Pathfinder Why Owlcat's Kingmaker Sucks, in Plain Language

[Pink Eye]

Desiderius has us beat. He has over 2k hours!

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

1857h 7m

AHH HE'S BACK! THE LEGEND! HE'S BACK!

 

[Pink Eye]

Desiderius Dude!!!

 

[Pink Eye]

Desiderius Codex has been boring without you man!

 

[Yosharian]

You should at least buy him dinner first.

Dude, I could end up as dinner for giant Tarantulos.

What the fuck is a tarantulos

 

[Pink Eye]

You should at least buy him dinner first.

Dude, I could end up as dinner for giant Tarantulos.

What the fuck is a tarantulos

It's a summoning spell to bring back the legend that is Desiderius.

 

[Pink Eye]

Just like the old steam days. We gotta purge the heretics!

 

[Beggar]

What's with all those hours? Ya'll beat this game 10 times?

 

[The Avatar]

This game sucks so much but I can't stop playing it

 

[Pink Eye]

Fack he's gone
Anons.... I....

We're never going back to the old steam days are we.....

 

[lobsterfrogman]

What's with all those hours? Ya'll beat this game 10 times?

Nevermind the completion counter but with these hours we are talking about playing 5-6h a day for every fucking day of a year. Holy shit, it's like another job! Is Kingmaker a single-player MMO?

 

[thesheeep]

What's with all those hours? Ya'll beat this game 10 times?

I don't get it, either.
I played through the game once, but every subsequent playthrough ended prematurely because I just knew all the maps, encounters, etc. already.
The only thing new was my build and that's just not enough "new" to keep me interested.

Of course, I haven't yet started with the procedural dungeon. That might very well lead to an increase in my play time...

 

[Pink Eye]

>I don't get it, either.
Tell me about it. I have a thousand hours from playing exclusively monks.

 

[Pink Eye]

May be one day I will publish all my unfair monk builds, but meh.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Dude, I could end up as dinner for giant Tarantulos.

Oh no one will end up dinner for me. I fucking suck.

I SUCK AND NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE THAT.

NOW KILL ME.

GET YOUR 200XP.

 

[Shadenuat]

you need more self esteem. even standard giant spider is 450 xp, and phase spider 1400

 

[vortex]

Oh no one will end up dinner for me. I fucking suck.

I SUCK AND NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE THAT.

NOW KILL ME.

GET YOUR 200XP.

tosses the spider barbecue

crispy taste

level up

 

[ArchAngel]

What's with all those hours? Ya'll beat this game 10 times?

I did like 3 times and have like 5 other parties in different stages of completion. And this is without last two DLC and feel like I still didn't 100% explore the base game.

 

[Mark Richard]

Oh no one will end up dinner for me. I fucking suck.

I SUCK AND NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE THAT.

NOW KILL ME.

GET YOUR 200XP.

tosses the spider barbecue

crispy taste

level up

Eat the cow and live for a day, milk the cow and live for a lifetime. I suggest employing the spider to produce silk for our workshops. Think of the profits, your grace! Nobles will be lining up out the door, merchants will come from far and wide, and I can finally get a decent pair of pantaloons.

1. (Lawful) "I won't tolerate monsters in my domain. Off with his head!"
2. (Neutral/Chaotic) "In exchange for a weekly silk tribute, this spider shall have my royal protection."
3. (Codex) "KingComrade."

 

[Delterius]

It felt like a burden to be given control of that state

The crown is a heavy burden.

 

[LannTheStupid]

Why Owlcat's Kingmaker Sucks, in Plain Language?

Odds are, something you like very much sucks. Why? Because this is the RPG Codex.

(C)
/thread

 

[Silly Germans]

Oh no one will end up dinner for me. I fucking suck.

I SUCK AND NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE THAT.

NOW KILL ME.

GET YOUR 200XP.

tosses the spider barbecue

crispy taste

level up

Eat the cow and live for a day, milk the cow and live for a lifetime. I suggest employing the spider to produce silk for our workshops. Think of the profits, your grace! Nobles will be lining up out the door, merchants will come from far and wide, and I can finally get a decent pair of pantaloons.

1. (Lawful) "I won't tolerate monsters in my domain. Off with his head!"
2. (Neutral/Chaotic) "In exchange for a weekly silk tribute, this spider shall have my royal protection."
3. (Codex) "KingComrade."

I might be overthinking things, but i have my doubts about all that white, gluey and sticky stuff around Eduardo being "silk".

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I might be overthinking things, but i have my doubts about all that white, gluey and sticky stuff around Eduardo being "silk".

SO WHAT IF I HAVE A CERTAIN LIKE TOWARDS JESSICA ALBA.

I LIKE HER, I THINK SHE LOOKS VERY NICE AND SOMETIMES WHEN I LOOK LONG ENOUGH PROBLEMS POP UP AND NEED TO BE ADDRESSED.

PERFECTLY NORMAL.

 

[Silly Germans]

Spider senses sure are sensitive

 

[Excommunicator]

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 think given the constant mention you've made about the time limit, you're taking it far too personally. I can only assume you didn't have an earlier save to recover from and it bricked your game.

For the record, yes, the time limit caught me as well. The biggest problem with the time limit is that it's just not clear enough. They implemented it as trash events. You get an endless stream of events that you *must* address or each one whittles down your kingdom, the reward for each is simply "we stopped them, until next time". They never stop, until you finish the chapter. If you don't do it in time you eventually get some stupid message that "you didn't deal with the problem!" and the game just ends all of a sudden. Stupid.

I got caught by the time limit and had to load an earlier save game to recover but as it turned out, the experience I had racing against the clock the second time around to finish the chapter before the imminent end of the countdown created one of the most enjoyable and memorable parts of the whole game.

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'd rather go replay Neverwinter nights, as outdated as it is than finish this piece of trash.

The dialogue being too verbose and some quests being very rigid in how you had to complete them are my two biggest criticisms for quests. The writing was decent to good but occasionally bad.

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.

I don't recall any of the classic RPGs that actually lets you escape all encounters. It was par for the course that you encounter something too tough you die, you reload. I agree that more games should have interesting ways to escape an encounter so loading isn't the only option. But this is not a problem unique to PFK.

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.

I was lucky enough to play it about 4 months after release and it was relatively flawless on the bug front, but had I played it closer to release I would probably be railing against it as well.

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

PFK has the best and most detailed in-game resources explaining the rules I've ever seen in an RPG. Decent visuals and combat, over-convoluted but at times quite interesting story.

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.

Yes it is. I can't recommend people keep pushing through to the end. Stop when you start getting tired because there's probably a good 20 hours more before you finish. Game is way too long.

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.

• The problem when you have to google something outside the game: you fall into a habit and you google more and more and more unless you stop yourself. It's not the game's fault when that happens though.
• Followers were annoying, as they are pretty much always are so that's one reason why I play solo in RPGs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Kingdom management was a (sometimes welcome, sometimes not at all welcome) distraction from the adventuring. Could have been a lot better done. It was about 50-50 hit and miss.
  
• Railroading on Linzi was very poorly done. I wanted to get rid of her the moment she opened her mouth but no such luck.
• Tristan quest was fine because you were given quite a few choices along the way.

So, the sad fact is: this game is frustrating and terrible and not rewarding to play. You may read some of the other reviews and think "Eh, I can love it despite its flaws." Please, let me save you time and tell you: probably actually not.

For the record I really enjoyed it despite its flaws and I think most people will too.

First: I love D&D and have fond memories of 3.5E, but ugh, this is a huge reminder of how unbalanced and awkward that ruleset is, and this game's rather faithful implementation of (the Pathfinder variant of) those rules does not help, especially combined with the braindead AI and awful user interface. In many fights, there are a dozen things I could do that would make the fight go easier and faster, but I just can't be bothered because it's a dozen pointless routine clicks to activate whatever thing or use some buff spell.

AI is pretty poor, their pathfinding sucks (haha) but these criticisms apply to most party based games of this sort, turn based or rtwp. There's a ton of busy work in RTWP and again this is why I like to play solo.

Second, the whole thing feels like "fails to live up to potential". Areas feel like sketches, and NPCs just exist to dispense quests and plot points. The world feels like a skeleton that no one had time to fill out, not a living place in which you are adventuring. Oddly, there's a whole lot of love and care put into the *cooking* subsystem, with favorite meals for different sidekicks and so on. If only that had been put into other areas of the game.

Agree, many of the miscellaneous areas were reused and amounted to little more than a backdrop for a combat encounter. There was nothing interesting about many of them. They should have reused core areas more so they could make each one more dense and interesting.

The kingdom management is an interesting idea, but it's marred in execution: the balance between being in the capital ranking up your advisors and whatnot vs. adventuring is more distracting than fun, and the results feel more like random die rolls than, again, living events. You basically just keep juggling assignments and hoping they don't fail.

Well put. Most of the time it's little more than a maintenance mechanic and easily the most poorly explained part of the whole game. I think the concept had potential but needed to be less of a randomised dialogue game watching numbers go up and should instead have been events where you prepare directly in line with your adventures, with events that you get to visit physically. It was too disparate like that.

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.

I tried to play a chaotic kingdom which wasn't quite possible as in order to achieve a positive outcome on an event you had to make a lot of lawful decisions (which in some ways makes sense) but I think the game should have been more clever about its implementation of alignment choices. I do appreciate how many instances there are in the game that trigger alignment shifts. Must be hundreds.

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 would say there is certainly enough to keep someone playing if they love BG games, at least until the 90hr or so mark. I burned out by then, which was at the early part of the House at the End of Time, a really badly designed area (there are a few).


This game is just Way. Too. Long. Like this post

 

[Pink Eye]

Whoa! All the cool people are coming to our subforum! Guys we're famous! We're internet famous.