Man I do not get all the whining I'm seeing all over the internet about how difficult the game is. Now, I'll grant that the encounter balance isn't all that great and could be improved a lot, but with how modular the difficulty settings are there's really no excuse for all this complaining. "Oh, it's such bullshit, the game throws an enemy that does permanent ability damage to you early on." Haha yeah such bullshit it's not like there's an option to make resting heal all negative status effects including permanent ability damage, you nugget. "Oh, it's such bullshit, this boss hits harder than I think it should." There's a literal damn slider that allows you to tweak the amount of damage your party takes. Slide it down to only taking 90% damage to make it a bit easier, or 50% to make it a lot easier, or hell 200% to make it a lot harder. Like this game gives you such a massive breadth of control over your difficulty settings. "I don't like the way encounters are balanced" is a valid complaint for this game. I don't like it either. But "This game is unplayably difficult" should absolutely not be a complaint when you can literally custom tailor the difficulty to make it as easy or challenging as you want (well, within reason. We'll still probably need mods to make it really challenging. I wish I had the money to pay the Sword Coast Stratagems guy to mod every RPG).
It's something I've seen a lot with TBS campaigns too, especially with Age of Wonders. "Ugh I hate the campaign it's such bullshit, I keep getting my ass handed to me." "Well what level are you playing on?" "Hard." "Have you considered, you know, playing on Easy or Normal?" "No I'm a Hardcore Gamer™ and those levels are for casuals if I can't easily beat the game on hard difficulty my first time through that's the dev's fault." Like holy hell you know who gives a shit what difficulty level you play on? No one. That's who. Get over your damn e-peen already.
Again, I'm not excusing questionable encounter balance. I think Kingmaker was made with people who are familiar with Pathfinder in mind, and if you don't know the ruleset, I can see the game being punishingly difficult. Not all complaints about the balance are equal, though. "This boss you're supposed to fight at level 2 receives a +14 bonus to all his damage rolls" is a valid complaint. Like I said, easily dealt with by tweaking the difficulty, but still, you're using the tools to compensate for the dev's poor decisions, and that's not ideal. But there are also complaints about how enemy squads work as a team, and that's just silly.
Anyway, my continued impressions, in point form because I've already wasted enough space with ranting.
Combat is a lot of fun. Not to sound like a broken record, but turn based combat would be 1000x better. Still, it's tabletop Pathfinder goodness, with about ten million spells, feats, and special abilities creating a deep and rewarding experience.
Combat AI is terrible. Just atrocious. You're better off turning it off completely, otherwise you can spend the game watching Amiri get ganked because everyone just charges in, which means the fast-moving low-AC Barbarian will be bearing the brunt of enemy attacks.
Your companions are not strong. They're poorly optimized and generally underwhelming. This wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for two factors: First, the game is on the difficult side, and second, it contributes to the next problem...
Custom companions are prohibitively expensive. This is just obnoxious. I mean it's frigging Pathfinder. Half the point of the system is all the crazy options you have for characters. It's not juist about bringiing in companions that are maybe a bit stronger than the ones you have, it's about not wanting to start a new game every time you have an idea for a character you want to try out, like a demented mad bomber that's half-angel.
The voice acting doesn't get any better.
But still the game is just a blast. Already I'm seeing enough options that I'm excited to see how things will look different on future playthroughs. I think this game is one or two patches away from greatness.
