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20 reasons why Kingmaker is objectively better than Baldurs Gate 2

Which game is better?


  • Total voters
    123
Joined
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Codex Year of the Donut
guys, there's no reason to argue
both pathfinder and D&D are shit
 

Sharpedge

Prophet
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Sep 14, 2018
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One of Paizo's creative developers said that they will always have a SJW agenda in their products. Just another reason why Pathfinder > DnD.

Don't you think you are laying it on a little thick here? People might realize you are trolling.
 

TemplarGR

Dumbfuck!
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So, now that Safav has been exposed for the Obsidian shill he really is, he makes a thread like this to throw smoke into people's eyes, and additionally subtly make people who want to defend BG2 to trashtalk Deadfire's main 2018 competitor, all in one thread... Nice job!
 

ikarinokami

Augur
Joined
May 5, 2013
Messages
109
The biggest problem with kingmaker, which I finished on hard, is that the combat is garbage. and it's garbage because the pathfinder ruleset is very much a TB ruleset. The game just makes me sad, it could have been so great if they didnt try to be all cute and force a square peg into a round hole. This game should have had a variation on the TOEE combat system and be in the running for GOAT rpg. instead it's just another what could have been..
 

Kyl Von Kull

The Night Tripper
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
If you really believe he is a troll, simply do not respond. If he is incorrect, simply argue against his points.

His points are nonsensical. I don't know if he's trolling or doing an elaborate self-satire. But "what does P:K do better than BG2 and vice versa" is a genuinely good question that deserves a serious appraisal. It's just not gonna happen in this thread.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
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Jun 17, 2012
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If you really believe he is a troll, simply do not respond. If he is incorrect, simply argue against his points.

His points are nonsensical. I don't know if he's trolling or doing an elaborate self-satire. But "what does P:K do better than BG2 and vice versa" is a genuinely good question that deserves a serious appraisal. It's just not gonna happen in this thread.

Yeah I was going to make that point. A lot of the reason people reply to these threads is they probably would find that discussion and comparison of the games interesting, but it's wrapped up in trolling so it's just a shitshow.
 

Reapa

Doom Preacher
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Obvious trolling. It's actually a conversation worth having, but he's not here to engage in any meaningful discourse. Just a bored child lashing out for attention at an adult's dinner party.
it really isn't.
i tried coming up with examples of why it may be better than bg2 and i couldn't think of any.



is having timed main quests an improvement? not really. especially when the timers are not explained. first curse manifestation is after 2 or 3 months, second is after a year or something and it gets predicted but not explained. it's an obvious artificial pressure mechanic and from my point of view it's not needed. it takes away the freedom of exploring at your own pace and gives you nothing in return. i don't know why shit like this is being done. i believe bg2 had quest timers for companions but not for the main quests / chapters and it was fine.

they may have done it for replayability. but what they achieve is forcing the player to replay the game before he's through with the game because he doesn't know enough about the game to play it efficiently in his first run and then the second and then the third and so on for every timer. i must have restarted the game 4-5 times and haven't finished it yet once. it's cool for roguelikes, it's not cool for story RPGs where you experience mostly the same thing over and over and over and even have to suffer through scripted events and unskipable cut scenes that you would have skipped even in your first playthrough because they were nothing but monologues and dialogues without player input and choices. at least bg2s were goosebumps inducing well voice acted.



is kingdom management something i want in an rpg? or would i rather focus on adventuring. it should be something to play with between adventures, but for some reason they made it a core element and then they even botched its design. there's no rhyme or reason to any of it and it's extremely poorly explained partly due to very unsuitable/uninformative UI.
for example: a certain arbitrarily chosen attribute will decide whether your companion will do well or suck at his government role which of course limits your freedom of developing that companion for the adventuring part. but that's not enough. the game tells you exactly which companions must fill the government roles instead of leaving that to you so you're pretty fucked. feel free to replay the fucking game the same fucking way every fucking time because of such moronic design decisions.
shit can't be that bad, can it? no, of course not, it's worse. it's much much worse because ruling is serious business and has to be done just right otherwise it's game over. they actually made a fucking side attraction to an RPG (the kingdom management) a core element that sets the stage for the actual game (the adventuring part) in terms of companion character development forced min maxing.
there are alternatives like using npcs as government officials but you can't level up npcs and you can't equip them so they are a very crappy alternative. you can also play the adventuring part with custom companions and use the ones the game gives you only for government roles. you can at least equip them but then you have to split your gear and again you can't level them cause then you'd have to also split your xp. so the alternatives suck more ass than the obvious way to play.

now the game already has loading times issues. it really didn't need the kingdom management to make them even worse. for some reason loading the kingdom management UI takes as long as loading a fucking location and they couldn't be bothered to make it stay in ram so it doesn't need to come from the hard drive every fucking time you need to access it. well done devs! good way to give your game some artificial length!!!

i wish i could stop criticizing the kingdom management and move on to other aspects, but there's just so much more that needs to be criticized. let's waste a lot of resources that could be spent on more content and make some crappy fluff. let's make the player build shit just for the sake of it and only in the kingdom management UI. let's not have the game world change in any way to show what the player spent his money on when building shit. let's not make any stores spawn ingame after building them. let's not make building a prison instead of an orphanage a moral choice with tangible consequences but a kingdom stats economics choice with only virtual consequences and let's not make those buildings spawn ingame either. let's make a huge amount of fluff just for fluff's sake.

then there's the core of the core element that should have been a side attraction. the fucking dangers and opportunities and projects and all that crap. they serve absolutely no purpose but to make it hard to not lose the game to kingdom management. that's all they do. and if you think there's an interesting aspect to it like nice stories of overcoming difficulties and getting rewarded for a job well done managing your kingdom then you are naive and shit out of luck. they almost did the text adventure part right. almost... for a game with a set length you'd think i'd be proper to have a line of unique events random or not or even based on your actions. no no no, we can't have that. we must have repeating events. like raidient quests. like fucking fallout 4. like persuade some sirens to stop sinking ships only to have to persuade them again after 2 months because of alzheimers. seriously??? was it really too hard to make non animated, non textured, plain fucking text events that don't repeat in a fucking game with a fucking arbitrarily set fucking length?
it was.

because they spent all their resources on making different outcomes for every event based on who of your officials you chose to take care of it......... gotcha! no they didn't. most of the time you can't chose which official takes care of which event. again the game limits your freedom by telling you who you must appoint. if you unlock all officials slots you sometimes get a choice between 2 of them. that's it. and of course no crappy design decision comes alone. once you appoint a government official to an event you can't recall him to do another. you have to wait till he's done. sometimes, especially for bigger projects they will be gone for several months leaving you with all other government officials at your disposal but unwilling to accept jobs that don't suit them well enough even in crisis situations. if i had any freedom in this game i'd charge them with high treason and impale them in front of my longhouse.



while the pathfinder character development mechanics are more restrictive than bg2's advanced dungeons and dragons in terms of multi classing min maxing they leave enough room for multi classing larping to not bother an rpg fan that wants to experiment. the system is not necessarily worse but it's not in any way better either especially with the lvl 20 character cap.




so they added like 2 things to the bg2 formula and while one is a pain in the ass, the other is just fucking stupid and does so much harm to the game it should have been cut as a loss even if it took years and and hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,375
I mean, it's kind of in the name. And isn't that a part of the module they based it on? Like I agree with some of the criticisms and it could have been implemented better, but I don't think cutting it entirely is the answer. If you don't like that aspect at all, maybe just don't play a game that is quite clearly labeled in the title as being that thing. It's like being upset that Baldur's Gate takes place in Faerun.

Maybe I find that line of thinking so weird because I remember with Pillars the criticism was that the settlement mode was too pointless, that it had nothing to do with the story and had no consequences.
 

Reapa

Doom Preacher
Joined
Jul 10, 2009
Messages
2,340
Location
Germany
I mean, it's kind of in the name. And isn't that a part of the module they based it on? Like I agree with some of the criticisms and it could have been implemented better, but I don't think cutting it entirely is the answer. If you don't like that aspect at all, maybe just don't play a game that is quite clearly labeled in the title as being that thing. It's like being upset that Baldur's Gate takes place in Faerun.

Maybe I find that line of thinking so weird because I remember with Pillars the criticism was that the settlement mode was too pointless, that it had nothing to do with the story and had no consequences.

the idea is great. the execution is fucking stupid, lazy and rushed. it even contrasts the level of attention to detail of the rest of the game. you have an owlbear rug in the tavern after killing a huge owlbear but you build a shop on the kingdom management ui in your capitol and it doesn't spawn and change your capitol.
do you see?
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,375
I mean, it's kind of in the name. And isn't that a part of the module they based it on? Like I agree with some of the criticisms and it could have been implemented better, but I don't think cutting it entirely is the answer. If you don't like that aspect at all, maybe just don't play a game that is quite clearly labeled in the title as being that thing. It's like being upset that Baldur's Gate takes place in Faerun.

Maybe I find that line of thinking so weird because I remember with Pillars the criticism was that the settlement mode was too pointless, that it had nothing to do with the story and had no consequences.

the idea is great. the execution is fucking stupid, lazy and rushed. it even contrasts the level of attention to detail of the rest of the game. you have an owlbear rug in the tavern after killing a huge owlbear but you build a shop on the kingdom management ui in your capitol and it doesn't spawn and change your capitol.
do you see?

I didn't like the kingdom mechanics either, but mostly the thing that pushed me off was the loading times more than the mechanics. I never tried turning on the "easy mode" for the settlement, does that skip all the nonsense or just make it slightly less punishing?

I guess my main point is that at least they tried to make the settlement part meaningful, most games that threw it in have made it completely pointless to where you would be right to say cutting it would improve it. In terms of Kingmaker I feel like the game and narrative would be pretty hollow if they had just threw it out, though I suppose you could design it more as a linear story thing where you have a few setpieces that give you the "feeling" of ruling (ala BG2 De'Arnise) without making it mechanics based.
 

Reapa

Doom Preacher
Joined
Jul 10, 2009
Messages
2,340
Location
Germany
I mean, it's kind of in the name. And isn't that a part of the module they based it on? Like I agree with some of the criticisms and it could have been implemented better, but I don't think cutting it entirely is the answer. If you don't like that aspect at all, maybe just don't play a game that is quite clearly labeled in the title as being that thing. It's like being upset that Baldur's Gate takes place in Faerun.

Maybe I find that line of thinking so weird because I remember with Pillars the criticism was that the settlement mode was too pointless, that it had nothing to do with the story and had no consequences.

the idea is great. the execution is fucking stupid, lazy and rushed. it even contrasts the level of attention to detail of the rest of the game. you have an owlbear rug in the tavern after killing a huge owlbear but you build a shop on the kingdom management ui in your capitol and it doesn't spawn and change your capitol.
do you see?

I didn't like the kingdom mechanics either, but mostly the thing that pushed me off was the loading times more than the mechanics. I never tried turning on the "easy mode" for the settlement, does that skip all the nonsense or just make it slightly less punishing?

I guess my main point is that at least they tried to make the settlement part meaningful, most games that threw it in have made it completely pointless to where you would be right to say cutting it would improve it. In terms of Kingmaker I feel like the game and narrative would be pretty hollow if they had just threw it out, though I suppose you could design it more as a linear story thing where you have a few setpieces that give you the "feeling" of ruling (ala BG2 De'Arnise) without making it mechanics based.
i read somewhere that letting the game take care of kingdom management can get you a game over with no chance to stop it because it doesn't change the mechanics/difficulty, it just automatically appoints officials as soon as something comes up leaving you with everyone busy in case of emergencies.
 

Gregz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 31, 2011
Messages
8,510
Location
The Desert Wasteland
I guess my main point is that at least they tried to make the settlement part meaningful

Trying and succeeding are two different things. If something is tedious and boring, do you leave it in just because you spent money and time on it? If you have any sense, the answer is no.

i read somewhere that letting the game take care of kingdom management can get you a game over with no chance to stop it because it doesn't change the mechanics/difficulty, it just automatically appoints officials as soon as something comes up leaving you with everyone busy in case of emergencies.

This is correct, it happened on my first playthrough.
 

Generic-Giant-Spider

Guest
Good job Safav, now you have people talking down Kingmaker and soon the Kingmaker crowd will say BG2 sucked and you have Rusty Shackleford saying both Pathfinder and D&D suck, you got 2house2fly thinking you're serious, Roguey is upset, Reapa just wrote an essay about kingdom management, TemplarGR is pissed off at you, and there's some guy called Gregz who I never even knew existed until now. Hi Gregz.

Is this what gets you off, Safav? Is this what makes you feel like a real man?
 

Western

Arcane
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Oct 25, 2007
Messages
5,934
Location
Australia
Codex 2012 Codex 2014 Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Good job Safav, now you have people talking down Kingmaker and soon the Kingmaker crowd will say BG2 sucked and you have Rusty Shackleford saying both Pathfinder and D&D suck, you got 2house2fly thinking you're serious, Roguey is upset, Reapa just wrote an essay about kingdom management, TemplarGR is pissed off at you, and there's some guy called Gregz who I never even knew existed until now. Hi Gregz.

Is this what gets you off, Safav? Is this what makes you feel like a real man?

Maybe he's playing the long game, and the game he really wants people to hate is... Deadfire.
 

Generic-Giant-Spider

Guest
Good job Safav, now you have people talking down Kingmaker and soon the Kingmaker crowd will say BG2 sucked and you have Rusty Shackleford saying both Pathfinder and D&D suck, you got 2house2fly thinking you're serious, Roguey is upset, Reapa just wrote an essay about kingdom management, TemplarGR is pissed off at you, and there's some guy called Gregz who I never even knew existed until now. Hi Gregz.

Is this what gets you off, Safav? Is this what makes you feel like a real man?

Maybe he's playing the long game, and the game he really wants people to hate is... Deadfire.

A lot of us are way ahead of him in that regard.
 

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