My friend Desiderius once said that Pathfinder: Kingmaker is kind of like a rogue like. You always learn something new in each playthrough. Which makes that next playthrough even more exciting! Because you get to try out all the new things you learned in your last playthrough!
Pathfinder is a deep rule set. The real fun comes from understanding the rule set then applying your gained knowledge towards build making and gameplay.
Although, in all honesty, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an obsession for me... A healthy obsession though. It's healthy because I'm having fun and am enjoying myself while playing! I'd rather be obsessed to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, than other terrible vices.
Yeah I can certainly appreciate what you're saying, this is my 5th start, and will probably end up being my 3rd full playthrough (after a couple last year), as I'm particularly enjoying the teams I've got atm. It's got a
lot of meat on the bone this game, and a great variety of playstyle possibilities and neat tricks.
Thinking about it further, I think it goes back to gaming for me being all about the virtual world feeling, it's all about a sense of immersion in another place, another reality. I only got into gaming in my 30s with Doom, when the feeling of moving through a semi-realistic 3-d space first crossed over the threshold into a kind of realism that doesn't need as much imagination - then retroactively, yes, I got into gameplay, and now I can play pixel art games quite happily. But prior to Doom, I lacked the imagination to create the virtual space in my own mind from the highly abstracted hints in earlier games.
But anyway, I think the real nub of it is that of course games are actually still quite limited in representing a virtual world, so when I start a game, my mind kind of fills in a whole load of realism and mystery behind what I'm experiencing, and so long as that illusion stays stable, the virtual world feels real and tremendously engaging. But as soon as I start to understand the game, see behind the Potemkin village, see how the illusion has been created - as soon as I'm in the sausage factory, so to speak, then the illusion fades and I lose interest.
Like, for example, I really enjoyed the Secret World MMO when it first came out. For a couple of weeks it was the best thing ever. And that was because the illusion of all these secret societies running around, and mysterious goings-on, was quite powerful at first. But then when I bumped up against the limits, the fact that things were repeating, there were only a few mission types, etc., etc. - that's when the jewel turned to dust in my hands
