Originally Posted by Archaven
i find Kingmaker gameplay design really well thought out. it's punishing due to their design especially if you don't have an earlier saved games like vordakai's tomb. Kingdom Management take times to learn and understand and actually there's some difficulty or challenges in it. i would say it involves in alot of trial and error. there aren't really many helpful guides out there. also the Kingdom Management is deadly. you can easily waste your time without doing much of anything (progressing your party, leveling and upgrading them). when the timer hits, it's only about you able to beat the encounter or reload to earlier saves to prepare for it.

while personally loving this, many casuals may find it very punishing and unforgiving. i would say if owlcat maybe and perhaps do a hard saves checkpoint for every critical chapters (which is non deletable saves). then players may still can go back to the latest chapter checkpoint before it's really Game Over.

there are plenty of time (hundred of days) before the timer kicks in for each chapter. it's a balance between the kingdom events and party leveling and progress.

they make it more easier with Wrath of Righteous. i love the crusade battle. it reminds me of Heroes of Might & Magic. some people here dislike crusade battles. I think there are only few forced major crusade battles. also if not mistaken there's a difficulty for the crusade battle if anyone don't enjoy it.

I am anything but a casual (in my opinion, at least), and I found it unforgiving regardless because it's not a well-implemented mechanic. Kingdom management is much too random and in the late game can become impassable not because you're bad at it but because your highest stats have success chance of 30% or so against the checks it throws at you. I've beaten the game once on Challenging and the part where you are bombarded with ridiculous unfixable hits to your kingdom stats (Pitax) that can ruin your game unless you safe-scum a lot or just switch it to cheat mode is NOT well thought-out. Neither are the late-game fights where you are drowning in enemies that have godlike stats and a lot of DR/resistances. The Bald Hilltop, on the other hand, was not a problem at all. It was more of a nuisance and a really weak plot anchor rather than an actual challenge.

I used to stand up for it back when it was being bashed for being unplayable on release due to how difficult it was at the start (The Old Sycamore and such). Having finally played it to the end after two enhanced editions and a myriad of patches, I, in retrospect, don't really agree with my assessment back then. It's a design disaster for the most part, and unless they intended for the players to min-max to hell and back, I see no way to explain why the game has an abundance of enemies with ridiculously overtuned abilities (+8 to AC from Dexterity on a random cat is insane) and that can hit you so reliably that any AC value below 30 in the early-to-mid game is already too little for your frontliner. It's not interestingly challenging, it's a stat bloat through and through. And people complain about how BG3 does that, when that one troll in Kingmaker's penultimate chapter was almost unhittable by my divine hunter PC with a +5 weapon, 26 Dex, and a bunch of active spells without casting True Strike on top.

All the class choices and multiclassing possibilities are nice, sure, but how many of them are actually functional against what the game throws at you and how many are just plain garbage? The alchemist is pretty much mandatory to have, as spamming difficult fights with force bombs saves you a lot of trouble (tactics, planning? Grenade spamming!), while someone like the crusader can neither do their cleric duties right nor hold their own in melee and ends up hampered in both ways. Something like the magus is a fantastic concept that is fun to play and build - but they melt in melee and can't hit crap without constantly using their weapon enhancement ability because of the lower BAB, so I had to scrap my very first playthrough because I kept dying to bandits and start with a regular ol' fighter (well, Aldori defender) instead.

As for the writing, maybe it is indeed dependent on whether or not you like the setting to enjoy it. I can't really take Golarion seriously, though. It took the edgier/more nonsensical parts of the D&D settings and cranked them up to the max while still clearly just taking a lot of the concepts and using them as their own. The pantheon alone sure is a... collection of extremes. And as far as Kingmaker specifically goes, it really makes you hate their version of the fey with a passion. Will-o'-wisps especially.

Last edited by Brainer; 22/08/21 09:08 AM.