Huh. I like both games so far. I don't quite understand why you all hate Pathfinder so much.
With Kingmaker, I really wanted to like it. I was enjoying it at first, even. I wouldn't care about it all that much (like how I'd pretty much forgotten about Dragon Age: Inquisition once I've beaten it a single time) if I didn't expect it to be great in the first place. It really disappointed me to the point of not wanting to even bother with WotR and not feeling like playing through it again as a different character. All the choices and options it seems to give you mostly amount to bugger all, or there's always the "right" choice, and you just get nothing or hinder yourself for no reason if you don't pick it. Like how you can not have certain party members around because you don't want them around (what good-aligned character would want Jaethal with them, for instance?), but all that does is deprive you of content and XP that the game is quite stingy with (a strange choice considering that they have a really good UI for planning out your character and you'd expect that you would be able to reasonably get to level 20 - myself, I finished at 17), and, at least in my case, you get nonsensical resolutions out of the blue (I kicked Jaethal out and still had the scene where Tristian kills her in the HatEOT).
And all the little things would just add up over the course of the playthrough too - like how I got one of my characters perma-cursed somewhere and nobody in the game could remove it because its DC was too high, and the NPC clerics don't actually cast spells but just read scrolls from your inventory (probably the dumbest implementation of that mechanic ever), or the Pitax-related kingdom bullcrap setting some of my stats to 0 so I could never upgrade them again because there wasn't enough game left to recover from that. The timer that upset many people didn't really bother me, as it's pretty generous apart from a few exceptions, but what did was the static world that wouldn't progress unless you intervene personally despite there being a moving clock in most cases. Like how the final quest in Valerie's storyline would just keep reducing your culture indefinitely until you go take care of it, or how neither the Temple of the Elk nor an obvious river crossing near your capital ever get repaired "because it'd take years", despite you building a freaking city from scratch in about two. The whole kingdom thing was also really shallow in the end. A bunch of copy-pasted villages with a different artisan that you can place wherever you feel like, but you never build roads, or establish camps and garrisons - nothing. The land remains just as untamed in practice as it was back when you just started, no matter what the projects you can pursue claim. It really kills any sense of accomplishment from kingdom management, which isn't too well-implemented to begin with.
