Pathfinder: Kingmaker (2018)

I have never played the tabletop RPG this game is based on, nor indeed any Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game. My experience of the D&D universe is limited to the terribrill film, general pop culture osmosis and most relevant to this review, the isometric CRPGs released by Bioware and Black Isle (later Obsidian).

Of all these titles, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (and its expansion Throne of Bhaal) was the standout, and I'd still say it's one of the best games ever made. Planescape Torment and Mask of the Betrayer may have had better writing, and the Icewind Dale series better combat, but BG II shone in all areas. It featured lots of different classes which increased replay-ability, a length story campaign with player choice and branching paths, one of the best villains in video game history, memorable and unique companions, relationships with those companions, interesting side quests, a great sense of progression, exciting and varied combat encounters, moral choice, a fantastic soundtrack and some great loot.

It set the bar for future CRPGs and created a template to build on. Many of its features and mechanics becoming commonplace in modern RPGs.

Why all this seemingly unrelated preamble that has nothing to do with Pathfinder: Kingmaker? Well, in the mid 2000s, Bioware, Black Isle (now basically Obsidian) and Larian Studios moved away from isometric CRPGs, and in Bioware's case especially, started making games that were more streamlined and some would say, console friendly. It appeared that 2D was dead and 3D was here to stay. That was until Obsidian's 2012 Kickstarter campaign for a CRPG in the style of BGII and Planescape Torment raised over $4 million. This success opened up the floodgates.

We've since had Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity and its sequel Deadfire, Tyranny, Torment: Tides of Numenera, two Divinity Original Sin games, three Wasteland games, Disco Elysium, remasters, numerous indie games and in 2018, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. All these titles owe something to BGII and could be considered spiritual successors to the 'classic' isometric CRPGs, sharing many of their mechanics and approaches to game play.

Of all these titles the two that come closest to replicating BGII's quality across the board, as well as its tone, are Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and because OS 2 is not strictly isometric (you can rotate the camera and the environment is 3D) and has a slightly different style of combat, the spiritual successor crown has to go to PK.

At times it's uncanny, like you're playing a direct sequel to BGII only with nicer looking pre-rendered backgrounds. The game even features the little green circles around your party members. The D&D setting certainly helps with that feeling of familiarity and while there are differences to classes, races, skills, spells and monsters, there's also a lot that's recognisable to someone like me. From my admittedly limited perspective I'd say that the Forgotten Realms is traditional fantasy to Pathfinders folkloric fantasy (there are Jabberwocky's and Fae, for example).

The main story revolves around a small kingdom in the Stolen Lands and starts off simply enough. There are a number of twists along the way and numerous instances of player choice that can affect the plot. It's all well written by the developers at OwlCat, with help from industry veterans like Chris Avellone. I also want to praise the games villain who is both layered and sympathetic, which is a nice change. She's no Jon Irenicus but there are definitely shades of that character.

The companions are well written and likeable too. They have their own wants but you can still shape and influence them. Like BGII and OS2 there's a lot of humour in the character writing, but it's nicely balanced with more serious stuff. The voice acting, while not used for every line of dialogue, definitely helps bring the companion to life. They all have their own branching quest lines and completing these allows you to gain influence over them, whilst revealing more of their personalities and backstory. These quests generally lead to some kind of moral choice that you can attempt to swing a particular way.

The main story campaign is split into numerous acts and quest lines, and like BGII the game often surprises and delights with where these quests go. There's lots of variety to locations and encounters and even the smallest side quest will have some kind of story line.

The combat also features lots of variety and strategy, and while I do have complaints, I mostly enjoyed it. The sheer number of creatures, classes, spells and abilities makes each encounter a little different and it's nice to see strategic real-time with pause combat again, and done to this level. The similarities to BGII's combat system certainly help, but now we also have fancier particle effects. You're also rewarded with decent loot for overcoming some of the tougher optional battles which can go on for some time. These kinds of encounters require some tactical thought you'll have to manage your party and skills carefully.

An addition to game play not found in BGII is Kingdom management. This involves picking advisers, carrying out tasks and timed events, and managing a kind of fantasy spreadsheet/text adventure. I do have my problems with it, but it can be a nice change of pace from all the combat and exploration.

My biggest complaint is that PK has a reverse difficulty curve, with some incredibly hard enemy encounters early on. These spikes in difficulty flatten as the game goes on but it's almost enough to stop you playing and is a high barrier to entry. The first proper 'boss' encounter is a bandit with some deer antlers on his head. He and his band of merry men pounded me into the ground so many times that I almost quit. There were also normal enemy encounters that wrecked me early on because I didn't have the required knowledge of what spells and gear to use.

After being destroyed by a wisp for the 50th time I looked online for a solution and felt validated by the sheer number of guides for these difficult encounters. There were also many threads with people complaining about the early difficulty, and it's an unfair difficulty as you have to have specific classes with specific spells to make these encounters doable. Forcing a player in an RPG down a specific combat route is not good design but thankfully after act four things balance out a bit. There are still challenging encounters throughout but they don't feel unfair, and I didn't feel limited by my chosen class or abilities.

The sheer number of classes and abilities doesn't help with the initial difficulty or ease you into the game. I think a more tutorialised intro may have helped as I felt pretty overwhelmed despite having some D&D experience from other games.

Kingdom management can also become a bit of a chore later on and the time limit you have on certain quests is not very well explained. The concept of kingdom management is a nice idea but I felt like it was getting in the way of the rest of the game towards the last few acts.

My final issue is with the role-playing and character alignment. Like in BGII you pick your initial alignment, but in PK numerous dialogue choices have alignment specific options and I frequently felt like the specific dialogue choice didn't match up to that particular alignment. It's a small issue, but one that does hamper role-playing a particular way, especially if you want to keep your initial alignment. There were also far more choices for certain alignments which is rather limiting.

These last two complaints are small though and don't really detract from what is a fantastic game. The poor balancing is harder to ignore (if not fixed), but I would urge you to struggle past it if you're a fan of the genre and particularly if you're a fan of that magical isometric CRPG, Baldur's Gate II. It might not match that title in quality (few games do), but it's certainly a worthy enough successor.

8/10

What can I say, I love this game. This game has two games: A management system and the CRPG one.

Pathfinder Kingmaker as a CRPG is one of numbers. Defeat the AC and saves or have enough AC and saves and you're good to go. Though roleplays may be preferred by majority of players and should play at lower difficulties, the real meat of the game is having sufficient knowledge of how to ramp up your characters numbers in such a way that characters have 75+ AC or 20+ saves. Survival in high difficulties require this meta knowledge.

The other aspect of the game is kingdom management. This one requires further mastery because artisans (who make OP items for the MC) is deeply ingrained in this system. Suffice to say that after 3 non-continuous months of gameplay and research, I've mastered the system. The previous sentence in layman's terms means "this portion of game is incredibly frustrating".

Still, this game is my second favorite CRPG.

I love RPGs and this is the first time I've actually quit after a few hours. No immersion. Story is bad, music is obnoxious most of the time (had to turn it down), the table top rules just doesn't work in a PC game, it's just annoying. The game is not voiced as good or as much as Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age, or anything like that. The UI is very confusing when choosing skills etc. The movement is slow and clunky. Mind you Pillars of Eternity also suffered from terrible combat trying to imitate Baldur's Gate which was just good for it's time, but it was worth it for the immersion, voice acting, story, characters, humor, etc.

It's just a bad game. I doubt it would have gotten any better had I continued to play it. Maybe they had a really low budget or something. Sad, because I thought it would be something more like Divinity OS or such. It's just not on anywhere near that level.

What a slog this game is. The walk, run and travel speed are so slow. And my characters need to nap 3x a day, using a terrible rest system.

None of the characters are really standing out, it's nothing pretty to look at and the combat is punishing and tedious.

It looks like this game is 100 hours + which is way too long, even for a good game. I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

I think that Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the closest thing to Baldur's Gate 3 that exists (so far at least).

It's an isometric rpg where you create your main character and can gather a party of up to five companions to travel with you. You also manage your own kingdom and deal with all the problems that come up. The kingdom management is a bit shallow but still adds a fun extra dimension to the game and it is very well integrated; most of the main quests deal with attacks on your realm in one way or another and I got very attached to my kingdom!

Somewhat controversially, this game features time limits, some of which are vague. I actually really liked this, I found it very immersive that if I didn't handle the trolls that were attacking my kingdom quickly then my people got angry and my kingdom became less stable. It is always very clear when a quest is important and you get plenty of time for normal exploration in between crises.

The companions are mostly likable and interesting enough, most are a little cliched but I didn't have any trouble finding five that I liked enough to adventure with. The main story is very good and very well told and I really enjoyed the lore of the world. Not all dialogue is voice acted but all of the voice acting that is there is of very high quality.

The dungeon and encounter design is incredible good, I played on hard and the fights were challenging throughout but always doable. Enemies were varied and I often had to come up with new tactics to win battles. Dungeons were long enough to give a sense of satisfaction but never overstayed their welcome. One of the few rpgs I have played where I never got tired of the combat.

The game uses the Pathfinder ruleset which is basically D&D 3rd edition very similar to NWN 2. Character creation and build is a bit complicated if you don't know the system but I got by with just my somewhat rusty memories of NWN 2 so I think if you're prepared to put a bit of time in with the in-game tutorial and explanations you should be fine.

The main flaws are: loading screens are common and can get very long (more than a minute at times) as the game goes on; sometimes I felt railroaded into making a decision with occasional moments of feeling trapped into making a choice that my character would never make; while the game does a good job in giving good and evil choices, there are times when the game tells you how your character feels which I am not a fan of; and I really don't like having a narrator in games and I really didn't like the narrator in this game.

It's a lovely looking game I think and overall highly recommended if you like this type of game.

Finally, when the game launched there were a lot of complaints about difficulty spikes and bugs but all of these have been ironed out now. I have put more than 200 hours into it so far and completed the game fully and I didn't have any issues.

Bought this on a Steam sale ages ago, finally installed and started playing. Haven't gotten to the kingdom stuff yet, but I'm enjoying the exploration so far. Really digging the dialogue trees and associated skills, I'm playing on a lower difficulty to experience the story so I'm not getting bogged down in overly long battles.

Exploration can be a little tedious at times, and I had one instance that felt a little overly punishing (a weird ghost skull man who nobody in my party could hurt that attacked when I tried to take a desperately needed rest). But I'll just chalk that up to standard CRPG nonsense.

I generally love CRPGs, but I don't think I'm going to make it through this one even though I'm 60 hours in. For every good decision Owlcat made, they made one annoying decision, and one outright bad decision.

The time limits are obnoxious. The swarms, ability damage, level drain, etc. spam is obnoxious. The waves of trivial enemies is tedious. The abundance of copy-pasted locations with a single encounter were disappointing. The kingdom management can be rather frustrating, with 'problems' sprouting up that, for some reason, can only be solved by a single adviser... who is already solving a problem that only they could solve. Some of your party members spawn in locations you've already visited after specific events, with no hints to go back. I most likely would have been in a losing position (you can actually completely lose if your kingdom fails) if I hadn't regularly resorted to searching the forums. The loading times are long and you are highly incentivized to save scum since problems tend to compound.

All that said, I was really enjoying the grand scope of the game. I like making and leveling up characters in Pathfinder, even if I have no interest in playing it as a table top game at this point. I was genuinely curious to see where the story would wind up. I'm just burned out on the tedium and constant minor frustrations.