What can change the nature of a man? Planescape: Torment: "If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can. I’ve seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag's heart half-circle. This entire Fortress has been constructed from belief. Belief damned a woman, whose heart clung to the hope that another loved her when he did not. Once, it made a man seek immortality and achieve it. And it has made a posturing spirit think it is something more than a part of me." Pathfinder: Kingmaker: "Just click on the dialogue option that says Lawful Good."
Don't forget about cycling through dialogue tree in Torment to see if you've missed an inconspicuous phrase that awards you enough experience to raise 2 whole levels and/or permanent stat boosts, that's balanced
I didn't believe I would have the patience for this video, but I hung on when I realized it was slowly unraveling Strat-Edgy's sanity. A true cosmic horror narrative for our times.
I ended up feeling like the overall message was: "7/10 as long as you play for long enough for Stockholm Syndrome to set in. 4/10 if you don't. Use of Walkthroughs recommended." Then I got to the ending. Oof.
I have to chuckle a bit at the way that Pathfinder ruleset handles a d20 system with character stats and what they mean. Ability scores and skills start to lose meaning as they balloon well beyond 20. The War Wisp had a Dexterity rating of 39 (a +14 on any given roll, lol)? This is while a Dexterity above 20 is already considered superhuman. I appreciate that the stat blocks of certain enemies should reflect the otherworldly power they might possess, but I always felt Pathfinder and some of the older D&D editions just had larger numbers than I can colorfully qualify as a DM. In a d20 system, a 20 skill roll should be great. When you have a 20 in Perception and still fail a trap roll, it just ends up feeling as lame as you described it while playing this game.
LordofBallyhoo I'm a huge 3/3.5 fan despite all the quirks and potentially broken combinations.... But Pathfinder I do not get. There are so many tiny tweeks that make the game more "heroic" (ie more prone to big numbers). And sub optimal builds are so much more heavily punished by the rules (multiclassing with core classes especially).
@@AlanGChenery I like to refer to Pathfinder as the fantasy buffet. It's everything you could want in theory but a lot of it is also unappetizing and won't go well together if put on the same plate :) If you ever get the itch to get outside your comfort zone, try a fudge dice role-playing system. I love how social and interpersonal RP is quantified and actively encouraged in a system like Strands of Fate
This is a problem of D&D 3.0/3.5 and Pathfinder ruleset. In AD&D 1 and 2 you could not permanently raise your stats over 19 and even 19 was super-human and you had to be of specific class and race (I think like half-orc fighter or barbarian) to have that. And even then you had to roll 18 on your 3d6 so you would be exceptionally lucky. Most players lucky enough to roll 18 on Strength would just have to also roll d100 for Exceptional Strength. Which wouldn't be all that impressive most of the time. And some races, like elves, would even have penalty for that. And if you're playing as mage, priest or thief, you wouldn't even be able to get exceptional Strength at all. And only Strength could be exceptional. In D&D 4 stats were still bloated but it was closer to Paragon Path at levels beyond 10 and really high stats would be at Epic Destiny in mid-20's levels. Which don't even exist in AD&D 1, 2 and D&D 5. In D&D 5 only magic items can raise stats beyond 20 except for Barbarian and his ultimate strength of 24 at 20th level.
Mostly agree with your assessment except for 3 things I've noticed thus far: 1. 22k gold at level 4 would be insane if it was for one character who is only spending it on himself. But the thing is you are likely splitting that gold on equipment for 6 (if you really care about a mainteam) or up to 8 (if you get everyone that you could have at level 4, since 4 of the 5 companions you meet in the tutorial will be available (whoever you went after last is not available for act 1) and there are 3 new companions + your char) meaning those 22k gold are either 3.6k or even just 2.75k gold per person. Going by the P&P Pathfinder GM references the expected wealth of a character at level 4 is around 6k gold, at 5 it's 10,5k gold, at 6 it's 16k etc. Not saying this bloating of money is good design but realistically you actually have LESS total gold than you would be expected to have in the P&P at that level and I think the shocked reaction your friend had is mostly because you had him thinking that those 22k gold were just for your one character alone, considering you asked him "what A character at level 4 would have" not "what an entire party at level 4 would have combined". 2. The issue with your feeling like you have nothing to do for 3 ingame months until the next mainquest event is triggered mainly boils down to you not having had any interest in the kingdom management at that point. I can't blame you for that because it honestly sucks but their design philosophy wasn't "let's have the players do nothing but boring sidequests for 3 months" but rather "they just unlocked the kingdom management and I bet they wanna check that out. when they do then their advisors will rapidly level up which will skip 14 days each time it happens and they will want to add regions to their barony when they can which skips another 14 days, so they will burn through these 3 months no problem". It ultimately failed because the kingdom management was annoying and boring but their initial idea for the mainstory progression was a reasonable one. 3. I wholeheartedly disagree with your idea of them making it so you can only set kingdom management to auto at the start of the game for the sake of a better user experience. Mainly because it would lead to the exact opposite. When you decide on it at the start of the game you are 1 short tutorial and a few hours of a first chapter away from ever coming into contact with the system and being able to check if you like auto-mode or not. If you then realize you dislike it that is you remaking your character and starting anew just for the sake of reversing one little thing you clicked hours earlier. It's far smarter to allow you to turn it on mid-game but what that setting really needs is just a popup very clearly warning players "if you activate this setting you can no longer deactivate it on this save" so common sense would lead to people saving once before they check the system out. There is a warning in the text to the left but something that could potentially be this disruptive and destructive to the user experience would need a clearer one.
I had a very similar experience with the game. There's a bunch of dubious design choices, playing this was a maddening experience. I played it on launch and eventually dropped it, only to try again a year and a half later and run into completely different problems and drop it again. Kingmaker is like an abusive boyfriend.
I tend to suffer choice paralysis with character builds and on new RPGs I play different builds through tier 1 and then beat the game with the playstyle I most enjoy. I've never gotten a build beyond the start of chapter 3. There are too many choices. For every playstyle, there are like four to six flavors of that you can play without multiclassing. And the beginning of the game is pretty boring, at least until Old Sycamore.
I was confused at their alignment designations for player choice. I searched for clarification and people suggested that "lawful" in this game often meant severity and rigidity that often manifests as cruelty. Strict and unforgiving adherence to some kind of law. When I thought about it this way, "lawful" actions made much more sense. As I understood it, slavery was illegal but it could not be enforced. This highlights the absurdity of the alignment chart. This interpretation is valid and so is yours, but some people take serious issue with different interpretations.
Yeah, these problems manifest themselves when every conversation forces you to make an alignment choice. You are constantly questioning the system, and feel like the system is railroading your roleplaying ability.
I will say that at least you can now buy a scroll from the druid in your court that resets your alignment to whatever it was when you made your character, so at least clerics and paladins aren't permanently screwed.
@@chaz9808 It means more if your casting isn't tied to a divine being. If your alignment shifts out from under your god, your spells literally don't work. Found that out the hard way on an inquisitor.
I agree that they shouldn't be vague on that. At the same time though I always assumed lawful meant strict and rigid adherence to the laws and I think it says as much in all of the dnd Crpgs as well like NWN and Baldur's gate. Isn't that point of picking lawful alignments? That it creates conflict?
This game is a chore without the mod bags of tricks, a cheat mod. Also, here's some good habits for that game: Entering an area, cast delay poison, see invisibility. Always have 5 rest worth of ration. Stack up on great restoration scrolls, and restoration scrolls. Use unbreakable heart and death ward whenever you get inside a cyclops ruin. Screw difficulty, make the setting custom, turn kingdom management to easy. if you keep kingdom management to normal, download kingdom resolution mod, enable kingdom management outside of borders, reduce upgrade time by half, and always click the kingdom management button on the adventure map and invest your gold in the kingdom from the start.
When you went to see the Nymph, there is a body on the east side of the map with two wolves (which a level 4 can dispatch easy) and 2 potions of invisibility. Even the journal entry says it would be wise to plan an escape in case things turn sour, and even a potion of Vanish could have been enough. About the treasurer, I got Kaessi (the tiefling kineticist from the dlc) as a treasurer so I never really missed Jubilost. You can also make custom characters to fill an empty role like that. About the huge-ass enemy hitboxes and the strange way your mouse jumps to it, if you press control you ignore them with your mouse. Also about huge, dumb enemies like a cyclops, they are weak against mind effects like Hideous Laughter, which can trivialize them. Big thing everyone should know, there is an Eye button on the corner of the screen. If you toggle it you can check a creature's stats in the middle of battle. About blindness and other permanent status effects (curses and ability damage): there are plenty of potions and scrolls of all the spells you need to remove said status and hoarding them can reward you later on. It also pays off to be prepared: clerics can convert their spells to healing (or damage), so it always pays off to have at least one of said situational spells prepared and then just use it to heal if you don't need it right now. About many summons or area spells that will destroy your day: prepare dispel magic or have some scrolls or wands on hand. They can turn combat about. Also, focus spellcasters. About alignment shift. It is... not great. Since I play mostly Neutral characters (Lawful and Chaotic) I find myself indulging in wanton Evil sometimes just to shift back away from good. It would be good if it could be disabled in the options, for sure. OH! Btw, if you shift out of your allowed alignment, you just need to cast Atonement and you erase all shifts.
It's also worth noting that there are a lot of spells like death ward and freedom of movement that you need just like resist energy for the wisps. The Kingmaker part of Kingmaker is also pretty important, what seemed like empty days you had to wait though were actually supposed to be spent increasing councilor stats and improving your realm, each of which take 7-14 days on average and about 3-5 seconds to pass. I also think the game was very much made for 3.5/pf and where AD&D, and 5e to a lesser extent, are much more low magic, 3.X is not. Things like +2 fullplate, or a +1 flaming bastard sword are par for the course, hell they have an average wealth per level for each character calculated into challenge difficulty. Overall I think I agree with a lot of the complaints about UX and UI, I think the game needed more testing and bugfixing, I think the whole thing needed more polish. That being said, as a long time d&d and pathfinder player, I played it from start to finish on challenging and overall ended up liking it more than either Baldur's Gate, but less than Planescape Torment or the first 3/4 of Tyranny.
I want to comment about the inspect key. I wish I had kept this part in the video because everyone brings it up and I feel dumb, but, there was one clip in the hours of footage where I am looking for the stealth key and I find it (the little eye at the corner of the character select) and I hit it, then I see the eye icon for inspect and I say out loud, oh, there's a stealth key over there as well.... That's why UX is so important. Also... Ahem. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU MAKE CUSTOM CHARACTERS!!! Mother fucker I swear I missed 90% of the goddamn features in this game.
@@StratEdgyProductions hahaha. Hey. That is the whole reason the game is beinf compared to BG, imho. It does NOT hold hands. I really appreciate it since I've grown tired of all the easy peasy rpgs of early 2000s, and this new age of CRPGs are to me like a revival to the old form, like Arcanum, Nox and Planescape. Now, customizing and editing characters is done by (enabling it on the menu, on the difficulty tab) and then talking to the NPC with the Eight-Eyes nickname. I forget her name, she is otherwise inconsequential. She hangs out on the tavern and in Olegs, before Barony. I think this game is more akin to the Souls games where you are either using the "face meets wall" approach or trecking through the wikis.
@@bavettesAstartes There's "Doesn't hold your hands" and then there's "Expecting you to realize you have hands when game treats you like a limbless torso from the getgo" and so many otherwise decent, even great, games that completely fail to explain important aspects or features adequately just become frustrating slogs or completely unfair. I never knew s existed in Dark Souls for the longest time. It doesn't explain them. And when I tried dodging I always seemed to get hit so I stuck to shields only, the stamina regen shield at that because it also never made poise and stability clear, either, and the regen seemed really important. Soooo, that was not as fun as the run could have been. But then I learned dodge is an and never touched a shield again. On top of that, you know how people complain like mad about things in the Game of Thrones books not being in the show? It's because you can't simply translate an encyclopedia volume's worth of pages and story and chapters and characters and texts into an hour long show. The medium is simply too different. The many complains Strat has laid out suggests the same thing is going on with Kingmaker (have considered nabbing it, but need to eventually finish Divinity first). Quality of Life is a super important aspect to game design. We all whine and complain about cash-grab mouth-breather no-brain games like CoD and how hard they take away player agency and avoid emergent gameplay out of fear the player goes off track, but FUCKING HELL so many games of fond memory are literally unplayable today. Why? Not because they stopped being good games, but because the industry learned QoL and lack the same technical limitations of those olden days. The problem is they've gone too far to ensure players don't make mistakes, but there are ways to keep the nostalgic challenges of old school CRPG and other games without sacrificing QoL. It even happens with modern games emulating other modern games because "difficulty." Example: Salt & Sanctuary is incredibly frustrating to navigate simply because it lacks a map. Great game, but this pissed me off to no end. It only lacks a map because it's trying to be 2D Dark Souls, but it's actually a Metroidvania (you get traversal skills). Imagine Super Metroid without a fucking map. Dark Souls worked without a map because it was designed to not need one. Salt & Sanctuary, if they make a sequel (and they should), absolutely needs a god damn in game map.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is probably my favorite game ever. I'll also probably never play it again on account of all the small annoyances and frustrations that come up.
@@youcantbeatk7006 Nobody who has beat pathfinder kingmaker has "not played very many games" some people have a higher tolerance for some bullshit and a greater love of other positives. I have a lot of critiques about Baldur's gate that make that game not something I really enjoy at all, it's clunky as fuck and the writing style of baldur's gate is like having a railroady DM who tells you that you're allowed to play a evil character but makes your experience complete shit without telling you that's why. But i'd never tell somebody who likes baldur's gate that they don't play games with good writing lol.
@@NeverTriedHardEnough I'd say that maybe the only thing this game does better than say any of the Infinity Engine games, the Obsidian spiritual successors, or games like the Divinity Original Sins is that this game has really good character building though it's not perfect and hurts from some of the mechanics. I still haven't played enough to honestly say it's a bad game though.
“Unless you plan on never playing the game and just come here because my monotone voice helps put you to sleep at night.” I haven’t played a single video game in 4-5 years, but watch almost every one of your videos for this reason.
A thought on plate armor. One reason it was so expensive in real life is that it had to be fitted by an armorer to the wearer. A 6'4" man mountain is not going to squeeze into armor made for a 5' shorty. No, a smith has to alter the armor by fire and forge, and if you're in a fantasy game setting by magic. Every smith who mainly shoes horses is not going to be able to do that work! Its a job for experts.
Not really true and it doesn't seem plate armour was nearly as expensive as you think. It's true that a full head to toe matching harness requires custom fitting. It's also true with people sitting well beyond averages that they're going to need custom stuff and like today must fork out more but this doesn't represent the averages. Plate armour is very modular because it's made of so many small components unlike say mail, scale, lamellar or even fabric armour which can't be modular. It's much more like laminar. Larger components like a full cuirass or a brigandine do require the wearer be within some sort of range, a breastplate and a plackart on it's own though not as much. It's really the fully enclosed greaves, vambraces and pauldrons though that really require a custom fit. If you look at a lot of 15th century art you might notice that many of the less heavily armoured soldiers have no vambraces or greaves even if they do still have plate protection on their arms and legs. They might have mail sleeves instead of pauldrons or spaulders which don't require a custom fit and are super modular. Armour was mass produced by huge expert armouring manufacturers.
@@7dayspking quote: 1468 England (Milanese Armor) Such armor was made to order by renowned armorers, and, as a rule, had decals and decorations, even if we are talking about combat, not ceremonial armor, and its cost converted by the above mentioned method was in the range of $100,000 to $250,000 . Source: armstreet.com/news/the-cost-of-plate-armor-in-modern-money You are full of it.
@@SadakoSenpai Did you read that article From the article "this means a set of XV century plate armor would cost from 8,000-$40,000" He arrived at figure by assuming 'foot soldier' and modern US soldiers earn equivalent wages and only provided a very small, selective sample size. And only of entire head to toe, custom made armour! 'a simple set of foot soldier armour would cost around $2,000' That $100,000-250,000 figure was for "A knight's plate armor" that was "made by renowned armourers, and, as a rule, had decals and decorations!" I don't even trust the figures in this article but how dishonest are you? Either you had trouble reading the article, barely read the article or you were deliberately trying to deceive me.
1:16:08 There was actually a way to make the creature reveal himself - a second level spell called Glitterdust, available to Octavia or Linzi or any arcane spellcaster. If you have the spell memorized, you get a dialogue option to use it and can take on the creature without sacrificing anyone. I usually had Glitterdust memorized since it neutralizes invisible enemies and has a chance to blind all other enemies, and was pleasantly surprised to be able to use it to solve this quest.
This video is so relatable it made me watch the whole damn thing. I too have tried to like this game so bad, restart after restart. I even made it to the tomb in one of the playthroughs. But in the end I was just unable to make that final push. It just felt the many ways in which the game fails to deliver stack up until they outweigh the allure of a game with sky-high potential as a gorgeous looking digital version of the pathfinder experience. As for ratings - as the UX research saying goes: don’t go by what they say, look at what they do. And I think the steam achievements speak for themselves. Only a tiny faction managed to finish the game and at the time of my research barely half made it past the introductory chapter after which another 30% drops before chapter 4. My guess this is largely due to the rather ruthless nature of many of the Pathfinder mechanics, combined with a lack of proper testing on the powercreep within the game making almost every interaction feel like the same cointoss. You win, you proceed - you lose (get critted, fail a check or save) you reload and hope the dice land differently this time (or skew the odds with the difficulty slider). Combined with a story that leaves you guessing whats even going on with little to no foreshadowing and where choices don’t seem to matter at all it’s a lot to ask to grind through 90+ hours of coin-flipping and loadscreens. All in all the game has been one of the most frustrating experiences. It *should* be a game I love and finish with ease, but somehow, despite all of its content still lacks all of the crpg fantasy buildingblocks; A rich, well-written story, strategic combat and meaningful choices/world development, with the exception of chapter 5. Anyways, great content and good luck with the writing.
But you can handle the months of playing the tabletop version with no way of saving, permanent fails/saves, permanent character death, character choice as deep as any puddle in a campaign on rails, no world building, and purely flavor based character building? Yeah. Your right, the devs did a terrible job. I suppose, if they wanted to do better, they should have created a system that processes every single random question or answer that a player may want to choose in a given dialogue. That would assume they had had the technology, and we as players the processing power to chose from an infinite tree of dialogue options. That would have been amazing. Honestly, why do some people even bother playing video games? One more thing. The loading screens are a lot shorter than the see you next week wait times of tabletop. It's not worth bringing up in a game this size.
@@travisdavidson2415 The random and unbalanced nature of a regular pen and paper tabletop game is much more tolerable than in a videogame. At least in actual pen and paper, the experience of being able to fully role-play your character and play with others helps alleviate a lot of the potential frustrating aspects of the game. On the top of that, an actual in person GM is able to tailor encounters to the party composition, can allow players to do actions not stated in the rules(like if they wanted to set of an environmental trap/hazard), and can adept to player choices on a fly and let them completely derail the campaign for better or worse. Now does that mean you shouldn't try to make tabletop rpgs? NO, but it also doesn't mean you should just slap together a bunch of encounters and not try to account for player choices. If you're going to make a videogame of a tabletop rpg, you need to take into account the limitations of the medium and adept your story and the mechanics of the game to those limitations. You need to make sure that encounters are simple enough that most party compositions can have a fair shot at beating them without having to save scum. If your story is too long to properly account to player choices, than you need to shorten it so that the amount of times the player is railroaded into a situation is reduced as much as possible. If the combat is feeling too slow and boring, change the mechanics in order to speed it up. Its lazy game development to not look at the limitations you're dealing with and just say "screw it, its better than nothing."
Yeah, the game requires You to google these quests sometimes to find the "not obvious" solution... like having spell X memorized/on a scroll to solve some encounter in an alternate way.
Much love to your break downs dude. Also kudos for not losing your mind from all the rough design decisions for this game. As someone who used to play the PNP Pathfinder and someone who’s tried to watch people play this game in the past without falling asleep to no avail, this has been the only review/play through I’ve been able to get the whole way through. Thanks for slogging it out and I’m looking forward to your next critical analysis on games and their design.
I find Pathfinder: Kingmaker to be a game at odds with itself. It's ultimately a Game that teaches you why being an Adventurer King is a bad idea but not in a fun way. The Kingdom Sim gets in the way of Adventuring and the Adventuring gets in the way of the Kingdom Sim. You can't manage your Kingdom if you aren't in the Capital (whose location is preset) and You can't use Companions if you sent them on a task for your Kingdom eventhough all You do in the Kingdom Sim is send one of your advisors on a task, you can't do that on the road because apparently the letter hasn't been invented yet in this world and scrying spells aren't worth shit, which would only be an inconvenience if it wasn't for the DEADLINES. The Deadlines in the game don't just apply to the minor events in the Kingdom Sim, even the Major, Story Critical Events have them, meaning you can Game Over from missing a deadline and with everything we discussed before it's very easy to end up with a fubar'd run where you either go super broke or G.O from story crises. The Actual RPG and Kingdom Modes are fun on their own but together they struggle against eachother in a way that ultimately leaves the experience frustrating. EDIT: I have since beaten the game and I can say that on the second playthrough most of my criticisms have been patched (I hated the deadlines the first time through because of how unfair they seemed without teleporters on top of how hard it can be to get back to your capital in time to do the major events) But the game still has it's share of flaws chief among them is the ridiculous difficulty spike in the endgame where thanks to the decision to make Wild Gaze a free action steamcommunity.com/app/640820/discussions/0/1735469327938498723/ the entire endgame is unplayable unless you have the Freedom of Movement spell on all characters at all times and how an entire ending path (the BEST ending path) is dedicated around curse research an arduous, long and expensive process that takes up one or two of your advisers for large stretches of time making it that much harder to advance them and leaves them unavailable for the events they are supposed to be doing meaning that you will constantly lose Arcane/Faith points and the rewards for researching a curse are often not worth it even in terms of Arcane/Faith points.
It's kinda funny, because this all means they converted the original tabletop campaign very well. All those problems existed in the tabletop version, and it was a huge drag there, too
@@Somanyheadphones I also forgot to mention the Auto skip Kingdom tasks that make it impossible to do the other tasks while they're going and advance all of the deadlines while you're doing one.
The game has been patched extensively. Now you can manage your kingdom in all the territory that you own, and by building an aviary building you can manage in it's neighboring territories as well. Also you can build mage buildings in your towns for instant teleportation from town to town in your own area. The actual deadlines are one of the best parts of the game! Bad guys are not just waiting for your convenience, they are trying to end you and it's your responsibility to get them first.
@@xxxxxrandom I have since beaten the game and I can tell you that on the second playthrough most of what you said holds weight (I hated the deadlines the first time through because of how unfair they seemed without teleporters on top of how hard it can be to get back to your capital in time to do the major events) But the game still has it's share of flaws chief among them is the ridiculous difficulty spike in the endgame where thanks to the decision to make Wild Gaze a free action steamcommunity.com/app/640820/discussions/0/1735469327938498723/ the entire endgame is unplayable unless you have the Freedom of Movement spell on all characters at all times and how an entire ending path (the BEST ending path) is dedicated around curse research an arduous, long and expensive process that takes up one or two of your advisers for large stretches of time making it that much harder to advance them and leaves them unavailable for the events they are supposed to be doing meaning that you will constantly lose Arcane/Faith points and the rewards for researching a curse are often not worth it even in terms of Arcane/Faith points.
I have finished bg1-2, icewind dale 1-2, pillars of eternity 1 (just started the second game), tyranny, fallout 1-2 but I couldn't get into pathfinder... the problem is: I don't know what skills or abilities synergy with what, so I am randomly picking stuff that "seems to stack in my favor" in combat, but doesn't in reality...
Gotta interject that your buddy is partially mistaken. At 27:15 You talk to your buddy about the appropriate amount of gold to have at level 4. Your guy says that level 10 is the right level to have that much gold. According to just the character creation outline for making new characters the appropriate amount of gold to have a level 4 is 6000gp. That is for one character. For 6 characters it is 6* 6000 for a total of 36,000 gold. This isn't even including the gear you have equipped which is a part of that total and I can tell you from playing the videogame that you will barely meet that amount. This is also not mentioning that that amount of gold listed in character creation is for normal advancement, Not fast or slow but just normal. The real determining factor in the economy is magic item availability and that Oleg's doesn't have shit for options. IMO PnP Pathfinder has a lot of crunch already without having to simulate pricing due to item availability. Items are already rarity priced and there are optional rules or DM fiat to simulate the former.
The only thing I want to say here is that the turn based mode mod makes this game much, much better. Btw 1:44:57 Yea I've made the exact same decision, albeit much earlier than you :D The biggest problem with this game is: when it's fun, it's realy fun, but when it's not, it's realy bad. There is no consistency.
I finally took the time to watch this and we had such a similar experience that i complained to my friends about the exact same issues you had, i fell for the combat at pretty much the same time, and i stopped playing at the same time you did. It's eerie.
I found this game an imperfect masterpiece. Developers had genious ideas dotted with crappy elements - for one the systemic lack of explanation on anything that pertains the character sheet and kingdom mechanics. I love its lenght and its impressive replayability (there is some real care for it from the developers). I loved it more than DOS2. Im still playing it, so if it doesn't screw up in the last 3 chapters i will give it a place in my personal top 5 fantasy RPGs (along with baldurs gate 2, planescape, morrowind and tiranny).
There's a lot I agree with here and a lot I wholeheartedly disagree with, but I respect that you took the time to document your experience with the game in such a detailed way. I hope the devs take notice of some of these criticisms for the next game.
Yeah, I went through the entire video and cut out all pauses, breaths, and dead air to make the video flow better and that... THAT! Cut over 30 minutes from the video. Believe me when I say that I am happy I did that. It would have been really bad had I not done that.
I love Kingmaker, I have over 1.2k hours on gog with it, and I've commented here before, but now I came back to challenge my view of the game again and I realised that you've being agonizing about poison and its ability dmg so much, but if you'd cast delay poison communal before the fights, you'd be immune to all those poisons and their terrible effects for like an hour, you'd go through many many encounters with ease (dp communal lets you fight in your own stinking clouds/cloudkills, so enemies die like flies and you're fine)
Hey bro! So I'm still watching your video- got to the economy part, with 22k at level 4. You might get around to an explanation, but you've got that spread across a party of six. So like 3500ish each +gear. At level 4 in the ttrpg you should have 6k worth per character. Just my thoughts. OMG I LOVE YOUR CHANNEL!
I honestly have no desire to play many of the games you "review/critic" but I like how much you care about them and honestly it feels like watching my best friend walking me through his favorite RPGs of the last 2 decades. Keep up the good work
You can build mage towers in towns to teleport. Its very convinient. And if you did proper kingdom management there are projects making you take less penalty in moutains swamps and forests
Proper kingdom management is very hard to do going into a play through blind. I missed two party members and because of that had to give up a shit load of opportunities. Late game I was so overwhelmed by events and my party had such awful event modifiers literally everything was impossible. All because I missed two guys that are barely even whispered about and the game never said that mercenaries can be advisors. I love the pathfinder table top game so I was able to rock the actual game, but then this stupid mini-game kept pulling me away from the part I was actually there for.
I absolutely despise the kingdom management in this game. It's absolutely awful. For one, I usually dislike all characters in games like this, and almost always go with a full merc party since I really can't be bothered listening to the banter and other nonsense from these characters, yet you are forced to acquire them all in order to manage your kingdom, then you have to level them up, etc to have them be better at their management positions which is just tedious and lame. Then there's the issue that you have the different alignments on how to solve events, which are also limited by the alignments of your available advisor characters. There's a few options for the roles, but all of them are flawed in their own stupid ways, not to mention you cannot get enough characters to have proper coverage of all the roles, and you will be stuck with characters whose alignment completely clashes with your character due to the limited choices you have. Custom characters don't work because they will automatically make random choices and will f-k up many events with poor or suboptimal resolutions entirely out of your control. When you have an official npc in charge of things you get to choose how things should be resolved, thus it is necessary to employ the npc's to do things. Why the game was designed like that I will not understand, as it's really very stupid. It stands to reason my character can use some of their tens of thousands pieces of gold to hire some certified experts whose views align with their own in order to manage the necessary parts of my kingdom, rather than leave it to the few ragtag and completely unstable fools who just so happen to have signed up on the quest to settle this land with me, without any choice from my part whatsoever. Absolutely none of the characters you meet have any reason to be trusted with a management position of any kind, they have no business being anywhere near a governmental council with the numerous issues and quirks they have, yet I'm forced to employ them anyways and just accept this fact that my land is ruled by a group of mentally unstable id iots lol.
@@luka188 There your party members, if you love the roleplaying game then you should know this is a official scenario so your party at the table would be those advisors.
7:38 "A lawful good character will always try to solve something without conflict..." Without knowing the full context of the situation presented (such as knowing if it was possible to know that those were slavers on sight) I can't weigh in on whether or not you were right about the game being confusing. However, I can tell you without a doubt that that statement I quoted is wholly and completely incorrect. The first sentence of the alignment section of the d20PFSRD states "This game assumes good and evil are definitive things." Additionally the very first characteristic of a good character is "they oppose evil." Again, and most importantly, the very first paragraph of the lawful good description is: "A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. She combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. She tells the truth, keeps her word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished." A lawful good character is outright expected to do the opposite of finding peaceful solutions when dealing with evil as evil is a real thing that must be destroyed. Secondly, you make the point that since you are the baron of the land and you should be able to freely determine the lawfulness of slavery to maintain your lawful good alignment is erroneous. There are two reasons why you shouldn't even consider that idea. First, and I don't mean this derogatorily, is that Paizo as a company openly endorse and promote leftist and progressive ideology. There is no way the company would allow the idea that slavery is anything other than evil exist in their setting. This game is being run by Paizo, not your local DM, so you have to expect to obey their ideology. Secondly, lawful good characters have the problem of being both lawful and good characters. Lawful and good ideology are inherently exclusive of their opposing traits while chaotic and evil ideologies are ambivalent towards them. For example, a good character can not take from the undeserving while an evil character can freely do charity. Therefore a lawful good character must not just be both lawfully good and adhere to the tenants of good, and goodly lawful and create good laws. While I may have a basic misunderstanding somewhere in that oversized message it is important to note that the alignment system in Pathfinder may need to be interpreted but it is inherently not open to interpretation. It may seem alien to you but that's because the alignment system exists to describe a setting where both good and evil are not mere concepts but actual energy that can be used to kill a man. In conclusion, whether or not the writers for the game were right it is wholly within the bounds of a lawful good character to shank an evil slaver in an alley if he can get away with it. Conflict is the tool of the players and the joy of the game (of Pathfinder) and it would be insane if players were supposed to avoid it.
nice overview. And that's why I personally enjoy making true neutral characters cause they allow you to think and act according to your own wisdom, not the requisite standards of your alignment.
@@dimas3829 my own wisdom leadd me down the lawful good path. It isnt a limitation of the alignment system. If your wisdom says neutral things to you, go for it. Course, there is an argument to be made in favor of playing characters with different views than the players.
Yeah, lawful good absolutely is not conflict averse in Kingmaker. That’s neutral good. If you’re trying to do an all lawful good run, you’ll end up killing tons of (plot relevant!) evil and/or chaotic characters/creatures. e.g. neutral good can make peace between the mites and the kobolds at Old Sycamore, lawful good requires you to kill at least one side.
Kingmaker does something really unique among mainstream games. *It will slap you whenever you expect it to behave like a game!* - If you rest just outside a cave, have an encounter! Because the inhabitants of the cave don't know that this is a game where they should let you rest on their doorstep. - If you go somewhere you have no reason to be, it will kill you. Because the encounters don't know that this is a game and that you are too low level for this area. - Trying to find Armag's tomb but cant find it where the walkthrough tells you it is? It is not bugged. The Perception DC is set to auto-fail and you need to find clues that reduce the DC first. Why do you expect to find someplace where you would have not a single idea on where to look? The clues will reveal themselves in time. - Are you expecting to get the next story mission immediately? Why would the world and story cater to you? Is this a game? Are you the protagonist? Down Boy! Bad assumptions! - Did you not pack enough supplies? If this is an "unfair" game-over in a game where surviving the wilderness is central, then what would be a fair game-over? Camping without supplies is dangerous, and you should not treat this like a game! I hated parts of this game, especially early on. But when it started to click I had a blast for most of it. This is a game is about dragging yourself through the mud, conquering every step with your blood, sweat and tears. It's a monkeys paw. You think you want to build a kingdom? That sounds awesome right? Well be careful what you wish for! For this game will let you build a kingdom. From nothing. In the middle of nowhere. With nature and everything else stacked against you. But you will do it *alone and with your own bare hands.* Dare I say this game is "Hardcore". It is certainly not for everyone. And I respect the hell out of the game for having the balls to do this in a mainstream space. And when you do win? For all the frustrations I had, I regret nothing! I conquered this hill on Normal+ difficulty (with mods and occasional walkthrough) and I feel like a boss! That's what this kind of game is for! The biggest problems I see is that - The game does not set the expectations it needs. I think most will expect a power trip. To get a crown early on and get to lead armies. You will get only one of those and it is more than halfway through a very long story. - It tutorializes its gameplay poorly. Like how on Candlemere you realize that you need to use Protection from Electricity to *solve* the Wisp encounters, because brute forceing the issue won't cut it any longer. Same with Delay Poison in all of chapter 3. Or death ward in chapter 4. And the game does not tell you that the vast amounts of downtime is there so you can play the kingdom management aspects. - It tutorializes its controls poorly. If you did not look for the buttons yourself then you are unlikely to find Analyze, or Offer, or the Calendar showing the day of the week, or the Unsnap targeting toggle, or the log that is essential to figuring out why something happened or did not work. - The game does not tell you that it is not a game. You should not expect game-y things. Events have fixed dates so there will be downtime. - I suspect the game does not tutorialize the Pathfinder 1E system well. And the 1E ruleset is incredibly unforgiving to new players. - At least for me, it did not tutorialize its own differences to the pen-and-paper system well. I'm not defending the poor design and UX. But at least these are all things that are no longer an issue with a second playthrough. If you were looking for more of a power-fantasy. Check out Owlcats next game: Wrath of the Righteous.
That caged troll scenario could be neat, but the game botches it horribly. My first reaction to the conundrum was "Alright, what have you actually learned? Do you know how we're going to defeat the trolls? How many more days do I need to give you to torture this thing before you'll know?" But no, the game doesn't even frame it as a means vs ends type of question. It's just "Good = catch & release (no matter how many people the Joker kills off-screen)" and "Evil = torture is great" and "Law = hurr durr there isn't a law, therefore it's fine." NONE of those is a compelling position! My decision was that the conflict between my people and the trolls is genuine, my people have a very good claim to my sympathy, and the trolls have none. After all, I was already set on killing as many of them as I had to. And I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm going to assume this guy isn't just a sadist, but really does expect his experiments to make the difference between victory and death. So sure, proceed. Then little miss spellslinger pipes up, "hurr durr Good is Good you have to let it freeeee," and I'm like... "What the Hell is WRONG with you? Those things KILL and EAT people, we have no good way to defend ourselves against them, and you just want me to let it go FREE? Go put it out of your misery if you're feeling squeamish, but don't ask me to let it loose on my people!"
Damn, this is practically spot-on with my own impressions of the game. I was also frustrated to no end by it despite finding some enjoyment in some of the stories and quest/character arcs. On the Obsidian forums someone asked how Kingmaker compares with Deadfire, and I wrote the following in response: I wasn't a fan [of Kingmaker], and it's a massive time-sink, probably twice as long as Deadfire overall and largely because of a lot of trash encounters, artificial timers surrounding the kingdom management system, and a much more extensive main story opposite to optional sidequesting and the likes. However, I would recommend giving it a try at least. It has its worthwhile elements and others have loved it so, who knows? As to how it compares specifically with Deadfire, well... I think it doesn't. I started a second playthrough of Deadfire as soon as I was done with Kingmaker and the more I played, the more the problems in Kingmaker became extremely apparent. Kingmaker is a pulpy high fantasy power trip, your goal is essentially to rise from novice adventurer to king of an entire new nation, and amidst it all there's numerous threats to your realm and pretenders to your throne, plenty of big epic stakes and enemies, but it's all very surface-level, it's all there for spectacle and entertainment's sake. Nothing wrong with that of course, it knows what it is. But Deadfire, as most Obsidian games, thrives a lot more on a solid thematic foundation, and even at its pulpiest there's still a sense of purpose to much of the content therein, if only to describe another facet of this world that is so deeply tied with the undelying discourse the game presents. And whereas the writing in Kingmaker frequently comes across as crude or generic, there's a life and character to the particular cadence of the Huana or the Valians that is unique, lively and very underrated when in contrast to the former. From a sidequest or side content perspective, there's no doubt in my mind that Deadfire's the better game - most of the side content in Kingmaker is lacking, the sidequests tend to be very straight-forward and not plentiful, whilst 80% of what is there to discover in the world map amounts to endlessly rehashed small areas that act as little more than "arenas" to trash encounters. And whilst the game does react to the choices you make, these are almost exclusively dialogue or build-based, and often dialogue options are gutted outright by arbitrary barriers like alignment - in comparison the roleplay in Deadfire seems much freer and more plentiful, as quests and area design allow for a player to resolve the same in multiple ways just by choosing to *play* the sequence differently instead of merely choosing a different dialogue branch. The freedom of exploration and liveliness of the world stand out a lot more in Deadfire when directly compared to Kingmaker, which on the other hand feels generic to a fault, if no doubt appealing on a sheer comfort-food level. All this without touching the worst aspect, which to me is the combat. Kingmaker's combat is absolutely woeful, ubiquitous and inescapable. If the first Pillars had a trash encounter problem, this one has it three times over. And all this without taking into account that the game does everything in its power to worsen and exacerbate every flaw in the IE games' combat system as well. This is the kind of game that follows the same balancing principles as a regular combat/strategy mod for Baldur's Gate II in that even in normal difficulties it requires you to have the prescience of knowing what you'll face when and what scrolls and characters to bring alongside you for which area; and since the game is on a timer all throughout, backtreading to acquire X or Y supply or companion is *very* costly. This is essentially a game where prebuffing isn't just a clever and accidental workaround to combat the way it proved to be in the IE games, it becomes a mandatory element through which all encounters are balanced around - and if you happen to forget to prebuff your party for a single trash mob of spiders (which can also occur as a random encounter on the road), then good luck because you'll likely end with two or three characters sporting a massive -8 STR, DEX and CON permanent debuff at the end of it. If you think this is just a single type of creature, or just a couple who can do this, think again, because basically *everything* here is capable of dealing attribute damage or permanent afflictions (see blindness too) to your party - and that's not even touching on several other baffling enemy designs like the AoE paralize auras on the Wild Hunt which themselves become your usual dungeon filler during the end of the game. Other irritating features, as with the IE games, include crowd control conditions and DoT AoE spells alla Wall of Blades, Web or Cloudkill enduring for minutes after combat ends, rest interrupts and random road encounters consisting of trash mobs are plentiful to the point you could well have four or five of the former and two or three of the latter occur before you finish either action, enemies having a tendency to be dumb and heavy on spamming single moves or attacks (case in point: alchemist enemies tend to bombard you with a seemingly endless and constant barrage of fireball, regardless of whether it's effective against your party or not (say that we've cast communal protection against fire on ourselves for example), despite also wielding a crossbow for example), and these shortcomings in AI tend to be 'balanced' through inflating base stats and abilities to absurd degrees, to the point that even a regular boar in act 1 can have an STR score of 32. It's compared to games like this that you realize just how much great work has gone into redesigning and improving combat in the Pillars series. All of which also leads me to the bottom line which is... Kingmaker is very likely a game served best by playing with cheats and cheat mods on. Movespeed cheats, difficulty down to a bare minimum, even the removal of random road encounters, anything to not have to deal with the relentless, tedious combat in this game and nevertheless allowing you to experience the story and several companions and companion arcs which are all very decent - I'd likely have enjoyed the game way more had I played it this way and not tried foolhardily to beat the game at the difficulty I did. Anyhow, these are my thoughts on the matter, hope they're worth something.
Excellent review. I would say you mirrored my experience save for a few things I missed in my first playthrough like the "inspect key" which has the same iconography as the stealth button (big UX nono).
The Platemail price actually checks out. The Suggested Price for Full Plate is 1500gp The Price of adding +1 magic to a set of armor is 1000gp So the standard price assuming your DM doesn't make changes is 2500gp
Which is true. I cut out a section where I looked up the price. The price isn't the problem. It's the fact that I could have afforded two set of plate +1 at level 4. Seems a bit out of whack.
@@StratEdgyProductions That's pretty much perfectly on curve for a Pathfinder adventure at that level, discount the fact that Kingmaker makes you sink gold into developing your township.
LG means that your charakter will aply rules that they vow upon, had been teached as a kid, etc. It can mean that LG option will result in a bloodshed in defend of peace, killing slavers etc. Not exactly law of the country.
That nymph quest where you’re supposed to go alone, the description of the quest literally hints at it being a trap and that you should bring invisibility potions
It's evil because they are your friend Nok Nok's folk. Though it doesn't really make sense with the concept of objective good or evil that are present in Pathfinder (and are the only reason why someone like Tsanna is chaotic evil even though she cares a lot about people but harsh with her punishment which is honestly more like lawful neutral).
The reason why Tsanna is evil is because she is a disciple of Lamashtu. The mother of monsters who wants her clerics to breed monster many at their core are evil. Also it might have been clever writing to make her seem nice with manipulative intentions because many of her cult are people who want children.
@@Edgar_A_Bro Lamashtu also accepts Chaotic Neutral clerics, which fits Tsanna in those instances as well. She acts as a mother figure being a priestess of the mother of monsters, but that doesn't mean she is a particularly kind one.
Great vid! The weird thing about Lawful Good is that it's often associated with zealotry. It's the Crusader ethic. Neutral Good is closer to modern moral good. Lawful Good becomes paradoxically ambiguous through it's lack of nuance.
Ok, you know what? This game is the most faithful reproduction of the old school cRPG genre since probably the second Baldurs Gate. It actually has the same clunkiness those games had and the story is the same level of high fantasy cheese. For the first time in almost 20 years I've actually felt like I played the game that understood how those games actually worked.
Thank you! I like this channel but DAMN did he do a terrible job of exploring some of the most basic mechanics that you are MEANT to exploit to make things much easier for yourself.
@@Heffalord I don't think a game is mechanically well balanced if its balanced under the assumption that you'll be more focused on min-maxing and exploiting mechanics rather than role-playing.
Man this video taught me more than the game itself did, I only knew where to get a treasurer and about the inspect key from you mentioning it here, checking it in game and seeing 'huh he's right' after like six hours of gameplay
I am currently at my first playtrough, and I gave my char weapon focus on warhammer now i have a bad feeling about that. For the dialogue, the game needs Tyranny's "Glaring silently" option, so then you could interpret that to any way you think it fits your character. I'm playing at challenging except i changed to "normal" enemies and it is affecting my mental health, I have never been smashing the keyboard like now playing this game XD. @1:34:00 One of the main problems is the "threatened area" or the area were opportunity attacks can be made. In Neverwinter Nights 2 it's a cone shaped area in front of the character. Since something like that could be harder to program I suppose , In this game this area is just a plain distance calculation from the character. @1:15:00 I suppose there are many ways to win the battles. But one way is become a "greaser" XD, the spell grease can be spammed and it's very useful in many of the more difficult battles.
I am replaying through now on Challenging difficulty and I am having a lot more fun with the combat. I wish there was truly a way to just play through the story in a streamlined way, however. I really REALLY wish that was an option.
On level up you can see spells if you remember what spells you like to use, right click colums you will see what you gain at that level, that includes all spells class can normaly cast, hovering over the icon will pop up spell description. 34:00 Named Longsword you mean. You (can) get enchanted longsword in all acts, most of them are not in shops but you have to find, if you have BtSL DLC you get more. 56:00 Well there are skill checks for climbing up the wall, this could make you think you need could jump down from walls to escape, plus there are invisibility and vanish potions. 57:51 Well she tells you she does not know where they exactly are either. 1:00:00 Connecting tissue is mainly Nyrissa. 1:13:25 Or you leave the hut, explore the village and find the kid without fighting. You would also get dialoges where you would point the village either to fear or positive emotions, and the "Spirit" would react to it. And also for somebody who is so stuck to RP LG character dialoge-wise you so easily commit wanton genocide without trying other options. 1:15:40 If you did not slaughter whole tribe you would have a choice to ask help to reveal that "Spirit". Also that guy is invisible so Glitterdust or See Invisibility would reveal him. Or if you added fear to village he would strike a deal. 1:28:21 Yes Jubilost is there only after Troll Trouble starts and before you deal with Hargulka+Tart. Notably before Troul Troble starts Jubilost is in you city. Before chapter starts Tartuk does not yet have kingdom, but after you deal with bosses, Tartuk is no longer available to interact with Jubilost. You also only need to talk to Jubilost if you did not save his cart, he will then be available after dealing with bosses. Also Barth Delgado is available right after Troll Trouble, if you allowed him to experiment. Another Treasurer is Mercenary, and another is DLC Tiefling companion. 1:32:19 Do they run out? Somebody did not read tutorial. Edit: More to come. TLDR: You should really use better guides/wiki, the one you use have only half of information.
30:20 This is more of a problem with the high-magic setting than this particular game. I never played Pathfinder but in D&D, Forgotten Realms is awful about tossing around magic items like they're candy.
My biggest problem with this game is that I wasn’t able to Finger if Death Linzi or Darvin on sight as a lawful evil necromancer. But no, they both have DeviantArt OC powers.
27:15 Your economy examples are little incorrect due to a misunderstanding at 4th level a character should have gear and money totaling 6,000gp and by level 5 should have 10,500gp but that is only one character. A party of 6 should have by the rules 36,000gp and 63,000gp. You're confused by the wealth being usually per character for most games and in CRPGs its wealth by party which is an unusual way for people to play tabletop. Your example of full plate should be 1,500gp for normal and 2,650gp for +1 full plate (1,500pg base + 150 masterwork + 1,000gp for the magic +1) which is what you find in the game which honestly surprised me I did the math than say what you found in the game. Whether the economy is good or not from a game perspective is beyond my ability to say but by pathfinder logic, a +1 full plate for a fighter at 4th level is very realistic. Lets budget out a 4th level character, fighter or main tank of some kind. +1 full plate 2,650 +1 longsword 2,315 ( 15 base + 300 masterwork + 2,000 for +1 on a weapon) (weapons use different math for magic and masterwork) +1 ring of protection 1,000 with 35gp left over for fun stuff like ink and quill or bucket or signal ring or a deck of cards or....sorry I love little mundane items to help build a character around or help with creating a catch around that character. But his is a 4th level character just becoming 4th level. By way of comparison, the best armor possible for a tank would be +5 mithral full plate at a minimum of 35,650gp to a max of 115,650gp. It abears that your arguments made to show the economy is bad are incorrect. Now the economy may be bad but your examples don't support that.
As an old school Pathfinder player, this perfectly encapsulates my frustration with the game. I felt tethered to a walkthrough and eventually threw in the towel after realizing I had another 4 chapters to go. A good DM can keep the narrative and mechanics in place with players. This game forced me to be a player and a DM at the same time just to progress. I lost all immersion narrative and mechanically. At that point, just read a PDF of the kingmaker module.
Yes. You very much are missing something. (Regarding the combat and pathfinder functionality) From failing to read the spell list. None of the fights that you found hard are ever to be hard with two clerics and a wizard. Read your spell list. My last point with the perception checks and unlock attempts are ,cannot be retried until you get a new rank in the skill, (tho I don’t think it says that anywhere but it’s been that way in most of my tabletop games for last 30 years. All in all enjoyed the video and agree about lazy weighting and lack of alignment choices
Based of character starting gold for character higher then lvl 1. 2 1,000 gp 3 3,000 gp 4 6,000 gp 5 10,500 gp 6 16,000 gp Having 4k g at around lvl 4 wouldn't be out of the norm. Since this video as been out for pretty much a year. I don't expect you'll see this. lol
I played the game in such a way that was enjoyable and fun UP UNTIL kingdom management. I, on my third play-through to Baron(not game completion) decided to shut off Kingdom management because the last two times I failed the game and was unable to recover losing. Kingdom management was too overwhelming. So on my third attempt, I had a badass character(red dragon sorceress), a streamlined playthrough to Baron and better idea on what to expect and how to build my team. UNFORTUNATELY turning of kingdom management meant completely and utterly taking it out of the equation. I thought it was going to minimize the responsibility and task overload. Nope, it completely removed it from the game. As it turns out it is also possible to lose this way because if something doesn't get done you can't make it happen, and so you watch the days go by until your kingdom fails. I suppose you could turn on INVINCIBLE KINGDOM, but combined with taking Kingdom management UTTERLY away, I may as well play something else other than half a game. I will probably go back to it at some point, maybe. In the meantime, I am doing Strat-Edgy's be a piece of shit Sith Kotor run. Looking forward to making Zalbar(Dream Weiner) kill Mission.
I think a lot of reviewer and people who judge a game, Need to realize that this game wasn't for them. CPRPG are complex games that are hard to get into. A lot of people think this game is tedious, to hard and Doesn't give any information. You're right.. for you. For others its a game they have been waiting a long time to play. Btw i just started playing it 1 month ago and I'm on the 6 act. I have loved every second of it. I brought wraith of the rightous before even completing kingfinder because it was on sale... But yeah watch the whole video and it was fun watching you shift alignments. Praiseing the game and calling it out when you had criticism. My biggest criticism is it needed more tutorials because i never played pathfinder tabletop before. I hear the next game fixes this issue so thats good. Overall this game is a 8 out of 10 for me. Pretty great compared to modern games.
Also you can see the influence of Chris Avellone in this game, but you are right there was too much and not a big enough team to make the quests punch like they should.
I've just beginning you're video, but you seems to misunderstood the concept of the differents alignments. Lawful neutral =/= gentle superman. A lawful neutral character is cold-minded. He is the incarnation of the blind justice, or at least he follows his honor code before everything else. If your lord ask you to do something, you do it. You don't even question it. If you are yourself a lord, you decide what justice is, and you punish everyone who don't follows her. Morality don't exist for the lawful neutral, this concept is for lawful good and lawful evil. You're judge dread, the incarnation of the law. So yes. You kill the bandits because they are dangerous murderer. The neutral good will try to see redemption in their heart. The lawful neutral just see their crimes and punishes them. That's what he is, and what he is supposed to be. If you want to be good, chose good alignment. Most of the people I know fail to really understand what every alignment is. Neutre act as he think for his life or for pure neutral purpose, good try to be the most virtuous as possible for the others, evil don't care for others and can walk on their corpses if is necessary, lawful follow a moral code and principles and chaotic don't care about following rules and do what he need to do (that describes all the x / neutral). Lawful good bring justice for the weak and innocents and purge the world of evils, chaotic evils acts for himself and only hismelf and is ready to kill everything in his way, lawful evil is a tyrannic character who follows blindly an idea of the order and will purge everything without the same idea and chaotic good help people with or without the law or the respect of a lord.
The best way to understand Lawful alignments is by looking at its opposite. Chaotic. In honesty the alignment should have been called "Ordered" but it does not roll off the tongue very well.
You laugh at being able to buy a full plate for pennies. As soon as I got my kingdom, a travelling merchant in the town square was selling an admantine plate armor +1 which costs like 18600. This thing is not only a plate armor +1 it also gives damage reduction 3/- . Everything hitting a character wearing this bad boy deals -3 damage. If the damage you were to get was 3 or less you don't get hurt at all. Suddenly tanking got so much easier.
So the game hasn't really gotten fixed until this last major update 2.0 which is almost a year after the game came out. And It is no Baldur's Gate, but as someone who is running the game in pen and paper it is better than nothing. I totally get your frustration though through most of this.
I think the thing with Kingdom management is that, even if you enjoy it, it makes your game worse to have it on because the game actively discourages you from interacting with it. If you spend time leveling up your stats or adding locations to your barony, like the game expects you to do, it takes away time that you could be spending doing missions that disappear on you if you don't do them. It takes away time you could spend exploring and leveling up. They should work in tandem, giving you a welcome break from one to do the other. Instead it punishes you and demands trade-offs that make the whole game less fun.
I would disagree. In my opinion it adds a strategic decision as to what you should be doing: wander around adventuring or attend to kingdom matters. It also made me plan my trips so as to waste as little time as possible. It definitely gets in the way of adventuring but that's the point, it's like an additional restriction that you should be aware of when planning.
2:08:31 btw, check the combat log at this moment. I'm not sure if you initiated that by a shortcut, or that was some kind of semi-automatic action, but "Lore (Nature) check succeeded - War Wisp information updated: Base, defence, attack"
That fight. That specific fight at 17 mins is why I checked out. Felt like a random spike that was utterly out of my control. Switched play throughs to go from swordsaint to a range magus and it tore me apart. I’ve never played pathfinder I couldn’t understand any of what was going on in melee or how to prevent getting aggro’d, or what to even build the characters into. Hell I got more out of turning the Barbarian into a Druid then the Milage I was getting out of barbarian.
Your gold is completely normal, a single PC should have accumulated a total net worth of 6k at LV4 and a party of 5 should have 30k between them. Mind you, this is total net worth, most adventurers by LV4 will have a +1 weapon a cheap wondrous item or two and maybe +1 armor if they like getting in melee. PF scales geometrically for mechanical reasons in order to allow characters to catch up later when they spend money on consumables or happen to lose valuable equipment. By LV10 a single character will have 62k wealth. This might seem like much, but LV10 characters are supposed to be great heroes, and there might be a handful of LV15+ characters per generation. It's really not a system that translates well into CRPG form, LV10 will take most groups at least several months to achieve. As for alignments, in PF they are not morality meters, but tangible metaphysical forces of the universe. It's entirely possible to be a morally good person with an evil alignment, such as by being mind controlled and forced to commit atrocities against your will. On the flip side, there are creatures made of "good/evil" who are incapable of acting outside their alignment and cannot be forced to change alignment anymore than you can force an animal to digest rocks. And yes, it's described badly in the game, as is in the tabletop rulebooks. I'm 100% with you through, it's crappy writing to add in choices that feel like prescribed generic alignment choices, in my opinion the best way to translate D&D alignment in CRPG form is to just let you pick it from the start and only shift alignment through narrative decisions and if you do something really drastic. "Morality points" are the stupidest idea ever, such systems allow you to be a "good guy" if you rescue people all the time but behead one of every 10 children you save.
Just watched your 3 hour and 40 minutes of your video. Your frustration with the game was the same as my frustration to watching your video. I'm still wondering if you every figured out that Bokkin's laboratory had to be built in the "outskirts" region of your kingdom and not in your capital in order for him to join you. One of your first things to do in the kingmaker portion of the game is to "annex" the outskirts (where Oleg's tradepost is.) It's in your Journal, which you complained so much about. Once you claim it (14 days, I believe,) you can build there. There you build the "laboratory" and after it is built, Bokkin goes there and does what he does. This was obvious to me on my first play through, by reading the journal, yet you missed it. Throughout the first part of your video, how to do it was there before your eyes, as it was mine. But you missed that? Really? Same as spell descriptions. I don't believe that you missed the communal spells to protect against elements, poisons, etc... You say you're a DM... but you missed this in the spell descriptions. It was obvious to me from the beginning. Permenant stat reduction was obvious too. If it's damaged, it needs to be taken care of. Whether through restoration spells or resting at an inn for a few days, was totally obvious. Again, this information is in the tooltips. 1 damage to a stat requires 1 day of rest to get rid of it or a restoration spell or scroll. Is it annoying? Yes. But that is the game, including the Table Top Game requires. As a DM, you should know that. I was a DM too and I know that. I do agree with you regarding perception checks when finding main quest objectives. DM's have the leeway to disregard that mechanic. Table top requires a random die roll when traveling. You complained about that, as well. It's a requirement. Another random die roll states what you fight. If the game states you fight a "rare' creature, that's what the random event requires. Again, if you're a tabletop DM, and the random event that is rolled is a higher CR than what your party can deal with, you can change it. But in a computer game, that might not be an option because of programming. I agree with you regarding that. But it is a CRPG. Reload. I appreciate your criticism but I find it lacking in some respects. I subscribed.
This could have been boiled down to 45 minutes. A lot of it is complaining about the same issues that could have been mentioned just once. I love your videos. I feel this video didn't have to be this lengthy.
This was a very enjoyable 3.5 hours. I played it too, a year ago. I still have stress flash backs when I see this game. It was cathartic to watch this video, I loved it. Thank you @Strat-Edgy Productions
I made it to the cyclops tomb that locks you in. I went in without enough supplies and don't have a save I can go back to. I couldn't dedicate another 20 hours to get a new character there and mostly gave up
I stopped after I got the Barony too and still have to come back to it. To me the plot kind of lost focus after that point and it felt more like busywork fluff than an epic quest.
So far I've really liked this game. Playing on hard difficulty too. I like hard battles and save scumming, and I like min maxing to the extreme. To the point where I made a whole custom 6 party team. Same thing I've done in BG1 and 2, pillars etc.. and other similar crpgs.
Idea: There should be a class of character, or at least one damn npc, that has the ability to be basically an encyclopedia on monsters. Maybe he starts only being able to learn about a monster after a couple of fights but as he levels up, he can learn to observe weaknesses and strengths whilst in combat. Maybe near the end game, he can even eye out some of them at first glance. You shouldn't leave that up to the player to go search up on the internet if it's so crucial. Enemy drops and maybe weaknesses are okay to not give outright, but if something is immune to like 60% of all kinds of damage, you need to be able to tell SOMEHOW about some of them.
You role a lore check every time you encounter a monster (different lores apply to different monster types) and you reveal more of their stat block when you hover over them as you build up your lore skills. Why the game doesn't ever tell you that, I don't know
7:50 but the game was talking about lawful GOOD vs lawful NEUTRAL. GOOD character (by rpg definitions) CAN (and probably should) attack evil characters without even talking to them. on the other hand, NEUTRAL character, would not, if he had no beef with them.
Min-Maxing is the whole point of this type of game! It's what we've been missing with the overbalanced to irrelevancy that was PoE and it's modern ilk.
Except you don't need to min max in this game either. There are tons of equipment that compensate for all weaknesses. You just need to save scum so you put on the right equipment to boost the stat you need for a particular encounter.
Min-maxing is a bad thing. It encourages stripping that whole game thing down to its rout mathematics and finding the "correct" solution to a problem. This works in, for instance, puzzle games where there usually only IS one solution, but the point of a puzzle game is to solve puzzles, not to immerse yourself in a fantasy world. Giving up on a playthrough 10 hours in because your class is simply mathematically worse then another is a fucking awful gut punch.
@@bruhbruh4329 minmaxing doesn't have to go this far. Sometimes, in this game especially, it just means that you have to take care that your character is good enough, not necessarily the best of the best.
35 restoration potions? Delay poison, communal. Damnit man, you had two clerics. Read the descriptions of their spells) Edit: oh god, all those scrolls too... So... Easily... Avoidable...
I'm playing this game in 2020 with only two mods attached: turn-based combat and xp scaling. I'd say that thus far I've managed OK. However, I suspect this is because of my familiarity with the rules, since Pathfinder 1e was the first ttrpg I ever played (talk about jumping in the deep end :D). I agree that there are definitely some things in this game that could do with improvement, most obviously the alignment choices and the general level of unforgivingness that cannot be hand-waved by a GM as you would in the P&P version. However, I have to say that with a willingness to save and load a bit (yes, I know, savescumming shouldn't have to be done to enjoy an experience, but as I said, it's to avoid the sometimes overly-harsh penalties), the game is actually pretty good. Sure, it's clunky here and there, and sometimes it's an ass, but quite often in general exploration and combat there's a level of thought that is required that makes for some excellent moments when you prepare for something just right. Oh, and as you found out, fireballing a crowd of squishies is the best feeling!
Most common weapon historically was a spear. The long sword is actually pretty rare if compared to spears and axes. Also not the most useful on battlefield it was a backup, status and "civilian" (something to walk around in town with) weapon but was never most common.
After that section with the wisps and your promise to be super prepared from now on I was surprised that you never sought similar counters to the things brutalizing you later, like poison and negative energy effects. Of course, the game doesn't explain any of it to you, but I thought at that point we established that the game is absolute garbage at communication and you need to do your own research to avoid extreme frustration. Your experience with the game reminds me of my own experience with the Divinity: OS games. They seem to be more or less universally loved, but I found them endlessly frustrating in small and big ways, and in general a huge drag.
I am surprised you didn’t enjoy dos gameplay, I understand having issues with the writing, but it’s the nature of avoiding any soft locks and having every npc as killable, what is it that you haven’t enjoyed about dos ? Perhaps a not so clear char creation, or being forced into using every element there is ?
@@peaceprinceshaxi5978 It's not a one big thing that was a deal breaker, but more of a thousand straws that broke the camel's back situation. Horrible inventory management; bad map screen; maddeningly slow run speed of the party; Diablo/MMORPG style deluge of RNG loot; overuse of environmental effects and no clear indication of their boundaries in combat; issues with range indication in combat; a lot of puzzles based on pixel hunting. The list goes on, as I said, it's a lot of things that undermined the pleasantness of the experience to the point of frustration for me.
@@daydev2599 ah i see now, thx for taking the time to explain, Its good to see others perspective ) I actually found the textured birds eye view map and environmental effects great, but i can see how it can be frustrating. The combat is less stat based with larger freedom of choice than what infinity engine games had in my opinion- and that’s what made it my goty. Whats your favorite part about crpgs ? I can see how min maxing in a stricter combat system is also fun
@@peaceprinceshaxi5978 Environmental effects in DOS are neat conceptually, but they're overused like five times over with the end result that everything is on fire and/or clouded all the time, and there are no clear boundaries. I'm not particularly picky about my CRPGs as long as the experience is relatively smooth. Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, Pathfinder, PoE, and more I enjoyed, but DOS games were just the perfect storm of annoyance. Another example: Underrail, a game that seems to actively hate the idea of being user-friendly in any way. My favorite genre is actually puzzle games, and there were some cool puzzles on DOS (those not based on pixel hunting buttons), but not enough to make up for the rest
Tbf to stratedgy his review was done close to launch before several options were added, the option where when you rest all poison damage is removed instead of 1 point, i personally never used it because i became paranoid so i always had something to deal with poison, but for aome people it's a decent option.
I think you should give the game another shot. I think it had a bunch of updates or a rework or something but a lot of stuff seems to have been addressed. I’ve been having a lot of fun and don’t have a whole lot of complaints so far. There are definitely issues, but they’re not bothering me to the point I’m putting the game down. I’ve put like 25 hours in it since I picked it back up on Thursday. The turn based option is a nice change too
This best way I have to describe the frustration and anger that is playing this game. Playing Pathfinder Kingmaker is like visiting the VA and being sent to get an MRI even though it says in your records that you are in fact not supposed to be any where near giant electro-magnetic devices because you have 13 pieces of fucking shrapnel embedded next to your god damn spine when what you actually need is an X-ray.
Everytime I see someone use real time with pause instead of turn based in pathfinder I gotta hold back. Like turn based makes it so much easier. Real time is only cool against weaker enemies
The game was fine for me for the most part, as i just picked the casual difficulty and enjoyed the story instead. Some things to note is, the game warns you that turning kingdom management on auto is a permanent solution so that was on you. Also you miss out on the true ending if you put it on auto. You don't have to abide by the core rules to experience the game, difficulty options are so vast that you can tailor the experience to the exact condition you want them in. There is no shame in playing on easy.
On the Solo Trap, there's a broken piece of Wall behind the tree, that leads to an exit. Its well hidden, but finishing that quest doesn't' do anything in the narrative which is the more frustrating part. It doesn't inform you you in the future chapters, or give you new dialogue. Its not even required for the Best Ending. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't even reward XP, which makes it pointless unless you enjoy the character's voice acting (which I do).
What can change the nature of a man?
Planescape: Torment: "If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can. I’ve seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag's heart half-circle. This entire Fortress has been constructed from belief. Belief damned a woman, whose heart clung to the hope that another loved her when he did not. Once, it made a man seek immortality and achieve it. And it has made a posturing spirit think it is something more than a part of me."
Pathfinder: Kingmaker: "Just click on the dialogue option that says Lawful Good."
Watching the Lost Snail fly away
Don't forget about cycling through dialogue tree in Torment to see if you've missed an inconspicuous phrase that awards you enough experience to raise 2 whole levels and/or permanent stat boosts, that's balanced
Yeah the game shouldn't dictate what is lawful good etc because you may have good reasons why doing something that seems evil is good.
The funny thing is, half of those "Lawful" options struck me as legitimately chaotic.
I didn't believe I would have the patience for this video, but I hung on when I realized it was slowly unraveling Strat-Edgy's sanity. A true cosmic horror narrative for our times.
StationJay same
I ended up feeling like the overall message was: "7/10 as long as you play for long enough for Stockholm Syndrome to set in. 4/10 if you don't. Use of Walkthroughs recommended."
Then I got to the ending. Oof.
I witnessed a alignment change a few times over the course of the video.
lol
"Unless you just watch this to let my monotone voice help you drift off at night"...
Oh god! He knows!
He so perfectly understood my motives, I'm using a variety of game reviewers to put me to sleep.
I've listened to so many of his videos to fall asleep.
Haha its not even that he's boring or anything. Something about his tone is just relaxing.
I have to chuckle a bit at the way that Pathfinder ruleset handles a d20 system with character stats and what they mean. Ability scores and skills start to lose meaning as they balloon well beyond 20. The War Wisp had a Dexterity rating of 39 (a +14 on any given roll, lol)? This is while a Dexterity above 20 is already considered superhuman. I appreciate that the stat blocks of certain enemies should reflect the otherworldly power they might possess, but I always felt Pathfinder and some of the older D&D editions just had larger numbers than I can colorfully qualify as a DM. In a d20 system, a 20 skill roll should be great. When you have a 20 in Perception and still fail a trap roll, it just ends up feeling as lame as you described it while playing this game.
LordofBallyhoo I'm a huge 3/3.5 fan despite all the quirks and potentially broken combinations.... But Pathfinder I do not get. There are so many tiny tweeks that make the game more "heroic" (ie more prone to big numbers). And sub optimal builds are so much more heavily punished by the rules (multiclassing with core classes especially).
@@AlanGChenery I like to refer to Pathfinder as the fantasy buffet. It's everything you could want in theory but a lot of it is also unappetizing and won't go well together if put on the same plate :) If you ever get the itch to get outside your comfort zone, try a fudge dice role-playing system. I love how social and interpersonal RP is quantified and actively encouraged in a system like Strands of Fate
That's a statblock fit for Hermes.
This is a problem of D&D 3.0/3.5 and Pathfinder ruleset. In AD&D 1 and 2 you could not permanently raise your stats over 19 and even 19 was super-human and you had to be of specific class and race (I think like half-orc fighter or barbarian) to have that. And even then you had to roll 18 on your 3d6 so you would be exceptionally lucky. Most players lucky enough to roll 18 on Strength would just have to also roll d100 for Exceptional Strength. Which wouldn't be all that impressive most of the time. And some races, like elves, would even have penalty for that. And if you're playing as mage, priest or thief, you wouldn't even be able to get exceptional Strength at all. And only Strength could be exceptional. In D&D 4 stats were still bloated but it was closer to Paragon Path at levels beyond 10 and really high stats would be at Epic Destiny in mid-20's levels. Which don't even exist in AD&D 1, 2 and D&D 5. In D&D 5 only magic items can raise stats beyond 20 except for Barbarian and his ultimate strength of 24 at 20th level.
The original Neverwinter Nights is basically exactly this.
You do have 6 party members to divide that gold amongst.
Mostly agree with your assessment except for 3 things I've noticed thus far:
1. 22k gold at level 4 would be insane if it was for one character who is only spending it on himself. But the thing is you are likely splitting that gold on equipment for 6 (if you really care about a mainteam) or up to 8 (if you get everyone that you could have at level 4, since 4 of the 5 companions you meet in the tutorial will be available (whoever you went after last is not available for act 1) and there are 3 new companions + your char) meaning those 22k gold are either 3.6k or even just 2.75k gold per person. Going by the P&P Pathfinder GM references the expected wealth of a character at level 4 is around 6k gold, at 5 it's 10,5k gold, at 6 it's 16k etc.
Not saying this bloating of money is good design but realistically you actually have LESS total gold than you would be expected to have in the P&P at that level and I think the shocked reaction your friend had is mostly because you had him thinking that those 22k gold were just for your one character alone, considering you asked him "what A character at level 4 would have" not "what an entire party at level 4 would have combined".
2. The issue with your feeling like you have nothing to do for 3 ingame months until the next mainquest event is triggered mainly boils down to you not having had any interest in the kingdom management at that point. I can't blame you for that because it honestly sucks but their design philosophy wasn't "let's have the players do nothing but boring sidequests for 3 months" but rather "they just unlocked the kingdom management and I bet they wanna check that out. when they do then their advisors will rapidly level up which will skip 14 days each time it happens and they will want to add regions to their barony when they can which skips another 14 days, so they will burn through these 3 months no problem". It ultimately failed because the kingdom management was annoying and boring but their initial idea for the mainstory progression was a reasonable one.
3. I wholeheartedly disagree with your idea of them making it so you can only set kingdom management to auto at the start of the game for the sake of a better user experience. Mainly because it would lead to the exact opposite. When you decide on it at the start of the game you are 1 short tutorial and a few hours of a first chapter away from ever coming into contact with the system and being able to check if you like auto-mode or not. If you then realize you dislike it that is you remaking your character and starting anew just for the sake of reversing one little thing you clicked hours earlier. It's far smarter to allow you to turn it on mid-game but what that setting really needs is just a popup very clearly warning players "if you activate this setting you can no longer deactivate it on this save" so common sense would lead to people saving once before they check the system out. There is a warning in the text to the left but something that could potentially be this disruptive and destructive to the user experience would need a clearer one.
I had a very similar experience with the game. There's a bunch of dubious design choices, playing this was a maddening experience. I played it on launch and eventually dropped it, only to try again a year and a half later and run into completely different problems and drop it again.
Kingmaker is like an abusive boyfriend.
no game will ever love you
Pretty similar experience, except I found the second attempt easier. My "abusive bf" game would be Temple of Elemental Evil. That shit is painful.
skill issue (same with OP)
I tend to suffer choice paralysis with character builds and on new RPGs I play different builds through tier 1 and then beat the game with the playstyle I most enjoy.
I've never gotten a build beyond the start of chapter 3. There are too many choices. For every playstyle, there are like four to six flavors of that you can play without multiclassing. And the beginning of the game is pretty boring, at least until Old Sycamore.
I was confused at their alignment designations for player choice. I searched for clarification and people suggested that "lawful" in this game often meant severity and rigidity that often manifests as cruelty. Strict and unforgiving adherence to some kind of law. When I thought about it this way, "lawful" actions made much more sense.
As I understood it, slavery was illegal but it could not be enforced.
This highlights the absurdity of the alignment chart. This interpretation is valid and so is yours, but some people take serious issue with different interpretations.
Yeah, these problems manifest themselves when every conversation forces you to make an alignment choice. You are constantly questioning the system, and feel like the system is railroading your roleplaying ability.
I will say that at least you can now buy a scroll from the druid in your court that resets your alignment to whatever it was when you made your character, so at least clerics and paladins aren't permanently screwed.
@@bruhbruh4329 that makes the whole mechanic pointless though...
@@chaz9808 It means more if your casting isn't tied to a divine being. If your alignment shifts out from under your god, your spells literally don't work. Found that out the hard way on an inquisitor.
I agree that they shouldn't be vague on that. At the same time though I always assumed lawful meant strict and rigid adherence to the laws and I think it says as much in all of the dnd Crpgs as well like NWN and Baldur's gate.
Isn't that point of picking lawful alignments? That it creates conflict?
This game is a chore without the mod bags of tricks, a cheat mod.
Also, here's some good habits for that game:
Entering an area, cast delay poison, see invisibility.
Always have 5 rest worth of ration.
Stack up on great restoration scrolls, and restoration scrolls.
Use unbreakable heart and death ward whenever you get inside a cyclops ruin.
Screw difficulty, make the setting custom, turn kingdom management to easy.
if you keep kingdom management to normal, download kingdom resolution mod, enable kingdom management outside of borders, reduce upgrade time by half, and always click the kingdom management button on the adventure map and invest your gold in the kingdom from the start.
When you went to see the Nymph, there is a body on the east side of the map with two wolves (which a level 4 can dispatch easy) and 2 potions of invisibility. Even the journal entry says it would be wise to plan an escape in case things turn sour, and even a potion of Vanish could have been enough.
About the treasurer, I got Kaessi (the tiefling kineticist from the dlc) as a treasurer so I never really missed Jubilost. You can also make custom characters to fill an empty role like that.
About the huge-ass enemy hitboxes and the strange way your mouse jumps to it, if you press control you ignore them with your mouse. Also about huge, dumb enemies like a cyclops, they are weak against mind effects like Hideous Laughter, which can trivialize them.
Big thing everyone should know, there is an Eye button on the corner of the screen. If you toggle it you can check a creature's stats in the middle of battle.
About blindness and other permanent status effects (curses and ability damage): there are plenty of potions and scrolls of all the spells you need to remove said status and hoarding them can reward you later on. It also pays off to be prepared: clerics can convert their spells to healing (or damage), so it always pays off to have at least one of said situational spells prepared and then just use it to heal if you don't need it right now.
About many summons or area spells that will destroy your day: prepare dispel magic or have some scrolls or wands on hand. They can turn combat about. Also, focus spellcasters.
About alignment shift. It is... not great. Since I play mostly Neutral characters (Lawful and Chaotic) I find myself indulging in wanton Evil sometimes just to shift back away from good. It would be good if it could be disabled in the options, for sure. OH! Btw, if you shift out of your allowed alignment, you just need to cast Atonement and you erase all shifts.
It's also worth noting that there are a lot of spells like death ward and freedom of movement that you need just like resist energy for the wisps. The Kingmaker part of Kingmaker is also pretty important, what seemed like empty days you had to wait though were actually supposed to be spent increasing councilor stats and improving your realm, each of which take 7-14 days on average and about 3-5 seconds to pass. I also think the game was very much made for 3.5/pf and where AD&D, and 5e to a lesser extent, are much more low magic, 3.X is not. Things like +2 fullplate, or a +1 flaming bastard sword are par for the course, hell they have an average wealth per level for each character calculated into challenge difficulty.
Overall I think I agree with a lot of the complaints about UX and UI, I think the game needed more testing and bugfixing, I think the whole thing needed more polish. That being said, as a long time d&d and pathfinder player, I played it from start to finish on challenging and overall ended up liking it more than either Baldur's Gate, but less than Planescape Torment or the first 3/4 of Tyranny.
I want to comment about the inspect key. I wish I had kept this part in the video because everyone brings it up and I feel dumb, but, there was one clip in the hours of footage where I am looking for the stealth key and I find it (the little eye at the corner of the character select) and I hit it, then I see the eye icon for inspect and I say out loud, oh, there's a stealth key over there as well.... That's why UX is so important.
Also... Ahem. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU MAKE CUSTOM CHARACTERS!!! Mother fucker I swear I missed 90% of the goddamn features in this game.
@@StratEdgyProductions hahaha. Hey. That is the whole reason the game is beinf compared to BG, imho. It does NOT hold hands. I really appreciate it since I've grown tired of all the easy peasy rpgs of early 2000s, and this new age of CRPGs are to me like a revival to the old form, like Arcanum, Nox and Planescape.
Now, customizing and editing characters is done by (enabling it on the menu, on the difficulty tab) and then talking to the NPC with the Eight-Eyes nickname. I forget her name, she is otherwise inconsequential. She hangs out on the tavern and in Olegs, before Barony.
I think this game is more akin to the Souls games where you are either using the "face meets wall" approach or trecking through the wikis.
@@humanhaggis it is hard to compare any game to Planescape. It is easier to compare books! Haha.
@@bavettesAstartes There's "Doesn't hold your hands" and then there's "Expecting you to realize you have hands when game treats you like a limbless torso from the getgo" and so many otherwise decent, even great, games that completely fail to explain important aspects or features adequately just become frustrating slogs or completely unfair. I never knew s existed in Dark Souls for the longest time. It doesn't explain them. And when I tried dodging I always seemed to get hit so I stuck to shields only, the stamina regen shield at that because it also never made poise and stability clear, either, and the regen seemed really important. Soooo, that was not as fun as the run could have been. But then I learned dodge is an and never touched a shield again.
On top of that, you know how people complain like mad about things in the Game of Thrones books not being in the show? It's because you can't simply translate an encyclopedia volume's worth of pages and story and chapters and characters and texts into an hour long show. The medium is simply too different. The many complains Strat has laid out suggests the same thing is going on with Kingmaker (have considered nabbing it, but need to eventually finish Divinity first). Quality of Life is a super important aspect to game design. We all whine and complain about cash-grab mouth-breather no-brain games like CoD and how hard they take away player agency and avoid emergent gameplay out of fear the player goes off track, but FUCKING HELL so many games of fond memory are literally unplayable today. Why? Not because they stopped being good games, but because the industry learned QoL and lack the same technical limitations of those olden days. The problem is they've gone too far to ensure players don't make mistakes, but there are ways to keep the nostalgic challenges of old school CRPG and other games without sacrificing QoL. It even happens with modern games emulating other modern games because "difficulty." Example: Salt & Sanctuary is incredibly frustrating to navigate simply because it lacks a map. Great game, but this pissed me off to no end. It only lacks a map because it's trying to be 2D Dark Souls, but it's actually a Metroidvania (you get traversal skills). Imagine Super Metroid without a fucking map. Dark Souls worked without a map because it was designed to not need one. Salt & Sanctuary, if they make a sequel (and they should), absolutely needs a god damn in game map.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is probably my favorite game ever. I'll also probably never play it again on account of all the small annoyances and frustrations that come up.
Go back to XCOM, you traitor!
Maybe you haven't played that many games... at least at the time of commenting.
@@youcantbeatk7006 Nobody who has beat pathfinder kingmaker has "not played very many games" some people have a higher tolerance for some bullshit and a greater love of other positives.
I have a lot of critiques about Baldur's gate that make that game not something I really enjoy at all, it's clunky as fuck and the writing style of baldur's gate is like having a railroady DM who tells you that you're allowed to play a evil character but makes your experience complete shit without telling you that's why.
But i'd never tell somebody who likes baldur's gate that they don't play games with good writing lol.
@@NeverTriedHardEnough I'd say that maybe the only thing this game does better than say any of the Infinity Engine games, the Obsidian spiritual successors, or games like the Divinity Original Sins is that this game has really good character building though it's not perfect and hurts from some of the mechanics. I still haven't played enough to honestly say it's a bad game though.
“Unless you plan on never playing the game and just come here because my monotone voice helps put you to sleep at night.”
I haven’t played a single video game in 4-5 years, but watch almost every one of your videos for this reason.
Bro that's gay
A thought on plate armor. One reason it was so expensive in real life is that it had to be fitted by an armorer to the wearer. A 6'4" man mountain is not going to squeeze into armor made for a 5' shorty. No, a smith has to alter the armor by fire and forge, and if you're in a fantasy game setting by magic. Every smith who mainly shoes horses is not going to be able to do that work! Its a job for experts.
Not really true and it doesn't seem plate armour was nearly as expensive as you think. It's true that a full head to toe matching harness requires custom fitting. It's also true with people sitting well beyond averages that they're going to need custom stuff and like today must fork out more but this doesn't represent the averages.
Plate armour is very modular because it's made of so many small components unlike say mail, scale, lamellar or even fabric armour which can't be modular. It's much more like laminar. Larger components like a full cuirass or a brigandine do require the wearer be within some sort of range, a breastplate and a plackart on it's own though not as much. It's really the fully enclosed greaves, vambraces and pauldrons though that really require a custom fit. If you look at a lot of 15th century art you might notice that many of the less heavily armoured soldiers have no vambraces or greaves even if they do still have plate protection on their arms and legs. They might have mail sleeves instead of pauldrons or spaulders which don't require a custom fit and are super modular.
Armour was mass produced by huge expert armouring manufacturers.
@@7dayspking quote: 1468 England (Milanese Armor)
Such armor was made to order by renowned armorers, and, as a rule, had decals and decorations, even if we are talking about combat, not ceremonial armor, and its cost converted by the above mentioned method was in the range of $100,000 to $250,000
.
Source: armstreet.com/news/the-cost-of-plate-armor-in-modern-money
You are full of it.
@@SadakoSenpai Did you read that article
From the article "this means a set of XV century plate armor would cost from 8,000-$40,000"
He arrived at figure by assuming 'foot soldier' and modern US soldiers earn equivalent wages and only provided a very small, selective sample size. And only of entire head to toe, custom made armour!
'a simple set of foot soldier armour would cost around $2,000'
That $100,000-250,000 figure was for "A knight's plate armor" that was "made by renowned armourers, and, as a rule, had decals and decorations!"
I don't even trust the figures in this article but how dishonest are you? Either you had trouble reading the article, barely read the article or you were deliberately trying to deceive me.
@@SadakoSenpai Get BTFOed.
@@7dayspking And that is not expensive? Bruh, get your shit together.
1:16:08 There was actually a way to make the creature reveal himself - a second level spell called Glitterdust, available to Octavia or Linzi or any arcane spellcaster. If you have the spell memorized, you get a dialogue option to use it and can take on the creature without sacrificing anyone.
I usually had Glitterdust memorized since it neutralizes invisible enemies and has a chance to blind all other enemies, and was pleasantly surprised to be able to use it to solve this quest.
This video is so relatable it made me watch the whole damn thing. I too have tried to like this game so bad, restart after restart. I even made it to the tomb in one of the playthroughs. But in the end I was just unable to make that final push. It just felt the many ways in which the game fails to deliver stack up until they outweigh the allure of a game with sky-high potential as a gorgeous looking digital version of the pathfinder experience.
As for ratings - as the UX research saying goes: don’t go by what they say, look at what they do. And I think the steam achievements speak for themselves. Only a tiny faction managed to finish the game and at the time of my research barely half made it past the introductory chapter after which another 30% drops before chapter 4. My guess this is largely due to the rather ruthless nature of many of the Pathfinder mechanics, combined with a lack of proper testing on the powercreep within the game making almost every interaction feel like the same cointoss. You win, you proceed - you lose (get critted, fail a check or save) you reload and hope the dice land differently this time (or skew the odds with the difficulty slider). Combined with a story that leaves you guessing whats even going on with little to no foreshadowing and where choices don’t seem to matter at all it’s a lot to ask to grind through 90+ hours of coin-flipping and loadscreens.
All in all the game has been one of the most frustrating experiences. It *should* be a game I love and finish with ease, but somehow, despite all of its content still lacks all of the crpg fantasy buildingblocks; A rich, well-written story, strategic combat and meaningful choices/world development, with the exception of chapter 5. Anyways, great content and good luck with the writing.
Trolltician username checks out. You also didn’t have any of the problems Star-edgy had right?
But you can handle the months of playing the tabletop version with no way of saving, permanent fails/saves, permanent character death, character choice as deep as any puddle in a campaign on rails, no world building, and purely flavor based character building? Yeah. Your right, the devs did a terrible job. I suppose, if they wanted to do better, they should have created a system that processes every single random question or answer that a player may want to choose in a given dialogue. That would assume they had had the technology, and we as players the processing power to chose from an infinite tree of dialogue options. That would have been amazing.
Honestly, why do some people even bother playing video games?
One more thing. The loading screens are a lot shorter than the see you next week wait times of tabletop. It's not worth bringing up in a game this size.
Amount of redundancy through savescumming and lack of information is a fatal flaw for a complex product like this.
@@vitaminc2161 May I ask that you elaborate?
@@travisdavidson2415 The random and unbalanced nature of a regular pen and paper tabletop game is much more tolerable than in a videogame. At least in actual pen and paper, the experience of being able to fully role-play your character and play with others helps alleviate a lot of the potential frustrating aspects of the game. On the top of that, an actual in person GM is able to tailor encounters to the party composition, can allow players to do actions not stated in the rules(like if they wanted to set of an environmental trap/hazard), and can adept to player choices on a fly and let them completely derail the campaign for better or worse.
Now does that mean you shouldn't try to make tabletop rpgs? NO, but it also doesn't mean you should just slap together a bunch of encounters and not try to account for player choices. If you're going to make a videogame of a tabletop rpg, you need to take into account the limitations of the medium and adept your story and the mechanics of the game to those limitations.
You need to make sure that encounters are simple enough that most party compositions can have a fair shot at beating them without having to save scum.
If your story is too long to properly account to player choices, than you need to shorten it so that the amount of times the player is railroaded into a situation is reduced as much as possible.
If the combat is feeling too slow and boring, change the mechanics in order to speed it up.
Its lazy game development to not look at the limitations you're dealing with and just say "screw it, its better than nothing."
Pathfinder: A Strat-Edgy descent into madness
I had to laugh at this. That should have been the title of the video :(
lmao yeah this is the truth.
Strat-Edgy Productions mi I’m my
YES that is the real title
Your problem with ability drain from poison is solved by a simple spell caled slow poison. People never read priest spell lists.
Yeah, the game requires You to google these quests sometimes to find the "not obvious" solution... like having spell X memorized/on a scroll to solve some encounter in an alternate way.
I like how he talks about sleeping as I’m tucking my self into bed
Much love to your break downs dude. Also kudos for not losing your mind from all the rough design decisions for this game. As someone who used to play the PNP Pathfinder and someone who’s tried to watch people play this game in the past without falling asleep to no avail, this has been the only review/play through I’ve been able to get the whole way through. Thanks for slogging it out and I’m looking forward to your next critical analysis on games and their design.
I find Pathfinder: Kingmaker to be a game at odds with itself. It's ultimately a Game that teaches you why being an Adventurer King is a bad idea but not in a fun way.
The Kingdom Sim gets in the way of Adventuring and the Adventuring gets in the way of the Kingdom Sim.
You can't manage your Kingdom if you aren't in the Capital (whose location is preset) and You can't use Companions if you sent them on a task for your Kingdom eventhough all You do in the Kingdom Sim is send one of your advisors on a task, you can't do that on the road because apparently the letter hasn't been invented yet in this world and scrying spells aren't worth shit, which would only be an inconvenience if it wasn't for the DEADLINES.
The Deadlines in the game don't just apply to the minor events in the Kingdom Sim, even the Major, Story Critical Events have them, meaning you can Game Over from missing a deadline and with everything we discussed before it's very easy to end up with a fubar'd run where you either go super broke or G.O from story crises. The Actual RPG and Kingdom Modes are fun on their own but together they struggle against eachother in a way that ultimately leaves the experience frustrating.
EDIT: I have since beaten the game and I can say that on the second playthrough most of my criticisms have been patched (I hated the deadlines the first time through because of how unfair they seemed without teleporters on top of how hard it can be to get back to your capital in time to do the major events) But the game still has it's share of flaws chief among them is the ridiculous difficulty spike in the endgame where thanks to the decision to make Wild Gaze a free action steamcommunity.com/app/640820/discussions/0/1735469327938498723/ the entire endgame is unplayable unless you have the Freedom of Movement spell on all characters at all times and how an entire ending path (the BEST ending path) is dedicated around curse research an arduous, long and expensive process that takes up one or two of your advisers for large stretches of time making it that much harder to advance them and leaves them unavailable for the events they are supposed to be doing meaning that you will constantly lose Arcane/Faith points and the rewards for researching a curse are often not worth it even in terms of Arcane/Faith points.
It's kinda funny, because this all means they converted the original tabletop campaign very well. All those problems existed in the tabletop version, and it was a huge drag there, too
@@Somanyheadphones I also forgot to mention the Auto skip Kingdom tasks that make it impossible to do the other tasks while they're going and advance all of the deadlines while you're doing one.
The game has been patched extensively. Now you can manage your kingdom in all the territory that you own, and by building an aviary building you can manage in it's neighboring territories as well.
Also you can build mage buildings in your towns for instant teleportation from town to town in your own area.
The actual deadlines are one of the best parts of the game! Bad guys are not just waiting for your convenience, they are trying to end you and it's your responsibility to get them first.
At least the tabletop game never made you take an hour to literally just walk somewhere. PK feels like a game run by the biggest douche DM on earth.
@@xxxxxrandom I have since beaten the game and I can tell you that on the second playthrough most of what you said holds weight (I hated the deadlines the first time through because of how unfair they seemed without teleporters on top of how hard it can be to get back to your capital in time to do the major events) But the game still has it's share of flaws chief among them is the ridiculous difficulty spike in the endgame where thanks to the decision to make Wild Gaze a free action steamcommunity.com/app/640820/discussions/0/1735469327938498723/ the entire endgame is unplayable unless you have the Freedom of Movement spell on all characters at all times and how an entire ending path (the BEST ending path) is dedicated around curse research an arduous, long and expensive process that takes up one or two of your advisers for large stretches of time making it that much harder to advance them and leaves them unavailable for the events they are supposed to be doing meaning that you will constantly lose Arcane/Faith points and the rewards for researching a curse are often not worth it even in terms of Arcane/Faith points.
I have finished bg1-2, icewind dale 1-2, pillars of eternity 1 (just started the second game), tyranny, fallout 1-2 but I couldn't get into pathfinder...
the problem is: I don't know what skills or abilities synergy with what, so I am randomly picking stuff that "seems to stack in my favor" in combat, but doesn't in reality...
Gotta interject that your buddy is partially mistaken. At 27:15 You talk to your buddy about the appropriate amount of gold to have at level 4. Your guy says that level 10 is the right level to have that much gold. According to just the character creation outline for making new characters the appropriate amount of gold to have a level 4 is 6000gp. That is for one character. For 6 characters it is 6* 6000 for a total of 36,000 gold. This isn't even including the gear you have equipped which is a part of that total and I can tell you from playing the videogame that you will barely meet that amount. This is also not mentioning that that amount of gold listed in character creation is for normal advancement, Not fast or slow but just normal.
The real determining factor in the economy is magic item availability and that Oleg's doesn't have shit for options. IMO PnP Pathfinder has a lot of crunch already without having to simulate pricing due to item availability. Items are already rarity priced and there are optional rules or DM fiat to simulate the former.
Was gonna mention the same thing. 2600 for + 1 plate doesn't seem out of line either.
@@tigrewulph and his estimate about +1 plate costing 8000 was way off. Full plate is actually more expensive than adding +1
@@souptouchesme by the book prices in 3.5 i think it was only supposed to increase price by 1000 gp. Maybe 2
Really love this long-form examination of a game; the detail is here if viewers want it. Wish I could find more vids like this.
The only thing I want to say here is that the turn based mode mod makes this game much, much better.
Btw 1:44:57
Yea I've made the exact same decision, albeit much earlier than you :D
The biggest problem with this game is: when it's fun, it's realy fun, but when it's not, it's realy bad. There is no consistency.
I finally took the time to watch this and we had such a similar experience that i complained to my friends about the exact same issues you had, i fell for the combat at pretty much the same time, and i stopped playing at the same time you did. It's eerie.
I found this game an imperfect masterpiece. Developers had genious ideas dotted with crappy elements - for one the systemic lack of explanation on anything that pertains the character sheet and kingdom mechanics. I love its lenght and its impressive replayability (there is some real care for it from the developers). I loved it more than DOS2. Im still playing it, so if it doesn't screw up in the last 3 chapters i will give it a place in my personal top 5 fantasy RPGs (along with baldurs gate 2, planescape, morrowind and tiranny).
There's a lot I agree with here and a lot I wholeheartedly disagree with, but I respect that you took the time to document your experience with the game in such a detailed way.
I hope the devs take notice of some of these criticisms for the next game.
* Eyes timeline...* My good sir, it seems you are missing 20 odd minutes of that foretold 4 hour video you spoke of in an earlier post ;)
Yeah, I went through the entire video and cut out all pauses, breaths, and dead air to make the video flow better and that... THAT! Cut over 30 minutes from the video. Believe me when I say that I am happy I did that. It would have been really bad had I not done that.
Methinks twas eaten by a gru.
Actually it's 19 odd minutes.
I love Kingmaker, I have over 1.2k hours on gog with it, and I've commented here before, but now I came back to challenge my view of the game again and I realised that you've being agonizing about poison and its ability dmg so much, but if you'd cast delay poison communal before the fights, you'd be immune to all those poisons and their terrible effects for like an hour, you'd go through many many encounters with ease (dp communal lets you fight in your own stinking clouds/cloudkills, so enemies die like flies and you're fine)
Hey bro! So I'm still watching your video- got to the economy part, with 22k at level 4. You might get around to an explanation, but you've got that spread across a party of six. So like 3500ish each +gear. At level 4 in the ttrpg you should have 6k worth per character. Just my thoughts. OMG I LOVE YOUR CHANNEL!
I honestly have no desire to play many of the games you "review/critic" but I like how much you care about them and honestly it feels like watching my best friend walking me through his favorite RPGs of the last 2 decades. Keep up the good work
You can build mage towers in towns to teleport. Its very convinient. And if you did proper kingdom management there are projects making you take less penalty in moutains swamps and forests
Proper kingdom management is very hard to do going into a play through blind. I missed two party members and because of that had to give up a shit load of opportunities. Late game I was so overwhelmed by events and my party had such awful event modifiers literally everything was impossible. All because I missed two guys that are barely even whispered about and the game never said that mercenaries can be advisors.
I love the pathfinder table top game so I was able to rock the actual game, but then this stupid mini-game kept pulling me away from the part I was actually there for.
I absolutely despise the kingdom management in this game. It's absolutely awful. For one, I usually dislike all characters in games like this, and almost always go with a full merc party since I really can't be bothered listening to the banter and other nonsense from these characters, yet you are forced to acquire them all in order to manage your kingdom, then you have to level them up, etc to have them be better at their management positions which is just tedious and lame.
Then there's the issue that you have the different alignments on how to solve events, which are also limited by the alignments of your available advisor characters. There's a few options for the roles, but all of them are flawed in their own stupid ways, not to mention you cannot get enough characters to have proper coverage of all the roles, and you will be stuck with characters whose alignment completely clashes with your character due to the limited choices you have.
Custom characters don't work because they will automatically make random choices and will f-k up many events with poor or suboptimal resolutions entirely out of your control. When you have an official npc in charge of things you get to choose how things should be resolved, thus it is necessary to employ the npc's to do things. Why the game was designed like that I will not understand, as it's really very stupid.
It stands to reason my character can use some of their tens of thousands pieces of gold to hire some certified experts whose views align with their own in order to manage the necessary parts of my kingdom, rather than leave it to the few ragtag and completely unstable fools who just so happen to have signed up on the quest to settle this land with me, without any choice from my part whatsoever.
Absolutely none of the characters you meet have any reason to be trusted with a management position of any kind, they have no business being anywhere near a governmental council with the numerous issues and quirks they have, yet I'm forced to employ them anyways and just accept this fact that my land is ruled by a group of mentally unstable id iots lol.
@@luka188 There your party members, if you love the roleplaying game then you should know this is a official scenario so your party at the table would be those advisors.
7:38 "A lawful good character will always try to solve something without conflict..."
Without knowing the full context of the situation presented (such as knowing if it was possible to know that those were slavers on sight) I can't weigh in on whether or not you were right about the game being confusing. However, I can tell you without a doubt that that statement I quoted is wholly and completely incorrect. The first sentence of the alignment section of the d20PFSRD states "This game assumes good and evil are definitive things." Additionally the very first characteristic of a good character is "they oppose evil." Again, and most importantly, the very first paragraph of the lawful good description is: "A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. She combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. She tells the truth, keeps her word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished." A lawful good character is outright expected to do the opposite of finding peaceful solutions when dealing with evil as evil is a real thing that must be destroyed.
Secondly, you make the point that since you are the baron of the land and you should be able to freely determine the lawfulness of slavery to maintain your lawful good alignment is erroneous. There are two reasons why you shouldn't even consider that idea. First, and I don't mean this derogatorily, is that Paizo as a company openly endorse and promote leftist and progressive ideology. There is no way the company would allow the idea that slavery is anything other than evil exist in their setting. This game is being run by Paizo, not your local DM, so you have to expect to obey their ideology. Secondly, lawful good characters have the problem of being both lawful and good characters. Lawful and good ideology are inherently exclusive of their opposing traits while chaotic and evil ideologies are ambivalent towards them. For example, a good character can not take from the undeserving while an evil character can freely do charity. Therefore a lawful good character must not just be both lawfully good and adhere to the tenants of good, and goodly lawful and create good laws.
While I may have a basic misunderstanding somewhere in that oversized message it is important to note that the alignment system in Pathfinder may need to be interpreted but it is inherently not open to interpretation. It may seem alien to you but that's because the alignment system exists to describe a setting where both good and evil are not mere concepts but actual energy that can be used to kill a man.
In conclusion, whether or not the writers for the game were right it is wholly within the bounds of a lawful good character to shank an evil slaver in an alley if he can get away with it. Conflict is the tool of the players and the joy of the game (of Pathfinder) and it would be insane if players were supposed to avoid it.
nice overview. And that's why I personally enjoy making true neutral characters cause they allow you to think and act according to your own wisdom, not the requisite standards of your alignment.
@@dimas3829 in essence what you mean is that being true neutral allows you to not have a clue about what you're doing.
@@khatack nah, that's chaotic neutral.
@@dimas3829 my own wisdom leadd me down the lawful good path. It isnt a limitation of the alignment system. If your wisdom says neutral things to you, go for it. Course, there is an argument to be made in favor of playing characters with different views than the players.
Yeah, lawful good absolutely is not conflict averse in Kingmaker. That’s neutral good. If you’re trying to do an all lawful good run, you’ll end up killing tons of (plot relevant!) evil and/or chaotic characters/creatures. e.g. neutral good can make peace between the mites and the kobolds at Old Sycamore, lawful good requires you to kill at least one side.
Omg yes!!! It's finally here. Susan cancell all my apointments and bring me popcorn!
Kingmaker does something really unique among mainstream games.
*It will slap you whenever you expect it to behave like a game!*
- If you rest just outside a cave, have an encounter! Because the inhabitants of the cave don't know that this is a game where they should let you rest on their doorstep.
- If you go somewhere you have no reason to be, it will kill you. Because the encounters don't know that this is a game and that you are too low level for this area.
- Trying to find Armag's tomb but cant find it where the walkthrough tells you it is? It is not bugged. The Perception DC is set to auto-fail and you need to find clues that reduce the DC first. Why do you expect to find someplace where you would have not a single idea on where to look? The clues will reveal themselves in time.
- Are you expecting to get the next story mission immediately? Why would the world and story cater to you? Is this a game? Are you the protagonist? Down Boy! Bad assumptions!
- Did you not pack enough supplies? If this is an "unfair" game-over in a game where surviving the wilderness is central, then what would be a fair game-over? Camping without supplies is dangerous, and you should not treat this like a game!
I hated parts of this game, especially early on. But when it started to click I had a blast for most of it.
This is a game is about dragging yourself through the mud, conquering every step with your blood, sweat and tears.
It's a monkeys paw. You think you want to build a kingdom? That sounds awesome right? Well be careful what you wish for! For this game will let you build a kingdom. From nothing. In the middle of nowhere. With nature and everything else stacked against you. But you will do it *alone and with your own bare hands.*
Dare I say this game is "Hardcore". It is certainly not for everyone. And I respect the hell out of the game for having the balls to do this in a mainstream space. And when you do win? For all the frustrations I had, I regret nothing! I conquered this hill on Normal+ difficulty (with mods and occasional walkthrough) and I feel like a boss! That's what this kind of game is for!
The biggest problems I see is that
- The game does not set the expectations it needs. I think most will expect a power trip. To get a crown early on and get to lead armies. You will get only one of those and it is more than halfway through a very long story.
- It tutorializes its gameplay poorly. Like how on Candlemere you realize that you need to use Protection from Electricity to *solve* the Wisp encounters, because brute forceing the issue won't cut it any longer. Same with Delay Poison in all of chapter 3. Or death ward in chapter 4. And the game does not tell you that the vast amounts of downtime is there so you can play the kingdom management aspects.
- It tutorializes its controls poorly. If you did not look for the buttons yourself then you are unlikely to find Analyze, or Offer, or the Calendar showing the day of the week, or the Unsnap targeting toggle, or the log that is essential to figuring out why something happened or did not work.
- The game does not tell you that it is not a game. You should not expect game-y things. Events have fixed dates so there will be downtime.
- I suspect the game does not tutorialize the Pathfinder 1E system well. And the 1E ruleset is incredibly unforgiving to new players.
- At least for me, it did not tutorialize its own differences to the pen-and-paper system well.
I'm not defending the poor design and UX. But at least these are all things that are no longer an issue with a second playthrough.
If you were looking for more of a power-fantasy. Check out Owlcats next game: Wrath of the Righteous.
Great assessment.
I 100,000% agree with this analysis. I had an absolute blast with kingmaker for these reasons exactly.
That caged troll scenario could be neat, but the game botches it horribly.
My first reaction to the conundrum was "Alright, what have you actually learned? Do you know how we're going to defeat the trolls? How many more days do I need to give you to torture this thing before you'll know?"
But no, the game doesn't even frame it as a means vs ends type of question. It's just "Good = catch & release (no matter how many people the Joker kills off-screen)" and "Evil = torture is great" and "Law = hurr durr there isn't a law, therefore it's fine." NONE of those is a compelling position!
My decision was that the conflict between my people and the trolls is genuine, my people have a very good claim to my sympathy, and the trolls have none. After all, I was already set on killing as many of them as I had to. And I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm going to assume this guy isn't just a sadist, but really does expect his experiments to make the difference between victory and death. So sure, proceed.
Then little miss spellslinger pipes up, "hurr durr Good is Good you have to let it freeeee," and I'm like...
"What the Hell is WRONG with you? Those things KILL and EAT people, we have no good way to defend ourselves against them, and you just want me to let it go FREE? Go put it out of your misery if you're feeling squeamish, but don't ask me to let it loose on my people!"
Damn, this is practically spot-on with my own impressions of the game. I was also frustrated to no end by it despite finding some enjoyment in some of the stories and quest/character arcs. On the Obsidian forums someone asked how Kingmaker compares with Deadfire, and I wrote the following in response:
I wasn't a fan [of Kingmaker], and it's a massive time-sink, probably twice as long as Deadfire overall and largely because of a lot of trash encounters, artificial timers surrounding the kingdom management system, and a much more extensive main story opposite to optional sidequesting and the likes. However, I would recommend giving it a try at least. It has its worthwhile elements and others have loved it so, who knows?
As to how it compares specifically with Deadfire, well... I think it doesn't. I started a second playthrough of Deadfire as soon as I was done with Kingmaker and the more I played, the more the problems in Kingmaker became extremely apparent. Kingmaker is a pulpy high fantasy power trip, your goal is essentially to rise from novice adventurer to king of an entire new nation, and amidst it all there's numerous threats to your realm and pretenders to your throne, plenty of big epic stakes and enemies, but it's all very surface-level, it's all there for spectacle and entertainment's sake. Nothing wrong with that of course, it knows what it is. But Deadfire, as most Obsidian games, thrives a lot more on a solid thematic foundation, and even at its pulpiest there's still a sense of purpose to much of the content therein, if only to describe another facet of this world that is so deeply tied with the undelying discourse the game presents. And whereas the writing in Kingmaker frequently comes across as crude or generic, there's a life and character to the particular cadence of the Huana or the Valians that is unique, lively and very underrated when in contrast to the former. From a sidequest or side content perspective, there's no doubt in my mind that Deadfire's the better game - most of the side content in Kingmaker is lacking, the sidequests tend to be very straight-forward and not plentiful, whilst 80% of what is there to discover in the world map amounts to endlessly rehashed small areas that act as little more than "arenas" to trash encounters. And whilst the game does react to the choices you make, these are almost exclusively dialogue or build-based, and often dialogue options are gutted outright by arbitrary barriers like alignment - in comparison the roleplay in Deadfire seems much freer and more plentiful, as quests and area design allow for a player to resolve the same in multiple ways just by choosing to *play* the sequence differently instead of merely choosing a different dialogue branch. The freedom of exploration and liveliness of the world stand out a lot more in Deadfire when directly compared to Kingmaker, which on the other hand feels generic to a fault, if no doubt appealing on a sheer comfort-food level.
All this without touching the worst aspect, which to me is the combat. Kingmaker's combat is absolutely woeful, ubiquitous and inescapable. If the first Pillars had a trash encounter problem, this one has it three times over. And all this without taking into account that the game does everything in its power to worsen and exacerbate every flaw in the IE games' combat system as well. This is the kind of game that follows the same balancing principles as a regular combat/strategy mod for Baldur's Gate II in that even in normal difficulties it requires you to have the prescience of knowing what you'll face when and what scrolls and characters to bring alongside you for which area; and since the game is on a timer all throughout, backtreading to acquire X or Y supply or companion is *very* costly. This is essentially a game where prebuffing isn't just a clever and accidental workaround to combat the way it proved to be in the IE games, it becomes a mandatory element through which all encounters are balanced around - and if you happen to forget to prebuff your party for a single trash mob of spiders (which can also occur as a random encounter on the road), then good luck because you'll likely end with two or three characters sporting a massive -8 STR, DEX and CON permanent debuff at the end of it. If you think this is just a single type of creature, or just a couple who can do this, think again, because basically *everything* here is capable of dealing attribute damage or permanent afflictions (see blindness too) to your party - and that's not even touching on several other baffling enemy designs like the AoE paralize auras on the Wild Hunt which themselves become your usual dungeon filler during the end of the game. Other irritating features, as with the IE games, include crowd control conditions and DoT AoE spells alla Wall of Blades, Web or Cloudkill enduring for minutes after combat ends, rest interrupts and random road encounters consisting of trash mobs are plentiful to the point you could well have four or five of the former and two or three of the latter occur before you finish either action, enemies having a tendency to be dumb and heavy on spamming single moves or attacks (case in point: alchemist enemies tend to bombard you with a seemingly endless and constant barrage of fireball, regardless of whether it's effective against your party or not (say that we've cast communal protection against fire on ourselves for example), despite also wielding a crossbow for example), and these shortcomings in AI tend to be 'balanced' through inflating base stats and abilities to absurd degrees, to the point that even a regular boar in act 1 can have an STR score of 32. It's compared to games like this that you realize just how much great work has gone into redesigning and improving combat in the Pillars series.
All of which also leads me to the bottom line which is... Kingmaker is very likely a game served best by playing with cheats and cheat mods on. Movespeed cheats, difficulty down to a bare minimum, even the removal of random road encounters, anything to not have to deal with the relentless, tedious combat in this game and nevertheless allowing you to experience the story and several companions and companion arcs which are all very decent - I'd likely have enjoyed the game way more had I played it this way and not tried foolhardily to beat the game at the difficulty I did. Anyhow, these are my thoughts on the matter, hope they're worth something.
Excellent review. I would say you mirrored my experience save for a few things I missed in my first playthrough like the "inspect key" which has the same iconography as the stealth button (big UX nono).
The Platemail price actually checks out.
The Suggested Price for Full Plate is 1500gp
The Price of adding +1 magic to a set of armor is 1000gp
So the standard price assuming your DM doesn't make changes is 2500gp
Which is true. I cut out a section where I looked up the price. The price isn't the problem. It's the fact that I could have afforded two set of plate +1 at level 4. Seems a bit out of whack.
@@StratEdgyProductions expected wealth per character at lvl4 is 6000 gp, yes, a +1 full plate for a lvl4 heavy armor wearer is very normal
@@StratEdgyProductions That's pretty much perfectly on curve for a Pathfinder adventure at that level, discount the fact that Kingmaker makes you sink gold into developing your township.
" Lightming seem to heal the Shambling mound for some reason."
Me: it's not an erro it follows the book
LG means that your charakter will aply rules that they vow upon, had been teached as a kid, etc. It can mean that LG option will result in a bloodshed in defend of peace, killing slavers etc.
Not exactly law of the country.
"Guess I'm going to have to get my spellbook out," the party's Wizard succeeded the intimidation check.
That nymph quest where you’re supposed to go alone, the description of the quest literally hints at it being a trap and that you should bring invisibility potions
Its evil to send goblins away because paizo loves goblins. Sadly the game never let's you exterminate them like most rulers would
It's evil because they are your friend Nok Nok's folk. Though it doesn't really make sense with the concept of objective good or evil that are present in Pathfinder (and are the only reason why someone like Tsanna is chaotic evil even though she cares a lot about people but harsh with her punishment which is honestly more like lawful neutral).
The reason why Tsanna is evil is because she is a disciple of Lamashtu. The mother of monsters who wants her clerics to breed monster many at their core are evil. Also it might have been clever writing to make her seem nice with manipulative intentions because many of her cult are people who want children.
@@Edgar_A_Bro Lamashtu also accepts Chaotic Neutral clerics, which fits Tsanna in those instances as well. She acts as a mother figure being a priestess of the mother of monsters, but that doesn't mean she is a particularly kind one.
Great vid! The weird thing about Lawful Good is that it's often associated with zealotry. It's the Crusader ethic. Neutral Good is closer to modern moral good. Lawful Good becomes paradoxically ambiguous through it's lack of nuance.
Ok, you know what? This game is the most faithful reproduction of the old school cRPG genre since probably the second Baldurs Gate.
It actually has the same clunkiness those games had and the story is the same level of high fantasy cheese.
For the first time in almost 20 years I've actually felt like I played the game that understood how those games actually worked.
Thank you! I like this channel but DAMN did he do a terrible job of exploring some of the most basic mechanics that you are MEANT to exploit to make things much easier for yourself.
@@Heffalord I don't think a game is mechanically well balanced if its balanced under the assumption that you'll be more focused on min-maxing and exploiting mechanics rather than role-playing.
Try the turn-based mod, makes the game so much better. Also recommend playing on at least hard with that mod.
Now it's a feature. XD
@@FatBoiaFatCat and a good one at that. that is all we wanted, was a single player dnd experience to its fullest.
Man this video taught me more than the game itself did, I only knew where to get a treasurer and about the inspect key from you mentioning it here, checking it in game and seeing 'huh he's right' after like six hours of gameplay
I am currently at my first playtrough, and I gave my char weapon focus on warhammer now i have a bad feeling about that.
For the dialogue, the game needs Tyranny's "Glaring silently" option, so then you could interpret that to any way you think it fits your character.
I'm playing at challenging except i changed to "normal" enemies and it is affecting my mental health, I have never been smashing the keyboard like now playing this game XD.
@1:34:00 One of the main problems is the "threatened area" or the area were opportunity attacks can be made. In
Neverwinter Nights 2 it's a cone shaped area in front of the character. Since something like that could be harder to program I suppose , In this game this area is just a plain distance calculation from the character.
@1:15:00 I suppose there are many ways to win the battles. But one way is become a "greaser" XD, the spell grease can be spammed and it's very useful in many of the more difficult battles.
I am replaying through now on Challenging difficulty and I am having a lot more fun with the combat. I wish there was truly a way to just play through the story in a streamlined way, however. I really REALLY wish that was an option.
On level up you can see spells if you remember what spells you like to use, right click colums you will see what you gain at that level, that includes all spells class can normaly cast, hovering over the icon will pop up spell description.
34:00 Named Longsword you mean. You (can) get enchanted longsword in all acts, most of them are not in shops but you have to find, if you have BtSL DLC you get more.
56:00 Well there are skill checks for climbing up the wall, this could make you think you need could jump down from walls to escape, plus there are invisibility and vanish potions.
57:51 Well she tells you she does not know where they exactly are either.
1:00:00 Connecting tissue is mainly Nyrissa.
1:13:25 Or you leave the hut, explore the village and find the kid without fighting. You would also get dialoges where you would point the village either to fear or positive emotions, and the "Spirit" would react to it. And also for somebody who is so stuck to RP LG character dialoge-wise you so easily commit wanton genocide without trying other options.
1:15:40 If you did not slaughter whole tribe you would have a choice to ask help to reveal that "Spirit". Also that guy is invisible so Glitterdust or See Invisibility would reveal him. Or if you added fear to village he would strike a deal.
1:28:21 Yes Jubilost is there only after Troll Trouble starts and before you deal with Hargulka+Tart. Notably before Troul Troble starts Jubilost is in you city. Before chapter starts Tartuk does not yet have kingdom, but after you deal with bosses, Tartuk is no longer available to interact with Jubilost. You also only need to talk to Jubilost if you did not save his cart, he will then be available after dealing with bosses. Also Barth Delgado is available right after Troll Trouble, if you allowed him to experiment. Another Treasurer is Mercenary, and another is DLC Tiefling companion.
1:32:19 Do they run out? Somebody did not read tutorial.
Edit: More to come.
TLDR:
You should really use better guides/wiki, the one you use have only half of information.
I enjoyed watching this whole video as im playing through it. Im glad im not alone.
This video just makes me want to play this game again. It's so good.
30:20 This is more of a problem with the high-magic setting than this particular game. I never played Pathfinder but in D&D, Forgotten Realms is awful about tossing around magic items like they're candy.
Tfw I've been absolutely shit on by dms only for them to give my characters a story buff
you don't need to succeed the diplomacy check at 4:30, only the alignment choice matters (the lawful one to get Valerie)
My biggest problem with this game is that I wasn’t able to Finger if Death Linzi or Darvin on sight as a lawful evil necromancer.
But no, they both have DeviantArt OC powers.
I think you need to consider that as 22,000 as a party so divide it by 6
Embrace the Long Man!
27:15 Your economy examples are little incorrect due to a misunderstanding at 4th level a character should have gear and money totaling 6,000gp and by level 5 should have 10,500gp but that is only one character. A party of 6 should have by the rules 36,000gp and 63,000gp. You're confused by the wealth being usually per character for most games and in CRPGs its wealth by party which is an unusual way for people to play tabletop.
Your example of full plate should be 1,500gp for normal and 2,650gp for +1 full plate (1,500pg base + 150 masterwork + 1,000gp for the magic +1) which is what you find in the game which honestly surprised me I did the math than say what you found in the game.
Whether the economy is good or not from a game perspective is beyond my ability to say but by pathfinder logic, a +1 full plate for a fighter at 4th level is very realistic.
Lets budget out a 4th level character, fighter or main tank of some kind.
+1 full plate 2,650
+1 longsword 2,315 ( 15 base + 300 masterwork + 2,000 for +1 on a weapon) (weapons use different math for magic and masterwork)
+1 ring of protection 1,000
with 35gp left over for fun stuff like ink and quill or bucket or signal ring or a deck of cards or....sorry I love little mundane items to help build a character around or help with creating a catch around that character.
But his is a 4th level character just becoming 4th level.
By way of comparison, the best armor possible for a tank would be +5 mithral full plate at a minimum of 35,650gp to a max of 115,650gp.
It abears that your arguments made to show the economy is bad are incorrect. Now the economy may be bad but your examples don't support that.
As an old school Pathfinder player, this perfectly encapsulates my frustration with the game. I felt tethered to a walkthrough and eventually threw in the towel after realizing I had another 4 chapters to go. A good DM can keep the narrative and mechanics in place with players. This game forced me to be a player and a DM at the same time just to progress. I lost all immersion narrative and mechanically. At that point, just read a PDF of the kingmaker module.
Yes. You very much are missing something. (Regarding the combat and pathfinder functionality) From failing to read the spell list. None of the fights that you found hard are ever to be hard with two clerics and a wizard. Read your spell list. My last point with the perception checks and unlock attempts are ,cannot be retried until you get a new rank in the skill, (tho I don’t think it says that anywhere but it’s been that way in most of my tabletop games for last 30 years.
All in all enjoyed the video and agree about lazy weighting and lack of alignment choices
Based of character starting gold for character higher then lvl 1.
2 1,000 gp
3 3,000 gp
4 6,000 gp
5 10,500 gp
6 16,000 gp
Having 4k g at around lvl 4 wouldn't be out of the norm. Since this video as been out for pretty much a year. I don't expect you'll see this. lol
I played the game in such a way that was enjoyable and fun UP UNTIL kingdom management. I, on my third play-through to Baron(not game completion) decided to shut off Kingdom management because the last two times I failed the game and was unable to recover losing. Kingdom management was too overwhelming. So on my third attempt, I had a badass character(red dragon sorceress), a streamlined playthrough to Baron and better idea on what to expect and how to build my team. UNFORTUNATELY turning of kingdom management meant completely and utterly taking it out of the equation. I thought it was going to minimize the responsibility and task overload. Nope, it completely removed it from the game. As it turns out it is also possible to lose this way because if something doesn't get done you can't make it happen, and so you watch the days go by until your kingdom fails. I suppose you could turn on INVINCIBLE KINGDOM, but combined with taking Kingdom management UTTERLY away, I may as well play something else other than half a game. I will probably go back to it at some point, maybe. In the meantime, I am doing Strat-Edgy's be a piece of shit Sith Kotor run. Looking forward to making Zalbar(Dream Weiner) kill Mission.
I think a lot of reviewer and people who judge a game, Need to realize that this game wasn't for them. CPRPG are complex games that are hard to get into. A lot of people think this game is tedious, to hard and Doesn't give any information. You're right.. for you. For others its a game they have been waiting a long time to play. Btw i just started playing it 1 month ago and I'm on the 6 act. I have loved every second of it. I brought wraith of the rightous before even completing kingfinder because it was on sale... But yeah watch the whole video and it was fun watching you shift alignments. Praiseing the game and calling it out when you had criticism.
My biggest criticism is it needed more tutorials because i never played pathfinder tabletop before. I hear the next game fixes this issue so thats good.
Overall this game is a 8 out of 10 for me. Pretty great compared to modern games.
Also you can see the influence of Chris Avellone in this game, but you are right there was too much and not a big enough team to make the quests punch like they should.
I've just beginning you're video, but you seems to misunderstood the concept of the differents alignments.
Lawful neutral =/= gentle superman.
A lawful neutral character is cold-minded. He is the incarnation of the blind justice, or at least he follows his honor code before everything else. If your lord ask you to do something, you do it. You don't even question it. If you are yourself a lord, you decide what justice is, and you punish everyone who don't follows her. Morality don't exist for the lawful neutral, this concept is for lawful good and lawful evil. You're judge dread, the incarnation of the law. So yes. You kill the bandits because they are dangerous murderer. The neutral good will try to see redemption in their heart. The lawful neutral just see their crimes and punishes them. That's what he is, and what he is supposed to be. If you want to be good, chose good alignment.
Most of the people I know fail to really understand what every alignment is. Neutre act as he think for his life or for pure neutral purpose, good try to be the most virtuous as possible for the others, evil don't care for others and can walk on their corpses if is necessary, lawful follow a moral code and principles and chaotic don't care about following rules and do what he need to do (that describes all the x / neutral).
Lawful good bring justice for the weak and innocents and purge the world of evils, chaotic evils acts for himself and only hismelf and is ready to kill everything in his way, lawful evil is a tyrannic character who follows blindly an idea of the order and will purge everything without the same idea and chaotic good help people with or without the law or the respect of a lord.
The best way to understand Lawful alignments is by looking at its opposite.
Chaotic.
In honesty the alignment should have been called "Ordered" but it does not roll off the tongue very well.
You laugh at being able to buy a full plate for pennies. As soon as I got my kingdom, a travelling merchant in the town square was selling an admantine plate armor +1 which costs like 18600. This thing is not only a plate armor +1 it also gives damage reduction 3/- . Everything hitting a character wearing this bad boy deals -3 damage. If the damage you were to get was 3 or less you don't get hurt at all. Suddenly tanking got so much easier.
Yeah but also you encounter enemies thqt just hit you for 20-30 dmg without crits it's not as broken aa it sounds.
Just got this game after sleeping on it for awhile. Really loving it but also the main quest broke on a single perception check my first playthrough
So the game hasn't really gotten fixed until this last major update 2.0 which is almost a year after the game came out. And It is no Baldur's Gate, but as someone who is running the game in pen and paper it is better than nothing. I totally get your frustration though through most of this.
I think the thing with Kingdom management is that, even if you enjoy it, it makes your game worse to have it on because the game actively discourages you from interacting with it. If you spend time leveling up your stats or adding locations to your barony, like the game expects you to do, it takes away time that you could be spending doing missions that disappear on you if you don't do them. It takes away time you could spend exploring and leveling up. They should work in tandem, giving you a welcome break from one to do the other. Instead it punishes you and demands trade-offs that make the whole game less fun.
I would disagree. In my opinion it adds a strategic decision as to what you should be doing: wander around adventuring or attend to kingdom matters. It also made me plan my trips so as to waste as little time as possible. It definitely gets in the way of adventuring but that's the point, it's like an additional restriction that you should be aware of when planning.
2:08:31 btw, check the combat log at this moment. I'm not sure if you initiated that by a shortcut, or that was some kind of semi-automatic action, but "Lore (Nature) check succeeded - War Wisp information updated: Base, defence, attack"
That fight. That specific fight at 17 mins is why I checked out. Felt like a random spike that was utterly out of my control. Switched play throughs to go from swordsaint to a range magus and it tore me apart. I’ve never played pathfinder I couldn’t understand any of what was going on in melee or how to prevent getting aggro’d, or what to even build the characters into. Hell I got more out of turning the Barbarian into a Druid then the Milage I was getting out of barbarian.
Man, I'm still halfway through and all I can say is that this video is one hell of a ride
Your gold is completely normal, a single PC should have accumulated a total net worth of 6k at LV4 and a party of 5 should have 30k between them. Mind you, this is total net worth, most adventurers by LV4 will have a +1 weapon a cheap wondrous item or two and maybe +1 armor if they like getting in melee. PF scales geometrically for mechanical reasons in order to allow characters to catch up later when they spend money on consumables or happen to lose valuable equipment. By LV10 a single character will have 62k wealth. This might seem like much, but LV10 characters are supposed to be great heroes, and there might be a handful of LV15+ characters per generation. It's really not a system that translates well into CRPG form, LV10 will take most groups at least several months to achieve.
As for alignments, in PF they are not morality meters, but tangible metaphysical forces of the universe. It's entirely possible to be a morally good person with an evil alignment, such as by being mind controlled and forced to commit atrocities against your will. On the flip side, there are creatures made of "good/evil" who are incapable of acting outside their alignment and cannot be forced to change alignment anymore than you can force an animal to digest rocks. And yes, it's described badly in the game, as is in the tabletop rulebooks.
I'm 100% with you through, it's crappy writing to add in choices that feel like prescribed generic alignment choices, in my opinion the best way to translate D&D alignment in CRPG form is to just let you pick it from the start and only shift alignment through narrative decisions and if you do something really drastic. "Morality points" are the stupidest idea ever, such systems allow you to be a "good guy" if you rescue people all the time but behead one of every 10 children you save.
Just watched your 3 hour and 40 minutes of your video. Your frustration with the game was the same as my frustration to watching your video. I'm still wondering if you every figured out that Bokkin's laboratory had to be built in the "outskirts" region of your kingdom and not in your capital in order for him to join you. One of your first things to do in the kingmaker portion of the game is to "annex" the outskirts (where Oleg's tradepost is.) It's in your Journal, which you complained so much about. Once you claim it (14 days, I believe,) you can build there. There you build the "laboratory" and after it is built, Bokkin goes there and does what he does. This was obvious to me on my first play through, by reading the journal, yet you missed it. Throughout the first part of your video, how to do it was there before your eyes, as it was mine. But you missed that? Really? Same as spell descriptions. I don't believe that you missed the communal spells to protect against elements, poisons, etc...
You say you're a DM... but you missed this in the spell descriptions. It was obvious to me from the beginning.
Permenant stat reduction was obvious too. If it's damaged, it needs to be taken care of. Whether through restoration spells or resting at an inn for a few days, was totally obvious. Again, this information is in the tooltips. 1 damage to a stat requires 1 day of rest to get rid of it or a restoration spell or scroll.
Is it annoying? Yes. But that is the game, including the Table Top Game requires. As a DM, you should know that. I was a DM too and I know that.
I do agree with you regarding perception checks when finding main quest objectives. DM's have the leeway to disregard that mechanic.
Table top requires a random die roll when traveling. You complained about that, as well. It's a requirement. Another random die roll states what you fight. If the game states you fight a "rare' creature, that's what the random event requires. Again, if you're a tabletop DM, and the random event that is rolled is a higher CR than what your party can deal with, you can change it. But in a computer game, that might not be an option because of programming. I agree with you regarding that. But it is a CRPG. Reload.
I appreciate your criticism but I find it lacking in some respects.
I subscribed.
This could have been boiled down to 45 minutes. A lot of it is complaining about the same issues that could have been mentioned just once.
I love your videos. I feel this video didn't have to be this lengthy.
I really do come here to go asleep.. for that i thank you.
This was a very enjoyable 3.5 hours. I played it too, a year ago. I still have stress flash backs when I see this game. It was cathartic to watch this video, I loved it. Thank you @Strat-Edgy Productions
I made it to the cyclops tomb that locks you in. I went in without enough supplies and don't have a save I can go back to.
I couldn't dedicate another 20 hours to get a new character there and mostly gave up
I stopped after I got the Barony too and still have to come back to it.
To me the plot kind of lost focus after that point and it felt more like busywork fluff than an epic quest.
So far I've really liked this game. Playing on hard difficulty too. I like hard battles and save scumming, and I like min maxing to the extreme. To the point where I made a whole custom 6 party team. Same thing I've done in BG1 and 2, pillars etc.. and other similar crpgs.
Idea: There should be a class of character, or at least one damn npc, that has the ability to be basically an encyclopedia on monsters. Maybe he starts only being able to learn about a monster after a couple of fights but as he levels up, he can learn to observe weaknesses and strengths whilst in combat. Maybe near the end game, he can even eye out some of them at first glance. You shouldn't leave that up to the player to go search up on the internet if it's so crucial. Enemy drops and maybe weaknesses are okay to not give outright, but if something is immune to like 60% of all kinds of damage, you need to be able to tell SOMEHOW about some of them.
You role a lore check every time you encounter a monster (different lores apply to different monster types) and you reveal more of their stat block when you hover over them as you build up your lore skills. Why the game doesn't ever tell you that, I don't know
imagine not using party wide delayed poison on this dungeon, lmao
7:50 but the game was talking about lawful GOOD vs lawful NEUTRAL.
GOOD character (by rpg definitions) CAN (and probably should) attack evil characters without even talking to them. on the other hand, NEUTRAL character, would not, if he had no beef with them.
Min-Maxing is the whole point of this type of game! It's what we've been missing with the overbalanced to irrelevancy that was PoE and it's modern ilk.
Except you don't need to min max in this game either. There are tons of equipment that compensate for all weaknesses.
You just need to save scum so you put on the right equipment to boost the stat you need for a particular encounter.
Min-maxing is a bad thing. It encourages stripping that whole game thing down to its rout mathematics and finding the "correct" solution to a problem. This works in, for instance, puzzle games where there usually only IS one solution, but the point of a puzzle game is to solve puzzles, not to immerse yourself in a fantasy world. Giving up on a playthrough 10 hours in because your class is simply mathematically worse then another is a fucking awful gut punch.
@@bruhbruh4329 minmaxing doesn't have to go this far. Sometimes, in this game especially, it just means that you have to take care that your character is good enough, not necessarily the best of the best.
35 restoration potions? Delay poison, communal. Damnit man, you had two clerics. Read the descriptions of their spells)
Edit: oh god, all those scrolls too... So... Easily... Avoidable...
it hurt to watch that debacle unfold. READ. YOUR. SPELLS.
I'm playing this game in 2020 with only two mods attached: turn-based combat and xp scaling. I'd say that thus far I've managed OK. However, I suspect this is because of my familiarity with the rules, since Pathfinder 1e was the first ttrpg I ever played (talk about jumping in the deep end :D). I agree that there are definitely some things in this game that could do with improvement, most obviously the alignment choices and the general level of unforgivingness that cannot be hand-waved by a GM as you would in the P&P version. However, I have to say that with a willingness to save and load a bit (yes, I know, savescumming shouldn't have to be done to enjoy an experience, but as I said, it's to avoid the sometimes overly-harsh penalties), the game is actually pretty good. Sure, it's clunky here and there, and sometimes it's an ass, but quite often in general exploration and combat there's a level of thought that is required that makes for some excellent moments when you prepare for something just right. Oh, and as you found out, fireballing a crowd of squishies is the best feeling!
Most common weapon historically was a spear. The long sword is actually pretty rare if compared to spears and axes. Also not the most useful on battlefield it was a backup, status and "civilian" (something to walk around in town with) weapon but was never most common.
I bounced on muh boy's magic missile to this.
Big moneehh big big monehhh!
Where's the lamb sauce
now this is proper etiquette
The same thing happened to me with the Treasurer and I got locked out of even having one. Thats when I quit playing.
How did you get locked out?
After that section with the wisps and your promise to be super prepared from now on I was surprised that you never sought similar counters to the things brutalizing you later, like poison and negative energy effects. Of course, the game doesn't explain any of it to you, but I thought at that point we established that the game is absolute garbage at communication and you need to do your own research to avoid extreme frustration. Your experience with the game reminds me of my own experience with the Divinity: OS games. They seem to be more or less universally loved, but I found them endlessly frustrating in small and big ways, and in general a huge drag.
I am surprised you didn’t enjoy dos gameplay, I understand having issues with the writing, but it’s the nature of avoiding any soft locks and having every npc as killable, what is it that you haven’t enjoyed about dos ? Perhaps a not so clear char creation, or being forced into using every element there is ?
@@peaceprinceshaxi5978 It's not a one big thing that was a deal breaker, but more of a thousand straws that broke the camel's back situation. Horrible inventory management; bad map screen; maddeningly slow run speed of the party; Diablo/MMORPG style deluge of RNG loot; overuse of environmental effects and no clear indication of their boundaries in combat; issues with range indication in combat; a lot of puzzles based on pixel hunting. The list goes on, as I said, it's a lot of things that undermined the pleasantness of the experience to the point of frustration for me.
@@daydev2599 ah i see now, thx for taking the time to explain, Its good to see others perspective ) I actually found the textured birds eye view map and environmental effects great, but i can see how it can be frustrating. The combat is less stat based with larger freedom of choice than what infinity engine games had in my opinion- and that’s what made it my goty. Whats your favorite part about crpgs ? I can see how min maxing in a stricter combat system is also fun
@@peaceprinceshaxi5978 Environmental effects in DOS are neat conceptually, but they're overused like five times over with the end result that everything is on fire and/or clouded all the time, and there are no clear boundaries. I'm not particularly picky about my CRPGs as long as the experience is relatively smooth. Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, Pathfinder, PoE, and more I enjoyed, but DOS games were just the perfect storm of annoyance. Another example: Underrail, a game that seems to actively hate the idea of being user-friendly in any way. My favorite genre is actually puzzle games, and there were some cool puzzles on DOS (those not based on pixel hunting buttons), but not enough to make up for the rest
Tbf to stratedgy his review was done close to launch before several options were added, the option where when you rest all poison damage is removed instead of 1 point, i personally never used it because i became paranoid so i always had something to deal with poison, but for aome people it's a decent option.
The start to both pathfinder games are wonderful its act 2 and so on.
You know what's funny? I love your videos, but this is probably the only one of yours that I keep coming back to and re-watching/re-listening.
I think you should give the game another shot. I think it had a bunch of updates or a rework or something but a lot of stuff seems to have been addressed. I’ve been having a lot of fun and don’t have a whole lot of complaints so far. There are definitely issues, but they’re not bothering me to the point I’m putting the game down. I’ve put like 25 hours in it since I picked it back up on Thursday. The turn based option is a nice change too
Well managed to listen to all that hehe, now I understand why I never got far in this game better
This best way I have to describe the frustration and anger that is playing this game. Playing Pathfinder Kingmaker is like visiting the VA and being sent to get an MRI even though it says in your records that you are in fact not supposed to be any where near giant electro-magnetic devices because you have 13 pieces of fucking shrapnel embedded next to your god damn spine when what you actually need is an X-ray.
Everytime I see someone use real time with pause instead of turn based in pathfinder I gotta hold back. Like turn based makes it so much easier. Real time is only cool against weaker enemies
The game was fine for me for the most part, as i just picked the casual difficulty and enjoyed the story instead. Some things to note is, the game warns you that turning kingdom management on auto is a permanent solution so that was on you. Also you miss out on the true ending if you put it on auto. You don't have to abide by the core rules to experience the game, difficulty options are so vast that you can tailor the experience to the exact condition you want them in. There is no shame in playing on easy.
On the Solo Trap, there's a broken piece of Wall behind the tree, that leads to an exit. Its well hidden, but finishing that quest doesn't' do anything in the narrative which is the more frustrating part. It doesn't inform you you in the future chapters, or give you new dialogue. Its not even required for the Best Ending. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't even reward XP, which makes it pointless unless you enjoy the character's voice acting (which I do).