It's a big game, but I found myself sitting around wondering "okay, do you really expect me to grind for another 30+ hours just to advance the plot? It turned out, the answer was yes. The game feels like a foundation with plot thrown in for flavor, but it didn't feel sufficiently connected to bring me from one thing to the next.
Also, several critical events I skipped the first time through because ... I didn't go to a particular location at the right time when there was nothing to tell me to go there, no journal entry, no quest marker. Ended up being rather annoying. Also, is it really too much to ask that on the world map I have something between "no names, no quest markers" and "all the names and your quest markers that you can barely find because the names are in the way"?
This is the most fun I have had playing a game of this genre. And I don't normally like this genre.
I loved the characters, the story and presentation. I even like being the Baron / Barroness.
This is a labour of love done right in my opinion.
You can almost hear the dice rolls in the back.
Many seem to dislike it for various reasons. I am assuming most issues have been fixed over the years. But one constant complaint is the difficulty. While I would agree (normal is too hard for me), in my opinion there is NO shame in reducing the myriad of difficulty setting to suit your ability.
My only serious complaint is that it seems to require a lot of GPU (graphic card) rersources. My GPU runs hot playing this.
A minor issue is that you cannot save during battle. Some battles can run long if you are controling it and not letting the AI go at it.
As many games of this type you cannot rotate the field of view. Common guys, it is past the 2020's :)
Halfway through the game. Here's what you can look forward to:
- After every act, I have to manually unzip my save file and delete 90% of it because of how horribly inefficient the save format is. For some reason this doesn't break the game at all. This fixes loading times, ingame lag, and savefile bloat.
- The Act 4 finale is very unbalanced even on normal difficulty. I know what I'm doing in this genre and my party was getting wiped by enemies that could 1v3 my entire tank frontline dead in two hits. These guys could appear in pairs, alongside 3 normal guys and 2 heavy casters in the back using Hold Person which is also guaranteed death if it hits. Switched to easy mode and skipped through the dungeon.
- The game crashes every time I exit.
- Inventory is full of garbage that I have to keep, and sorting never works. Anytime you pick up a magic item you have to spend another 30 seconds finding it again in your bag before you can see if it's worth using.
- There's a ton of good QoL difficulty options but I can't imagine how bad this game would be without them. Half the combats in the game would normally require a 7 day roundtrip out of the dungeon and back home to heal. That could make your game unwinnable from all the time limit events.
- "Kingdom Management: Auto" works but is really janky. You get constant UI popups that make no logical sense. The game is telling me that everything is failing, my kingdom is collapsing due to riots, and I have to just keep playing and trust that the spaghetti code won't game over my 40 hour save.
It breaks my heart not to immediately recommend this. I was worried this was going to be Pillars with a Pathfinder coat of paint, and am delighted by how faithful an adaptation it is! It's not 1:1, and there are some notable class omissions (Gunslinger and Summoner I get, Cavaliers lose a lot without mounts, but Witch and Oracle should have been doable), but you're still given an impressive amount of options that rivals the complexity and depth of the tabletop experience... if you only have the Core Rulebook, Advanced Player's Guide and Ultimate Magic, but that's honestly the most you can ask in reason. Writing and characters are certainly on par for the genre too.
I had a rough experience with an early boss, and it sounds like most people do. It reduces a lot of damage, and you might not have stumbled upon those two magic-users that can actually use offensive spells yet. I was ready to dust myself off and carry on, but then I read more reviews, and it seems like the issue doesn't get better. Your heroes will do virtually no damage to an enemy, and even your tanks will be dead before you can figure out why. What's worse is random encounters don't seem to adjust well to your party's level either.
If there *is* a simple fix here, I think it's adding an option to remove damage reduction from enemies, but it sounds like it could use a bigger fix than that. I hope to see a *major* balance patch in the future. Until then, I'm certainly gonna keep playing, but this is gonna be save-scum central and I don't super-enjoy that.
(On a positive note, I actually love the camping mechanics. A lot of people say they're a pain, but it's not that hard to buy a few days of rations from Oleg, and then put the characters in the roles where they have the biggest numbers. Good to see a cRPG not just say "sure, naptime, whatever". Only thing that might help is an estimate on how many days of travel to get to a destination.)
Truth be told, I don't know anything about the board game.
This out of the way, This game Pathfinder has everything to sooth a player needs for its genre but 2 points, 1 of which is a huge caveat.
1) There are way too few character portraits. I don't care if the budget was included for it or not. Character creation is a big requirement for this type of games and that was an extremely cheap move that smells "wait, maybe there could be more portrait for a coming DLC"?
2) The biggest problem of all is the shear number of patching. RPG games and closely surrounding game genres.
The game is definitely WORTH BUYING but this is NO game gold release, this is at best a BETA HOT FIX stage; therefore buy it and leave it for a month or 2, if not, don't buy it and wait for a month or 2 while "they fix bugs" and perhaps you will remember the game exists.
