Pathfinder Why Owlcat's Kingmaker Sucks, in Plain Language

[Gregz]

These are a collection of review snippets from real people who have played the game. Every quote is from a different review, i.e. not the same person:

Owlcat made some scummy choices when they re-released the game under this new "enhanced edition" title in order to delete all of the negative reviews.

Like a good old evening of table-top DND, if prior to beginning the DM found out you’re f***ing his wife.

The quest design is obtuse and poorly written, the interface and design itself plays like a board game that is pretending to be a badly DM'd D&D game.

I would fire this DM if he sat at my table.

Time limits and a game that punishes you if you don't play the way the developers want you to makes for an un-fun experience.

I've been playing RPG's since the first Baldur's Gate in 1998, so when i say I haven't played a worse RPG you can take it to the bank. It fails on every level except visuals, it looks pretty but combat, story, tool tip are sloppy, unfun and lacking. Avoid this game at all costs

The insufferable Fatigue status is ALWAYS popping and forcing you to the arduous work of resting, that includes never used before rations, hunting and stuff that, again, just ruins the game further. Nobody likes rest, no one actually uses complex resting mechanics in the tabletop game. Whoever developed this, i'm sure never played Pathfinder before.

The late game, at level 15+ is absolute horrible. Creatures with Armor Class of 63, everything damages Str, Dex, Con or drains your levels. You have to constantly reload to pass skill checks of 40+, you miss treasures, events and even locations in the map just because of the ridiculous high Challenge Difficulty skill checks. No d20 game should go as far as this, the late game is just a mesh of high numbers and hit-kill spells.

The Kindgom management system ruins the game. You will spend a vast amount of time dealing with annoyances from everything around you with the most overcomplicated, boring and unecessary system imaginable. The game completely change, and the feeling of a good rpg adventure is lost. Now is just a chore. Dozens of events, keeps poping while you try to explore or resolve other stuff in the game, random stuff happens and you lose events. Your advirsors need a unreasonable amount of time, months and months to solve anything and, in meantime, more stuff pile on and can even fail tyour game, because of timers. With that you will have bad quests failing because you have to deal with other stuff. And this is core gameplay, this kingdom management simulator is a crucial part of the game, and I can't imagine a dev making it worse than this one. This point is the sole responsible for the vast amount of negative reviews, and with reason.

And the ultime disrespect to the player: The game remove your companions near the end. You pass through one of those old cliché "you must find your companions (because they conveniently got separeted) and you witness villain talking to them". And just like that, you can't use some anymore. And you are done for if you made your strategies around using those, like I did by losing two of three casters in my party. A disrespect to the player, the removal of crucial pieces just because "its fun". And its not even with good reason.

The final battle is a huge chore. This kind of mechanic no one should use in a game where casting is limited uses per day. It reforces the idea that the devs don't actually play tabletop Pathfinder, in order to create such a bad showdown

Worst of all, though, are the stupid secret timers. You get some message saying that you better hurry up on a particular plotline, so you go off to do it, and then midway though SURPRISE the timer goes off and you lose. I don't know why anyone thought that was a good idea. Even the "can't fail" mode doesn't actually prevent these from happening. If you're forewarned, at least know that it is presented as an open world, but you're on a railroad nonetheless.

And, actually, that brings me to my final complaint. There's an alignment system where you're supposed to be able to choose good, evil, lawful, or chaotic options, but often these are assigned nonsensically, and it's usually a thin veil over "of course we're going to solve this the murder-hobo way no matter how this conversation goes". It's just really, really poorly done.

To be very clear: this isn't a complaint about difficulty. The game difficulty is fine. I don't care that the advisor activities are sometimes low-percentage, or that there *is* a time limit. I care that it's just all so arbitrary.

So, the game is pretty, the scope is vast, and there's plenty of leveling up and finding new gear and stuff, and it really seemed like there was enough potential here that I kept playing until finally I got to the last straw... but, yeah, I don't recommend that YOU do. Save your time for something better.

I'll keep this short since many other reviews detail the many specific shortcomings of the game. To summarize: the design is awful. Horrible. Terrible. It's like playing tabletop DND with a DM who is a massive, gaping, prolapsed ♥♥♥♥.

In a nutshell, poor level design. Everything in a level should be beatable or escapable so you can come back another day. Relying on the player reloading constantly is a poor design construct.

Don't get me started on Kingdom Management, or the ridiculous time crunches, or the cheesy dialogue, or the annoying stereotype companions.

Putting the bugs aside, even if the game worked perfectly, it still has a major flaw built into it and that is the fact that you are limited on time for the main quest. It kills almost all desire to play this game. It seems to me that Pathfinder: Kingmaker could have been the next Baldur's Gate 2, but the devs failed to realized that this is a game and it's meant to be enjoyed. Rushing through a game like this isn't fun.

Lopsided Fights with underpowered party members and overpowered enemies in great tactical positions don't make for "Challenging" fights, they just make for unfair slogs that require scum saving to get through.

Slick presentation but design is all over the place. Uneven combat, choice being clumsily taken away in places for 'story purposes', and most importantly, the inane completely unnecessary time limits on everything.

There's a truckload of bugs and optimization issues in this game, Instead of fixing bugs the devs have the audacity to launch a kickstarter campaign for a sequel that will be just as crappy as this one.

anti-fun and just frustrating. If you buy this game be prepared to destroy your f5 and f8 button, discover that certain classes are terrible and have to restart the game and pray to rnjesus that you roll well.

Probably the worst part of the game is the final levels and the final boss fight, repeatedly I've had to stop playing because of how annoying it was and the only reason I've kept going is of how much time I had already put in.

This game is honestly pretty bad. I spent 90% of my time googling answers to things. The questing system is absolutely terrible. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing half the time. Constant difficulty spikes make the game super frustrating. The kingdom management is so annoying. There is a countdown timer where if you don't complete certain missions in a certain timeframe you can actually lose the game. I ended up failing it with 40 hours played. I understand that to some people this might be fun, but I just quit after that. I absolutely hate the followers. They are all incredibly annoying. They constantly ask things of you, but don't do anything for you in return. One of my followers straight up stole a ton of money out of the town's treasury so they could buy a printing press. Like, are you actually serious? The options to deal with her are like: it's okay, I forgive you, or wow that's awesome! so glad you got a printing press!! There's no option to kill her, or exile her. There is also another follower who suddenly decides to become evil, steal some magical artefact and teleport away. And then the game has the nerve to give me a quest where I can get him back as a follower. Why would I want someone like that on my team again??? Every single follower is out to get you. It's honestly not fun constantly being betrayed all the time.

To summarize, this game could be fun. But honestly, it's terrible. While other rpgs let me enjoy the story, questing, and characters, pathfinder kingmaker makes me want to rip my hair out. I'm constantly being hamstrung by game mechanics, being backstabbed by my followers, hitting difficulty spikes, spending most of my time played googling things rather than actually playing the game, and there is a looming 24 like timer in the background counting down the days until you fail the game.

This is my complete Steam review, and I only stopped at 20 because it's a round number:

Spoiler

I've been playing computer role playing games for over 30 years. In all that time I have never felt compelled to leave a negative review for a game. Kingmaker is a tremendous lost opportunity.

The Good:

1. Character creation and leveling follow the pathfinder ruleset closely.
   
2. Combat mechanics are satisfying (despite being real time with pause, instead of turn-based).
   
3. Custom party formation is a welcome quality of life feature.
   
4. High fidelity graphics and visual effects.

The Bad:

1. Encounter design is terrible.
   
2. Kingdom management is a tedious and joyless experience. The option to play with it disabled doesn't work. There are many cases where you can lose the game by "misplaying" this mechanic, without explanation.
   
3. Maps are reused 4-5 times in places.
   
4. Very slow party travel across maps, with no ability to change walk speed.
   
5. Choices have consequences, which would be great if you were given a clue what they were.
   
6. Alignment based dialogue is poorly thought out and forces the player to 'roleplay' according to Owlcat's definition of alignment, which is often wrong.
   
7. Enforced encumberance forces you to leave valuable loot behind.
   
8. +5 weapons, worth thousands of GP, can be found in barrels and crates in towns during the end game.
   
9. Annoying toy chow dogs barking, and NPCs coughing and grumbling at every other rest location. Are these quaint and relaxing sounds in Russia?
   
10. Heavy, expensive, and limited 'camping provisions' are required to rest in dungeons.
    
11. No ability to craft + poor itemization and very limited vendor selection.
    
12. Random encounters offer almost no XP, and a bunch of loot you can't carry.
    
13. Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.
    
14. Tedious unsatisfying puzzles.
    
15. Custom quests are poorly described, requiring unintuitive actions from the player (like using torches to kill swarms).
    
16. If your character isn't charisma (CHA) focused you'll miss out on an entire level of party XP because you can't make the throne room event skill checks.
    
17. Unbearable load times. Frequent required trips back to your throne room to solve kingdom management issues makes this especially painful.
    
18. XP is doled out at certain times and locations only, like a bad CYOA novel. You cannot farm meaningful amounts of XP to level your party using random encounters.
    
19. The game ends abruptly before you can maximize your character's level.
    
20. Inumerable bugs, many of which are game breaking.

I lost two long games to game breaking and quest ending bugs.

I considered not leaving this review in the hopes that more people would buy this game, complain, and perhaps as a result Owlcat would fix their mess. Instead they ignored the obvious deep flaws with their game and put out a DLC.

This is my subsequent Codex review:

Spoiler

A profound wasted opportunity inspired by the Russian philosophy of go fuck yourself. Or as one Steam reviewer so aptly put it, Kingmaker is "Bad GMing, The Video Game." Kingmaker features claustrophobic quest timers with fatal end states, potentially game ending choices and consequences which you have to make blindly, feminist themes, race-mixing cuckold fetishes, and more! While Kingmaker starts strong, your only reward for playing is pain and suffering, which gets increasingly worse with each advancing chapter. This game hates you. It hates your party. It hates fun. It probably hates itself. Try as you may to build your party and enjoy a classical D&D experience, the metagame, whether in the form of fatal quest timers breathing down your neck, terribly implemented kingdom management mechanics, or fatal bugs in required quest chains will make you wish for the painful death of Owlcat's sadistic and incompetent developers. Kingmaker is not difficult in any traditional sense. Either you telepathically glean what the developers were thinking when they cobbled this mess together, or you lose the game.

The main reason I do not recommend this game is the incredibly poor DM-skills of the developers. I am not sure if the campaign this game is based on is as poor as this game, but to sum it up, probably every mistake a DM can make is in this game.

Any real live DM who would guide his friends through a campaign like this would be rightfully beaten to death.

Outside of the metagame issues, how is the combat system you ask? More metagame abuse!

Your characters are playing Pathfinder, they have all the relevant classes, stats, feats and rules from the game, but the GM is not playing the same game as you. You're constantly wondering about every opponent in the game trying to work out what crap the designer/GM has pulled with this one, and it very quickly becomes a chore rather than a game.

I really regret that I bought this and have put as much time into it as I have. This coming from someone who lists Jagged Alliance 2, Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale 1&2, Fallout 1&2 as my favourite games of all time.

This could be a great game, but messing with the established material in a way that looks amateurish and with no sense of balance has ruined it.

The ambition and scope of Kingmaker is astonishing, the design and execution is a critical

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Ideas expressed in this post are so retarded it makes me wonder how this person is even able to produce any coherent speech at all since his IQ must be no more than 50.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't think it sucks, but it's nowhere near as good as people pretend it is. It's a good clone of a good game, it's not a genre (re)defining masterpiece.

 

[Divine Blessing]

AAA victims pride parade - convenience is a (ludophilosophical) factor, but the quest marker infection escalated into an outbreak of brain-afk demand (difficulty settings?). somehow the overtaxing is comprehensible, but a problem philosophy had to overcome with Foccault. the deconstruction of interactivity via convenience into an auto-chess movie has to result in fatigue, where the demand for games can only stagnate, as there is no innovative potential left - this is the ultimate crisis of gaming itself, when the demand grows weary of gamings surpreme last resort convinience, but can not return to past (and outdated) states. players dont want to "bot" games?

although some arguments rnt wrong (esp tech is ugly), its a prove of RPGs stagnation - the core concepts were simply re-iterated on factors like accessibity, itemisation, usability etc, how convinient. this (ludo)psychological phenomena of the decline of intrinsic value is not a matter of overconsumption, but continous social change - the markets demand has changed (years ago).

the problem itself is not convinience, as PFK has difficulty settings and mods to Dad-mode, but how convinience is employed. although PFK is really ugly at usability, the problem is innovation, PFK tries to simulate with complexity and (very minimal) genre mix. ofc PFK fails like any pretender, and simply ignores the last decade of gaming (as inspiration to try someting maybe not revolutionary, but new (remember c64 Kaiser?).

 

[Tigranes]

Random mishmash of badly spelled jargon to desperately sound like they are intelligent

Bots like these make me appreciate Infinitron

 

[Gregz]

Random mishmash of badly spelled jargon to desperately sound like they are intelligent

Owlcat's writing is pretty bad.

 

[M. AQVILA]

Owlcat's writing is pretty bad.

Not as bad as Larian Studios though.

 

[Ramnozack]

While I don't agree with a lot of your points, I will say that I think that the pacing, writing, and the area design needs to be improved upon. Everything just feels a little to small and 'disconnected'. It doesn't flow as well as the BG games do.

 

[luj1]

Chapter I was decent.

 

[Shadenuat]

While I don't agree with a lot of your points, I will say that I think that the pacing, writing, and the area design needs to be improved upon. Everything just feels a little to small and 'disconnected'. It doesn't flow as well as the BG games do.

its not his points, its just retarded steam revios.

 

[luj1]

It doesn't flow as well as the BG games do.

It doesn't flow because MQ is automated.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Tigranes]

Random mishmash of badly spelled jargon to desperately sound like they are intelligent

Owlcat's writing is pretty bad.

I mean this Divine Blessing dude.

Owlcat writing is pretty forgettable and inoffensive, true to certain strands of P&P heritage.

I'm not done with the game yet, but as much as I like the game overall & am impressed by the devs, it's also clear that they struggled to piece all the different mechanics together (a challenge for the best of devs) and that the game is a sometimes clunky, sometimes delightful homage rather than the glorious standard for new CRPGs.

 

[Trashos]

Kingmaker's writing is very good. It is uneven at times, but still very good.

The narrative is mind blowingly interesting in how it achieves its goals. I am not saying that it does not have flaws or parts that it falls short (or parts that I still do not understand). However, the way all content in this fucking huge game fits under only a few intertwined themes is a sight to behold. I have never seen anything like this in another game of this length before. It is a quality in story telling and theme exploration that goes beyond gaming.

Some of you are not worthy. Tigranes gets a free pass, because he has not seen the full picture yet (let alone start identifying the connections between the various stories in the game).

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

PF:K is pretty good for an NWN 2 clone. Too bad it doesn't look like Owlcat Games has a Mask of the Betrayer in them.

 

[Mark Richard]

I've been playing RPG's since the first Baldur's Gate in 1998, so when i say I haven't played a worse RPG you can take it to the bank.

You're overqualified, honoured elder. For a Harry Potter fansite.

 

[user]

All I can see here is "snif snif, the game let me fail and I hate failing so much, snif snif".

 

[jungl]

Great review. The kingdom management system was the worst thing I could recall in rpg gaming recently. The backtracking between load screens. Also EVERYTHING was rushed with the game. Combat encounter design, areas, quests etc.

I don't mind time limits in games but due to all the bugs you couldn't even complete the game till waiting a real life year after release LOL.

 

[Viata]

I've been playing RPG's since the first Baldur's Gate in 1998, so when i say I haven't played a worse RPG you can take it to the bank. It fails on every level except visuals, it looks pretty but combat, story, tool tip are sloppy, unfun and lacking. Avoid this game at all costs

Right.

Also, is there a time limit? I have not played the game and to be honest, the time limit puts me off.

 

[Trashos]

Also, is there a time limit? I have not played the game and to be honest, the time limit puts me off.

Yes, there are time limits. They can be frustrating in the first playthrough -they were for me too, but I got used to them eventually.

 

[deuxhero]

The time limits aren't frustrating if you're halfway competent about time mangement.

 

[Trashos]

Maybe. They are not frustrating to me now that I know the whole picture, but I found the *hidden* timers frustrating on the 1st playthrough.

I do suck at time management in general, that much is true.

 

[Yosharian]

In all fairness some of the criticisms regarding alignment choices in dialogue are legit

 

[Pink Eye]

Maybe. They are not frustrating to me now that I know the whole picture, but I found the *hidden* timers frustrating on the 1st playthrough.

I do suck at time management in general, that much is true.

>They are not frustrating to me now that I know the whole picture, but I found the *hidden* timers frustrating on the 1st playthrough.
That's the experience for us all. Game beat my ass first time. But after some patience I figured the timers out, and came up with the best strategies to dealing with them.

 

[Lilura]

Imagine thinking Poncefinder: Cuckmaker is equal to or greater than the greatest D&D RPG ever made, Baldur's Gate.