Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

What started out as a bland story of "adventurers come together, kill some goblins and then become heroes" turned into a very enjoyable CRPG in its fullest sense. Good parts first: The story becomes richer and more interesting after a dull first part, you have extreme amounts of customization options available to your PC and your companions (the game system is based on D&D 3.5 rule set), unlike many others I found the kingdom management sidegame to be a nice touch, the world and the NPCs are fleshed out enough that you care about their opinions/backgrounds/wishes, and I have not encountered any major or game-breaking bugs (since I started playing when most of the patches and updates were already published). It was a very pleasant (and long) gaming experience, it has been a long time since I have enjoyed a CRPG this much. What I'm neutral about and many others have heavily criticized: the game doesn't hold your hand. In a given map you will be fighting a group of lowly goblins and then within the same map you will encounter a monster so much above your current level that you will be obliterated. So the game expects you to run away from certain fights and then come back to them again when you have grown. Fair enough. The problem is with fatigue when travelling and loading screens and what-not, I do not want to visit the same maps/locations again. There is also no way of adding notes/markers on the map to remind you what you left behind... In its current state this is a gem of a CRPG.

The game may well be great, but it's incredibly sluggish on my pc although it meets the recommended specs. Requested a refund.

There's a lot to be said about the game, overall it's a very flawed but interessting CRPG. The issues lie more in the design philosophy of the developers, which seem to be; "We have a save function, and therefore, players are going to save scum, so lets design the entire game around this concept!". Random Encounters that'll shred you to pieces(unless you save prior to moving anywhere on the map), high difficulty checks on chests\traps. Chests you can only attempt to pick once per character(meaning, you save, check how difficult\hard the chest is, if it's too hard, you come back later and pick it). Even quests are heavily designed around the idea of save-scumming, as while the idea of time being an important resource is potentionally interessting\good, the way the quest locations are handled\done, leaves one to feel like you 'have to' save, then move around the map to find the location you need, then reload and go there directly. Another issue is, if you go to a location, clear it, then continue onwards with the main-quest, if this location 'was' a quest location with a scripted event, this scripted event won't trigger until you're at that point in the quest. Meaning; you might be completely lost and have no idea what to do(because you never got the scripted sequence). One such situation is in Troll Trouble, if you go to the broken watchtower too soon, you'll not trigger the proper event sequence, therefore, you won't know to go there to get the proper troll-locations(and so will at best, wander aimlessly wasting time, time, which is something you rarely have to spare!). Essentially, the bugs at release have mostly been fixed, but because of these fundemental design flaws I can't give this more than 2 stars. Had it not been designed around save scumming and scripted-events be missable(by no fault of your own), it'd have been 4 stars. There's more issues than just this, but those two are the biggest ones in my opinion.

So I think the way to look at this game and wrath of the righteous is like how'd you look at baldur's gate 1 and 2. Kingmaker, like baldur's gate 1, is a relatively low power level adventure. You run a kingdom and deal with all the issues that come with it. Things get a bit wacky once your halfway through the game, and that's where your first difficulty spike will probably be. Wrath on the other hand is like baldur's gate 2, high power, high stakes. You're fighting demons and demon lords. This also applies to the polish and quality of life features. Since this is owlcat's first game, it's missing a few things such as icons indicating spells you can copy and not having a rotatable camera. The major game breaking bugs have been ironed out at least, so you shouldn't have to worry about the game bricking itself mid playthrough. Overall, buy it on sale if you really like Pathfinder and really enjoyed wrath of the righteous. It's a lot easier than wrath, that's for sure.

Potentially a great game, once it´s finished. As many others have mentioned, there are a lot of balancing issues. Random encounters will potentially one shot your entire party in the first round. A lot of monsters deal permanent stat damage, that I have so far found no way to "cure", which means mu avergare dex in my party is down to about 5 after playing for two hours. Also, loading times are terribly long, there are many many many many graphics and sound bugs. The game tends to just halt for 20-40 seconds at random intervals, even in the middle of a dialogue or combat, and I´m running the game on a very high end rig. (Geforce 1070, i7-8700, 16 gb ram). At one point I thought my hard drive had actually crashed, but it was just PF:K doing it´s things. I´ve given up getting the game to run in a tolerable pace for now, and sincerely hope that the issues will be fixed, and this will not be another stone in the pile of kickstarter games, that should have never been released.