Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

I finally managed to finish Kingmaker, after ~70h of gameplay (I ended up using cheats around the last chapter). The first 30h or so were very promising: the game is well written, the pace is good and the difficulty manageable - especially is you tweak the very complete difficulty settings, and remove the most absurd rules, like not being able to remove permanent effect by resting. I have two main issues with the experience, which ended up being a cumulation of frustration on the second part. The first one is that is used to the letter the original tabletop rules, which only work because there is a gamemaster adapting its campagin to the player. In Pathfinder you can start a fight, fail a check, get all your band controlled / root / wathever; even if you prepared first. Only solution, reload and hope for a better dice role. Basically, having the good preparation, skill setup, level and strategy do not garantee victory. And it's not a tactical game either: a fail dice roll does not mean you'll need to rethink your strategy or adapt, just that now you have to hope to stay alive long enough. A game like Darkess Dungeon creates choices with its randomness, Pathfinder creates frustration. The second biggest issue I found is that preparation for a fight is almost impossible without dying and reloading. The first time you encounter a new enemy type, it might start as a group of 5 of them, coming from all direction. You notice a small band of bandits and attack them just to see 10 new enemies spawning from nowhere and attacking your ranged character no longer protected. The first time you encounter a Troll, if you have no acid spell or bombs, you cannot leave the fight. Basically, the original tabletop rules are not good and this game suffers from it. Tabletop RPG are designed with a gamemaster, they fall without it. I had some other issues with the game (balancing, loading time, etc...); but keep in mind that I really enjoyed the first 30h of gameplay.

I get that this was a very buggy game at launch, and I ran into a bunch when I first played it. But now that it has been patched this is exactly the kind of rpg I love. If you don’t like heavy dialogue games, then this game isn’t for you. This is not all combat so be ready for that. There is a lot of city dialogue and character building. The one thing I don’t like about the game is that the main quest is timed. There’s a lot of timers in this game and I wish that I just had more down time in the game to explore. But overall I love the mechanics and style of the game. If you love tabletop rpgs then you would love this game.

This game is absolutely my game of the year. There are quite a few bugs from what I've read, but they are being fixed quickly. I'm just getting to act 4 and haven't actually experienced anything except minor display bugs myself, so I can't really comment on their severity. Outside of the bugs, the game itself is incredibly deep. The class options alone had me sitting around reading up and deciding what to play for a couple of days before I actually dug into the game. The story is well written, compelling, and presented in a way that's quite refreshing compared to other CRPGs I've played this year. Our companions are all lovable in their own way and have excellent dialogue and their own interesting side stories. Pathfinder: Kingmaker has an absurd amount of content as well. I'm almost 100 hours in and approximately half way through the game. And that's not even counting replayability, which I'm already preparing for a next playthrough. Overall I'd say that if you enjoy story driven games you absolutely cannot miss out on this one. Don't let the potential bugs keep you away, it's too good to be overly concerned with some glitches here and there.

Game has a good story but it has a lot of issues that are immersion breaking. I lost several hours of gameplay after the party became bugged - fatigue wouldn't get removed after resting. I think this was after the Debates quest with Jubilost. Other issues I encountered before: 1. Duplicated Amiri - had to reload to an earlier save because she was no longer interactable in the Tuskgutter area 2. The elf artisan quest. One of the key characters isn't interactable too.

At first, I am not new to D&D 3.5. Maybe that's why I did not experience any problems with the game being too difficult. So I kinda understand people that give low rating to this game. Especially, considering that the class descriptions are not full, some game mechanics are not clear etc. But is the game balance or difficulty level is broken? Absolutely not. This is the best balanced D&D cRPG I've ever played, and I played them all (unfortunately, I can't go into details, since I am limited on review size). When I see people complain on some bosses, I realize that they would have the same problems with Baldur's Gates 2, for example. It's not their fault, they are not used to the games like this one, but it's so sad that this brilliant game fails to gain acceptance it deserves because of that. The graphics is the best I've ever seen in isometric RPG (better than PoE2 for example, which still looks nice). I do not mean only the technical part, it's just beautiful. Level design, portraits, items in your inventory, everything. They really tried their best to make a great game. The soundtracks are amazing. They are beautiful, various and they don't last too long, replacing each other, so you never get tired of them. The writing is good. It's not Planescape: Torment, but at least the game don't feed you tons of senseless texts, like PoE (I still like PoE though). I can't rate storyline or companions, since I haven't completed half a game yet. All I can say, the companions got their big quests, so it looks promising. I also want to praise the strategic part. In this game you rule a barony, and I think it complements the game really well. Yep, there are some flaws. I ran into few bugs (they are fixed now), loading screens are a bit annoying... That's all. It's a brilliant game, guys. I really think this is one of the best D&D