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Preview Pathfinder: Kingmaker Trailers, Previews and Interviews

Infinitron

I post news
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Jan 28, 2011
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tags: Alexander Mishulin; Deep Silver; Owlcat Games; Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is just four days away from release, and Owlcat and their publisher Deep Silver have been trying their best to promote it. Earlier this month there was a Kickstarter update about romances, and there's been a steady stream of micro-updates on the game's Steam page showcasing its artwork. Several videos have also been produced, including two light-hearted developer Q&A videos, a very silly trailer that introduces the game's companions, and more recently, a video that offers a look at its character creation possibilities. I'll post the latter two here:



Kingmaker was at PAX West early this month. Several previews of the game were published afterwards, most of them unfortunately a bit shallow. We finally got a decent preview a few days ago at a site called Trusted Reviews. It has the most in-depth description of the game's kingdom management layer we've seen so far, plus a few personal testimonials from creative director Alex Mishulin. Here's an excerpt:

Rarely has a colon so clearly delineated the two sides of a game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is based on the pen & paper Pathfinder role playing system, which is itself an adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons third edition (to put that in video game terms, think Neverwinter Nights). At first that plays out exactly like you’d expect, a standard, not particularly imaginative isometric RPG with real time pause combat and an eccentric group of characters, including a splendidly oily, scheming little gnome who serves as an antagonist. Act One sends you on an epic quest to kill a bandit king in a place called the Stolen Lands. Then things start changing, as with the king dead you decide to set up shop in his lands and found your own kingdom.

Suddenly the game reveals a second layer, one closer to a strategy game than an RPG. There’s even a straight up city builder interface here, where you can plonk down taverns and blacksmiths in various towns around the kingdom. These towns will come to reflect your character and their moral choices, an evil kingdom might be stocked with bandits who raid their neighbours, while a lawful good one (yes we’re working with the old school D&D alignment system here) might be policed by shining paladins.

It isn’t just building though, as the kingdom will produce dynamic events that can be solved by assigning your advisors or companions, much like Dragon Age Inquisition’s War Table. One incident involved a group of villagers attempting to stone a young girl accused of Witchcraft. At first I assigned ruthless noble Landon to deal with it, as he had the highest stats. The result, he let them burn the girl and then fabricated evidence that she was guilty.

Horrified I reloaded and tried again, this time with the studiously lawful Valerie in charge. She stopped the mob and insisted on holding a fair trial instead, fortunately the girl was found innocent. Not every character can solve every problem, they have a specialty, like community, military, divine, etc. But the sheer volume of characters means you’ll nearly always have more than one choice how to approach a problem.

[...] I’m familiar enough with the Pathfinder system to marvel at the notion of fitting an entire city building game into a D20 dice system, but Alexander takes pains to explain that they stuck close to the source material, with one notable exception. “There are no goblins in there.” He gestures to a set of books for the pen and paper version of Kingmaker (unfortunately all in German, so I have to take his word for it). “ When we talked to Paizo they said they know that in Kingmaker there are no goblins but goblins are so Pathfinder that you have to find a way to introduce them. We’d already played a lot of Pathfinder so we were familiar with Pathfinder Goblins“ He explains “They’re very different from the goblins of dungeons and dragons. They’re very charismatic, they run and mayhem, they love fire and burning stuff, they hate dogs, they think reading something takes away your soul. They’re really strange, charismatic creatures.“ Fans obviously agreed, as a goblin companion was one of the successful stretch goals for the company’s kickstarter.

The other thing Alexander is keen to impress on me during our talk is just how interconnected to the strategy and RPG layers are. After Act 1 is over you’ll be constantly pivoting between Kingdom management and questing, with each affecting the other. He gives the example of a troll infestation which threatens the kingdom, requiring a quest to resolve it. You have three in game months to achieve this, or you’ll get a hard game over. “It is part of the story as well as part of the game, and because it’s part of the story the game is over if you lose your Kingdom.”

“But we do understand that some players don’t like the strategy game layer.” he adds “There is a special mode in settings where you can place your kingdom on automation. Most of the decisions will be taken out from you, you will still be speaking with NPCs about quests and side activities…. All of the decisions all of the events will be taken out from you and you will play with the kingdom in the background.” By the same token the difficulty level is highly customisable, so those who are more interested in the strategy layer can turn on “auto-level-up”, drop the difficulty and focus on kingdom building.

But the real fun seems to come from when the two overlap, when your questing overturns a person or item that helps your kingdom, or your artisans craft a great magical item to help your adventure. “The story of the game is the story of the kingdom” says Alexander. Finally, obsessive castle building an be more than just a sidequest.
Additional Kingmaker previews are available at Tom's Guide, USgamer, OnRPG, TechRaptor, Bleeding Cool and RPG Site. There was also an interview with Mishulin at Expansive last week, and most recently an interview with Chris Avellone about the game's story, also at RPG Site. Finally, today Chris and Alex participated in a Reddit AMA where they answered questions from fans. And I think that's about it.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Wot? No visceral combat, immersive experience or streamlined modern RPG experience? Where are the meaningless buzzwords?

There is even a russian dude talking about making a party of 6 mages.

I'M IN!
 

Kron

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2009
Messages
642
Location
The dark throne in Algalord
Pathfinder is interesting as a ruleset, but the art featured in the book per se is pretty terrible. And for some reason all the videogames based on it insist on replicating those designs (all of Pathfinder's art is so unnecessarily tied closely to Wayne Reynold's character designs). This seems like that "look" got washed over by some bland tumblr art.
Not trying to be edgy here, but I can't really get into a several dozen hours long RPG when everything looks so uncharacteristic.
 
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Shilandra

Learned
Joined
Sep 22, 2016
Messages
152
Location
The Hive
Ooooh, this sounds like I can make a brutally oppressive, lawful good theocracy with churches everywhere that lets you rightfully put to the torch the infidels who've earned the righteous judgment of our god.

I hope its not to late to pre-order!
 

Farewell into the night

Guest
Four day till release? I remember reading about kickstarter not so long ago, weird times.
 

Stormcrowfleet

Aeon & Star Interactive
Developer
Joined
Sep 23, 2009
Messages
1,020
The party trailer was kind of cringy and I don't like the fact you only seem to be fighting huge-ass monster.

That being said, I got hooked at party of 6 mages.
 
Joined
Apr 3, 2006
Messages
1,386

Normally when a game makes me physically nauseous it's due to FOV issues. This is the first time that voice acting has had the same effect. Guess I'll be using custom companions on my first playthrough. I'm looking forward to spending 50 hours creating every possible combination of custom party, and then actually playing the campaign for 15 minutes before uninstalling -- just like Storm of Zehir.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
At this point, I just want a game with a good character system, without bullshit, with decent itemization that isn't Diablo shit and some decent fights to use all those cool items and abilities with. I want also a writing that at least doesn't make me wish to avoid it like a plague and drive me close to suicide out of insanity when I enter on any dialogue heavy zone. The city building can be simplistic, the story mediocre and the characters forgettable, the graphix may look mediocre, they may even have streamlined some aspects of the module.

All I want is a game that doesn't fuck up badly on the combat and doesn't torture me with endless inanity. Is that to ask too much these days? I want to make my wizard party, kill shit with it with no bullshit on the way. If those russians do that and make a functional Baldur's Gate clone, I'm more than happy for it. So, if this sucks, nobody can say I had the highest expectations for this, and I should have lowered my expectations, learned my lesson after InXile and Obsidian experiences. My expectations are as low as they can get.
 

Frozen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 1, 2014
Messages
8,303
How come the ugly one is not dyke again.
Some deep social programing right there.
 

Awakened_Yeti

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Dec 28, 2005
Messages
147
My expectations are as low as they can get.

... whilst still having expectations themselves?

yeh man... like whoa

and oh yeh:

exhibit.jpg


so...........

put that in your pipe and smoke it?

if youre into that sort of thing
 

Farewell into the night

Guest
... whilst still having expectations themselves?

yeh man... like whoa

and oh yeh:

exhibit.jpg


so...........

put that in your pipe and smoke it?

if youre into that sort of thing

Wow, I played all of these games. Evils Islands, Silent Storm and HoMM V are my favourites from those titles.
 
Joined
Feb 11, 2007
Messages
2,951
So when is codex mailing out keys? :M
Yeah, I'm wondering about this too. Are we going to get keys directly, or through the codex? I would like to actually get the game tomorrow.
 

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