Game News Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Edition and Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC Released

[Infinitron]

Tags: Owlcat Games; Pathfinder: Kingmaker; Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Beneath The Stolen Lands

Pathfinder: Kingmaker was released in a disastrously incomplete state, but that didn't stop it from becoming our RPG of the year for 2018. Today it reaches its final form with the release of the extensive Enhanced Edition update, making it probably one of the best RPGs of all time. You can read more about the Enhanced Edition in the two developer diary updates published by Owlcat over the past two weeks. It's got so much stuff in it that the Beneath the Stolen Lands roguelike mode DLC released alongside it seems almost like an afterthought. Still, it's a big enough deal to get its own launch trailer:

Meet with the self-proclaimed protector of Golarion, and discover what secrets lie buried beneath the Stolen Lands, in a shifting labyrinth of madness where nothing is what it seems, complete with dangerous enemies to battle and ancient treasures to unearth. Defend the lands against one of the most deadly enemies the world has ever faced.

• Enter a massive dungeon with a party made from scratch. Begin your adventure to the Tenebrous Depths with a party of newly created characters. Start the game from the main menu and experience the descent into an endless rogue-like dungeon.
• Explore the near-infinite possibilities of building a Pathfinder character. Try out different builds to perfect your tactics at your leisure. Create a band of adventurers able to overcome any danger!
• Defeat is but a new beginning! Dying in an encounter enables additional benefits for your next playthrough.
• Unlock new items to buy across multiple playthoughs. The number of item slots nearby traders have depends on how far you have been able to descend during all of your previous forays combined.
• ...or enter the dungeon as your main character. Alternatively, you can wait for an invitation from a mysterious protector of Golarion as you play through the Main Story. The preset version of the dungeon is included into the main campaign, allowing you to use your character and companions to conquer the Tenebrous Depths.

Of course all this is happening on the same day as the Baldur's Gate III announcement, because Owlcat gonna Owlcat. Oh well, they'll be okay. Beneath the Stolen Lands is available now on Steam and GOG for $10. The full patchnotes for the Enhanced Edition are available here.

 

[Gay-Lussac]

Gonna pick the whole thing up on the next sale, hope it's good!

 

[DeepOcean]

At least one good news today.

 

[The Avatar]

Doesn't seem much different from a normal patch. A bunch of bugs fixed as usual, and a couple classes and some items were added. How exactly does this warrant the "Enhanced Edition" moniker?

 

[mindx2]

If you have the Imperial Edition does the BtSL dungeon come free?

Infinitron it doesn't show up in my GOG library yet. It only shows v. 1.3.3, what's the new version #? Is that it, 1.3.3?

 

[deuxhero]

Doesn't seem much different from a normal patch. A bunch of bugs fixed as usual, and a couple classes and some items were added. How exactly does this warrant the "Enhanced Edition" moniker?

Calling it an EE allows them to delist the original and hide all the negative reviews they got for it being a bug minefield at release.

 

[Infinitron]

Doesn't seem much different from a normal patch. A bunch of bugs fixed as usual, and a couple classes and some items were added. How exactly does this warrant the "Enhanced Edition" moniker?

Calling it an EE allows them to delist the original and hide all the negative reviews they got for it being a bug minefield at release.

They haven't done that.

 

[ikarinokami]

The combat is so awful, this is game is strictly a one or done, or might have to shoot myself. hopefully the turn based mod will work well, so I can finish this game again

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

What a shitty game for munchkins. Decided to check out the EE change list, see new prestige class, new regular class. Think to myself, maybe, just maybe, these will be better than the horrible vanilla classes/kits.

Ok, Slayer, some sort of a rogue/ranger hybrid, cause they clearly ran out of original ideas. Why not just recycle 2 existing classes. Cause ffs, if there is one thing this game is mising, it's Sneak attacks. Let's add moar sneak attacks.

Then, there is the Aldori Swordlord. A true brethren to Aldori Defender and the Duelist, with not a single fucking interesting ability to its name. This prestige dipshit is so dull, his defining class ability is to lower the other guys' crit chance. Cause nothing says cool like taking away the other guys's cool stuff. Then he gets some feats, which everybody can get anyway, but he can save a feat point, so he can get some other dull feat. Of course he also has some other ability that takes a paragraph to describe, which basically amounts to adding some numbers to your dazzling display ability, so you can Demorilize enemies. Well, fuck me now, and call me Mr. Bigglesworth, I always wanted to build a character who debuffed and demoralized people. Maybe as his Ultimate, he can drive the final boss into a suicidal depression. Wtf is this shit, I don't even...

Have you sinners forgotten how cool Baldur's Gate classes were? Ffs, even Neverwinter Nights had builds that gleamed like gold compared to this shit-pile. Wizards that could actually cast powerful spells after a while, and not be utility-bots, training-dedication themed Kensai, elegant Blades, Assassins that had to get into position and use actual stealth correctly.

In this fecal mound, almost every single class/kit is some munchkin mess of mismatched bullshit or some hopelessly boring gimp. A sword saint runs around casting spells, rogues get sneak attacks just by attacking en masse, wizards do less damage than tanks, bards and rangers run around as elementalists, but it's ok, cause in the end you can just throw on 20 buffs on your party, and mow through everything anyway. Cause that's what passes for cool gameplay these days.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Doesn't seem much different from a normal patch. A bunch of bugs fixed as usual, and a couple classes and some items were added. How exactly does this warrant the "Enhanced Edition" moniker?

Calling it an EE allows them to delist the original and hide all the negative reviews they got for it being a bug minefield at release.

You can't hind the decline! Imbecile will always find a decent game a bullshit their way in order to give it poor ratings. But I am sure BG3 will be praised, since they seemd to remove miss mechanics (and the rest of dnd systems,it seems).

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

It's not described anywhere in Kangmaker, that would be too useful for them. Have to go back to source material:

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/prestige-classes/other-paizo/s-z/swordlord/

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Thonius]

Surprised they made it via patch route. I thought the gonna go wasteland and dos route. I quess they stopped caring about retards and their retarded review bombs.

 

[Daven]

What a shitty game for munchkins. Decided to check out the EE change list, see new prestige class, new regular class. Think to myself, maybe, just maybe, these will be better than the horrible vanilla classes/kits.

Ok, Slayer, some sort of a rogue/ranger hybrid, cause they clearly ran out of original ideas. Why not just recycle 2 existing classes. Cause ffs, if there is one thing this game is mising, it's Sneak attacks. Let's add moar sneak attacks.

Then, there is the Aldori Swordlord. A true brethren to Aldori Defender and the Duelist, with not a single fucking interesting ability to its name. This prestige dipshit is so dull, his defining class ability is to lower the other guys' crit chance. Cause nothing says cool like taking away the other guys's cool stuff. Then he gets some feats, which everybody can get anyway, but he can save a feat point, so he can get some other dull feat. Of course he also has some other ability that takes a paragraph to describe, which basically amounts to adding some numbers to your dazzling display ability, so you can Demorilize enemies. Well, fuck me now, and call me Mr. Bigglesworth, I always wanted to build a character who debuffed and demoralized people. Maybe as his Ultimate, he can drive the final boss into a suicidal depression. Wtf is this shit, I don't even...

Have you sinners forgotten how cool Baldur's Gate classes were? Ffs, even Neverwinter Nights had builds that gleamed like gold compared to this shit-pile. Wizards that could actually cast powerful spells after a while, and not be utility-bots, training-dedication themed Kensai, elegant Blades, Assassins that had to get into position and use actual stealth correctly.

In this fecal mound, almost every single class/kit is some munchkin mess of mismatched bullshit or some hopelessly boring gimp. A sword saint runs around casting spells, rogues get sneak attacks just by attacking en masse, wizards do less damage than tanks, bards and rangers run around as elementalists, but it's ok, cause in the end you can just throw on 20 buffs on your party, and mow through everything anyway. Cause that's what passes for cool gameplay these days.

You need to lighten up a bit mate.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

What a shitty game for munchkins.

I see you're passionate about this subject. Let me ask you something. Did you enjoy the gameplay at all, despite your complaints about the classes?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

What a shitty game for munchkins.

I see you're passionate about this subject. Let me ask you something. Did you enjoy the gameplay at all, despite your complaints about the classes?

I tried, but it's very difficult. The combat is low quality for some of the following reasons:

- unlike normal DnD games, the retarded difficulty settings make the challenge uneven and the combat frustrating. For instance, I am mostly playing on Challenging, which is as close to Core rules as you can get in Kangmaker (Normal is a little below Core, Challenging a little above), but the stats and rolls are all messed up, so you often run into stuff your party cannot handle like it normally would, only with either cheese, or massive buffing. Case in point, that freaking Skull on the sycamore map. Or another example, my wizard cannot do any real damage at all, because most of the tougher enemies have bloated hitpoints. A 30 damage fireball barely dents them.
- game using cheese tactics. A lot of fights, enemies spawn behind your group in the middle of the fight, to create cheap artificial challenge.
- everything is solved not with tactics or cool builds, but with buffs. Put on 10 buffs, and roll through anything.

Exploration also kinda sucks. There are a few large maps, but most are tiny affairs. Itemization is terrible. C&C is kinda pointless since one of your party members will always have the needed stat, so there is no point to it, like there would be in a single character game.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

What a shitty game for munchkins.

I see you're passionate about this subject. Let me ask you something. Did you enjoy the gameplay at all, despite your complaints about the classes?

I tried, but it's very difficult. The combat is low quality for some of the following reasons:

Ok, that makes sense. Not to stretch the subject too much, but what would you call "cool buffs" (in BG1-2, for instance)? and in what way does the itemization fail in PF:KM / win in BG2 ( asking because I felt that unlike P:OE the rare items in PFKM were actually mostly pretty sweet)

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

There are no cool buffs. As the man said, buffs are the last refuge of the scoundrel. Buffing everyone with everything kills the whole point of having unique crafted characters in the first place.

BG itemization allowed choice and cool builds, unlike Shitmaker. For instance, if you like swords, why the hell are only exotic swords like leven curve blade and falchion given good critical threat ranges, while normal swords like greatsword, longsword, bastard sword, etc are shafted?

 

[Tacgnol]

There are no cool buffs. As the man said, buffs are the last refuge of the scoundrel. Buffing everyone with everything kills the whole point of having unique crafted characters in the first place.

BG itemization allowed choice and cool builds, unlike Shitmaker. For instance, if you like swords, why the hell are only exotic swords like leven curve blade and falchion given good critical threat ranges, while normal swords like greatsword, longsword, bastard sword, etc are shafted?

Just as a quick FYI, the Falchion is actually a martial weapon, not exotic.

Also on the point of exotics, they've implemented many of them incorrectly. The estoc (another 18-20 crit range weapon) for instance, can be used with martial proficiency as a 2h weapon on the tabletop, you only need exotic proficiency for 1h usage. Owlcat were lazy and just made it so all the exotic weapons require proficiency to equip, even though many of them only need exotic to enable special abilities or allow 1h usage.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

You are missing my point. Shitmaker forces you to go with a narrow type of weapons (curve blade, falchion, a few others). If you want to go with the more common fantasy swords like greatswords, longswords, bastard swords, you gimp yourself. This is one example of bad itemization.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

You are missing my point. Shitmaker forces you to go with a narrow type of weapons (curve blade, falchion, a few others). If you want to go with the more common fantasy swords like greatswords, longswords, bastard swords, you gimp yourself. This is one example of bad itemization.

Um, because if you want to use most of the weapons with an expanded critical threat range, you need to use up an extra feat. Or you could have a lower threat range and an extra feat. Why should the most boring, bog standard weapons also be the best ones?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

They shouldn't be the best ones, there should be choice. Different weapons all relatively equally viable for different builds. But right now, any kind of sword build, you d be crazy to take greatsword for example, instead of elven curve blade/falchion.

 

[jungl]

The shit combat with stupid high AC on mobs and bloated hp are fault of 3rd edition DnD its way too buff focused. You can buff a character to be more then double in effectiveness.

 

[serf]

Greatsword is viable. Its damage dice is 2d6 for medium size, so an enlarged fighter with lead blades on and with vital strike feat deals 8d6+bonuses at max BAB, also Vital strike needs only BAB6 while Critical Focus is BAB9.
PC builds is where P:KG (with mods like eldritch arcana and advanced martial) excels, everything else is very mediocre, but at least devs tried to make an initiative usable in an abomination that rtwp is.