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.
