Pathfinder Why Owlcat's Kingmaker Sucks, in Plain Language

[The_Mask]

I don't need a profile on the 'Dex.

You rate my posts "Cuck", Lilura, that'll teach me~!

 

[user]

Jeez get a room you two

 

[Skdursh]

I don't need a profile on the 'Dex.

You rate my posts "Cuck", Lilura, that'll teach me~!

It's like you're double-dog daring me to rate your post "cuck" right now, but if I did I would inadvertently be siding with Lilura and lmao no thanks... so... I'm going to rate it cuck, but I want you to know that it is explicitly ironic and not because you're having an internet slap-fight with the forums' resident Cuntzilla.

 

[The_Mask]

She deleted her post.

LOL

 

[Yosharian]

Hopefully she'll delete her account, too

Edit: checking ignored users just in case they're saying something negative about her, lmao. Mental breakdown and ensuing 'I'm leaving the codex' post in 3, 2...

 

[Storyfag]

She deleted her post.

LOL

"she"

LOL

 

[Gregz]

I have added some more recent Steam reviews to the OP, and included my own Steam review at the bottom.

Notice that none of the design flaws which pushed these people away have been addressed by Owlcat, and are being carried over into the sequel that Infinitron is shilling.

 

[Black_Willow]

Wow, such autism.

 

[NJClaw]

I have added some more recent Steam reviews to the OP, and included my own Steam review at the bottom.

Note that none of the design flaws which pushed these people away have been addressed by Owlcat, and are being carried over into the sequel that Infinitron is shilling.

I agree with some of the points of your review, but most of them are completely and utterly retarded.

A single example:

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.

So "your abilities and skills matter" is a flaw?

 

[Lawntoilet]

I have added some more recent Steam reviews to the OP, and included my own Steam review at the bottom.

Note that none of the design flaws which pushed these people away have been addressed by Owlcat, and are being carried over into the sequel that Infinitron is shilling.

I agree with some of the points of your review, but most of them are completely and utterly retarded.

A single example:

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.

So "your abilities and skills matter" is a flaw?

You also don't even need to be Charisma focused to have good Persuasion, if you are an autist with zero Persuasion then your subjects won't be real big fans (which is the point of throne room events) so it kinda makes sense if you're not retarded.

 

[frajaq]

Wow, such autism.

RPG Codex was built on autism about CRPGs

 

[Grampy_Bone]

While I wouldn't say Pathfinder "sucks" per se, I've definitely been a harsh critic.

Whats funny to me though is how people will use steam reviews/metacritic score/etc selectively as a tool to bolster their thesis (myself included). No matter what happens, your point is always proven:

-If a game you like has high scores, it proves it's a high quality title
-if a game you dislike has high scores, it proves people are stupid and like crap
-if a game you like has low scores, the filthy casuals can't appreciate sophisticated gaming
-if a game like dislike has low scores, once again the wisdom of crowds is validated

Clearly as a rhetorical tactic this avenue is limited. My personal metric is that sales determine quality, but that triggers a whole different level of autism. At very least, it's a readily observable metric. Kingmaker seems to have sold... something...

decent...

maybe....

???

 

[mediocrepoet]

I CAN PLAY THIS GAME! :D

See my comments in italics below, primarily because your anal bleeding comments everywhere about this are tiresome.

tl;dr I think you're terminally retarded, consider seeking medical attention.

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

I dunno. I read them, I think it's actually because you can't count any higher. But what do I know?

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.

That's really exciting and must give you unparalleled insight into everything. For the record, I've been playing CRPGs for a comparable period of time, nearing 40 years now. In all that time, I've wanted to shit on many games and have. I am a Codexer, after all. Kingmaker is awesome.

The Good:

1. Character creation and leveling follow the pathfinder ruleset closely.
   
   Yes
2. Combat mechanics are satisfying (despite being real time with pause, instead of turn-based).
   
   Yes
   
   
3. Custom party formation is a welcome quality of life feature.
   
   Okay, but pretty much every game has this. I figured you might've come across some before, given your over 30 years of monocled experience.
   
   
4. High fidelity graphics and visual effects.
   
   Ok, graphics whore.

The Bad:

1. Encounter design is terrible.
   
   For the most part, no it's not.
   
   
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.
   
   Game has retard check. This is good. Sorry you had to find out this way.
   
   
3. Maps are reused 4-5 times in places.
   
   Yeah, reused maps suck.
4. Very slow party travel across maps, with no ability to change walk speed.
   
   Completely unlike, say, Baldur's Gate without boots of speed. I hear Skyrim and Oblivion got rid of this shit effectively.
5. Choices have consequences, which would be great if you were given a clue what they were.
   
   Yes, consequences to choices is always best when you can effectively game them beforehand and only make optimal choices.
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.
   
   I'm actually stuck on this one, because the complaint is more retarded than most of the other stuff in here.
7. Enforced encumberance forces you to leave valuable loot behind.
   
   Completely unlike the source material, the Infinity Engine games, the Gold box games, ... You realize even Diablo has mechanics like this, and that they're a good thing, right?
8. +5 weapons, worth thousands of GP, can be found in barrels and crates in towns during the end game.
   
   Completely unlike other games in the genre at high levels like MOTB, Baldur's Gate 2, etc. Have you actually played any of these games before?
9. Annoying toy chow dogs barking, and NPCs coughing and grumbling at every other rest location. Are these quaint and relaxing sounds in Russia?
   
   Change your volume? Leave the area? Honestly, I don't even know wtf you're talking about.
10. Heavy, expensive, and limited 'camping provisions' are required to rest in dungeons.
    
    Yes, everyone knows that a proper incline RPG should allow you to rest spam so you can go nova on every fight without worrying about resources.
11. No ability to craft + poor itemization and very limited vendor selection.
    
    Yeah, the itemization actually is kinda shit for the most part.
12. Random encounters offer almost no XP, and a bunch of loot you can't carry.
    
    Loot, see above. XPs... I kinda get this, but they were trying to stop you from hitting level 20 in act I given the volume of combat in these types of games. Surely even someone special like you gets this?
13. Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.
    
    Are you seriously upset that it's possible to lose the game?
14. Tedious unsatisfying puzzles.
    
    YMMV.
15. Custom quests are poorly described, requiring unintuitive actions from the player (like using torches to kill swarms).
    
    Yes, intuitively you would expect to be able to effectively combat hundreds/thousands of tiny bugs, creatures, etc. with a broadsword. Have you been outside before, btw?
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.
    
    Only degenerate games have stats that actually mean something. Proper games let you do everything you want whenever you want. Is your personal GOAT Oblivion?
17. Unbearable load times. Frequent required trips back to your throne room to solve kingdom management issues makes this especially painful.
    
    Eh, they actually addressed this. Load times aren't too bad and you can do most shit from the map now and skip running through the capital to the throne room. But at launch, this did suck.
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.
    
    See above about hitting level 20 in act I.
19. The game ends abruptly before you can maximize your character's level.
    
    Not entirely true anymore, but even if it was, not every game expects you to hit max level. YMMV.
20. Inumerable bugs, many of which are game breaking.
    
    This is definitely not true anymore. But their launch period and like six months or so after were notable for this, sure.

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

I'm sorry you didn't get your gold star and that the game hurt your feelings by telling you you're not actually as special as your mom says.

 

[frajaq]

lol just lol if you didnt edit your party's movement speed way up when playing this shit

 

[Serious_Business]

Fuck plain language

 

[user]

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.

Wow... it's almost like you are trolling. You say 30 years of computer rpgs, yet your complaints reflect more like 3 years of mobile hack and slash games!
Sure, game was terribly buggy initially, but they even crunched and started fixing bugs from like day 1. Check the dates and the amount of fixes. Initial dlcs were minor and even if that wasn't the case here's how dlcs work (when you are not bethesda bioware or EA).

 

[Nerevar]

Well load times and the fact that it uses Unity so it is using much more resources than it should also it is using MSAA didn't come with TB mode from the start.

Mostly I just hate the henchmen "Cuck orc" and "slut elf" just need to be removed from the game the writing is horrible. How Russians made this game and didn't get arrested for homosexual propaganda is beyond me.

There shouldn't be a -4 penalty for using mercenaries as leaders that's just silly it acknowledges that the stock henchmen are bad and punishes you for replacing them.

I do agree that the game does favour playing as a char focused character with persuasion, that's why I've only played Pal, Scaled monk and Sorc so far as my main character.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Well load times and the fact that it uses Unity so it is using much more resources than it should

There are plenty of Unity games that have fast loading, this is entirely the developer's fault.
e.g., compare PoE1 to PoE2 load times. Sawyer actually discussed this in his post-mortem, they rewrote the save/load system for deadfire because it was a major issue.

 

[Thonius]

You can always put points in pers, make it favorite skill via feat and take feats that add STR to PERS... don't member if wiz to pers and int to pers were mods feats or not, but you can use those too.

 

[Nerevar]

I had to unfollow Sawyer he keeps talking about retarded shit on his social media.

I'll listen to this hopefully he stays on topic and doesn't start talking about netflix shows and other faggot shit.

Edit: (In reference to PoE1) "We feel like people liked the companions overall." No no they didn't and the ones on PoE2 were much much worse. Fucking soy brained old man. Sad to see.

 

[FreeKaner]

People complaining about encounters you need to come prepared to, random events that you have to react to, the kingdom management, the resource management, inventory management, party travel around the map, random encounters etc. are clueless and tasteless. These are all good parts of the game. I especially enjoyed trap encounters that trigger that are borderline unbeatable with what you have early on, like the slavers and the camp with dead bandits. It was fun to take on those.

What is wrong with this game is that pathfinder kingmaker is that pathfinder is an utterly garbage, bloated system that is wide open to exploitation. Devs tried to counteract this possibility of abuse by trying to make encounters hard to match but because they couldn't do that with having enemies to counter with abilities available to you due to sheer amount of abilities available in the game and infinite combinations of it, they had to inflate stats of enemies and in turn also inflate the stats of your companions, resulting in absurd numbers past mid-game. Result is a mmoesque stacking of modifiers upon modifiers so you can check past the high numbers end game, having a fighter with 50+ AC (lol) or melee character with AB of 30+ from items and abilities. Making the small +1 bonuses that would normally be bread and butter of DND completely invalid unless they are stacked.

The correct route would be to of course cut at least half the abilities and subclasses from the game. In no pathfinder pnp campaign would a party use even a tenth of what you use with your party, the system was designed so someone making a campaign and the players in it would cherrypick parts of it to use and ignore the rest, depending on campaign type. Unfortunately the devs seem to be so in love with the system they decided to include so much of it, I bet if they had time they would include all of it.

Alas, it looks like we won't be getting a cRPG in the vein of BG1 because of sheer amount of bloat and inflation fetishists RPG fans and devs seem to posses, gotten from playing BG2 as a teenager or young adult for the first time.

 

[Shadenuat]

how about you play dragon age, it has 3 classes and 3 races. and allow everyone else enjoy literally the only rpg on the market with real powerful character building except maybe that diablo-like with death coalas.

 

[FreeKaner]

how about you play dragon age, it has 3 classes and 3 races. and allow everyone else enjoy literally the only rpg on the market with real powerful character building except maybe that diablo-like with death coalas.

Yeah, if you say the devs couldn't handle the character creation they used in the game by encounter design (like BG2) or overall low power levels (like BG1) and had to do absurd stat inflation to counteract it that by the middle-game you are fighting absurdly stat inflated enemies with equally absurdly stat inflated companions while still walking over them it must mean you like dragon age.

I literally wrote about how DA:O is a dysfunctional broken game several times here, but this game doesn't come even half as close to having as entertaining challenge as either BG1 or BG2. Considering that the only time game has somewhat decent encounter design, fun encounters and evenly matched enemies is in the first few levels before you get to abuse the system. It seems obvious why they had to amp up every enemy's stats to counter-act the amount of pathfinder ruleset they poured into their own game. This is not about whether your character is powerful as for one that is entirely relative, your character would feel powerful with 25AB if the enemies had 20AC too, for second the game is based on a D20 system so the numbers need to stay close to it, ideally never ever twice above it for it to not be absurd. This is about the fact of sheer possibility they allowed by copypasting (I.E not creating themselves) pathfinder system without consideration for their implications.

Considering the devs are avid pathfinder players, they should have been at least half aware that PNP would only have a facet of all the available resources. Not meant to have 6 13+ characters that were munchkined to max then the game "balanced" around it by giving wolves 27ac. This is inelegant, tasteless excess. For all the faults of BG2 it never even comes close to this absurdity and even liche and dragons you face have reasonable stats.

Between having abilities that are either implicitly flat out useless, like being able to pick feats and abilities that will not be used because encounters late game don't have those types of enemies or knowing with metagame knowledge which will be used a lot and can invalidate entire encounters. As well as completely stat-inflated enemies this game has a lot in common with DA:O by the way. Since you seem to be trying to create a dichotomy between two. It is certainly a much better game than DA:O as DA:O is a dysfunctional game but it does make a lot of the same mistakes.

I would even say the strength of this game lies not in its combat, but the combat is simply a vehicle that lets you enjoy its much better thought out and implemented resource management systems, including time which is indeed rare in RPGs. That is the combats you face are simply a method to grinding down resources you have by attrition, rather than being enjoyable in itself beyond the first few levels. That is however partially just D&D's fault, exacerbated even more so in pathfinder that it starts to disintegrate the more power level increases, where it is most enjoyable in low levels with few abilities and even more so in RTwP.

 

[Shadenuat]

what does bg1 has as "entertaining challenge" which PK doesn't? 2d kobolds instead of 3d? it doesn't even have any character building to speak of.

developers allowed you complete mastery over your party building and provided all the options you may want. the faults of that are obvious but the advantages outweight them just like in every other classical rpg that gave you all the options but suffered balance issues because of that.

 

[FreeKaner]

what does bg1 has as "entertaining challenge" which PK doesn't? 2d kobolds instead of 3d? it doesn't even have any character building to speak of.

developers allowed you complete mastery over your party building and provided all the options you may want. the faults of that are obvious but the advantages outweight them just like in every other classical rpg that gave you all the options but suffered balance issues because of that.

Are you functionally illiterate or are you being obtuse? The existence of 3d kobolds is fine in both games early on, what is different is BG1 provides entertaining challenge by creative use of normally stated enemies via encounter design because the tools available to you are accountable for. So they can make an encounter of kobolds, half of which are ranged and one caster and your party can overcome this buy positioning and usage of abilities which are infrequently but deliberately used. Meanwhile what PFK does is because they allowed you everything that you could simply auto-attack all the kobolds if they had normal stats, they have to instead use bandits which have stats of tarresque. Because in a system like this advantage for the player is exponential due all the possible synergy you can use and metaknowledge you already have, since they have no way of working around this because there are just so many abilities and feats that they cannot account for, all they can do is inflate the stats linearly so that it may stay ahead of the exponential curve.

In BG1 and BG2, you beat an encounter because you use the correct abilities in correct positioning allowed by your build that you did with knowledge of using these, in PFK you do because you had the clarity to stack correct bonuses so that your d20 roll can actually catch up to enemy saving throw without having to hit a natural d20. Such sheer excess is not good design, even though it may appear so because some modern games might make the opposite mistake in streamlining.

I will state again I am not talking against first few levels, where the combat and encounters are entertaining. I am talking about later where you can do your 5 classes mixed builds with exact feats and abilities narrowed down with help of meta knowledge. Especially because quite a bit of what they copypasted into game is useless for the campaign at hand. Which is another thing why copypasting everything from PNP is bad idea, because in a PNP the players would be given a general idea of type of challenge they would take on and pick abilities according to that.