i am checking out all the latest WOTR youtube videos now. I must say it looks incredible.
Has anyone played Kingmaker? I am thinking about playing it now i have never played it before? I loved DOS2 and Pillars Deadfire how does it compare to those 2?
I've been playing PK. ~170h so far, first playthrough, doing the end chapter rn. I first tried this game 3 years ago when it was first released then gave up cause I wasn't able to cope with the difficulty (trust me, this is saying something, coming from me). I only gave it a second try recently also because I was hyped by WotR. Only playing on normal (Challenging, to be precise, but with "normal" enemy stats) and I've been enjoying it. A lot, in fact. A shame the ending portion is such bullcrap that killed essentially 95% of my enjoyment and 40% of my motivation to replay the game, despite all the build ideas I've been having and thought I'd like to try. I'm actually redoing the entire ending section a second time, cause I'm not satisfied with the fact that I ran out of patience and lowered the difficulty to Story mode just to get through the ending portion in a "no longer caring what happens anymore" kind of mood.
How does it compare to DOS2? Very different. To Deadfire? More similar, but PK is more brutal, has more complex mechanics, awkward pacing, with a hit-or-miss "kingdom management" thing. Also, this is only my 1st playthrough and my party doesn't have a dedicated spellcaster, but I find PK is more "brawn" oriented - as in, it favors physical combat over magic. PoE is more balanced between brawn and brain. I may do another playthrough with a dedicated spellcaster and may change my mind, though.
This review is spot on. I'm also used to playing CRPGs on the highest difficulty settings and the beginning of Kingmaker on Hard, which is not even the highest difficulty setting, must've been the hardest game I've ever played. After level 5 or so my build started to get broken, so the rest of the game was relatively easy.
I'd say that because of the stat bloat Kingmaker is not a game that encourages experimentation, since even on Normal a non-optimized character will suffer. A shame considering the endless possibilites you have.
Other than that, the game is too long clocking close to 200 hours if you want to try to do everything (which I always do), which kinda undermines replayability as well. If all this time was spent on quests and combat it'd be cool, but dozens of hours were spent in main quest downtimes and kingdom management, which I thought was boring. Still, for CRPG fans is a must play, there is too much good stuff in there. @teclis should definitely check it out and play at least (and most likely only) once.
