long if you are controling it and not letting the AI go at it. As many games of this type you cannot rotate the field of view. Common guys, it is past the 2020's :)

The save files balloon up to ridiculous sizes, eating up disk space, and slowing the game to a crawl. I've never finished this game because halfway through due to the size of the save files, the game slows down to a crawl. Don't get this game, especially if you don't have loads and loads of free disk space.

It breaks my heart not to immediately recommend this. I was worried this was going to be Pillars with a Pathfinder coat of paint, and am delighted by how faithful an adaptation it is! It's not 1:1, and there are some notable class omissions (Gunslinger and Summoner I get, Cavaliers lose a lot without mounts, but Witch and Oracle should have been doable), but you're still given an impressive amount of options that rivals the complexity and depth of the tabletop experience... if you only have the Core Rulebook, Advanced Player's Guide and Ultimate Magic, but that's honestly the most you can ask in reason. Writing and characters are certainly on par for the genre too. I had a rough experience with an early boss, and it sounds like most people do. It reduces a lot of damage, and you might not have stumbled upon those two magic-users that can actually use offensive spells yet. I was ready to dust myself off and carry on, but then I read more reviews, and it seems like the issue doesn't get better. Your heroes will do virtually no damage to an enemy, and even your tanks will be dead before you can figure out why. What's worse is random encounters don't seem to adjust well to your party's level either. If there *is* a simple fix here, I think it's adding an option to remove damage reduction from enemies, but it sounds like it could use a bigger fix than that. I hope to see a *major* balance patch in the future. Until then, I'm certainly gonna keep playing, but this is gonna be save-scum central and I don't super-enjoy that. (On a positive note, I actually love the camping mechanics. A lot of people say they're a pain, but it's not that hard to buy a few days of rations from Oleg, and then put the characters in the roles where they have the biggest numbers. Good to see a cRPG not just say "sure, naptime, whatever". Only thing that might help is an estimate on how many days of travel to get to a destination.)

Truth be told, I don't know anything about the board game. This out of the way, This game Pathfinder has everything to sooth a player needs for its genre but 2 points, 1 of which is a huge caveat. 1) There are way too few character portraits. I don't care if the budget was included for it or not. Character creation is a big requirement for this type of games and that was an extremely cheap move that smells "wait, maybe there could be more portrait for a coming DLC"? 2) The biggest problem of all is the shear number of patching. RPG games and closely surrounding game genres. The game is definitely WORTH BUYING but this is NO game gold release, this is at best a BETA HOT FIX stage; therefore buy it and leave it for a month or 2, if not, don't buy it and wait for a month or 2 while "they fix bugs" and perhaps you will remember the game exists.

Pathfinder Kingmaker has the makings of a truly fantastic game, but it needed another year in development. The game currently suffers from numerous bugs (both major and minor), but the real problem is that the later chapters feature appallingly bad game design. The first issue is that the difficulty is all out of wack. The enemies you face seem to assume you will always have an optimized party that's also buffed to the gills. If you use a less hardcore team, expect to die a lot. In theory this can be compensated for via the difficulty slider. But late game even that breaks down because the difficulty slider only tweaks the damage and attack bonus/AC relative to the NPCs. That doesn't do much when NPCs will spam powerful status effects faster than you could dispel them. This is made exponentially worse by the game's second issue, its penchant for 'Guide Dang It' quest design. Hidden information and unwinnable quest states abound. Seemingly innocuous decisions can completely hamstring you 30 hours later, sometimes severely. I'm no stranger to this design philosophy, but it needs to be done very carefully. Kingmaker has done so very poorly. Specifically, the game is very long, meaning the amount of time wasted is enormous. The other problem is that it really undermines the 'roleplaying' aspect of the game, because some choices are much better than others but there's rarely any way to guess that ahead of time. There are a lot of good parts to this game. The plot works well, and the companions are surprisingly well done. Unfortunately, that makes the shortcomings all the more frustrating, because I want to slog through in the illusory hope of finding a satisfying ending. Someday, I suspect the bugs will be patched and walkthroughs will make it possible to avoid the many, many pitfalls in the story. When that day comes, I'll try to re-evaluate this game. Until then, Pathfinder Kingmaker has to be counted as an extreme disappointment.