Thinking of them just reminds me of calendar scenes"
Rasputina - How We Quit the Forest
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Some spoilers follow, though I tried to hold back. Long story short: game's way more of a chore and less of an epic than it should've been. And, seriously, if you can't tell from Irovetti's descriptions that you'll wind up fighting him at some point, you need to watch more children's cartoons.
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A long time ago I preordered Pathfinder: Kingmaker, largely on the name guarantee of Chris Avellone's involvement. Then it launched, to such a chorus of complaints about bugs and incompleteness that, with a dramatic sigh, I postponed my first playthrough until six months after release. I wanted to like this game. With Obsidian Entertainment now dead and buried under Microsoft's impious pall, many of us look to Bioware, InXile and newer developers like Owlcat or DoubleBear for old-school RPGs with a strategic viewpoint. Owlcat's debut with Kingmaker was supposed to be a return to sanity, ditching the idiot-friendly later editions of DnD in favor of the more complex throwback to 3.5e (and the Neverwinter Nights games) Pathfinder.
Unfortunately, while the result deserves some measure of praise, it sadistically and fruitlessly abused the genre's untapped potential, to the point where its failures can even become informative. Until playing Kingmaker, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a graphics memory leak! (Although, in fairness, this seems to have been patched during the past few months.) Some of its bugs are minor, like a summoned kitty still prowling my capital's streets months after I did away with its summoner:
... or my animal companion deciding to poke her tusks through village maps because she's starved for attention:
... or the many tooltips and cutscene speech bubbles which become illegible, chopped off because they don't snap to the screen's edge. Or the inability to rotate 1x2-sized buildings on town map grids. Or that the sound cuts out sometimes if you minimize. Or that a few seconds ago the whole thing locked up during a loading screen just as I was complaining about its bugs. (No, seriously, I could not make that up. Kismet.) As a software product, Kingmaker's an ode to the quality of Russian craftsmanship, and quite a few of its more heinous bugs have registered near the top of the "game-breaking" scale.
That one's a twofer. Not only was I not told what repetitive <null> event was causing me to lose point after point of my kingdom's five lives' worth of "unrest" metric, but that last one was factually wrong. And thus my game ended and had to be re-loaded from half a workday's worth of playing time earlier.
All this (and much, much more) was likely why, over half a year post-release, Kingmaker's completion rate still ranked under five percent.
Even now as I'm writing this it hangs at 7.1% (from what I understand, most RPGs can at least break into the low teens) and even that speaks a tremendous level of dedication on the part of its fanbase. And, in fairness, it does provide fans of the old DnD adaptations with much of what we'd wanted, like hard-hitting status effects and elemental damage requiring specific counters, reminiscent of the old Infinity Engine games. The system of feats and spells is impressively comprehensive, with most choices surprisingly relevant to your actual gameplay. It's even allowed yours truly nerdy wolfy to play one of the prestige classes I've always wanted: a Wizard / Druid Mystic Theurge.
Moreover, as you're not just fighting endless numbers of undead and golems like in the old NWN campaigns, I've found I can finally become the master of poisons I always wanted to be. Acid Arrows, metamagic-buffed Acid Arrows, Acidic Spray, Cloudkill, Burst of Nettles, Acid Fog and most importantly, enough disabling Stinking Clouds to funkify the kingdom of Nyctimus from Pitax to Brevoy. Half my fights end with my brazenly breathless bestie Jaethal wading into a stinking cloud to murder all my harmlessly nauseated enemies. Look, ma, no fireballs! As an unforseen bonus, my vitriolic vein turned a major quest involving fireproof trolls into a cakewalk.
There is indeed a fair bit to like here. Sound tends toward blandness, but the First World battle theme still stands out and inserting that spirited rendition of a Bulgarian folk song into your town ambience was a stroke of brilliance. The classic "rags to riches" RPG character development is handled well enough, with both low levels being a resource-deprived struggle for survival and high levels encouraging you to lavishly expend resources taking down difficult foes. Skill checks have a greater effect than in most games and I was pleased to find my theurge's encyclopaedic knowledge of all things natural or arcane being put to frequent use. Building a balanced party is integral to gameplay but not so restrictive that it pigeonholes you into a specific setup. I eschewed the designated tank in favor of running a chaotic neutral party with no filthy hu-mons (well, ok, half a filthy orc-mon) and thus wound up slapping a shield on my resident zombie girl as a second best. As a tank, Jaethal the Inquisitor's rather squishy and over-reliant on spellcasting. On the other hand, her undeath makes her a tireless tank immune to most status effects, and self-resurrecting to boot. Aaaannd that's how the other half of my fights ended, with Jaethal picking her teeth off the ground.* Turns out that's a perfectly acceptable and even borderline overpowered way to run your campaign.
Kingmaker's biggest inspiration was obviously Neverwinter Nights 2 with its base-building feature. Cleaning up, propping up and gussying up your barony and its various towns proves pleasingly intricate, and even incorporates the element of time to a degree not usually seen outside Mount&Blade or the first Dune game. Time passes whenever you're traveling or engaged in upgrading your barony, and managing your trips' logistics to get back to your capital in time to assign tasks is critical to your survival (though you can flip off (literally and figuratively) this entire half of the game from the start of your campaign.)
Here though is also where most of the poor design decisions were made. Countless HELP! posts can be found online by players who can't tell how to advance their campaign, only to find out they had to run back to the capital and pass a couple of days through the kingdom management screen. Crises can be devastating (to the point of forcing a loss condition, as shown above) and especially on a first playthrough you're really not given enough information... for instance about the blatant gimmie halfway through which halves your advisors' training times. Also, while appointing your companions to government posts makes perfect roleplaying sense (worked great in M&B as well) tying their efficacy as advisors to their core stats unduly muddles their customization. You're almost better off adventuring with custom heroes and optimizing Owlcat's roster for paper-pushing. This waxes onerous as soon as you have one of your advisor / companions die only to find out this nullifies all his progress on the current barony task if you choose to wait until returning to town to cast the expensive but mundane "raise dead" scroll.
And it's not like this is Kingmaker's only design flaw.
As I've complained in previous posts, too much balance and immersion were sacrificed (probably by the Pathfinder tabletop version itself) in order to appeal to brainless little twerps who want to act like DragonballZes.
The writing boasts some high points (like the Storyteller's... err, stories told, or the tear-jerking bard's story from Silverstep) and Jaethal whether or not actually written by Avellone, must certainly bear his influence. And, albeit handled summarily, the Octavia / Regongar pairing of Chaotic Good / Evil with a potential for neutrality was conceptually sound. Even the rambling Shaynih'a the Tulip grew on me eventually. For the most part though the writing's uninspired and simplistic or outright insultingly phoned in, from scraps of flavor text to larger quests being left up in the air (e.g. Trobold - would it kill them to call once in a while? After I sided with them over the filthy (and tasty) hu-mons?) Even the potentially memorable villainess loses much of her personality when she's inevitably relegated to the status of victim of some conveniently male deity. Oh, and she did it all for twue wuv, for an extra dose of trite.
The alignment system is a bit too easy to game, with shifts too slight to add up to meaningful trends.
Also, despite several nominally evil or chaotic companions, the canonical Kingmaker run is obviously meant to be Neutral Good edging into Lawful. That infuriatingly cutesy little pissant Linzi serves as narrator. All your enemies are Evil, Chaotic or both, with only one companion quest sending you up against a group of paladins... and even that was probably meant to be solved peacefully. Not that I'd know. I microaggressed them until they attacked and butchered the lot.
Other powerful and potentially impressive, important enemies are simply thrown at you with little or no explanation or context, like the dragon and other monsters you randomly find lurking in caves, or Irovetti's palace staff.
Too many scripted encounters throw you into fights without preparation - in some cases from over a screen away - and the inability to examine friendly and neutral targets also negates scouting.
Itemization is terrible. No scythes for Jaethal and her illustration be damned, no handaxes above a +1 for my custom halfling ranger companion, no bastard swords through all the middle game despite one or two of your companions canonically using them. Instead, you'll see mountains of the same trash loot thanks to the lack of variety in humanoid enemies.
And there's the biggest problem. Kingmaker suffers from a severe dearth of content to fill its intended epic length, and tries to compensate via repetition. Which is not to say it's barren. It offers more than enough material to compare reasonably with its competitors. Still, random encounter maps get re-used constantly, most environments seem a bit sparse and by-the-numbers (lots of boxes, tiles and paintbrushed brush) and for some reason, Owlcat wanted to present the image of a much larger game but wound up overextending what could have been perfectly enjoyable at half length. Even your villages, once you walk into them, turn out to be all the same cut and pasted environment, ten times re-pasted. Thus much of your time will be spent in shameful, blatant timesinks. Lengthy monologues and unskippable cutscenes before fights you'll need to reload ten times over, no map notes but plenty of monsters that will require you to return to a specific zone at later levels, and other tired old tricks crop up constantly. As in the Baldur's Gate games your main character's death spells an instant Game Over (and it's just as bad an idea here) and entirely too many fights start by forcing you into a tactically unsound position you'd never adopt willingly and scripting all the enemy's archers to focus you personally. Forcing you to reload fights you could defeat handily if allowed even minimal preparations counts as "replay value" ... right? Some apparent roleplaying or strategic choices are instead linear, with insufficient hints that one is a prerequisite to the other, crucial to advancing the plot - see Irovetti vs. Nyrissa. If you focused on the wrong one, have fun reloading a save from three hours earlier to get the sequence of events right. Most aggravating are the number of times you're sent looking for needles in haystacks. One quest hilariously orders you to find something "deep in the Narlmarches" - which marches comprise three entire swamp regions with decreased movement speed amounting to over a quarter of the campaign.
"Uh, excuse you! As you apparently didn't notice, we're trying to traverse the Quagmire of Slogdonia."
And ok, some gradual improvements have been made over the past year, especially where bugs are concerned, and barony management has been spruced up a bit. Crisis points allow for more flexibility, custom characters can at last fill advisor roles, etc. But the observation remains: this is not a game; it's a player-funded fundraising campaign for Kingmaker 2, and I already paid several times over by buying Pillars of Eternity and all the other titles whose coattails the ex-Nival
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* Jaethal as a weeble-tank reminds me of abusing poor Jaheira in the same way during the Baldur's Gate campaigns and... heyyy, waitaminute... why are they both divine-spellcasting elf warriors whose name starts with a "J" ...?
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