20 reasons why Kingmaker is objectively better than Baldurs Gate 2

[Mr. Magniloquent]

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.

Spoiler

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.

That's a lot to anecdotally share about something unworthy of discussion.

 

[Saerain]

Jesus... I liked Kingmaker, but OP has convinced me to uninstall out of sheer spite at these lies.

 

[TemplarGR]

It's your stepfather in BG.

It's Gorion you pleb

 

[laclongquan]

And it's foster father, not stepfather. There IS a difference. To be more precise: Gorion does NOT fuck MC's mother.

 

[Cael]

*sigh* Golarion is the Pathfinder setting's world. Like Toril is the Forgotten Realms' world.

 

[Incendax]

I feel like this is a strategy.

Like, he's going to point at this thread in the future and say "See! I talk about more things than Deadfire!"

 

[Darth Canoli]

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..

On the bright side, in less than two years, Realms Beyond will be released and like a Kraken, it'll wipe the floor with these RTwLoading sharewares.

 

[TemplarGR]

I feel like this is a strategy.

Like, he's going to point at this thread in the future and say "See! I talk about more things than Deadfire!"

Yup. That's what shills usually do after being discovered. He didn't mind creating non-Deadfire threads BEFORE being talked about as a shill... Only AFTER, as a desperate smokescreen...

Give it up dude, just create an alt account, this account is compromised now, everyone knows your agenda.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

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.

Get good! There are tons of time limits beyond the curse manifestations.

Here is what Kingmaker does that few other CRPGs ever pull off (except for Fallout before they patched it to be more noob friendly): it turns time into a scarce resource that needs to be carefully managed. You’re supposed to play as though you’re under the gun, because you are. I’ve restarted often to fiddle with my build, but never because I fucked up by taking too long to get things done.

Without timers, you can rest spam to your heart’s content. That trivializes the difficulty. Kingmaker’s frequent use of timed quests forces you to make sacrifices that you’d never make in another CRPG. Imagine playing Fallout with no timer for the water chip quest. It would be a very different game and definitely a worse one. Being under the gun forces you to play more aggressively. You can’t just rest for several days every time you get hurt, you need to use your stimpaks or else you could potentially trigger a game over. Kingmaker does a good job of replicating that feeling with its series of timed quests.

And Kingmaker’s timers are rarely purely binary. Take a little too long and you won’t fail the quest, but you will experience negative consequences (like trying to save both Jhod and warden bro in the lead up to the womb of Lamashtu—you can’t rest every time you get fatigued or else one of them will die). Take too long to put down the trolls and they’ll gradually erode the stability of your kingdom, although that instability also opens up some new quests. Same goes for the ancient curse quests—you can save yourself if you miss the first deadline, but your kingdom stats will get increasingly fucked the longer you take.

Which brings me to the next point: the timers are integrated into many other design elements, creating a layer of strategic decision-making that is wholly absent from most other CRPGs (aside from holy mother Fallout).

• The resting system: because you’re short on time, spending many extra hours hunting for food is often a big mistake. That means you need to bring lots of rations with you so that resting never takes more than eight hours, with extra rations in case you need to go into a dungeon where you can’t hunt. But rations are really heavy! Suddenly, inventory management isn’t just an irritating chore, it’s essential to beating the game. The combination of timers + the need for rations forces you to plan out every expedition when you go out adventuring. Maybe some people prefer to take a more leisurely approach, but for me this sense of being under the gun was a great feeling. I actually had to think about logistics in an RPG!
• Kingdom management: the key here is that developing your kingdom isn’t just a money sink, it’s a time sink, too. There are concrete rewards for upgrading your kingdom stats and your towns—your craftsmen in each province give you awesome unique equipment. But every time you annex a territory, upgrade a stat to the next level, or upgrade a settlement, you lose two weeks. Aside from the occasional long periods of peace, like the year after the season of the bloom, you have to be careful about how much time you spend upgrading. Striking a balance between efficient adventuring and effectively ruling your kingdom was a lot of fun for me. The only strategy in most RPGs involves your build decisions and maybe your equipment loadout. Kingmaker’s systems add an extra dimension.
• Attribute damage: because you’re time constrained, enemies that “permanently” drain your stats are a real pain in the ass. You can walk back to your capital or Oleg’s to rest for days in order to recover your STR/DEX/CON/whatever, but between travel and resting you might lose a whole week. That time is precious. Instead, you’re better off using restoration spells with expensive components—diamond dust and diamonds. Without the scarcity of time, you’d have no reason to burn money on diamonds aside from avoiding the inconvenience of walking back to your capital to sleep.

I can see why some people find the kingdom management mechanics irritating/frustrating, but I have very little sympathy: you can automate your kingdom in the difficulty settings AND you can turn on Immortal Kingdom so that you’ll never get a game over from kingdom management. If you don’t want to engage with this system, it is entirely optional.

However, some of these complaints really miss the mark. Yes, Kingmaker sometimes forces you to make tough, mutually exclusive decisions when it comes to assigning your advisors. If you assign your most useful guys—like the treasurer or the high priest—to projects that can take months to solve, you may indeed get into trouble if something urgent pops up that only they can deal with. That’s not bad design, it’s choice and consequences! Do you want to make long term investments in your kingdom? Then you may have trouble responding to more immediate crises as they pop up. Do you want to stay flexible so that you can troubleshoot problems as they arise? Then don’t assign Jubilost to spend months hammering out a trade agreement.

Maybe it would be better if Kingmaker let you use the wrong advisors to handle events: your general is busy killing invaders, but you can send out your minister of culture to put down a bandit uprising, they’ll just get a huge malus on the difficulty check. In practice, though, you’d just end up failing most of these and generally failing an event hurts your kingdom’s stats much worse than ignoring it. The idea that any companion could fill any advisory role seems really stupid to me, though.

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

Dude, you can just enable the shared EXP option so that companions outside your party get the same EXP as the ones in your party. You will never be penalized for this unless you’re running with fewer than six people, so I’m wondering if maybe you just don’t understand the game’s mechanics as well as you think you do.

By the way, there are consequences for building, say, a prison rather than a hospital. Your advisors will quit if they ask for something like the hospital and you overrule them too many times.

It would be great if all the buildings from kingdom management showed up in your actual towns, but it’s absurd to complain about the absence of this while also bitching that Owlcat invested TOO MANY resources in kingdom building.

Edit: I don’t know if you played the game immediately on release, but Owlcat eventually rolled out a patch that made kingdom management much less punishing. Now if you get an event near the end of the month, it doesn’t expire until the end of the next month.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

(like trying to save both Jhod and warden bro in the lead up to the womb of Lamashtu

Jhod's a nerd and I already have Tristian being a little fluffy boy about his benevolent religion. You should always opt to save the Jaime Lannister doppelganger.

 

[Reinhardt]

You can just order fighter guy to stop playing hero and return to capital. Lawful master race.

 

[The Great ThunThun*]

Kyl Von Kull

Timed Quests against degenerate gamaplay.

Can you believe that I have tried to raise this topic since 2013 and only 5 years later has the codex become even faintly receptive to this?

 

[Beastro]

The worst thing about this thread is that I see octavius changed his avatar.

You cant do that! Put it back to the cat right this minute!

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

You can just order fighter guy to stop playing hero and return to capital. Lawful master race.

I could do that, but then the priest doesn't die.

 

[Iskramor]

Name a CRPG with better kingdom management. I'll wait.

Stronghold crusader. *drops mic*

 

[Reapa]

it's fine, you can skip it

So what devs need to do to make goty is make content skipable.
I am disapoint.

Get good! There are tons of time limits beyond the curse manifestations.

Here is what Kingmaker does that few other CRPGs ever pull off (except for Fallout before they patched it to be more noob friendly): it turns time into a scarce resource that needs to be carefully managed. You’re supposed to play as though you’re under the gun, because you are. I’ve restarted often to fiddle with my build, but never because I fucked up by taking too long to get things done.

Without timers, you can rest spam to your heart’s content. That trivializes the difficulty. Kingmaker’s frequent use of timed quests forces you to make sacrifices that you’d never make in another CRPG. Imagine playing Fallout with no timer for the water chip quest. It would be a very different game and definitely a worse one. Being under the gun forces you to play more aggressively. You can’t just rest for several days every time you get hurt, you need to use your stimpaks or else you could potentially trigger a game over. Kingmaker does a good job of replicating that feeling with its series of timed quests.

And Kingmaker’s timers are rarely purely binary. Take a little too long and you won’t fail the quest, but you will experience negative consequences (like trying to save both Jhod and warden bro in the lead up to the womb of Lamashtu—you can’t rest every time you get fatigued or else one of them will die). Take too long to put down the trolls and they’ll gradually erode the stability of your kingdom, although that instability also opens up some new quests. Same goes for the ancient curse quests—you can save yourself if you miss the first deadline, but your kingdom stats will get increasingly fucked the longer you take.

you must be trolling. get good at what? it's a single player game. give me the freedom to play it as degenerate as i want. arbitrary timers are the laziest way of implementing pressure as well as choices and consequences. it's like cooldowns in bad turn based games with bad resource management. i'd rather chase a rumor of some treasure than get forced to kill stuff before it kills some peasants i have to protect to not get a game over. attract me, don't push me! you just proved the game also has bad writing to boot. congrats!
are we fighting waves of trashmobs that our main concern is too much freedom to rest between fights? don't answer that

Which brings me to the next point

sorry to hear that and good luck with it!

the timers are integrated into many other design elements, creating a layer of strategic decision-making that is wholly absent from most other CRPGs (aside from holy mother Fallout).

• The resting system: because you’re short on time, spending many extra hours hunting for food is often a big mistake. That means you need to bring lots of rations with you so that resting never takes more than eight hours, with extra rations in case you need to go into a dungeon where you can’t hunt. But rations are really heavy! Suddenly, inventory management isn’t just an irritating chore, it’s essential to beating the game. The combination of timers + the need for rations forces you to plan out every expedition when you go out adventuring. Maybe some people prefer to take a more leisurely approach, but for me this sense of being under the gun was a great feeling. I actually had to think about logistics in an RPG!

see, i don't care much for logistics. i enjoyed both morrowind with it's gigantic inventory and daggerfall with its horses and carts. how to carry your stuff should not be a worthy puzzle for people smart enough to rule a kingdom and save the world. also food probably shouldn't be heavier than weapons and armor. you didn't enjoy inventory space management, you're just trying to come up with arguments to mask the fact that you fell for the illusion of a good game. i don't believe you are that simple minded, just a bit dishonest.

• Kingdom management: the key here is that developing your kingdom isn’t just a money sink, it’s a time sink, too. There are concrete rewards for upgrading your kingdom stats and your towns—your craftsmen in each province give you awesome unique equipment. But every time you annex a territory, upgrade a stat to the next level, or upgrade a settlement, you lose two weeks. Aside from the occasional long periods of peace, like the year after the season of the bloom, you have to be careful about how much time you spend upgrading. Striking a balance between efficient adventuring and effectively ruling your kingdom was a lot of fun for me. The only strategy in most RPGs involves your build decisions and maybe your equipment loadout. Kingmaker’s systems add an extra dimension.

of course you get some reward for loading in and out of that crappy ui every month or so but that doesn't make the kingdom management part good, it just makes up to you for suffering through it.
again with the fun for you. i'm glad you enjoyed it, i enjoyed it too. i'm just saying it should have been much better. it's not systems and it's not a dimension. it's a nice feature that could have been much more complex, much more interactive and much more rewarding,

• Attribute damage: because you’re time constrained, enemies that “permanently” drain your stats are a real pain in the ass. You can walk back to your capital or Oleg’s to rest for days in order to recover your STR/DEX/CON/whatever, but between travel and resting you might lose a whole week. That time is precious. Instead, you’re better off using restoration spells with expensive components—diamond dust and diamonds. Without the scarcity of time, you’d have no reason to burn money on diamonds aside from avoiding the inconvenience of walking back to your capital to sleep.

pretty sure you have enough money to burn through by the time you get drained periodically. the plain tedium and boredom of walking back makes the timers superfluous. really no need for arbitrary, artificial pressure.

I can see why some people find the kingdom management mechanics irritating/frustrating, but I have very little sympathy: you can automate your kingdom in the difficulty settings AND you can turn on Immortal Kingdom so that you’ll never get a game over from kingdom management. If you don’t want to engage with this system, it is entirely optional.

it wasn't optional at release. the fact they made it optional after release just proves it was so bad they gave up on it as a punishing core element. this is one rare instance where a freedom, the freedom of being able to chose to skip it, is neither good nor satisfying. don't act like they did us a favor. it should have been fixed and expanded, not made optional. like that dude said yesterday, it's in the very name/title of the game.

However, some of these complaints really miss the mark. Yes, Kingmaker sometimes forces you to make tough, mutually exclusive decisions when it comes to assigning your advisors. If you assign your most useful guys—like the treasurer or the high priest—to projects that can take months to solve, you may indeed get into trouble if something urgent pops up that only they can deal with. That’s not bad design, it’s choice and consequences! Do you want to make long term investments in your kingdom? Then you may have trouble responding to more immediate crises as they pop up. Do you want to stay flexible so that you can troubleshoot problems as they arise? Then don’t assign Jubilost to spend months hammering out a trade agreement.

ffs! kids, this is what happens when you drink and post! how the fuck ist chosing 1 advisor from 2 candidates a tougher decision than my proposal for complete freedom of choice and character development???? especially since your given choices are always the ones with the highest pertinent attribute!!!! please don't piss me off with such low quality shilling.

Maybe it would be better if Kingmaker let you use the wrong advisors to handle events: your general is busy killing invaders, but you can send out your minister of culture to put down a bandit uprising, they’ll just get a huge malus on the difficulty check. In practice, though, you’d just end up failing most of these and generally failing an event hurts your kingdom’s stats much worse than ignoring it. The idea that any companion could fill any advisory role seems really stupid to me, though.

of course it would be better. it's you who is stupid. failing an event should only ever be worse than ignoring it in case of a critical failure. do you ever act in such a way in any crisis situations? do you let a leaking pipe leak away with no attempts to at least soak the water if you can't immediately stop it from leaking???

Dude, you can just enable the shared EXP option so that companions outside your party get the same EXP as the ones in your party. You will never be penalized for this unless you’re running with fewer than six people, so I’m wondering if maybe you just don’t understand the game’s mechanics as well as you think you do.

i'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt on making an honest mistake here even though you dude me, bro and insult my intelligence. yes you can chose to let people outside your party get the same xp as those in your party but at loss for your active characters. the xp rewards get split evenly between all playable characters. so instead of splitting a 3000xp reward between 6 characters at 500xp each, the reward gets split between maybe 12 characters at 250xp each. you can't be this stupid, can you? no wonder inventory management challenges you intellectually. FFS!

By the way, there are consequences for building, say, a prison rather than a hospital. Your advisors will quit if they ask for something like the hospital and you overrule them too many times.

i've heard that rumor. never seen it happen. and it's not tied solely to buildings. when possible, try to end an argument on a strong note for maximum effect. rhetoric 101

It would be great if all the buildings from kingdom management showed up in your actual towns, but it’s absurd to complain about the absence of this while also bitching that Owlcat invested TOO MANY resources in kingdom building.

it's not absurd, it's imperative that they learn not to invest too much into stuff they can't do well. they made a good game overall, better planing would have made the game even better. the kingdom management part was obviously rushed or lazily done or both. i see you haven't touched on my argument about repeating events. you can't have radiant quest like events in a text adventure. you just can't. even if they ran out of ideas, as bad as that would be in a creativity based field of work, that lack of creativity or time or motivation should have been hidden. you have 150 events in a game with 75 months? then don't go over 2/month on average. this is not even mathematics, it's basic arithmetics.

 

[Sharpedge]

I am not even sure how you are running out of time, if anything, there is far to much of it. In my current playthrough I just had to skip 240 days to get between 1 timer and the next which is some seriously tedious nonsense.

 

[Reapa]

I am not even sure how you are running out of time, if anything, there is far to much of it. In my current playthrough I just had to skip 240 days to get between 1 timer and the next which is some seriously tedious nonsense.

what about your first playthrough?
that's just what i was saying. timers are the lazy way to put pressure on the player. they work until you get the hang of it and overcome the learning curve. then you get stuck with every location explored and months to skip till the game decides you're ready to move to the next region. imagine bg2 telling you you need to gather your party and rest a while before venturing forth.

 

[Cael]

magine bg2 telling you you need to gather your party and rest a while before venturing forth.

"You must rest for 240 days before venturing forth."

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

i'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt on making an honest mistake here even though you dude me, bro and insult my intelligence. yes you can chose to let people outside your party get the same xp as those in your party but at loss for your active characters. the xp rewards get split evenly between all playable characters. so instead of splitting a 3000xp reward between 6 characters at 500xp each, the reward gets split between maybe 12 characters at 250xp each. you can't be this stupid, can you? no wonder inventory management challenges you intellectually. FFS!

I need to respond to this first, because you're flat out wrong. What you're describing makes intuitive sense, but it's emphatically not how P:K works. Read the thread, dude. As many of us explained:

You are being retarded. We tested this to death. As long as you have a full party, there is no difference for the people in your party. It only helps them when you have five or fewer party members.

With a full party, XP sharing is a sanctioned cheat mode to allows the companions you don’t use to keep leveling at the same pace as the ones you do use. That’s why the option exists.

It works like this.

6 XP! Party of Six.
Sharing On = Everyone in party gets 1XP. Everyone back home gets 1XP. (Yes, this is more than 6XP).
Sharing Off = Everyone in party gets 1XP. Everyone back home gets NOTHING.

6XP! Party of Three.
Sharing Off = Everyone in party gets 2XP. Everyone back home gets NOTHING.

6XP! Party of One.
Sharing Off = Everyone in party gets 6XP. Everyone back home gets NOTHING.

Yes, one options means only those in party get XP. But if you got 6 in party you still get same XP.

If you got XP sharing turned ON your XP gain is divided by 6 and than everyone in your party and out of your party gets that amount.
If you got XP sharing OFF, you get a set amount of XP and it is only shared between those in your party.. which can be max 6.

It does not need to make sense, it is how it works. We tested all this in first 2 weeks of the game release.

Go ahead, test it out if you don't believe me.

 

[jungl]

Problem with kingmaker the kingdom making portion of the game, practically the whole game feels utterly pointless and not rewarding. The load times are horrible the game at best is 30-40 hours long but the load times almost double this.

 

[Sharpedge]

I am not even sure how you are running out of time, if anything, there is far to much of it. In my current playthrough I just had to skip 240 days to get between 1 timer and the next which is some seriously tedious nonsense.

what about your first playthrough?
that's just what i was saying. timers are the lazy way to put pressure on the player. they work until you get the hang of it and overcome the learning curve. then you get stuck with every location explored and months to skip till the game decides you're ready to move to the next region. imagine bg2 telling you you need to gather your party and rest a while before venturing forth.

I still didn't really feel pressured by time, I used much more time then I use now, but I was still well within all the time limits. The one I came closest to running out on was the very first timer which is the shortest and even then I finished with 23 days on my first playthrough. On subsequent playthroughs its always been over 60. The timer kind of felt unnecessary to me since you really had to be wasting time in order to run out.

The thing I DO like about the hidden timers (not the timers like the curse) is how they aren't failure states but rather alternative ways of progressing the same quest. I feel act 1 does this really well, where if you go rescue Jhod immediately, you don't meet tartucio in the tomb, but you can catch up with him, or if you go to the temple of Elk instead of the ancient tomb. It gives the world a sense of time progression, which doesn't exist in many games but without the cost of a failure state attached, just an alternative means of progression. This occurs to some extent or another in all the chapters, but it is done best in the first.

If anything I would remove the visible timers and instead add a quest notification upon completing all the main quest portions in a chapter to, "speak to the story teller about how to defeat the curse" or something like that in order to move to the next phase. The amount of time allocated to a chapter is not ideal for anyone, because either you (somehow) run out, or you have far too much time and sit around doing nothing. I would also remove quest notifications for hidden timers but leave the hidden timers themselves in, because you weren't at the ancient tomb, so how do you intuitively know tartucio is not there anymore?

 

[Volrath]

Glad to see you're still as retarded as ever Reapa.

 

[Reapa]

i'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt on making an honest mistake here even though you dude me, bro and insult my intelligence. yes you can chose to let people outside your party get the same xp as those in your party but at loss for your active characters. the xp rewards get split evenly between all playable characters. so instead of splitting a 3000xp reward between 6 characters at 500xp each, the reward gets split between maybe 12 characters at 250xp each. you can't be this stupid, can you? no wonder inventory management challenges you intellectually. FFS!

I need to respond to this first, because you're flat out wrong. What you're describing makes intuitive sense, but it's emphatically not how P:K works. Read the thread, dude. As many of us explained:

You are being retarded. We tested this to death. As long as you have a full party, there is no difference for the people in your party. It only helps them when you have five or fewer party members.

With a full party, XP sharing is a sanctioned cheat mode to allows the companions you don’t use to keep leveling at the same pace as the ones you do use. That’s why the option exists.

It works like this.

6 XP! Party of Six.
Sharing On = Everyone in party gets 1XP. Everyone back home gets 1XP. (Yes, this is more than 6XP).
Sharing Off = Everyone in party gets 1XP. Everyone back home gets NOTHING.

6XP! Party of Three.
Sharing Off = Everyone in party gets 2XP. Everyone back home gets NOTHING.

6XP! Party of One.
Sharing Off = Everyone in party gets 6XP. Everyone back home gets NOTHING.

Yes, one options means only those in party get XP. But if you got 6 in party you still get same XP.

If you got XP sharing turned ON your XP gain is divided by 6 and than everyone in your party and out of your party gets that amount.
If you got XP sharing OFF, you get a set amount of XP and it is only shared between those in your party.. which can be max 6.

It does not need to make sense, it is how it works. We tested all this in first 2 weeks of the game release.

Go ahead, test it out if you don't believe me.

well, then it's the devs who are stupid...
what they did there in that case is undermine their own systems, because they implemented training events in kingdom management to help you keep your inactive companions close to your level. those training events now serve no purpose.
it's so counter intuitive that i still don't believe it, but i will test it some day.

 

[Gregz]

Kyl Von Kull

Timed Quests against degenerate gamaplay.

Can you believe that I have tried to raise this topic since 2013 and only 5 years later has the codex become even faintly receptive to this?

This might be the biggest philosophical point of hatred I have against Kingmaker.

Games should be fun, not homework assignments with deadlines.