...But there are very definitive issues:
1. The characters, story and writing are all over the place: it's not inherently bad but there's room for a lot of improvement. Baldur's Gate II, Divinity: Original Sin II or Fallout this is NOT.
2. The pacing feels off, with some very odd choices regarding character progression.
3. The biggest issue of them all: ever played a tabletop game with a GM that just seems to enjoy finding loopholes in the rules to make their players' lives difficult? This is it. Get ready to save before every encounter JUST IN CASE you're thrown another curveball that would've been impossible to foresee.
I won't talk about the various issues the other comments describe, but about the main thing that heavily disappointed me.
You see, the game follows a story. Once this story ends, the game ends. It can be annoying for some, but I understand that choice, a strong story arc rather than a crappy endless playthrough, fine.
Or at least, it would have been fine, if the game didn't force you to rush through the story.
You want to do sidequests, or explore, or develop your kingdom? Nope. If you don't do the main quests quickly, a hundred negative events (to the point of getting two per day) fall on you, to force you to focus on the main quests.
Alright, I'll disable the loss condition based on the kingdom's stats.
Nice try, but the main quests are also timed. If you persist and don't do them, you simply get a game over.
So I reached the end of the game, because I was forced to, and when I reach the final zone, I see all my side quests and such marked as "failed". No time to do them, and no possibility to do them after the final quest.
I didn't even want to keep playing after that. Is it a way to artificially increase the playtime by forcing players to make multiple games, to explore the various parts of the game? Or did they simply not think about it?
I don't know, but that's really enough to remove the pleasure of playing a Pathfinder game - you know, the TTRPG, which is supposed to focus on freedom and fun.
I would curse developers of Pathfinder: Kingmaker to develop 1000 old-school isometric RPGs until they start value quality over quantity.
This game is nothing but wasted potential buried under multiple layers of poorly thought-out time-wasters. It tries to recreate good 20 years old games but recreates not only their merits but flaws too, adding new ones in the process. As you progress through the game it starts as a 4/5 star solid attempt to inject you with nostalgia and then slowly devolve to 2/5 stars tedious second job experience as you endure all its flaws over and over again to finally get to the end. It may be interesting for people who have no reference to how good old RPGs look, but if you are not familiar with the CRPG genre, it is not clear why you would pick up this game in the first place.
I hope you are proud of yourself, OwlCat Games. Real-life toxic DMs can ruin spare time only for like 3-4 players at once, but you managed to transfer this experience to the video game, which is played by thousands. Try to make JRPG instead of CRPG.
While the game has a lot of promise and does some make some interesting changes to the CRPG template, it is full of bugs and unfinished content. Frequent crashes, broken abilities and traits, graphical glitches, and information screens that display programming code instead of formatted content -- the game is just not done. It also suffers from a severe lack of polish. Many quests are unclear and often break or get stuck. The game also has some of the worst balance problems in any RPG I have ever played. The current state of the game is bad enough that I literally went back to the site to double check that I had not bought a game in early access. With a few months of additional bug fixes and balancing this will be a great RPG that might rival some of the classics. But I would recommend waiting until the developer completes that process before buying.
I do own another edition of the game on GOG. 4.6/5
I loved "Planescape", played 10 000 hours "Baldur's Gate", tried many RPGs since then. AAAs ended up disappointing me, and i stopped bothering 10 years ago. I played "Original Sin" I/II, "Dragon Age: Origins", "Fallout NV", "Wasteland", some others. While those are worth your while, i had to buy Kingmaker in 2021 to really find what i was looking for.
You can play this game in so many different ways, it makes me dizzy. "Pathfinder: Kingmaker" showcases a living world, with people, stories, fates. It adressses perfectly what a proper RPG should be like: it is about how the world itself lives. Not about the 'underlying mechanics and lore', like "Pillars of Eternity". Oftentimes, details will change depending on which order you do things. You may miss some you never knew about and then find out the next time you play. Dialogues change depending of what you did before. You can recruit bandits to be your "tax collectors", or simply end them. You can be righteous, or you can slander, exploit, steal, swindle, kill or lie. You can recruit 'beneficial' (to you) a**holes in your government, or get rid of them for the sake of justice. But the game never presents you with any 'ideal solution'. At times, you may have to choose the 'least bad'. Life is a lot like this and this makes this world relatable.
The game is long (1100h for me so far. I really take my time trying stuff, experimenting, reloading...The DLCs are worth it). There are so many ways to build a character, it takes time to figure out the kinks of Pathdinder's system. But at the same time, it is not mandatory to try. Straightforward builds are efficient, fun, can be played right away, and are not the 'least effective solution'.
Itemisation is good, progression is fulfilling, exploring is rewarding, replayability is high. Many basic tasks are not uselessly automated, although i miss BG's special arrows. I can only recommand it to anyone looking for an actual RPG
