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.
