So I seemed to have missed my first two opportunities to get a Treasurer. The gnome never appeared and the mage seems to have vanished after I made him end his “project”. My final option seems to be a character in Act 3 I guess. Is it viable to wait that long (I finished the main quest of Act 2), or am I basically screwed?
If you fail a check, Jubilost won’t join you immediately, but will instead wait at your capital.
I don’t believe I met Jubilost. He was never at the ford, as far as I can tell. Maybe he is hiding in a corner of my throne room?
The problem here is also that even if you understand D&D there’s some Pathfinder-specific wierdness (like infamous swarms) and the game misses opportunity to calculate stuff in tooltips and tell you effects of your action.
E.g. in Pillars of Eternity 2 when you hover over fireball skill it will tell you “Attacks with accuracy of 80 with damage of 54”. Hover over 54 to see tooltip about how your stats, perks and gear affect this number. In Kingmaker it will tell you “school boolsheetphysics, attacks for 1d4 per character level +1 for each HP dice of a character” or something. You’ll have to remember if your character has proficiency in boolsheetphysics and at a glance you can’t say if this spell is better than the one that deals 1d8 per two character levels rounded down, double damage at night.
I’ve gotten much farther dealed with trolls and cleared out the cursed hill for the second time. I’m infuriated and bored with the game. Couple of time I tried to get back into it cause dungeon puzzles and exloration are fun, and the progression system taunts you with complexity. But then I return and see how all those numbers in practice add up to less depth than KotOR primitive d20 system, and the game is full of combat, and you have to repeat all the same buff clicks to turn lost battle into total victory. And kingdom stuff looks completely useless and moot.
Can’t remember any RPG that dissappointed me as much. Many so-called disappointing RPGs become so because of hype, like with Dragon Age 2 you expect Origins but better. On its own terms it’s an OK game. But here first act gave me a promise of a good game, only by the end of it I was drowned in thrash fights and straightforward obvious tactics that fit every fight.
Well, I don’t agree with some of your message but I think we can both find common ground on how freaking awesome the Pillars 2 combat log/tool tip system is. Top of its field, imo.
Perhaps it has broken other RtwP games for me.
Previously I’ve played BG and other infinity engine games and it was fun. Wes, there was KotOR and Dragon Age that felt much better but they went for a much simpler design (not saying it as if it’s something bad, that simplicity made for much more challenging and strategic gameplay than BG2 occasionally) and so it didn’t feel like it’s just better than older games, it was different. But PoE2 has a complexity of those big tabletop roleplaying games and is also as comfortable to play as modern RPGs. While Pathfinder Kingmaker seems to be less playable than Enhanced Editions of BG1-2 in many regards. Has same level of complexity but no real party AI in case you want to play casually and UI is marginally better than in BG2EE.
PoE2 needs those tool tips because its combat is much more complex than PFKM. Every time I fire up PoE2 I have to find my own post in the PoE2 thread to remind myself what that mess of numbers and icons above an enemy’s head mean.
PoE2 is less complex than PFKM. PFKM has much more classes, abilities, spells, perks. It just hides more information from you and most of those mechanics are not impactful enough so that you notice lack of UI for them.
PFKM is more complex but it’s also easier to ignore that complexity. PoE assumes you get into all those mechanics, they didn’t even had any party AI in release version of PoE1.
This one screen is more complex than anything in PFKM -
And every class has their own! And you can dual class! It says everywhere that dual classing is not recommended for inexperienced players.
So many tooltips in that description, but the thing is that you NEED them. I have over 100 hours in PoE2 and I still barely understand how it works.
And you mentioned AI! The AI editor in PoE2 is a full on nightmare.
PFKM uses the Pathfinder ruleset. It was designed around a game you can play at a table, with humans. Sure, it can get a mess at the higher levels. But humans can do it. The PoE2 system was designed to be controlled by a computer, and it shows.
But it’s intuitive, whereas Pathfinder, even to someone like me who played countless hours of D&D 1st and 2nd edition, is still a struggle.
Really? I haven’t played it yet, but isn’t it exactly like D&D 3rd edition, which was the best one?
Technically, 3.5 on steroids
edit - for someone coming from 2, I’d say the best analogue would be the Player’s Option series from 2, but even that falls a bit short.
I just involuntarily shuddered. That might be even grosser than your random poop stories.
I…don’t see any concept in that image that isn’t in Kingmaker, only difference is that it lays it all out there.
I finished Kingmaker the other day, and it feels like a game that tried to bite off more than it could chew. A lot of it is pretty fun, but it’s dragged down by a lot of poorly signposted quests, and encounter design that depends on hard counters that it often does an equally poor job of signposting. And the final two chapters are just an endless slog of damage sponges that spam debilitating effects.
That screen is less complex than PFKM levelup selection of perks. PFKM has a dozen different lists of perks that your characters can get, and at any given level you probably more available perks than any PoE2 character ever has access too. And AFAIK there’s no way to see those special perks (like Barbarian ones) before you have an opportunity to take them.
Also note how on your screen I can see exactly all that spell does and don’t have to read whole wall of text to see what it is.
Except that the PFKM level-up screen is the same for every class, whereas the PoE2 screen is different for every class.
I’m glad you understand what that spell does, because I don’t know what it does. Knock an enemy prone, but damage +25%? What? Fuck if I know. And that was just picked at random. Every class has many confusing abilities. I always have to hover over Resolve because I don’t understand what it does.
Just WTF is a cipher, anyway? Bard? These classes are off the wall more complex than anything in PFKM.
In PoE2, should I wear heavy armor or light armor? I don’t know which is better. No idea. What’s my DPS? Which weapon is better: a very slow weapon with high damage or a slow weapon with slightly less damage? No idea. The game cannot even tell you your DPS. Good luck.
Why are there two huanas? What’s the difference? I figured it out, but it took a while to get a grasp on the various politics. That’s not a bad thing, and I generally enjoy that kind of thing, but it seems like they went out of their to make things as confusing as possible for the player.
Children can play Pathfinder with a piece of paper, a pencil, and some dice. The same cannot be said for PoE2. But maybe I’m just stupid.
I just can’t see how any of those points can apply to PoE2 and aren’t much more pronounced in PFKM. Especially about classes: you say cipher is confusing but you’re OK with a system that makes Wizard, Sorcerer and Magus vastly different classes?
It’s just a skill tree, it’s not hard. Yes, there’s a lot of information, but it’s much clearer than the endless list of feats in Pathfinder, and it easily lets you plan your character.
You could do a similar tree for pathfinder feats, but it’d much more complex, since there’s a ton more feats, and instead of just being gated by level and other feats, there’s attribute requirements, skill requirements, and base attack bonus requirements (which of course vary by level).
I think your familiarity with Pathfinder and D&D is clouding your judgement here.
I have to agree with @alekseivolchok , PoE ruleset and clases are a lot more intuitive than PF. I’m somewhat familiar with BG2 and other implementations of 2.5e and it helped me grasp PoE faster than PF.
Still, some people love this game. Here’s a popular streamer Cohh who likes his RPGs complex. It seems he doesn’t have much of experience with Pathfinder systems. He says it’s one of the best RPGs ever.
Also he says he played a game for 140 hours. And it was his second playthrough.
Things like this make me think that maybe I’m playing those games in a wrong way. He played on high difficulty while I’ve played on Normal - and the moment when the game became extremely boring is the same moment fights become a trivial matter of clicking all the buff icons and then staring at the screen.