So I return to my capital after another successful quest. Things are going well and all. I am about to become a king. There are two regions that can be added to my barony. So I click on one and now I have to wait 14 days. After 3 or 4 I see a message box "Your barony has been destroyed. Game over." Ok, Let's see the last report. Some event successfully resolved, some other succesfully resolved. Nothing, just nothing that would explain what just happened. In fact the game ended without giving me a SINGLE word of explanation of what was the reason for the game over. I was thrown out of the game after playing more than 100 hours and the game did not even deign to give a summary, explanation, anything. OWLCAT - it is the Mount Everest of game development incopetence and arrogance. Avoid them like the plague. Just dont tell me the core of the game is ok, it is just D&D system that is ok, this particular representation of this system, the game called Pathfinder Kingmaker is a travesty.
Every mechanic in the game is sabotaged by bad design choices the devs made!
As others have pointed out, everything has timers; it's stupid.
Even if you lose one thing when choosing another, timers are NEVER a good idea.
Look at Tyrrany; you gain something and lose something with EVERY choice, but there's no hurrying the player, ever!
This game has the ability to farm enemies as much as you want via random encounters and you'll need them!
However, if you take the time to do the normal level up to outmatch hard enemy encounters, you WILL lose because the developers built in mechanics SPECIFICALLY to screw you over if you farmed at ALL!
Speaking of encounters: the majority of the enemies have PLAYER levels.
Anyone who's ever played on one of those live servers from NWN or NWN2 where they do the same thing will know why this sucks.
For those who don't: Player levels are intended to make a character gain power FAST; while moster levels are intended to npcs gain power slowly.
This is needed because the players group will always be outnumbered, so to make it a fair fight the npcs are weaker on a 1 to 1 basis.
The kingdom building mechanics are another area that could've been great, but they completely ruined!
Example: If you build a shop, you get one economy.
You'd reasonably expect from that point on, no matter what happens you now have at least 1 point in economy.
Sadly this is false; your kingdom can lose EVERY POINT in every single area of it's stats no matter what buildings you have.
This makes no sense!
It's not like you are losing buildings by way of a battle that disrupts your trade; those are completely unrelated to the actual kingdom.
On events:
The majority of writing and characters in the game are great.
The problem comes in with the design of the events... which are essentially another stupid timer.
You have ONE military guy to deal with a military event, but they spawn 2, then 3 at a time to screw you over.
There's more but word limit hit.
Do not buy!
TL;DR The encounters in this game boarder on idiotic, several are instant death, and with no option to flee combat it forces you to scum save. The game does not follow Pathfinder rules making so several classes are unplayable, especially ones that require positioning or finese
Any game that forces you to scum saves breaks your imersion in the world. The party balance is junk and you are forced to manage with what ever hog pog group they decide you get. The real time nature of the system and rules they decided to keep and ones they didn't makes certian classes not viable. Classes such as the magus need percise timing to be able to five foot adjust out of threatening reach to cast then be ready to strike, but there is no way to have such control in this game. However if you try to play such a class you will be constantly punished with attacks of opportunity.
Managing maigc in this system is abysmal, and as far as I can tell instead of making it so the AI will not cast AOE spells into combat, they just made it so the enemies do not get hurt by their own AOE spells. The game does not use the same rules as Pathfinder so you do not get bonus spells for high Int for a Magus or Wizard nor do you get bonus Skill points so several stats are not longer balanced, the point buy system caps your stats so you can't have an 18 stat to start.
That is before you get to the quests which bounce all over the place as far as difficluty which as this is not a skill based game you will end up in ecnouters that come out of left field and just wipe your party. this type of poor balance not only waste's the players time but is also extremely frustrating. You often have no warning of what you were about to encounter, and with no way to flee combat you end up reloading a lot, Then with timed quest that fail often without any indication that their was a time only add insult to injury.
This could have been a really good game, but unnecessary pointless timer on Campaign and hidden timers on quests destroys having fun in this game. If only developers had made this game without pointless timers it could have been a classic.
Note: I was a Kickstarter backer.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker represents the beginning of a new paradigm for Dungeons and Dragons style RPG's. It does some things better than anybody else than ever before, but other things in the game design are just backwards and extremely unfun.
Pros:
- Implementation of the mechanics of Pathfinder ruleset is bar none.
- Fleshes the Adventure Path it's based on in interesting ways.
- Unparalleled DND style character customization with more options than you can feasibly play.
- Dynamic difficulty sliders that mitigate some of the issues.
- Great music, VO, sound, UI and graphics.
- Lots of fun loot.
Cons:
- RTWP absolutely ruins some mechanics that would be easy to mitigate in TB, such as Trip Attack.
- Completely useless kingdom management that will randomly ruin your save game in ways you can't anticipate.
- Sloooooooow start.
- Strangely poor party composition of both companions and vassals.
- P:K all falls apart in the end, with a literally headache inducing final chapter.
- Needlessly OP enemies everywhere always.
Neutral:
- You get the most out of the game with extensive use of cheat mods.
- Long. 100+ hours.
- Very good but pricey DLC.
- A mixed bag of interesting companions and boring.
Ultimately, I kind of really hated it in the end, but I'm absolutely dying to play a sequel just to see for myself how Owlcat improves upon their formula. With more experience, they absolutely have the potential for greatness.
