Pathfinder: Kingmaker

aggh! Don’t tell me! I am playing this non stop last day or so. First chapter still…

I’m so sick of the numbers in this game.

You’re level 9, so every single enemy has an AC of 35+ and an attack of +19 or more.
This is on normal difficulty, so “weaker” enemies. This is the DLC so you have +1 weapons and very few options.

The scaling is just such dogshit across the board.

Free DLC today out of the blue.

Makes mages more viable by letting you actually get freaking scrolls by the sound of it. Also some new spells.

Cool beans!

I am having a very good time (and a completely bug free time, so far, as I start chapter 3) with P:K lately.

There’s also a 1.3 beta version released today with a pretty hefty list of bugfixes: Steam :: Pathfinder: Kingmaker :: Patch 1.3 open beta! - March 20, 2019 - Part 1

Including:

New feature : you can now enter the Global Map straight from your throne room. No need to run through the capital every time you’re leaving the castle anymore!

I’m pretty impressed with what Owlcat have done with the game after the buggy launch.

Playing it now and am impressed too. Combat is not as fluid as in Pillars of Eternity but it’s somewhat compensated by a more traditional abilities, e.g. my fighters don’t do much except fighting. It’s also seems to be very forgiving as you can use every item from your inventory and you use it to fight bullshit like those swarm enemies. The game is also not afraid to vary challenge: a dungeon room with enemies I can fight may contain, say, traps that none of my characters can dispose of.

In general right now it feels more like anything goes kind of RPG, not an experience balanced from strategic point of view. Maybe this is how you have to approach all of those tabletop system games unless they’re clearly dungeon crawlers.

Yeah, they’ve been fantastic and created a great game, the true successor to BG2.

I’ve only backed about half a dozen Kickstarters and I always do the bare minimum to get the game, including this one. But for their next game I’m going in big.

It’s a bit sad that they’ve said they probably won’t do physical rewards anymore.

The beta isn’t backward compatible for the record.

Also you have to restart steam to get out of the beta apparently.
Just a head’s up.

Previously I’ve only looked into this game a little, was too deep into Pillars of Eternity 2.

Now getting back to it and I struggle to explain what makes this world different from most modern fantasy/sci-fi RPG worlds. Or rather what makes more popular modern worlds different, cause here I get the same feeling as I got from Forgotten Realms games like Neverwinter Nights (BG2 was similar while BG1 felt too childish or primitive). Previously I’ve tried to formulate it like modern games rely too much on drama and overcomplicated moral issues and it came out sounding like “I don’t want politics in my videogames” or something like that. But it’s not that, of course. P:K just like NWN before it is not childish. It may be more… operetic, greek tragedy sad compare to something like Dragon Age which is more like, I don’t know, Stephen King sad? In P:K some of the letters you read are heart-breaking, like a story of a father who told a fairy-tale to his children about how you can see a magical dragon if you go to a magic hill in the night, and children believed in the story with some sad ending. In Witcher or Pillars of Eternity it would be a story about abusive drunk father beating his children to death or something.

Or maybe it’s a difference between a story over world and world over story. In Witcher or PoE or Dragon Age you can feel that the world rules are created in parallel with story and often serve thematic need of a specific tale. In NWN/P:K there’s some of that, of course, but you can see that a lot of the world exists on its own and doesn’t care about you, there will not be a new type of creature or a new type of magic conjured into existence for the needs of specific side-quest. Not saying that one approach is better than the other. Maybe I should compare more modern storytelling to something like Bradbury where fantastical elements are there to show new sides of same old human emotions. And older ones are like, say, Azimov or Sheckley or even Tolkien who are mostly interested in creating a new world with its own quirks and not to create some sort of allegory.

I like your take a lot. Though one of the first quests in P:K does in fact have a father beating (and burning) his child (nearly) to death. There is something different about how it is all presented.

It’s presented as if author doesn’t even pretend it’s real life story. Even detail like the way father punishes his son is important: he only does it with magic spells. And they talk in monologues. You might look at it and understand that it’s an abusive parent and see the tragedy, but it won’t feel uncomfortable, it won’t hit too close to home. You don’t look at the father and think “I hope I won’t be like that with my kids. But maybe I will be cause I’m angry and like to drink. I am scared now.” You look at him and see evil guy.

Evil dude in P:K is like an evil dude from Star Wars, while Witcher or Dragon Age have evil dudes from Schindler’s List. Technically they’re on the same level of evilness, but the emotional impact is different.

In many ways, this is the Pathfinder “Inner Sea” setting in a nutshell.

Pazio make its name by creating some wonderful, deep, and well-written modules for the D&D 3.0 and 3.5 rules (in addition to running Dragon and Dungeon magazines). Each module or set of modules was incredibly detailed, but largely self-contained. After some time they decided to create a central “world” to contain all these modules/campaigns… and the result was their “Inner Sea” setting.

The problem is that each of the Pazio campaigns is amazingly detailed and should really be the core of a setting on their own. By combining them all into one world, you necessarily end up with a hodge-podge of settings that sit uneasily next to one another (at best) and frequently step on one another in terms of magic, technology and especially geopolitics. You’ve got a temperate wilderness over HERE; your “Oriental Adventures” over THERE; a fallen spaceship over YONDER; your Gothic horror sitting over THERE; Egyption-style undead THITHER; Arabian Nights stuff is stuck on HERE; pirates; Conan-style barbarians; Vikings; etc.

They kind of tape it all together with some meta-lore, but all breaks down quite quickly if you try and focus on anything larger than one particular region.

Re: setting, I’ve enjoyed what little I’ve seen from Kingmaker and the Adventure card game – except for the comic relief goblins. Sorry Obsidian, I’d plunk down some money to support your game if all your expansions weren’t goblins.

The Card game is kind of disappointing in that they just stopped. They should’ve just kept making the things and I would’ve kept buying them. Instead we got goblins for one chapter or something and that was it.

Obsidian’s Pathfinder computer game remains broken and unpatched and cannot be completed without cheesing the final adventure.

Which is kind of inexcusable.

I don’t remember cheesing the final encounter, but it’s been a while.

Paizo stopped writing checks though, so it’s unlikely we’ll see any more or any fixes.

It worked for most of the game’s life cycle, and then was broken in the last official patch.

Ah, so it’s a Pathfinder thing, not Kingmaker specifically.

The latest 1.3 beta has this change which should make the HatEoT easier to figure out:

In the House at the End of Time, the Magical Lantern will shine a different color depending on the current state of the House.

Glad to hear there have been so many improvements. Has the kingdom-building side of the game improved, too?