Well that’s good!
Working my way through Act 3. As a computer game, this has issues. As a D&D simulator I guess I can see what it’s doing.
- Character leveling: Frustrating if you don’t know what the feats do. They are prerequisites to others.
- Difficult of encounters is high. You are not told what the DR of the monster is (cold iron, adamantine, etc etc). A lot of things are not transparent and you’re expected to figure it out and beat it. For example, a certain troll boss was hasted so you should have dispelled/slowed it. Brute forcing with a munchkin party is barely possible.
- There is no handholding, and a lot of modern RPG things from the last… 15 years are not in there, possibly by design. For example, you get told to meet a companion in the tavern. Okay fine, but the companion’s adventuring right besides me grr okay i’ll run back to the capital. Oh yeah, quests will expire with no warning. Pick up quest, then okay let’s go… wait, where am I going? Quest tracker doesn’t tell you. There’s no big glowing sign on the map telling you GO HERE. Dammit, I was supposed to read all that stuff? This is like Sierra games!
- Last problem this engine is slow. What is this, total war? Why does it take so long to switch zones?
If someone picks it up I highly suggest going to Nexusmods. You’ll want the fast travel because the game is infuriatingly slow. You’ll want the Control-M to exit. You’ll want the respec mod so you can figure out what the feats do and whatever.
You’ve seen nothing yet
https://i.imgur.com/Z27IAGx.png
Munchkin up.
Oh yeah, more on the game telling you jack shit. There are enemies (e.g. the one above) that are immune to spells that allow spell resistance. What are the spells that don’t allow spell resistance? Well the game certainly isn’t going to tell you.
Half the time I’m just messaging my friend and he tells me what to do, which feats to pick, etc etc. He knows the pathfinder system. I think he buys the books to read for fun.
His newest fun tactic is delay poison + cloudkill + invis. Apparently the cloudkill will move up and kill all the monsters with 0 risk. I guess this is how you’re supposed to do these things. If the game is gonna be such a ****, I think it’s fair enough to do it back.
Yes cloudkill is super strong. And accidentally game breaking in certain ways (see my post above)
I seem to be doing something wrong. When i download the mod manager and the mods I cannot seem to get them to open. I manually download the file and save it it is in a zip file. When i go to that file all it lets me do is extract all. I watched a video on the site and i am getting nothing that looks like that. Nothing shows up on the desktop
Let’s see. I have my F:\Pathfinder directory.
The mod manager goes in the following path. All mods are installed through the manager’s menus:
F:\Pathfinder\UnityModManager
Run the Unitymodmanager. In this screen you gotta select pathfinder if it’s not in and then click install.
Then you can go to mods menu
It’s something like that, I don’t remember any other trick.
edit:
Anyway once you run the game there’s gonna be a big overlay screen with all the mods. You can close this screen and summon it back up with control-f10 anytime.
Thank you That helped. Got it to run. Downloaded fasttravel and respec
A lot of this, and some of the bugs they quashed in the game early on, give me a strong impression the devs have very precariously stacked most of the conditional stuff in this game into a handful of increasingly unwieldy piles of checks, rules exceptions, and hacks.
e.g., there was an early bug where a companion who was supposed to not be there was actually there, invisible, in the scene. So rather than just, say, removing the character from the game-state, they just turned on a secret super invisibility flag to bypass whatever check was going on there, but that ended up messing up a different rules interaction added in later, and. . . Bug.
Same deal with the companion quest stuff. They need to be in the tavern to trigger that dialogue option because of [interlocking rabbit hole clusterfuck of 25 separate bandaid hacks, barely functional event triggers, and brute-force variable flips].
And I get it, man. Game dev is messy and complicated and sometimes, rather than restructuring a dialogue progression check rules system from the ground up to accommodate an unusual possibility introduced by a single late game quest, you just slap a hacky fix on that quest and move on.
But for a game this vast and sprawling, with so many interconnected pieces and parts, eventually the weight of all those slapped-on fixes drags the whole thing down, and fixing an issue with one hacky bandaid in Hour 17 accidentally breaks another one invisibly in Hour 32 that means that, for reasons no one can clearly define anymore, in the post-game Superdungeon, all trolls are blue and float six feet off the ground, spinning at 4500 RPM.
The beta test for Pathfinder: Kingmaker has finally begun :-p
https://owlcatgames.com/content/beta-test
Pretty substantial draft patch notes:
This bit caught my eye:
Players can Inspect units now. The functionality is activated by toggling a new button in HUD Menu. After activation, the skillcheck is either made or revealed (if players have already met the specific type of unit before). The result of the skillcheck and revealed sections of unit information can be found in the Combat Log. A special tooltip with available information shows in the upper right corner of the game on hovering the unit or Combat Log record with the mouse cursor.
I’ve only just started Act 2, so I’ll probably just start again from the beginning.
Looks like good things.
Still can’t properly summon stuff as a Druid though, makes me sad.
If you haven’t already, I’d post a thread on the official forums about it just to make sure someone sees it. Though something like Druids not being able to properly summon stuff seems like a thing that everyone should know about. I think you are talking about the spontaneous casting issue you mentioned to me a few weeks back?
I have several times and on Reddit.
And yeah, the Spontaneous Casting issue. It especially screws Divine Heralds. The class is probably one of the weakest ones around as it is, but they literally can’t use their class feature effectively. They get all the summon talents as part of their kit… and then can never use the last one unless they memorize Summon spells. When the entire point of their class is that the can SC Summon spells. You can make a regular-ass Cleric without losing all the stuff a Herald does and do the same thing they do as well as they can.
Hell I even had people agree with me. One poor bastard was playing a Divine Herald. One could argue they had bigger issues, but screwing Druids hard and Divine Heralds completely is a pretty big issue. If you aren’t willing to fix Spontaneous Summons, maybe don’t have an Archetype based on the concept in your game.
When this is patched up a bit more, is this better than both Pillars of Eternity games?
I like the system better in Pathfinder. The Kingdom stuff is not interesting but dies actually provide good flavor.
I think Pillars had better characters and writing - even if it could be too flowery (especially in the first one). On the other hand, I do like that the story in Kingmaker isn’t some end of the world type story.
That said I’m pretty tired of RTwP instead of turn based. If you like RTwP I think either of the games could work for you. Scott and some others said the end game in Kingmaker is pretty screwed up so you might want to see if that is fixed.
That’s impossible for someone else to quantify for you.
They are both RPG’s, and party based, and real time with pause. So depending on how into any of those aspects you find yourself, that should be your first point of investigation.
One uses 3.5 D&D and the other is a proprietary mechanical system. Both are different, flawed, and awesome in their own respective way. It really depends on what you like. I tend to think Pathfinder’s mechanics were more interesting in some ways, less so in others. I love what PoE 2 has done with things like per encounter abilities, and multi-classing. I’ll always love D&D 3.5 though, as well.
The story in Pathfinder is actually super cool, though props go to the writing team of the original module since Pathfinder is just a translation of that Pen and Paper product. Still, it’s inventive and features some really cool beats in the story (when they work, but I’m trying to not considering bugs and state of the game for the purpose of this discussion). However, PoE2 also has some really great quests, moments of exploration, and areas and details that are fun to uncover. Some really epic, optional encounters and rewards.
Visually I think PoE 2 is the bigger technical achievement. Pathfinder does look great and has its own charm, though.
The combat in both is pretty darn fun, but in many ways Pathfinder is the more hard core experience. You can easily (especially early game) find your party in need of camping without the ability to do so (just for one example), while in PoE 2 everyone is always able to do great and satisfying things in combat and resting is more of a bonus than not camping is a penalty, in P:K.
The encounter balance feels better in PoE 2, though I haven’t played since they patched in harder difficulty levels to actually be harder. PoE 2 wants everyone to feel like their characters and party are viable and that they can enjoy themselves. Pathfinder seems to assume everyone is min-maxing as hard as the developers do, and it makes mid- and late-game encounters sometimes just feel ridiculous. I mean, trying to play Pathfinder in something resembling the core pen and paper rules is suicide. Some folks may enjoy that, it made me feel like my attempts at having fun with leveling up my character was instead just me making bad choices in the name of “role playing”. Not ideal.
If I had to say which was my favorite right now, PoE 2 because I was actually able to complete that game and I had more time with it over all in terms of hours played. However, since my inability to complete Pathfinder was due to bugs and such it’s really hard to take that out of the equation and give an objective opinion. Very disappointing. And the rules/mechanics they put into the end game of Pathfinder are just… I really hope they change them. I won’t go into details, but it’s not fun or interesting or “cool” at all. Left a sour taste in my mouth for sure.
Which brings me back to, it really is more about what you like and want from a game like this. Everyone will have a different opinion, you’ll just have to form your own on this one.
The real answer is both games are super awesome and we are blessed to have them both as RPG options.
The story in this game is sufficient. It basically gets the job done, though there are some fairly silly / ??? things going on (e.g. Nok Nok is a fun companion…but why exactly are we humoring him, Valerie’s schtick, Hellknights clusterfuck). As long as you’re fine with railroading regardless of fake choices with a few exceptions (e.g. Jaethal, which imo is one of the best examples of writing, though it is undermined by bugs).
Now, back to game systems. Kingdom management has been discussed a few times above, its shit, no real choices, and its basically a minigame of advisor juggling you play to not lose. And a money sink since any investment you make pretty much never pays off over the course of the game (which appears to last ~4.5 years ingame time). Basically a vanity thing outside of that (and a bad vanity thing since you don’t even get to see the growth of your stuff).
As for its DND 3.75 system, it’s quite crunchy. Problem is with documentation, and again, unknown bugs affecting behavior. However, I think how the game is constructed/balanced makes it very boring to play past Act 2. The AI in this game is target the first guy they see. So then you munchkin yourself a 50-60 AC tank. And then every character that is not a tank you don’t bother with AC at all, since with dudes running around with +30 to hit, it basically doesn’t matter. Then you get bored. Also what sucks is the degree of prebuffing needed. That super high AC probably has quite a bit of it come from buffs (magic vestment, barkskin, shield, haste, etc).
Though TBH that happened in Deadfire too, except that was due to health regen stacking from Paladins and Chanters and various other items.
I will say I greatly enjoyed how this game really emphasized appropriate spell casting planning. You basically adventure/rest around the availability of Protection/Resistance from Energy, Death Ward, Restoration, Delay Poison, etc.
I enjoyed this game a ton through Act 1, but I paused once I reached Act 2, because I had no clue how to make informed decisions about managing my kingdom. I love the idea of it, but the game needs to document trade-offs much better than it does. And from the sound of things, there needs to be more upside to kingdom management.
I really did enjoy the D&D crunchiness, though – so much so that I’ve gotten back into the 5th edition big time, DMing games for my family and playing one play-by-post game online. If I ever get a free Saturday, I’m going to go to my FLGS for an Adventurers League session.