Qt3 Games Podcast: Just Cause 4, Driftland, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Title Qt3 Games Podcast: Just Cause 4, Driftland, Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Author Tom Chick
Posted in Games podcasts
When June 21, 2019

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Paging @Jason_McMaster

Brutal comments on Just Cause 4, all the patches and DLC seem to offer no salvation for its damaged core game. Maybe we will get a stream of Tom trying out the Demon’s dlc.

I figured Tom would mention the Chick Parabola when I saw Driftlands mentioned, the comments on Steam from other players brought up similar points.

Did any of the patches to Kingmaker make it any less unrelentingly brown?

I got Majesty Gold and Majesty 2 free from Twitch the other day. Should I just play those again, or give Driftland a go instead? Bear in mind I rarely make it far along the Chick Parabola, partly because I’m not very good and partly because I tend to flit between games.

I would say you’re better off with Majesty. It’s not trying to straddle the city-builder/resource-management genre, so it’s got more focus than Driftland. Driftland is good for maybe one full skirmish game before you’ve seen everything. But the amount of content in Majesty is far more generous, especially when you consider the different ways any given game can unfold.

-Tom

Necessary warning: Majesty may contain traumatizing voice bits.

Taaaaax collector!

-Tom

I’m melting

OK Jason Pathfinder went to the top of my Steam summer sale wishlist.

I hope you like it! I’ve had a great time with it so far

After hearing the discussion about Driftland and Majesty I was reminded of this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/97110/Kohan_Immortal_Sovereigns/

You can consider this a vote for the Wednesday stream. I’m curious if it holds up.

Be wary. Jason might not have gone far into the game. I loved it initally too but then it started throwing trash fights at me again and again, as in similar battles with no interesting problems. And with a complex system like this it has surprisingly lot of silver bullets: almost every class has a buff that it can cast before or just in the battle that will be universally good and work in almost every circumstances. Thus the whole game turned into deciding whether it’s time to use buffs before I autoattack my enemies and reloading if I’m wrong. And the game is packed with those straightforward boring fights.

But you run a kingdom - and it has a roguelike built into it! And 50% off!

Can’t argue with that.

Mind that roguelike part is a DLC - Beneath The Stolen Lands.

Thanks for the heads up - I’ll probably get distracted by something else before I get sick of the trash mobs!

There’s nothing to “be wary” about. PFKM is the best game of its kind since BG2. The developers have stood behind their game 110%, constantly updating and improving it. It’s absolutely fantastic.

So is what I wrote wrong or you don’t mind main gameplay consisting of doing exactly the same thing over and over?

Shooters! You just shoot people over and over again! Racing games! You just drive on a track faster than the other drivers repeatedly!

Aww, you guys are being a bit unfair. We’ve all played games that felt like there was a bunch of uninspired padding to draw out the playing time. @alekseivolchok’s observation sounds like that might be the case with Kingmaker over the long run. I’ve certainly played my fair share of RPGs in which I developed the attitude of “oh god, not another pointless battle…!”

And if there are tuning issues with “silver bullets”, like he mentions, that would make them feel all the more pointless. I have to say the three full screens of DIY difficulty settings doesn’t inspire me that the developers have much of a grasp on how to tune their game.

Difficulty%201

Difficulty%202

Difficulty%203

You can change all that stuff at any point in the game, and it’s even in the rogue-like. What kind of rogue-like asks me to make a choice on a drop-down bar to determine enemy stats, move a slider to set a damage multiplier, and check a box to determine whether my kingdom is invincible? Ugh.

On the plus side, it was kind of cool to immediately meet characters from the Pathfinder card game. Hey, it’s Amiri! I know her!

-Tom