Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

I've spent over 120h on this game and beat it, but I still didn't see everything there's to see. If someone asked me to put a top 3 isometric(ish) cRPG games of recent years I'd definitely put Pathfinder: Kingmaker on the list (next to the Divinity Original Sin II and Pillars of Eternity II). For some reason I haven't heard of this game before premiere, so I wasn't hyped, only found it out recently and gave it a go. Seems like that was lucky as this game had a lot of issues in its early life. Now in 1.3.x patches the game had almost no technical issues. (few times it froze completely when I was alt-tabbing, but that's it). What makes this game really unique is it's strategy layer. This is really well done and a big and important part of the game, and not just some optional mechanism. It also blends really well with the story and gameplay. Another very good thing was the story itself, it's really nice, full, interesting and deep. To be honest I was expecting something completely different, but I don't want to spoil anything. I liked the Pathfinder character creation system, which is almost like well known Dungeons & Dragons but with much easier multiclassing and many interesting classes I could try. It allowed me to create a very interesting and powerful character, so I'm very happy about it. For me all these things alone are enough to call it a very good game, but there's more smaller good things, like nice music, graphics, characters, lore etc. Also the ability to control the difficulty levels on the fly! I think that besides some minor technical issues I mentioned before the only big flaw that comes to my mind is that there are quite a few repetitive elements in the game (eg. similar/same maps being reused). But that's not too bad. If I could give a score with a fraction I would give something like 4.8/5

This is the one and only true successor of BG1/2. I become pretty old while waiting for a game that provides the same feeling I had playing BG1/2 when it was released in 1998. Owlcat did a really nice job and they are still doing with steadily improvements. They created a very big game with hundreds of hours of gameplay. Interesting I just compared the pure HDD space of several games. BG1=0,6GB BG1 enhanced=3,04GB POE=15,2GB POE2=41,4GB Kingmaker enhanced=43,6GB

To be honest I reinstalled the game multiple times after rage quitting it because it has such potential. I can overlook balancing problems or encounters that are too hard. That’s what mods and cheatengine are for. I can still very much appreciate the love and dedication gone into this game. For example the visual effect when 4 mages cast chain lightning on your foes. Superb! It makes me feel like the emperor roasting Luke Skywalker. I also love the equipment that is physically shown on your characters. Such level of detail and dedication. Most of the main quest missions are really good and I loved playing them. Buuuuuuuuut it brakes my hard heart what you did with the engine. The loading time is just insane. I own decent hardware and I’m very tolerant when it comes to indie games. Heck I even played on multiple machines trying to get around the short comings of this game. Most of the time is wasted looking at the loading screen. Add the occasional PC freezing crash and it’s just frustrating. Please please please open a repo somewhere on Github to get this fixed it ruins this promising game. It’s just sooooo sad that all the love that went into this game is wasted that way. Just opensource this already and let your fans help you fix it. Or reach out to the modders and give them some direction. Another big issue is the lack of direction for quest (both main and side). I found myself multiple times scrolling through forums just how the heck I can proceed with the main quest. Sadly it finally broke down for me when I decided to switch of kingdom management and wanted to advance to the next event. Game just freezes now and all of my saves have that option turned of. Sadly you can’t turn it back on. I might start this again if the loading is reduced to a second or so. Then I’d gladly know how the story ends.

While I really enjoyed some part of the game, I cannot mark 4 stars for this game. You can spend many hours in this game, and you can play even more than twice with different characters and choices. In the entire gameplay, the size of the game universe (jobs, character creation, and other in-game choices), combined with DLCs, felt so big and diverse (my favourite is Varnhold’s Lot, which can experience the main story from the viewpoints of other NPCs). If you enjoy Baldur’s gate or Pillars of Eternity, I think this is a better option than Divinity Original Sin. One of main problems is (as stated in other reviews too) save/load time. They happen too often, and interrupt the gameplay. For example, in the kingdom management even when you open and close the village/town I had to stare at the loading screen every time, and this happens often enough that I forget what I originally wanted to achieve! I think they should somehow optimise whatever they can. Graphic arts and music is okay. Scenario is understandable. The in-game journal, written from a viewpoint of one of NPCs, felt very odd and a bit clumsy. I personally did not like this character but even if I do I think they should have done in a better way even if they try a unique approach. Generally, it seems the production team is indulging themselves: I think they calibrate their QA threshold in a wrong way, as if they can make it pass at least people involved in kickstarters who knows about the contents are satisfied. I thought it was a brave and good attempt to make the pathfinder RPG into CRPG, but I think they should have waited for the release until it converges to a tolerable level.

A game that takes the rules seriously, I liked it! I played it on Linux and didn't find any serious bug, just some minor graphics glitches that could be solved with a driver update. The only thing I didn't enjoy was that halfway through the game you'll notice that loading times get longer and longer. In the end it was so bad that I went and get a coffee and when I came back it didn't finish loading. So you need some patience.