Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

I love the game. It has depth and has a very similar feel to old Baldurs Gate 1/2 etc. Also like those older games certain classes are more interesting / fun to play than others. That said this game has a major technical issue that will not be fixed anytime soon I fear and that is the ridiculous loading times. ONLY buy this game if you can install it on a fast SSD drive, otherwise the constant loading screens will drive you crazy. It will literally be 5 to 30 seconds of playing followed by 3 full minutes of loading on repeat. Having a super powerfull PC with loads of memory and insane speeds will not help you, it's just bad coding, you need to run this on a SSD.

Pathfinder is what happens when a game system is designed to be played in "min-max" mode. Basically this means game mechanics above story or everything else, with player characters that are ultra specialized in very niche things. To make the game challenging, therefore, even the most mundane of obstacles must be barely obtainable by application of some olympic level statistic or skill. Poor you if your adventuring party is deficient in some capability. Stack on top of this a repetitive card-based, resource poor, "choose the least terrible set of options" kingdom-building meta-game and you have a forced recipe for save scumming. Coming to the rescue are reduced difficulty setting choices, but they feel like they sound: something lesser than the full experience. To be honest, I did not deviate from normal except to eliminate some settings that would simply cause me to reload the most recent save (e.g. party character death ... yes, I am a cretin). Sometimes the game shines with puzzles or obstacle solutions available via the environment or dialogue. I found the game favors the player character who picks a lawful or good alignment, but is very tolerant of letting their party do whatever ... The main plot-line is not traditional and deals more with capriciousness than protagonism. The voice acting in English is mostly ok with some actors extremely overwrought and emotionally monotonic. Some of the text and dialogue is obviously written by someone challenged by English spelling and sentence structure. The combat, especially at the higher levels and with usage of haste, can be overwhelmingly busy. Some spells that should be able to be cast on a location with an area of effect, must instead be cast with a player or enemy as a target. As far as I can tell, once these are initiated, if the target moves, the area of effect does not move with it. Until used to it, this "feature" can result in some wasted resources. In summary, fun but looooooong ... and tiresome.

Almost 150 hours in and I'm not even close to the ending. It's huge, enthraling, complex, well written (mostly) and FUN. It's first RPG after many, many years which gripped me from the beggining and did not let loose. I've spend 8 hours just in the character creation part, so MANY possibilities. It's wonderfull experience, at least now after so many patches. If you liked BG, ICWD, Torment etc., you will love this game.

I'm loving this game. It's a great CRPG based on the D&D 3.5 rules, streamlined a bit to make it better to play as a videogame. First of all, if you don't know all the Pathfinder rules, it has some information mission on the character creation. It doesn't tell you which stats the class use for spellcasting, or the HitDice of the class. If you know D&D you will know or can safely assume that information, but it would be nice to have it ingame. Combat in the game is turn-based and can be paused at any moment. Also, the info the game lacks in the character information, is complete in combat. You have a combat log that register every attack, skill and magic used, and if you mouse over it, a tooltip will tell you exactly what bonuses or debuffes affected the roll, giving you all the info you need to know what you need to do. The difficulty is also very customizable. You can choose how much damage the enemies will do. If they have higher or lower stats than normal. If the characters in your party can die. If permanent stat damage is healed only by magic means or by rest too. The difficulty of the kingdom management, and so on. Kingdom Management is half of the game. You're trying to build a new country, and oh boy, there's so many curses in this damn land you would assume it's all above a giant indian burial ground! Now, there's a big thing in this game, that might now feel right to many people. There's a time limit for the game. Every time you finish a main quest, when the timer ends, a new main quest will appear and a new timer will be there. It's a lenient timer tho, the game gives you a timer on real time. So when your character receives a quest with 90 days to finish it, it's real 90 days time. That's because the vast majority of the timer is used while traveling on the world map between locations. The game also has some bugs, but it has been constantly patched by the developers. It's not perfect, but it's a damn fine videogame!

Отличная игра от московской студии. Но нет русскоязычной озвучки. А это не есть хорошо.