Pathfinder: Kingmaker

I think the convo with Ross I had while/after playing this really crystallizes my fundamental opinion of this game: it's a game I wish I had played when I was 12. It's got an absurd amount of content and a solid amount of depth and customization in your characters and combat. And those qualities both benefit the game and detract from it. It's great that you can spend your time either investing in running your kingdom or going on side quests. But after a while there's too much so I started skipping all the kingdom events. It's great that there's a million different items in the game for you to hunt for. But after a while I became fatigued with scrolling through gigantic lists of mostly trash items. It's great that there are an absurd number of abilities and class synergies to be explored. But I was never the type to be interested in all that (too much).
In short, the game is just too long.

I could complain about it being too difficult but you know what, the difficulty options available are very good. And you throw in a cheating mod and voila you've cut away a lot of the chaff (like the incessant amount of resting that is one of my central complaints with the D&D-to-PC-game conversion that consistently handicaps the fun of games in this genre).

I do like that you do go through almost all 20 levels with your characters in the campaign. There's a really nice power curve where your party basic becomes a group of gods. Which is really accurate to how D&D is supposed to play. It's exemplified so well because at a couple different points the game will throw you up against regular bandits when you're like level 14 and you get to watch as your Wizard casts a single fireball that incinerates a group of 10-20 people. Horrific. And wonderful.

I enjoyed investing and learning about the world and the lore. But ultimately found few of the characters particularly gripping. Will I remember the weird undead elf lady? The depressed dwarf? The traitorous elf? The poly, bisexual half-elf and half-orc couple? Maybe the last one because that's actually pretty original inside of an actual good game.

But ultimately I'd have to say what ended up being a 67 hour game for me (with cheats to speed things up quite a bit) felt like it should have been a tight 40 hours. Ironically after the game seemed to waste so much of my time forcing me to walk outside of dungeons to rest...now I need a rest from these types of games.

2024-01-05
I see Rogue Trader being played and talked about a lot and I’m just like Why? Looking back I do not look at any point of playing Pathfinder Kingmaker fondly. It’s like a D&D game if it was made by the history channel. So dry and boring and forgettable. I read my review talking about the various characters and I honestly didn’t remember any of them without them being mentioned first. I don’t remember much if any of the story or the lore or anything sticking with me. For me it had no soul.