Difficulty problems: a message from our Creative Director
We hear your comments on the game difficulty and difficulty spikes, and we will take specific steps in addressing those spikes. First of all, the encounter with the wolves is too hard right now even for normal difficulty, so we will be reducing the number of the wolves in the encounter, as it is a part of the tutorial and should not be as harsh. Speaking of random encounters - we will double check our random encounter generation rules once again to be sure that the encounters that are too powerful for your party didn't happen.
We hear a lot of comments about the spider cave Bokken is sending you to. Swarms are difficult, as swarms of tiny creatures are immune to weapon damage in Pathfinder and require special handling with fire, alchemical fire or AoE spells. From hotfix 1.0.2 Bokken will be warning you of those dangers and provide the party with means to handle them at least partially (several alchemical fire flasks). There will also be separate tutorial messages about difficult to notice mechanics on enemies (like damage immunity or damage reduction, regeneration and similar). For story mode and easy difficulties, those qualities of creatures will be turned off (story mode) or reduced (easy).
The first chapter of the game allows you to choose between different objectives, you can start pursuing your rival, or you can start dealing with the bandits. Because of that, you can reach certain boss enemies having different levels and overall power. We will be reviewing encounters in the Temple of the Elk and the Ancient Tomb to be sure their difficulty is suitable for a 2nd level party.
And one last note about the difficulty - there are plenty of difficulty options to choose from, and we really hope that each player can find the difficulty of the game that will be interesting to them. Unfair and Hard difficulties were meant as really difficult challenges, where creatures are much more powerful than player's party (and we will be adding an additional warning for the new players, who want to start the game on those difficulty settings). I know that there are some players who consider modes like this the only viable modes of play, and while respecting that I want to say that we were designing them to be very difficult and require a lot of patience, careful party building and getting accustomed to party abilities and adapting your strategies to that. A lot of encounters there are killing my party when I am playing the game and require at least several tries to change the tactical approach to the encounter. Please keep that in mind.
--Alexander Mishulin,
Pathfinder: Kingmaker Creative Director
