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Crispy™ Is Kinkmaker gud?

  • Thread starter Whiny-Butthurt-Liberal
  • Start date

Is Pathfinger: Kinkmaker a gud game that is worth buying/playing?

  • Yes, it is good

  • No, it's shit

  • I am ambivalent

  • Haven't played it

  • Kingmaker


Results are only viewable after voting.

Whiny-Butthurt-Liberal

Guest
Steam reviews are kind of on the fence as a whole, plenty of praise to the story (well yeah, Chriss Avelone), but lots of people whinging about the game being too difficult. Motherfucker, turn the difficulty down until you start enjoying the combat. Is it really just a case of autisic gamers being too fucking retarded to play on a lower difficulty because it's called "easy"?

Anyway, let's have our very own General Discussion consensus. Vote now!

P. S. I am too scared and confused to look into Gaming forums, there's probably going to be twenty subforums, a megathred, and reddit-like moderator insanity.
 

Sentinel

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Ommadawn
Yes, but you have to beware that it's heavily based on 3.5 D&D. Also the story wasn't written by Avellone.
It's the best real-time party-based cRPG out of the renaissance but that isn't saying much when the competition is basically non existent.

Complaints about difficulty are mostly because at launch the game failed to explain core monster-related mechanics that prevented people from getting past encounters. For example, there's an optional cave with a spider swarm very early on. Spider Swarms are immune to anything but fire basically, so most people just kept whacking at them and getting 2 shot. The game also didn't provide you with an infinite supply of firebombs (through a store) until a couple patches in, which meant that if you wasted the few you got until that quest, you were kind of fucked.

PS: On that note, back at release the random encounter generator was completely fucked, and it wasn't rare to be faced with a monster 10-15 levels higher than you while travelling the world map, leaving you no choice but to reload.
 
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Gregz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 31, 2011
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The Desert Wasteland
Too bad chapter 2 casuals are able to vote. This game gets progressively and precipitously worse the longer you play it.

I've been playing computer role playing games for over 30 years. In all that time I have never felt compelled to leave a negative review for a game. Kingmaker is a tremendous lost opportunity.

The Good:
  1. Character creation and leveling follow the pathfinder ruleset closely.
  2. Combat mechanics are satisfying (despite being real time with pause, instead of turn-based).
  3. Custom party formation is a welcome quality of life feature.
  4. High fidelity graphics and visual effects.

The Bad:
  1. Encounter design is terrible.
  2. Kingdom management is a tedious and joyless experience. The option to play with it disabled doesn't work. There are many cases where you can lose the game by "misplaying" this mechanic, without explanation.
  3. Maps are reused 4-5 times in places.
  4. Very slow party travel across maps, with no ability to change walk speed.
  5. Choices have consequences, which would be great if you were given a clue what they were.
  6. Alignment based dialogue is poorly thought out and forces the player to 'roleplay' according to Owlcat's definition of alignment, which is often wrong.
  7. Enforced encumberance forces you to leave valuable loot behind.
  8. +5 weapons, worth thousands of GP, can be found in barrels and crates in towns during the end game.
  9. Annoying toy chow dogs barking, and NPCs coughing and grumbling at every other rest location. Are these quaint and relaxing sounds in Russia?
  10. Heavy, expensive, and limited 'camping provisions' are required to rest in dungeons.
  11. No ability to craft + poor itemization and very limited vendor selection.
  12. Random encounters offer almost no XP, and a bunch of loot you can't carry.
  13. Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.
  14. Tedious unsatisfying puzzles.
  15. Custom quests are poorly described, requiring unintuitive actions from the player (like using torches to kill swarms).
  16. If your character isn't charisma (CHA) focused you'll miss out on an entire level of party XP because you can't make the throne room event skill checks.
  17. Unbearable load times. Frequent required trips back to your throne room to solve kingdom management issues makes this especially painful.
  18. XP is doled out at certain times and locations only, like a bad CYOA novel. You cannot farm meaningful amounts of XP to level your party using random encounters.
  19. The game ends abruptly before you can maximize your character's level.
  20. Inumerable bugs, many of which are game breaking.

I lost two long games to game breaking and quest ending bugs.

I considered not leaving this review in the hopes that more people would buy this game, complain, and perhaps as a result Owlcat would fix their mess. Instead they ignored the obvious deep flaws with their game and put out a DLC.
 

Agame

Arcane
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Insert Title Here
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Angthoron

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2007
Messages
13,056
Alignment based dialogue is poorly thought out and forces the player to 'roleplay' according to Owlcat's definition of alignment, which is often wrong.
I dunno man, this has to be the first game I've played where the Lawful Good option for handling bandits and murderers is "Thanks for surrendering, I will now behead all of you, you evil shits"

I mean...
 

Incendax

Augur
Joined
Jul 4, 2010
Messages
892
Gregz is correct about most of his points.
And yet, I still had quite a bit of fun.
Flawed but enjoyable describes pretty much all the old classics, so this feels right at home.
 

deama

Prophet
Joined
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Messages
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UK
Gregz is correct about most of his points.
And yet, I still had quite a bit of fun.
Flawed but enjoyable describes pretty much all the old classics, so this feels right at home.
Isn't it more likely that you enjoyed it because there's barely anything out there?
 

Whiny-Butthurt-Liberal

Guest
Another question: should I wait about 6 months for them to actually finish making balancing and bugfixing the game before playing it?
 

Incendax

Augur
Joined
Jul 4, 2010
Messages
892
I meant crpgs, like nwn, baldur's gate, icewind dale, etc...
Exactly! I heard they came out with a DLC called Throne of Bhaal. I’ll have to see if my old BG2 saves are still around. And I never did get around to playing Icewind Dale 1. So many games, so little time.
 

Incendax

Augur
Joined
Jul 4, 2010
Messages
892
Another question: should I wait about 6 months for them to actually finish making balancing and bugfixing the game before playing it?
1.2 is completely functional and has no major bugs (just little ones). But you might as well wait for 1.3, since Kingdom Management needs a balance overhaul.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
I dunno man, this has to be the first game I've played where the Lawful Good option for handling bandits and murderers is "Thanks for surrendering, I will now behead all of you, you evil shits"

I mean...

Problem is when those arent options, you can be limited and even forced to take a aligment hit at times such as when Tristian decided he wanted to gift me potions (Romance path I believe) and my TWO choices were one Good and the other Evil.

Aligment should not be a straitjacket, the fact it gives options is great but at the same time the fact it restricts such options is not.

Cheap generic fantasy crap.

To be fair that is Golarion fault as Paizo had to rush something to fill the void made by WotC leaving OLG with 4th Ed. Its still what can be described as "landfill of fantasy settings" with everything thrown.
 
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deama

Prophet
Joined
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Messages
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UK
Another question: should I wait about 6 months for them to actually finish making balancing and bugfixing the game before playing it?
1.2 is completely functional and has no major bugs (just little ones). But you might as well wait for 1.3, since Kingdom Management needs a balance overhaul.
Are they going to address kingdom management in 1.3?
 

Drowed

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The Bad:
  • Choices have consequences, which would be great if you were given a clue what they were.
  • Enforced encumberance forces you to leave valuable loot behind.
  • Heavy, expensive, and limited 'camping provisions' are required to rest in dungeons.
  • Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.

I agreed to most things, but... Aren't those points positives?
 

cr0mag

Novice
Joined
Mar 5, 2019
Messages
36
Story is good, companions are interesting, game plays well. However, the kingdom management sucks and the game is way too long. Still 9/10 tho
 

grom

Educated
Joined
Dec 5, 2018
Messages
79
I agreed to most things, but... Aren't those points positives?

Mostly, but not:
Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.

Failure to resolve a quest before its deadline should result in consequence that you live with for the rest of the game. Game over for anything other than full party wipe is bad RPG design in my book. If failing a quest leads to instant game over, then you just reload and do it again. Where's the roleplaying in that?
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
I agreed to most things, but... Aren't those points positives?

No, the first problem is choices you have to make without the consequence being apparent ... let me give you a example, when you get a Barony you have to take a Advisor and there are 3 choices with one being from your sponsor, another from her opponent Sortova and then there is a third one. Now you can assume taking one is taking a side with either the Swordlords or Brevoy with the 3rd being neutral but that would be wrong, VERY WRONG.

Encumbrance is a problem since you are kinda forced back to sell things or store then, you can get around it since you can disable it working on the World Map but this is they having half a system, in Pathfinder there are mounts but since Kingmaker lacks mounts and just have pets ... you can see the problem, traveling weight in Pathfinder was designed around players can just store then on a mount but as they dont exist in Kingmaker since no mounted combat ... maybe its generous but still ... it shows problems on design with intensive combat encounters.

As for deadlines ... the problem is that kinda removes exploration element and Pathfinder isnt linear, at some points you are just clicking on the skip to get to the next Kingdom event to trigger or to start and on the other you have a deadline, since you also have to be in your Capital for meetings and the like.

The real issue always goes down to the execution of those points, you notice people dont complain about Fallout deadlines.
 
Joined
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Serpent in the Staglands Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
I agreed to most things, but... Aren't those points positives?

Mostly, but not:
Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.

Failure to resolve a quest before its deadline should result in consequence that you live with for the rest of the game. Game over for anything other than full party wipe is bad RPG design in my book. If failing a quest leads to instant game over, then you just reload and do it again. Where's the roleplaying in that?
But the game is about building a kingdom and the (few) quests that cause a game over come with a ton of stuff telling you HEY BRO IF YOU DON'T DEAL WITH THIS SHIT IT WILL DESTROY YOUR KINGDOM. Meanwhile you have like a year to solve basically all of these, which is a shitload of time unless you just dick around in the kingdom management skipping days like a retard.

"I wanna play the role of a king who lets his kingdom get overrun by beasts and undead but it still exists somehow" isn't good roleplaying. It's just idiocy, and it should result in a game over.
 

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