Pathfinder Why Owlcat's Kingmaker Sucks, in Plain Language

[NJClaw]

POSTED: MARCH 30
[...]
Don’t let anyone tell you “you've just gotta get used to the pathfinder rule-set”. Bull. There’s nothing genius or outlandish to it. A few visits to a sub-reddit will have you fluent in no time.
[...]

Well, there you have it, folks. Videogamerz on reddit, now we even value their opinions.

 

[NJClaw]

POSTED: MARCH 30
TL;DR: Like a good old evening of table-top DND, if prior to beginning the DM found out you’re f***ing his wife.

At the outset of this review I would like to declare my bias. I am completely partial having logged 350+ hours into Pathfinder: Kingmaker at the time of writing. 350 miserable, insult-hurling, keyboard smashing hours.

I bought P: K (and its various DLC) because at face value it resembles all the games of its genre I’ve loved in the past (Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate, Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, Tyranny, Star Wars: KOTR, Pillars of Eternity - you get the point.)

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is nothing like those games. It will tell you it is. It’s not. It’s far, far more sinister.

I have finished this game. Twice. Earned more than half of its bloody achievements including the damned Tenebrous Depths secret. I finished this game not because of the above beloved classics, but for the same exact reason I finished Getting Over it with Bennet Foddy. They’re the same game. GOI is just honest from the get-go.

Me, I hate-f***ed this game.

Don’t let anyone tell you “you've just gotta get used to the pathfinder rule-set”. Bull. There’s nothing genius or outlandish to it. A few visits to a sub-reddit will have you fluent in no time.

No, I hate this game because it hates me. It hates you. It hates the player, hates fun/clever/rewarding game design, hates not perma-nerfing your NPC’s stats, hates not meta-gaming, hates not dilligently prepping each and every member of your party before every fight, hates not spending 30 minutes pre-buffing, hates completionists…etc etc.

Like a wife-beater with an expense account it tries just the tiniest bit to keep you from leaving - namely through world-building and characters deserving of a far more competent game-design team.

In this way, P: K is akin to a good old table-top DND session, if prior to starting the DM found out that you’re f***ing his wife.

There is one subset of players who should ignore the above. I’m talking to the masochists out there, the ultimate min-maxing, rubix-cube with a blindfold solving, virtual mountain-climbers who get off on finishing a game that hates being finished. You will play it, you will agonise through it, publish your incredible speed-runs and game-breaks on Youtube and feel a shred of dopamine for what you’ve done.

For everyone else, for everyone who loves all those games I listed at the start – run. Don’t play this game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is for the gamer who can hate a game almost as much as he or she hates themselves.

A very long way of saying "I want to play on Easy mode, but I'm too insecure about myself to accept that, so I'm going to play on Hard and then I'm going to complain about it".

Just fucking play on Easy, how bad do you have to feel about yourself to feel judged by single player games difficulty settings.

 

[Pink Eye]

Pride before fall, as they say.

 

[rashiakas]

games so bad it forced him to complete it. twice. dayum.

 

[Pink Eye]

350 hours of so called "misery" too.

 

[Desiderius]

That's what happens when you remove the Band-Aid of shitty faceroll game design from a whole generation. Sawyer wussed out and didn't want to face the giant whine.

Bestseller D:OS II has two unavoidable battles (back-to-back!) gating the end of their first act (Alexander and Dallis on the ship) that are harder than anything in Deadfire. Or really P:K at this point, other than people being retarded and thinking you have to do optional/Easter Egg battles right when you first find them.

 

[Darth Canoli]

That's what happens when you remove the Band-Aid of shitty faceroll game design from a whole generation. Sawyer wussed out and didn't want to face the giant whine.

The only difficult thing happening while playing PFKM is fighting off your boredom to keep playing.
The system is so exploitable and the difficulty settings are so retarded it's nightmarish (at max difficulty) at level 1 (it used to be, they fixed sawyered it fast enough) and piss easy from level 8 and onward.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Spoiler

POSTED: MARCH 30
TL;DR: Like a good old evening of table-top DND, if prior to beginning the DM found out you’re f***ing his wife.

At the outset of this review I would like to declare my bias. I am completely partial having logged 350+ hours into Pathfinder: Kingmaker at the time of writing. 350 miserable, insult-hurling, keyboard smashing hours.

I bought P: K (and its various DLC) because at face value it resembles all the games of its genre I’ve loved in the past (Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate, Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, Tyranny, Star Wars: KOTR, Pillars of Eternity - you get the point.)

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is nothing like those games. It will tell you it is. It’s not. It’s far, far more sinister.

I have finished this game. Twice. Earned more than half of its bloody achievements including the damned Tenebrous Depths secret. I finished this game not because of the above beloved classics, but for the same exact reason I finished Getting Over it with Bennet Foddy. They’re the same game. GOI is just honest from the get-go.

Me, I hate-f***ed this game.

Don’t let anyone tell you “you've just gotta get used to the pathfinder rule-set”. Bull. There’s nothing genius or outlandish to it. A few visits to a sub-reddit will have you fluent in no time.

No, I hate this game because it hates me. It hates you. It hates the player, hates fun/clever/rewarding game design, hates not perma-nerfing your NPC’s stats, hates not meta-gaming, hates not dilligently prepping each and every member of your party before every fight, hates not spending 30 minutes pre-buffing, hates completionists…etc etc.

Like a wife-beater with an expense account it tries just the tiniest bit to keep you from leaving - namely through world-building and characters deserving of a far more competent game-design team.

In this way, P: K is akin to a good old table-top DND session, if prior to starting the DM found out that you’re f***ing his wife.

There is one subset of players who should ignore the above. I’m talking to the masochists out there, the ultimate min-maxing, rubix-cube with a blindfold solving, virtual mountain-climbers who get off on finishing a game that hates being finished. You will play it, you will agonise through it, publish your incredible speed-runs and game-breaks on Youtube and feel a shred of dopamine for what you’ve done.

For everyone else, for everyone who loves all those games I listed at the start – run. Don’t play this game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is for the gamer who can hate a game almost as much as he or she hates themselves.

Hey bud, I'm starting to get a bit concerned about you. Did someone at Owlcats tape you up and sodomize you for weeks on end before throwing you away like a worthless chew toy? It's ok, we both know the answer to this.

I just want you to know that there are mental health resources available and the Codex will be supportive with your vulnerability.

Please take care and be safe.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

That's what happens when you remove the Band-Aid of shitty faceroll game design from a whole generation. Sawyer wussed out and didn't want to face the giant whine.

kangmaker is incredibly easy though, the only thing close to difficult is knowing how to build your character and using all your prebuffs when you enter a map

 

[LannTheStupid]

Isn't Gregz a Pole by chance? That would have explained a lot.

 

[Desiderius]

That's what happens when you remove the Band-Aid of shitty faceroll game design from a whole generation. Sawyer wussed out and didn't want to face the giant whine.

kangmaker is incredibly easy though, the only thing close to difficult is knowing how to build your character and using all your prebuffs when you enter a map

All you clowns were telling me I couldn't use a weapon on Octavia because she could only hit mobs with Touch AC since all the numbers were insane.

Now it's P:K is incredibly easy all you need is some prebuffs.

Yes, after 2,000 hrs P:K is incredibly easy, yet still not trivial if you don't want to savescum. It's the mark of a good game that it took a learning curve that long to get there.

 

[Desiderius]

A very long way of saying "I want to play on Easy mode, but I'm too insecure about myself to accept that, so I'm going to play on Hard and then I'm going to complain about it".

Just fucking play on Easy, how bad do you have to feel about yourself to feel judged by single player games difficulty settings.

Notice the absence of even one freaking specific instance of anything he's talking about. He knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

 

[luj1]

The shittiness of PKM has nothing with its difficulty level. On the contrary, the challenging segments were the best thing about it.

 

[Desiderius]

LannTheStupid

Location: Soviet Union

I mean, they did win the Cold War, so they've got that going for them. Local AWFL cops going positively orgasmic shutting down everything that moves (tennis courts and running tracks today) so our empty hospitals don't get overwhelmed.

This is somewhat serious, so let me clarify. I have multiple organ transplants, so have been perforce on top of matters concerning the virus since December. Our hospitals are (relatively) empty (like twenty cars in a garage that is usually so packed it's hard to find a spot) since they're postponing all elective stuff to prepare for the Coronavirus flood in conjunction with people being (justifiably) afraid to go to the hospital lest they catch it there. I had to go to get a blood test, though I did my regular check-up via telemedicine and am otherwise on house arrest, with the exception until recently of that running track that was foolishly closed.

The models they're using to predict that flood are likely (and understandably) on the high side of predicted cases. We'll find out soon enough and hopefully be able to readjust them more into line with reality.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I bought P: K (and its various DLC) because at face value it resembles all the games of its genre I’ve loved in the past (Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate, Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, Tyranny, Star Wars: KOTR, Pillars of Eternity - you get the point.)

Placing the likes of PoE, KOTOR, and Tranny alongside FO and FO2.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I bought P: K (and its various DLC) because at face value it resembles all the games of its genre I’ve loved in the past (Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate, Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, Tyranny, Star Wars: KOTR, Pillars of Eternity - you get the point.)

Placing the likes of PoE, KOTOR, and Tranny alongside FO and FO2.

nwn is easily worse than any of those

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

nwn is easily worse than any of those

It is also trash, but doesn't make them look good though.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

What pattern ?

He thinks people who prefer turn-based combat are idiots, and thus also unable to handle mechanics like hidden quest timers.

Yes, this is the codex we live in today...

 

[nyjsu]

There's not much to talk about really, combat and exploration in PFK are golden and everything else is trash. I can't believe there are people who actually enjoyed the writing, it's only merit was that there wasn't too much of it.

 

[NJClaw]

There's not much to talk about really, combat and exploration in PFK are golden and everything else is trash. I can't believe there are people who actually enjoyed the writing, it's only merit was that there wasn't too much of it.

Companions are interesting and their quests are worth following. That's one of the most important aspects of writing to me in these games.

 

[LannTheStupid]

I hope all local tabletoppers and literary critics will get their healthy doses of SARS-CoV-2 and we will never see them again.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I hope all local tabletoppers and literary critics will get their healthy doses of SARS-CoV-2 and we will never see them again.

you mean the wop remover?

 

[Pink Eye]

I hope all local tabletoppers and literary critics will get their healthy doses of SARS-CoV-2 and we will never see them again.

Harsh. Go easy on them.

 

[Yosharian]

I mean Kingmaker is a game of buffs and builds applied correctly, that's not incorrect to say. Mechanically, I mean.

 

[Nano]

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.

True. Mods make it more tolerable, but it was a pretty poor implementation all-around.

*uses cheats to bypass the one gameplay element responsible for the difficulty of time management*

Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.

The time limits are so generous they may as well not even be there. If you actually hit them, it means you tried to hit it, and tried hard.

*calls you a wimp for complaining about the time management*