Pathfinder: Kingmaker -Baldur's Gate style RPG releasing Tuesday

ArenCordial

Senior member
Sep 18, 2012
214
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Thought I'd start a thread because this game hasn't gotten much press coverage. Releasing Tuesday is Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It's a Baldur's Gate-esque RTwP isometric-party rpg that was successfully kickstarted a few years ago. Chris Avellone, formerly of Obsidian, is one of the lead writers and I've watch a few streams on the game and it looks surprisingly good. Pathfinder, for those unaware, is basically 3.5 DnD. Anyone that has played Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, or even the Pillars games will be comfortable here. Kingmaker is one of Pathfinder's most popular adventure paths which they've taken and made into a PC game.


Its got
-7 acts (completionist runs they estimate around 80 hours, probably 40 for main story)
-10+ classes (all the usual DnD staples + a few Pathfinder additions like the Alchemist, Inquisitor and Magus) and around 8 races.
-BG style maps for exploration
-11 companions, all with a full story arc.
-6 party slots (5+Player Character) just like BG for party tactics.
-Kingdom building mechanics. One of the central points of the game is building your own kingdom. This comes with quests, building projects, events, and new regions to add to your expanding kingdom. So your alignment and decisions play a big party into how your Kingdom turns out. So if you are a good aligned character you can have your capital turn into a bastion of light, and if your evil you can align with monsters/undead and have vicious enforcers keep the peasants in line.
-A ton of character building options.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-kingmaker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGmXmBNx7nM&feature=youtu.be

Anyway thoughts I'd give a heads up for any isometric rpg fans.
 

DeathReborn

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 2005
2,743
734
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It looks great but not a fan of digital party based RPG's, I'll stick to the physical games for that I think.

Might look into it in the future.
 

Feneant2

Golden Member
May 26, 2004
1,418
30
91
First I hear of this , I loved the old Baldur's Gate games so it should be a good. I couldn't get into Pillars of Eternity and Torment so I hope it's less like those and more like the old D&D.

40$ is pricey though, I'll wait until it's on sale for 20$.
 

Rhezuss

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2006
4,120
34
91
Heard of it when the Kickstarter started but forgot it even existed...now i'm teased. Will take a look at it tonight for sure!

But with my current Pillars of Eternity PS4 playthrough I have a lot on my plate. Still need to start Divinity: Original Sin 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Wasteland 2 and other "old school isometric" RPGs...man I should quit my job...
 

Elcs

Diamond Member
Apr 27, 2002
6,278
6
81
Backed it on Kickstarter but they alienated a good portion of people by announcing DLC prior to completing the game.

Still looking forward to it but cautious over their business practices.
 

SMOGZINN

Lifer
Jun 17, 2005
14,202
4,401
136
Backed it on Kickstarter but they alienated a good portion of people by announcing DLC prior to completing the game.

Still looking forward to it but cautious over their business practices.

The right solution to that sort of thing is to wait a year or two for them to put out the inevitable 'complete edition' for half the price instead of being one of the foolish people that buys that full priced 'incomplete edition' on launch.
 

Red Storm

Lifer
Oct 2, 2005
14,233
234
106
Interesting, I think I remember hearing about this game and then completely forgetting about it. I'll probably catch it when it eventually goes on sale.
 

Elcs

Diamond Member
Apr 27, 2002
6,278
6
81
The right solution to that sort of thing is to wait a year or two for them to put out the inevitable 'complete edition' for half the price instead of being one of the foolish people that buys that full priced 'incomplete edition' on launch.

Which you can't then do after you've Kickstarted it.

They just committed PR suicide for me with that.
 

bguile

Senior member
Nov 30, 2011
529
51
91
The right solution to that sort of thing is to wait a year or two for them to put out the inevitable 'complete edition' for half the price instead of being one of the foolish people that buys that full priced 'incomplete edition' on launch.

I'm that foolish person! I bought this since I am off sick from work for a few days and needed something to help kill the time, and am sick of my regular games.

This game is based off the pathfinder PnP rules, which I believe is a branch of DnD 3.5? I don't know much about it, but most of the skills, feats, and spells look and feel familiar. It looks and feels like pillars of eternity, but its not nearly as polished or balanced. In a way it's a bit deceptive, as I went in thinking it would be POE, Baldurs gate clone, and it is, but it has some much more serious mechanics. I can't just wander around in wilderness for hours, since it seems your party will get fatigued after about 12-14 hours, and I am constantly resting. You can't just pick up tons of left over armor and weapons after a battle, because you will get quickly over-encumbered, so you have to be selective about what you take. You can't just load up your characters with alternate weapons, or heavy armor and big sheilds, because each character has a weight limit based on their strength, and will get over encumbered quickly, which leads to fatigue, which leads to having to rest more often. Some quests seem to have time limits associated with them, so you just can't ignore them forever. Map movement speed is also tied to your total part weight as well it seems (not sure about this though).

However, I haven't gotten very far, because this game will kick your ass. It doesn't really hold your hand like Pillars does.

I made through the tutorial fairly easily, like any other game, then headed out to do the main quest. Started out just fine, until I ran into a random encounter with some slavers that I had no hope of beating at level 2. Only non combat option was to give them one of my companions, with a side quest to rescue said companion later. Screw that, since I only have 4 out of the 6 companion slots filled, and I can't afford to hire anyone else at the moment.

So reload, and this time managed to avoid the random slaver encounter. Made it to some ancient temple related to the main quest, only to find I get slaughtered by one of the creatures in there.

So reload again, this time I figure I will do some side quests to level. One of which was a simple fetch quest. Ok easy enough, and I get to said cave fairly easily. Only to encounter some creatures called spider swarms (one creature made of tiny little spiders), which as it turns out is invulnerable to normal weapons. In a way it makes sense, since you just can't hit 30 little spiders crawling all over you with one sword. Because of my party make up and items in my inventory, I don't have an effective way to deal with them, so once I again I have to reload and go some where else.

One another map I was grinding through fairly easily, only to come to a camp site with a bunch of dead people, who had been burnt to a crisp. The game asked if wanted to camp, so I did, only to get ambushed by some flaming skull which I totally wiped on.

At this point, I finally scraped together enough money for a 5th party member (wizard with some AOE fire damage), and dealt with the spider swarm mob, but I am still just at level 2.

The game does have some interesting mechanics, but it needs more balancing. I do sorta like it though.
 
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bfun_x1

Senior member
May 29, 2015
475
155
116
I'm that foolish person! I bought this since I am off sick from work for a few days and needed something to help kill the time, and am sick of my regular games.

This game is based off the pathfinder PnP rules, which I believe is a branch of DnD 3.5? I don't know much about it, but most of the skills, feats, and spells look and feel familiar. It looks and feels like pillars of eternity, but its not nearly as polished or balanced. In a way it's a bit deceptive, as I went in thinking it would be POE, Baldurs gate clone, and it is, but it has some much more serious mechanics. I can't just wander around in wilderness for hours, since it seems your party will get fatigued after about 12-14 hours, and I am constantly resting. You can't just pick up tons of left over armor and weapons after a battle, because you will get quickly over-encumbered, so you have to be selective about what you take. You can't just load up your characters with alternate weapons, or heavy armor and big sheilds, because each character has a weight limit based on their strength, and will get over encumbered quickly, which leads to fatigue, which leads to having to rest more often. Some quests seem to have time limits associated with them, so you just can't ignore them forever. Map movement speed is also tied to your total part weight as well it seems (not sure about this though).

However, I haven't gotten very far, because this game will kick your ass. It doesn't really hold your hand like Pillars does.

I made through the tutorial fairly easily, like any other game, then headed out to do the main quest. Started out just fine, until I ran into a random encounter with some slavers that I had no hope of beating at level 2. Only non combat option was to give them one of my companions, with a side quest to rescue said companion later. Screw that, since I only have 4 out of the 6 companion slots filled, and I can't afford to hire anyone else at the moment.

So reload, and this time managed to avoid the random slaver encounter. Made it to some ancient temple related to the main quest, only to find I get slaughtered by one of the creatures in there.

So reload again, this time I figure I will do some side quests to level. One of which was a simple fetch quest. Ok easy enough, and I get to said cave fairly easily. Only to encounter some creatures called spider swarms (one creature made of tiny little spiders), which as it turns out is invulnerable to normal weapons. In a way it makes sense, since you just can't hit 30 little spiders crawling all over you with one sword. Because of my party make up and items in my inventory, I don't have an effective way to deal with them, so once I again I have to reload and go some where else.

One another map I was grinding through fairly easily, only to come to a camp site with a bunch of dead people, who had been burnt to a crisp. The game asked if wanted to camp, so I did, only to get ambushed by some flaming skull which I totally wiped on.

At this point, I finally scraped together enough money for a 5th party member (wizard with some AOE fire damage), and dealt with the spider swarm mob, but I am still just at level 2.

The game does have some interesting mechanics, but it needs more balancing. I do sorta like it though.

I noticed balance was the biggest complaint for this game. Like you said, there seem to be random encounters that can only be won with silver or fire weapons and neither are available in the beginning.

Is the story any good?
 

ArenCordial

Senior member
Sep 18, 2012
214
15
81
Is the story any good?

Its tough to say at this point. I'm nearing the end of chapter 1 and so far I'm not bored but this is well before the kingdom is unlocked and you're just fighting bandits at this point. The writing is kind of all over the map. Most of the time its serviceable then you occasions where its pretty good and others where its extremely corny.

I can echo the sentiments that this game won't hold your hand. This is probably as close to a real dnd campaign as I've seen in a crpg. You've got to rest, you need to find supplies, you have limited carrying capacity, enemies can hit you with debuffs that won't wear off so you need to use the right spells to counter the effects, etc. Enemy defenses also have been buffed from standard pathfinder as well so that probably where the balance issues for most people are coming in. I doubt this will be a problem late game when you have a plethora of buffs but early game it can be challenging. Hopefully this keeps late game relevantly challenging instead of a becoming a snooze fest like a lot of games after a certain level. I'll say this much, I've actually had some challenging fights and that's really nice after coming off Deadfire, which was pretty much a cake walk.

It can be a bit rough at times but its fun. Good news is for people who want to have an easier time they have custom difficulty setting you can change at any time to alter a lot of thing.
 

BSim500

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2013
1,480
216
106
Hmm. The Steam review score has dropped down from "Mostly Positive" to now "Mixed" with a lot of negative reviews complaining about wildly unbalanced difficulty, ie "The tutorial is OK then everything falls apart" and nonsensical random encounter design (eg, werewolves ignoring the first 10 damage of any non-silver weapon appearing so early in the game you've never actually found any silver weapons yet or ghosts appearing before you acquire a heavily enchanted magic weapon required to damage them...)

Is this another "fake old school" style cRPG where the devs completely mis-remember / over-exaggerate what old-school games actually played like? To me the old school greats were about freedom of gameplay. Eg, Neverwinter Nights (3e ruleset) could be as easy (overpowered buffed Cleric) or as hard (underpowered classes like Pale Master or Harper Scout) as you wanted for role-playing reasons. But you could always make any class work with a little creativity, didn't need to min-max anything or work around broken random encounter mechanics for the "average" playthrough, and the game was awesome for reasons (ie, Aurora Engine + full Toolset = masssive +16 year enduring modding community, etc) other than fake 'leet REAL gamer' difficulty that seems to be doing the rounds with over-designed "new old-school" games.

After watching some gameplay + reading reviews, I'm still struggling to reconcile a personal 'this looks like it should be my kind of game' with "this is the most capricious, painful D&D style CRPG I've ever played" and "I've beaten Baldurs' Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2 with all expansions. This game is atrocious" reviews. The last bad "new old D&D" game I played was NWN-wannabe "Sword Coast Legends" and I ended up completely agreeing with the most negative reviews about how bad it actually felt to play beyond the screenshots. Is this game like that? It seems to me that the entire encounter design needs less tweaking and more completely rewriting from scratch when even Pathfinder DM's are downvoting it?
 
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[DHT]Osiris

Lifer
Dec 15, 2015
14,006
12,077
146
Is this another "fake old school" style cRPG where the devs completely mis-remember / over-exaggerate what old-school games actually played like?
Based on some of the 'balance' issues, it sounds more like a P&P D&D run by a horrible DM.

'You and your party of level 1 adventurers enter the town of Blight. A Tarrasque charges down the hill toward you.'
 

Borealis7

Platinum Member
Oct 19, 2006
2,914
205
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i loved "Sword Coast Legends" despite it's flaws, and yes it was painful until about level 5. after that, it became challenging but not that difficult. from mid to end-game, i was rofl-stomping every enemy. try getting better at the game before dismissing it.

having said that, i think i'll wait for a sale on this one.
 

ArenCordial

Senior member
Sep 18, 2012
214
15
81
I think the difficulty isn’t as bad as people make out. There are fights where you lose and need to adjust your tactics. A lot of people remember the old games with rose colored glasses but in BG1 alone I remember getting one shot at the Friendly Arm Inn, having a diseased zombie ruin my day and force me back to town to find a cleric the remove it with a spell I didn’t have yet, a group of kolbold archers drop my mage in seconds, or a group of spiders wreak my whole group with poison.

Heck just as recently as Divinity Original Sin 2, I lost a lot of fights because the game loved to ambush you and nuke your group forcing you to reload and reposition with meta game knowledge.

The fault of the game imo is their isn’t a lot of feedback so people may not know oh you need AoE spells to damage a swarm. Originally that fight kicked my butt until I came back a level later after finding a pair of spellcasters. I just killed the werewolf people were complaining about first try without any silver weapons. I realized my weapons weren’t working so I used magic and grenades. Problem solved. Now stats are higher than standard pathfinder on enemies which may piss off pf vets who think oh this should be a cake encounter and are really forced to use resources to get through it. I really don’t get the complains when there is literally a slider that adjusts how much damage the enemy can do to you. Too hard? Make it easier on yourself until you find a challenge you are comfortable with.
 

rivethead

Platinum Member
Jan 16, 2005
2,635
106
106
BG1 is a great example. I remember getting eaten by a bear.....a frickin' bear. I had just left Candlekeep...walking through the fields and....Smokey was apparently hungry.
 

GoodRevrnd

Diamond Member
Dec 27, 2001
6,803
581
126
Ya, BG1 was absolutely brutal. Even BG2 still made you think a little more carefully about encounters, depending on party makeup, and presented a reasonable challenge early on. Later on the Underdark was quite tough. It kind of sounds like complaints of new gen gamers who were raised on having their hands held through RPGs and older gamers who just don't have patience any more (*cough* me).
 

bguile

Senior member
Nov 30, 2011
529
51
91
I think the difficulty isn’t as bad as people make out. There are fights where you lose and need to adjust your tactics. A lot of people remember the old games with rose colored glasses but in BG1 alone I remember getting one shot at the Friendly Arm Inn, having a diseased zombie ruin my day and force me back to town to find a cleric the remove it with a spell I didn’t have yet, a group of kolbold archers drop my mage in seconds, or a group of spiders wreak my whole group with poison.

Heck just as recently as Divinity Original Sin 2, I lost a lot of fights because the game loved to ambush you and nuke your group forcing you to reload and reposition with meta game knowledge.

The fault of the game imo is their isn’t a lot of feedback so people may not know oh you need AoE spells to damage a swarm. Originally that fight kicked my butt until I came back a level later after finding a pair of spellcasters. I just killed the werewolf people were complaining about first try without any silver weapons. I realized my weapons weren’t working so I used magic and grenades. Problem solved. Now stats are higher than standard pathfinder on enemies which may piss off pf vets who think oh this should be a cake encounter and are really forced to use resources to get through it. I really don’t get the complains when there is literally a slider that adjusts how much damage the enemy can do to you. Too hard? Make it easier on yourself until you find a challenge you are comfortable with.

I do agree with this. It is hard, and there are some issues the developers needs to fix. But it also requires more attention to your party that what I have become accustomed too. Like, in Deadfire, your companions will give you audible cues if their weapons are not working. In pathfinder, they will just swing away forever till they are dead. It's up to you to read the damage results, and figure out what the problem is.

Now using the swarm example ( I am assuming you are talking about the spider swarm), when I first encountered it, I wiped immediately. I was definitely not expecting to encounter an enemy immune to all martial weapons at level 2 (magic missile didn't help either). Maybe you might find something immune to piercing damage and have to switch to maces or clubs, but immune to everything?

So I tried using torches at first. That helped some, but the torches were not enough by themselves (I do think the damage from the torches could be increased a bit, in regards to the spider swarms at least). So then I tried using torches, and the few AOE grenades I had at the time, but it still wasn't quite enough. Finally I had to come back with a wizard, and use the torches as well to finish it. The funny part was, afterwards you have to retrieve some berries from a plant to finish the quest. My Barbarian fails her nature lore check and takes damage from trying to get the berries. Because, as it turns out, the plant is called a razorbush. I never paid attention to the name, and never considered it would happen, because I am so used to getting the quest reward and moving on.
 

Carfax83

Diamond Member
Nov 1, 2010
6,841
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Thinking about buying this game. I'll probably get it, but I want to wait a bit till it's more polished and refined.
 

DrunkenSano

Diamond Member
Aug 8, 2008
3,892
490
126
Same here, doesn't look amazing enough to get right now. Will wait for discount or humble bundle.
 

Ranulf

Platinum Member
Jul 18, 2001
2,331
1,139
136
I'm in the wait camp. Game looks great but watching some of the bugs and difficulty live on streams kills much of my enthusiasm. I was watching a stream earlier and saw a bunch of archers ignore line of sight and hit their targets while the player characters could not return fire.