This game was fun! Then for some reason, my kingdom was destroyed due to "Call of Abaddon". None of my open quests mention anything about “Abaddon”. I believe I was only in Chapter 2, but well over 50 hours playing. I tried an older save and enabled auto kingdom and "invincible kingdom", but game still ends. There is no way I’m going to start a new game to get back to where I was hoping the same thing doesn’t happen again. If you want a game that ends after 50 hours of playing for no apparent reason, then this is the game for you!!!
Pathfinder: Kingmaker has great potential, as blend of roleplaying game and building game based on a well tested concept from the original Pen and Paper Pathinder-Kingmaker adventure path. Yet, it attemps to create a verbatim copy of the adventure path as PC game, and as that fails.
It suffers from several problems:
- Lacklustre NPC
- Poor story
- Freedom deception
- Hidden optimization requirements
- the game feels extremely slow
First and formost, the iconic NPC are flat. That makes them a great tool at the table, as they have to interpreted by the Game Master, but as characters in a computer game they convey part of the story and require more depths. Loading screens and cutscenes tell me what kind of person the NPC are, but during gameplay, it does not play any role at all.
The story is your run of the mill "zero to hero" story, where a ragtag band fights a threat from beyond. Even worse, it pretends to be rather open, where in fact it is not: Most occurances are scripted, even though they are disguised as "random encounter".
Pathfinder requires rules mastery for successfully playing an Adventure Path, and Kingmaker is no different. The games does not openly tell you, though, and even deceives you into believing that optimization is not necessary through the often badly built "story companions" (I greatly advise anyone to look for a character build thread in the forums). Furthermore, many events are purely based on chance.
Last but not least, the game feels sluggish on my PC and reacts very slowly whenever I interact with it. That might be due to my system though.
Even though I generally love this kind of game, it does not truly deliver. I cannot fully recommend it.
One day, I hope, this game will be seen as one of the best. But it is not this day. The graphics are pretty, and who can argue with the Pathfinder rule set? Isometric like BG and IWD, it's a recipe for greatness.
But the following issues still plague it.
1. Bugs - far less it seems than release, but they are there - and glaring at times.
2. Laggy - it's a resource hog - I can run circles around games with more advanced graphics but can only manage to run this at the lowest settings or I get terrible lag. Badly designed.
3. Loading Times - as others have said, there's a long loading screen for literally everything. Camp? Loading screen. Go into your bedroom? Loading screen. And the loading screens take awhile.
4. Kingdom Crap - OK so technically this doesn't count against them because the dang game is called Kingmaker, but the kingdom management is very tedious and not my style. I want to adventure and kill monsters - but no sooner do you really get invested in that are you required to hot foot it back to your capitol to play bureaucracy the game. Wee!
In time, if the Devs care, they can eliminate or mitigate the first three. From what I'm told #2 and #3 are due to poor programming and picking a bad engine. I don't know for sure as I'm not a game designer.
I'm torn between 2 and 3 stars. If you get this, get it on sale.
I don't usually get very invested when I play video games, this one is different though. Personally I love the story, the characters and the rulesets. I am almost at chapter 6 and having so much fun. However, If you are new to pathfinder ruleset ( As was I) the beginning is going to be rough but it is very worth it.
I definitely recommend It
I've been playing Pathfinder since it came out, I love how they have adapted the written Pathfinder rules to make the game and they made what I think are the best choices to streamline the gameplay. The Kingdom Building takes effort to get used to it but it actually works quite well especially with the more recent updates. The most exciting part for me is the new turn based mode, it is much slower than real time with pause but it works great and solves a lot of the issues that the combat had before. It's really a great game.
