Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Owlcat Games have been better than Mundfish in their claim to be an international studio based in Cyprus, seemingly having avoided bigger controversies so far. The masquerade seems to be holding up even now with their newest game, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which came out a couple of weeks ago. Russia has not really been mentioned in the headlines the game has made up to this point.

Ambitious and bloated optimization adventure

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is Owlcat's first game -- as far as I know anyway -- and a highly ambitious one too. The fact it released in a state of absolute mess isn't surprising the least. A roleplaying game using an extensive tabletop ruleset is bound to have complications. Add the Unity engine's issues on top of that and there's a long road of patch releases ahead.

Owlcat stuck with the game, though: Kingmaker was smooth sailing for me bug-wise except for one side quest having a noticeable, albeit minor, problem. A much bigger issue was low framerate after repeated reloads -- Unity's scripts probably getting all tangled up, no doubt. I hear the console version of the game remains a buggy state, unlikely never to be fixed: Owlcat kind of got separated from the game when they seceded from their Russian parent company. Or so the story goes anyway.

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is owned by Paizo who used to publish Wizards of the Coast's Dragon and Dungeon magazines. When the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons was about to come out, Paizo decided to abandon D&D and make their own RPG based on the Open Gaming License. If you're familiar with the D&D 3.5E rules (like I am), you're practically familiar with Pathfinder too already (its first edition at least). The differences are negligible and easily figured out. The oddest thing for me was the kineticist player class that is added by The Wildcards DLC.

Kingmaker is based on a six-module adventure path (what Paizo calls their premade Pathfinder campaigns) of the same name but I don't know how faithfully the game really follows it. For instance, of the many companions, Jubilost is apparently the only one that even appears in the original adventure path in some way.

You are one of the adventurers tasked by a Brevoy noble to tame a neighboring region called the Stolen Lands. After taking out the initial big bad around, you establish a barony that eventually develops into a kingdom. Kingmaker's main story runs out of steam pretty early, considering the game's total 200-hour playtime (for a completionist like me). The Season of Bloom chapter already pretty much reveals what is going on and there are many chapters still left after it.

Like with BioWare's Dragon Age Inquisition, there's a plausibility issue in how you are the ruler but also the adventurer. Once you are a king/queen it becomes particularly silly: a person in such a position would never leave to do dungeon crawling without a massive entourage. At least Kingmaker doesn't have Inquisition's busy-work tasks to make it feel like a singleplayer MMO like Inquisition.

Too involved secondary game mode

Kingdom management is Kingmaker's worst feature. It is an incredible time-waster that often feels frustrating and never satisfying. Difficulty can be customized and kingdom management can be set to automatic. That however causes you to miss certain things, I've heard. So instead I set it to Effortless. I suppose that, when looking at my kingdom's flourishing stats at the end of the game, one might conclude it was indeed effortless. But the journey there sure didn't feel like it. I spent a long time reloading quicksaves so that my advisors would succeed in their event checks which can have very high Difficulty Classes despite the low difficulty setting.

Randomness sure is the bane dialogue and kingdom event checks. With D&D-like game rules, it's not a surprise inclusion but in a computer RPG, there's no dungeon master to balance things out when you fail. It's too bad that so few developers do static checks like Obsidian Entertainment. Successful skill checks grant experience points based on the DC. Thus when given an opportunity to lower a DC, one should not take it. You can get ridiculous amounts of experience by savescumming the highest checks.

Then there is how you need to take care to not roll over an event starting date -- by having your character locked in some project -- because that starts causing troubles for your kingdom stats the longer the event stays unattended. Chapters are set to start at specific dates and finishing a chapter main quest early might leave you with only simple side quests to do while waiting for the story to continue. There are times you probably have to spam that skip day button.

Kingdom management also involves improving your capital and other settlements. It feels inconsequential outside few key buildings. Notice boards (lawful-kingdom only) are a cheap way to get +2 to a region's advisor checks, aviaries allow you to enter the kingdom management screen from neighboring regions, and teleportation circles/mage towers will later allow you to shortcut slow overland traveling, which is another realtime-consuming activity.

Until the endgame, your kingdom provides very few building points to even construct buildings. The points are used for kingdom projects as well -- of which many are simply traps. There are all kinds of expensive trade agreements and whatnots that will never pay themselves back. You can buy points with gold and it sure feels funny to sell your personal item collection to a vendor so that you can build stuff. But as it is, prioritizing your kingdom's artisans' needs is important due to the valuable magic items they keep providing you.

Plenty of challenge

Unlike the D&D CRPGs of old, there is no Core setting for main difficulty. The closest you can get to the tabletop Pathfinder rules is by setting the difficulty to Challenging and then lowering the two enemy scaling settings back down to 100%. If you desire the ultimate challenge, the main preset goes up to Unfair which is exactly what it says. Enemy stats and difficulty checks will be bloated onto a ridiculous level. A better way to increase challenge would be to have more enemies and/or different group compositions. That would involve a lot more effort though, considering the amount of encounters in the game.

Originally Kingmaker shipped with only realtime-with-pause combat but turn-based mode toggle got added later (after there had been a mod for it first). I bet playing through the whole game on turn-based would make a playthrough even longer. Some players like switching to turn-based for difficult fights but I stayed in realtime through the whole game.

How Kingmaker's realtime implementation works took quite a bit to get used to when coming straight from Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition. Combat movement felt very slow in comparison. Once I had access to movement increasing utilities, melee characters' effectiveness grew considerably. There is the Charge action but in Kingmaker initiative rolls did seem to matter (which is a first for me in a realtime adaptation) and enemy positions had often changed to make the Charge no longer possible once it was the character's time to act.

Baldur's Gate 2 is more lax: spellcasting and attacking are on different timers. A character can immediately swing after casting a spell and vice versa. Turns are more vaguely defined to make the game's combat smoother. (Not that I can recall anymore how AD&D 2E's actual rules worked but I'm pretty sure there was no casting and attacking on the same turn.)

In Kingmaker, AI's targeting was at times questionable, characters not always choosing the sensible, the closest enemy in melee range, instead going around to someone else, which can be hazardous when attack of opportunity is a thing.

"Core" difficulty provided overall a pretty good varying challenge. Having buffs can make a huge difference but that's not too unusual for a game like this. Early on, Kingmaker made me use all the tricks I had -- probably due to how I tried to avoid resting as long as possible.

There's an infamous side quest early on: baptism by fire, one could say. I had heard about the spider swarms yet I was still unprepared how difficult they were at that point of the game. It's easy to end up trying the quest too soon because it's on the way to the main one. By midgame, the swarm enemy type ceases to be an issue until endgame brings them back tougher than ever. Your available resources may affect how dangerous they are; my party composition wasn't often optimal.

Not optimal for roleplaying

One should not try to roleplay in Kingmaker -- at least not an evil character. The game favors power gaming; trying to stick to your alignment can result in some terribly suboptimal results. I really started to miss the dispositions from the Pillars of Eternity games. In those, I felt I could pick options to match my character instead of having to pick one with the most beneficial results. I was bemused by how often the choice to refuse a companion quest in Kingmaker was tagged as Lawful Evil -- why? In general, dialogue options way too often didn't match my understanding of the D&D alignments. If you end up straying from your alignment enough to have it change, you can simply buy a scroll of atonement to reset it. That's kind of cheap.

I wanted to make an evil paladin type of character, like I had in Pillars of Eternity. But paladin is restricted to the Lawful Good alignment and there's no evil counterpart (without mods). An evil cleric is close but isn't as cool. Instead I ended up on choosing inquisitor, which is sort of a divine jack-of-all-trades class. My intention was to try roleplaying the character but the game doesn't really support it. And the character had other problems too. If I had to choose again, I would just go with paladin, which has usually been my first choice when given the option in an RPG.

I based my character on Ynthel Duumin who's the protagonist of the Forgotten Realms novel Maiden of Pain by Kameron M. Franklin. Ynthel is a priestess of Loviatar, the Maiden of Pain, whose counterpart in Pathfinder's world of Golarion is Zon-Kuthon. Loviatar and her priesthood make sense but Zon-Kuthon far less so: nothing suggests to me that he's Lawful Evil in alignment. According to his description, his servants don't really include inquisitors either which made my character Nyleth odd from the start. The god is barely worshipped except in the land of Nidal after which I named my kingdom Nidalia, and my capital New Pangolais after Nidal's capital Pangolais.

Like clerics, inquisitors get proficiency with their deity's favored weapon. The optimal choice would be a deity with an exotic weapon because they're usually better than simple and martial ones. Given Zon-Kuthon's portfolio, I guessed that his weapon of choice would be something like a whip or a spiked chain. Those kinds of weapons are rarely, if ever, implemented in games and instead the fallback weapon is flail. That turned out to be exactly the case in Kingmaker too. Unfortunately the flail is a simple weapon, which the inquisitor knows how to use by default. 1d8 damage with x2 critical damage is terrible, definitely not the most powerful choice. But I did like that there was a +5 flail, named Tyranny to fit a Lawful Evil ruler.

Companions aplenty

While I planned my character through all the 20 levels on my own, I didn't bother spending the time to learn the rest of Kingmaker's 15 classes and their 45 archetypes to know how to spec my companions. Instead I used Neoseeker's builds. I believe they're meant for Unfair so they should be plenty good for anything below it. You should still check the comments on each because they might point out issues. Octavia's build, for instance, has some completely incorrect choices like a spell from a prohibited school.

I originally hoped I could play the game by sticking to just a set party but that is not the best thing to do in Kingmaker. By recruiting everyone, you will get more quests and more people to pick your advisors from. However, when not on a quest for a specific companion, I tried to stick to the party I had originally decided to go along with my evil character: Valerie, Amiri, Jaethal, Nok-Nok, plus Kalikke/Kanerah from The Wildcards.

It's a melee heavy party which caused some issues but worked well enough. Things didn't get as hopelessly packed in close combat ranged as I had feared but there was some serious redundancy in how a lot of melee builds use the intimidate feat family. Haste spell is one thing I mainly missed but Use Magic Device and spell scrolls/wands get you a short duration one. The final boss of the Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC was an interesting power check if the party had what it takes. I did manage to beat it even if I had had doubts after the first attempts I did before fully resting.

Nok-Nok gets kind of ridiculous with his kukri sneak attacks and Kalikke/Kanerah are extremely useful to have at the endgame. The latter's high level kineticist's area-of-effect abilities ease the endless tough fey enemy spawn considerably. Even if Jaethal is an inquisitor like my character (I used the Inq 3/Clr (Herald Caller) 17 build for her), I predicted that her undead traits would be a useful utility to have. (I was right.) Of the other possible companions, Jubilost would have been a great permanent inclusion because he's on the same power level as Nok-Nok. Alchemist is apparently a strong class -- very useful against swarms too.

Adequate presentation

Kingmaker's UI is stylish and thematic but it has some usability issues. It's not the first topdown RPG to use the layout it does but I'd prefer message/combat log to be in the middle. And be wider as well. Tooltips would have needed some rewriting: concise descriptions instead of the full feat/spell texts. It would also be helpful if feat descriptions told how the game's implementation differs from tabletop. For example, inquisitor gets at some level the ability to make their weapon have the bane property against a creature type for X amount of turns per day. But when you click the ability in the game, nothing seems to happen; you don't choose any type. Instead your weapon will be considered to have bane against everything you hit. That perplexed me for quite a bit.

One odd annoyance -- and I'm surprised it hasn't been removed -- is how the main menu starts zoomed out and angled when you launch the game. You can click on it while it's still moving but it's a bizarre decision to have it be like that. Maybe they wanted to make sure you listen to the main menu theme.

I immediately recognized the tune to be Inon Zur's work. It's quite reminiscent of Icewind Dale 2 and Dragon Age: Origins. Zur didn't compose the entire soundtrack; the title track might in fact be the only one from him. It's definitely the best of the lot.

Kingmaker's voice acting is mainly found in main and companion quests. I would've preferred them to scatter it out a bit. Instead of having long back-to-back paragraphs voiced, they could've done that to the first line of minor stuff to have more an even experience. Also, having characters do a lot of "talking" in non-voiced cutscenes that you can't skip is not great.

One final thing I want to mention is the Varnhold's Lot DLC. The idea of it is pretty cool: playing the events of something your character will later learn about and have your choices affect your main playthrough. In practice, though, it doesn't quite work out. Having to make a new character (or more if you don't like the default companions offered) in the middle of a 100-hour run turned out to be annoying. The payoff for the DLC wasn't very satisfying either. The DLC became a rather hardcore dungeon crawl in the end. It was a bit too meta to have the fey at the end to confess having done everything just for funs, there being no point to any of it.

I don't know if/when I will play Owlcat's second game, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. I do have the base game on Steam but I'd prefer to play it on some other launcher where I don't care about my average completion rate. Wrath looks like a game that would take few hundred hours to 100%.

My character

Nyleth du Muin, Lawful Evil Human Inquisitor of Zon-Kuthon

Str 16 (+2 from Human)

Dex 13

Con 14

Wis 15

Int 10

Cha 14

Deity: Zon-Kuthon

Domain: Destruction

Skills: Athletics, Knowledge (World), Lore (Religion), Perception, Persuasion

Feats & stats:

1 Feat: Power attack, Human bonus feat: Persuasive

2 -

3 Feat: Weapon Focus (Flail), Teamwork feat: Precise Strike

4 +1 Wis to 16

5 Feat: Extra Bane Weapon

6 Teamwork feat: Outflank

7 Feat: Dazzling Display

8 +1 Dex to 14

9 Feat: Shatter Defenses, Teamwork feat: Shake It Off

10 -

11 Feat: Improved Critical (Flail)

12 +1 Str to 17, Teamwork feat: Back to Back

13 Feat: Cornugon Smash

14 -

15 Feat: Critical Focus, Teamwork feat: Shielded Caster

16 +1 Str to 18

17 Feat: Combat Reflexes

18 Teamwork feat: Seize the Moment

19 Feat: Blind Fight

20 +1 Str to 19

Spells:

1    Cure Light Wounds, Divine Favor, Bane, Shield of Faith, Bless, True Strike

2    Boneshaker, Hold Person, Cure Moderate Wounds, See Invisibility, Lesser Restoration, Effortless Armor

3    Cure Serious Wounds, Heroism, Communal Resist Energy, Communal Delay Poison, Prayer, Remove Curse

4    Divine Power, Cure Critical Wounds, Freedom of Movement, Death Ward, Communal Protection from Energy, Burst of Glory

5    Righteous Might, True Seeing, Communal Stoneskin, Spell Resistance, Resounding Blow

6    Overwhelming Presence, Heal, Blade Barrier, Inspiring Recovery, Harm

Kingdom advisors:

Regent: Valerie

Councilor: Shandra

General: Amiri

Treasurer: Kanerah

High priest: Jhod

Diplomat: Bartholomew

Warden: Ekundayo

Magister: Octavia

Curator: Jaethal

Minister: Jubilost

Deity: Abadar