Pathfinder: Kingmaker | A Look Through UX Eyes

Pathfinder kingmakers an uneven experience for me there are times when it glows and other times like a jewel it only glimmers if you rotate it to catch the light the first experience of the game was a positive one at first the Lord was deep and I look forward to the kingdom making mechanics and and the quests that might arise from the ensuing political intrigue but at some point around the one-fourth mark of the game I just stopped playing I didn't know why at first it just wasn't anything pulling me back into the game then I came back to it for this review and suddenly all of the glaring problems came right to the forefront and really called attention to themselves I suddenly found that unlike my other reviews I couldn't get away with only recording footage when something important happened or write about a specific system that I found either lacking or brilliant instead I found that I needed to record everything because I found myself complaining long and often about so many choices that the design team at Al Kat made I'm sure the out cat team were wonderful people he's owned at me everything from UI complaints lack of quality of life mechanics to downright broken quests and journal entries that straight-up lie to you the first 20 hours of this game was an exercise in tedium and frustration all that changed however sometime around a 30 hour mark and it was a genuine revelation so in order to communicate what I found in the most thorough and fair way possible this video will be different from previous videos the video will be broken up into categories at first like my other videos I'll be talking about the individual parts of the game that I liked and didn't like but the way I will do that will be drastically different there is no script for this these are my genuine reactions and surprise and frustrations that I experienced as I experienced them I found that this lent is sort of narrative to my usual review format and that you can track how the character arc of the game evolved from frustrating and confusing to wonderful as story once the story section of the video has begun this is where spoilers come in and if you haven't played the game you really want to tune out unless you never plan on playing a game and just come here because my monotone voice helps put you to sleep at night well I'll tell you what this will be the perfect video for that as it is gonna be a long long video because there is just so much to talk about here I know that there's a lot of negatives to talk about in this video and if you really enjoyed this game I urge you to just hang in there because eventually all the right decisions the designers made with this game start to shine through for very specific reasons which I will go into in detail so strap in strap on folks because I'm giving this game the OL in-out let's dig in shall we let's start with dialogue choices first okay now this is a very special conversation right here so in this conversation you have a bunch of different choices and obviously cartucci o is trying to frame you for something right so you have all of these diplomacy checks that you have to make in order for people to actually believe that you're not the spy which is fine except for that one that one allows you to you know use common sense instead of a skill check right that's great like if you never put on the ring you're fine right this one is not that great now here's the thing about this I didn't rob the [ __ ] armory I couldn't get through the next door without a key you can't get through the next door without of keys so there was no other way around that situation you can't even lockpick locket which is stupidest [ __ ] I had to break into that armory right in order to make this dialog appear right so this is another case of the developer forcing the scripted series of events to happen and and not allowing the players ingenuity to rule the day now I only have two choices here forgive me my trespasses my defense we were in the middle of a battle and in dire need of weapons and the second one we were in the middle of battle and needed weapons there was no time to run and ask for permission now did you notice that both of those dialogue choices mean the same thing the only thing I took out of that Armory was a key why isn't there an option to say I didn't take anything out of that armory or robit all I took was the key to open the door it's because they want you to do this diplomacy check and it's kind of stupid because there's a chance you can actually fail this when you didn't steal anything at all like you took great care to not steal anything and you still get screwed and if I don't succeed here's what happens if I don't succeed I don't get the tank so if I'm any other class in the game that isn't a tank I am NOT going to have a tank I'm gonna have a barbarian which isn't the same as a tank okay she dies pretty fast on Normal difficulty sometimes before you can even do anything I say people were dying in front of me how could I just walk by that's the way I would react cuz that's like ridiculous right it's patently ridiculous on its face but if you fail that she's like you know what those seem pretty suspicious oh that's weird and actually I just realized why they make you make these choices these choices actually determine who in this group is gonna be coming along with you and who isn't because they don't want to give you a full group up front they don't want to are tuccio to have to go out there by himself doesn't make any sense they don't want you to have a big full group of six people right out the gate they want you to have to build your group and all that stuff which is fine but there was another way to do this they could have made it so that I could have said yeah I didn't steal anything so I don't know what this dude's talking about it just took the key so I could open the door and then Valerie would have been like okay yeah that's fine but then the other people would have been like what you didn't steal anything why that sounds stupid you should have taken stuff to defend yourself so no matter what you did you would still only get Valerie as a tank because if you need a tank your only choice in this situation is to keep reloading this dialog until you get the tank the side benefit of doing things this way is that you're signaling to the player that the world will react to your actions right so if I went through that entire part of the game without stealing anything from the armory what it tells me as a player is that people will take notice of what I do and it might influence the way I play the game from there on out but in this way it just tells me the opposite that the NPC's will not acknowledge what I've done so I could basically do whatever the hell I want and alignment doesn't matter it's actually doing the opposite of what the designers intended so there's a bunch of different options and none of them are totally right for a lawful good character but in this one instance that I've seen so far it actually has something that's based on my religion which is great so I really like that so I want to point out something here when we first met the Technic League the lawful good option was not even have a conversation with the people and try to avoid bloodshed it was immediately to attack and now the neutral good option is to spare her her life I'm really not understanding this whatsoever lawful good is okay with murder but neutral good I'll spare her life which it should be I mean a good character should always spare their lives that's what they do unfortunately I'm just not sure why it is that a lawful good character would try to attack first and ask questions later that doesn't seem like a lawful or a good option and let me try to explain more about what my mind frame was here a lawful good character will always try to solve something without conflict right that's my thinking but a lawful character always obeys the law and in new mariya slavery is legal and while new Miriam may have little in the way of laws surrounding slavery it's ostensibly legal by the fact that the various slave guilds operating in the region are too powerful to stop it stolen lands where laws are essentially set by you the new bearing it is lawless untamed land so in that same vein of role-playing if I am setting the laws then I should be able to determine what is right and what is wrong in my lands if I want to arrest slavers for setting up shop in my lands or execute them I should be able to do that but giving no quarter to slavers and attacking all of them on first sight or not even being able to try and talk to them or not even being able to try to talk sense into them seems to limit my role-playing options granted at this point I'm not the baron yet so I only have the moral compass of my character to go on if the game is telling me outright that attacking another living being before trying any other means is a lawful good action explicitly then doesn't that change my perception of lawful good and by its extension by definition of all other alignments as well it's not that I think that lawful good won't try to kill somebody that's evil whenever it can in certain cases it absolutely will take for example a paladin and a demon or an angel versus a devil or cleric versus necromancer a paladin may not even try to talk to a demon lest he be swayed by their wicked ways but when a game presents me with a chance to do so I always take it because it is interesting to me to think that I might be able to sway that demon from any action even if I can't possibly do so or that the demon might sway me in some way I also don't believe that alignment is prescriptive because it is in fact more descriptive and a lawful good character may do some evil things but by labeling so much of the dialogue as on lineman chases you are prescribing roles to those alignments and defining them concretely it is like the dialogue is constantly judging you for making a choice that should be more about the personality of the character rather than their morality I also found that when the options were labeled by alignment I paid more attention to the alignment label then at a dialogue itself because as a paladin I didn't want to lose the voice of my god if you were to drop labels from a dialogue that would be even worse for alignment specific characters because some of the morality shifts are downright ludicrous and your alignment would shift without you knowing why I believe this is the main reason why most games don't do this type of shifting of alignment and only use those shifts sparingly in dialogue and when they do those shifts are sometimes very drastic they can get away with that in baldur's gate because the shifts weren't as numerous when compared to Pathfinder and when you picked an evil aligned option you [ __ ] knew it that's because the writing and the intent of the writer was clear this actually touches on another point that I was thinking about just now that every time I say something it says I've performed a lawful good action well okay but just saying things doesn't mean you've done anything your actions are what matter this I totally don't agree with anyway that's I think that might be at the of what my problem actually is with this dialogue is that saying a thing does not make you a thing doing a thing makes you who you are so this whole alignment system here that they're trying to do just doesn't make any sense to me because how is it that I can free everybody and then still be a lawful evil character just because I said something that was lawful evil like what if I'm saying things I don't mean I don't know it just to me it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to do it that way if I perform a lawful evil action like I actually do a thing that's lawful evil that's another story but most of the time it's just me saying things and therefore I'm that person because I said it people aren't usually what they say they are they're usually what they do and that's sort of the problem with evil is because evil characters usually say good things a lot so that they can get what they want out of you let's think about role playing as what it actually is right let's say I'm role playing an evil mage wannabe and Alec here in the red wizards of thay Alec here is of course the lowest of the low and that guild and he has to pretend that he's evil but all of his actions speak to his actual intent so he says a lot of evil things he's kind of a dick nobody likes him nobody wants to be around them but when it comes to actually taking an evil action he just can't bring himself to do it at his very heart of hearts he's a good person that's a character and unfortunately a system like this where the only thing that matters is what you say actively prevents you from role playing any kind of character with nuance let's take a look at Kombat next all right so we're on this fight again I restarted the game with a paladin and I put the game on a little bit easier the reason I had to reduce the difficulty is two reasons here one was my party composition was really bad so I started a thief I only had the one tank the Barbarian and Lindsey so I didn't have a real healer on my team to heal the damage that I'd be taking and since I wasn't a tank I didn't have enough people to soak up damage plus the guy kept fearing my only tank so that immediately meant that everybody on my team would get team wiped so I had to restart the game completely with a paladin I didn't make it so that criticals kill you and one [ __ ] hit we're gonna see if this flight goes any better this time around again that doesn't seem like a lawful good action as you can see the combat hasn't gotten much more difficult I literally haven't had to heal or really do anything or take any kind of care and this is just on Normal difficulty before and Normal difficulty was like kicking the [ __ ] out of me especially in the early game like it was very difficult because of the encounters but now it's just kind of like a joke and part of that I have a feeling is because of the fact that highly valuable very powerful items are available in the very first town that you go to the fact that one of my guys has on full plate plus one that's ridiculous huh he has a belt of giant strength a ring that gives him a plus one to his armor a cloak of resistance and I believe I'm where you I'm also wielding a heavy shield plus one my AC right now is 26 there's not many enemies at my level that are gonna be able to hit me like my two main tanks are just ridiculously evasive I'd have to put the difficulty up to like hard in order for this combat to be challenging normal Normal difficulty is not what I would imagine normal difficulty would be and that's sort of why in when I'm running VND campaigns I'm very careful about the stuff that people can buy I'm very careful about it like when they're in town I tell them a friend I'm like there's certain things you're gonna be able to buy and certain things you're not gonna be able to buy some DMS are much much less conservative about that they're like oh you want full plate armor okay do you have the money for it cool go ahead no it shouldn't be that way like if your characters somehow have a shitload of money and they're able to buy the best type of armor that they could possibly buy you shouldn't let them do that absolutely shouldn't let them do that because you're going to throw the whole game's balance out of whack also when a con on that a bit now what I mean by that is you're gonna throw the balance out yes but you shouldn't prevent them from being able to get it but getting items like that full plate Armour full plate Armour plus one plus two plus three those things should be very difficult to get like you should have to do a quest to get stuff like that like you should have to go find a really good expert Armour maker he's a hermit and he lives by himself in the mountains and it's really difficult to get there that's what I mean about preventing players from just being able to buy whatever the hell they want because the side effect is that the things that they end up getting end up just not feeling all that good I just end up feeling like okay yeah cool I just got some plate meal plus three cool because it's so widely available you get it at a [ __ ] grocery store like you can get it at Oleg's tavern like that's ridiculous an economic supply and demand is what determines what prices are in our brains we're tying the value of something that we get to its rarity is it hard to get is it rare is it one-of-a-kind these are all important things this game does none of that what you're doing to your games balance is you're just you're making it so that the enemies later on have to get so ridiculous you're just throwing balance out the window so in my opinion just like how baldur's gate handled it you don't get access to that kind of stuff so very late in the game money-wise economy wise they balance that game pretty well it's very difficult for you to afford that kind of stuff early on buying any of that kind of stuff was a huge investment that you weren't willing to make that early on no he might actually be challenged here all right I'm actually having to open up my spell book now [Music] all right that's a little disappointing here we go now we're gonna have a fight let's sleep some [ __ ] shall we oh [ __ ] well there goes our healer [Music] oh [ __ ] alright here we go I guess her spell failed awesome [Music] okay yeah this is uh this is pretty [ __ ] tough right here man go ahead and see if we can wake up wake up this dude goddamn he just got like unlimited fireballs or what Lindsay why are you going up here [ __ ] oh my god all right that's fantastic thanks cool I don't understand what the [ __ ] just happened just now so he did 8 and then 16 I hear him immediately cool that's fantastic thanks here I was [ __ ] complaining about difficulty and now it's like a way too [ __ ] difficult by like a lot he ain't laying on his own [ __ ] hands let's go dude why aren't you laying on hands self look ain't doing [ __ ] god dammit dude that's [ __ ] worthless all right well we're dead there's literally nothing we could do at this point alright so we're gonna try this fight again now that I know there's a bunch of [ __ ] in there that is a [ __ ] hidden from view why is she not in the shadows why are you not in the shadows hello hello hello give me some kind of feedback tell me why tell me why she can't be in the shadows what the [ __ ] so what she just saw there was two different examples of the game not giving you feedback when something isn't working and the player wouldn't possibly know why the first one was the lay on and self what the game doesn't tell you is that or at least it doesn't tell you in a way that I saw is that you have to right-click that option to make it an auto spell which means that it will be used every time a certain condition is met right so sometimes you do that with other spells like I want to use this spell every round but you wouldn't think that you would want to use a self heal on yourself every single round literally the only way I was able to get that spell to kick off was to right-click it and have it go off when it wanted to unfortunately the only experience I have with that is by using that to automatically cast certain spells like spells that fire off every round and don't have conditions so it's confusing at best so I felt like I wasn't in control of when that spell actually went off or not the second thing you saw there was that my mage was not able to go stealth because she was already seen but the problem was is the wasn't telling me that was why so it just left me to my own devices with that this game suffers from just not having so many basic quality of life things in the game that would have made learning how to play the game so much easier but they're just completely missing man it's so annoying the [ __ ] spells like heal one before [ __ ] damaged or something it's like every time I heal people it doesn't do anything it just [ __ ] it barely keeps them alive what is [ __ ] bombs especially since this is a video game and not a pen and paper game where the DM realizes oh you know this encounter has too many enemies I'll take one or two away from it you know what I mean in a video game they're not really doing that and the difficulty spikes can get out of control if the encounters are not tailored towards the area and the level that the people might be in especially when you have such swings in difficulty between one level to the next it's it's really hard to balance now I've changed a difficulty to easy and let's see how this goes [Music] Wow that happened a lot quicker didn't it and that the bombs not doing anywhere near as much damage that was a whole lot easier not even comparable that actually seemed a little more reasonable but with maybe a little too easy because I didn't even really have to think I only had to stop combat maybe once or twice to actually you know change my tactics and that's one of the general complaints that I have about the combat is that one level difficulty to the next level with difficulty is not even comparable to one another so for instance when you switch from normal to challenging which is the basic rules of the Pathfinder game you get this huge swing in difficulty because now they're not doing weak critical hits they're doing full-on critical hits which means that you can die with a single hit if they get a critical now granted that's the way it is in pen and paper as well the problem is is that pen and paper though it has all those rules the DM never puts you against something unless they're dicks they never put you against something that you can't possibly win against but this game all too often does that because it's a video game and that's why you need to be able to tailor the rules a lot more granularly and it's not enough to have a damage slider because decreasing the enemy's damage to a point ends up being so that you don't get hit at all like when you do get hit you get one hit of one point of damage that's nothing for instance I did a run on stream with the challenging difficulty and in the elk temple there is a boar that you have to fight that boar can do 2d twelve of damage to your level two characters which means that if he criticals you he doesn't put you on death's door he kills you outright the game's balance is not a matter of the rules not being adapted very well to the video game it's the fact that the encounters are so out of whack and the counters do not scale at all to your level so therefore your walking into a place that maybe the designers didn't think you would walk into that early and because of that you just get rekt by monsters that have no right being as strong as they are for your level and a lot of C RPGs what you'll see is that the level designers when they're designing main areas of main mission areas they'll scale them a little bit lower to a level that's a little more reasonable so I think that the way they balance a lot of the levels in the early game is that they balance them for around the level in order to be on but because those areas follow in a sequence it's really easy to balance them so in this game all of this area opens up to you and it makes it really difficult to balance all of these random encounters that you can run into in these areas that open up as you explore and because of that and because you could do the story out of sequence which brings other problems with it which I'll go into in the story section it made it very hard for Paizo to actually balance those encounters you'll never hear me say this any other time but this is one of those occasions where auto balancing and encounter to a player's level would have come in handy and you don't even have to match your level you just have to get it within one or two levels of their character level that way the encounter is still really challenging but it's not just like one shotting you all the time and it would be even better if the difficulty level decided what the scaling would be so instead of having damage sliders criticals all that stuff you could actually just control the difficulty of the game by controlling how much the enemies scale to the level of the player so for instance if you're playing on challenging difficulty there's no scaling if you're playing on normal there's slight scaling and if you're playing on easy it scales all the way down to your level and to be honest Paizo may have actually done that but like so many other things in this game there's so many UX problems there is a difficulty for how combat plays out I believe its enemy difficulty they'll say easier enemies somewhat easier enemies normal enemies things like that but that doesn't tell me that they're scaling to my level that just tells me that they're gonna be easier to kill and quite frankly when you put that thing on somewhat easier enemies it scales their damage down a lot and then you take it to account the fact that they do even less damage with the slider you could very easily make this game way too easy and the problem is very difficult to find a good middle ground of challenging but fair with the tools that they provide mainly because you never know what any a given option is actually trying to tell you because of again bad UX decisions and speaking of speechless let's look at the economy and the stat look that comes from it since we got back from the stag words castle we got a ton of [ __ ] alright so we're gonna go ahead and sew off all this gear because we have no use for any of it now with all that stuff sold I just made ten thousand eight hundred and eighty four freaking gold coins I am a level four and I have 22,000 gold now I want to do an experiment real quick because Cain has played Pathfinder and D&D for a long time now and I want to ask him a question because I can't say for a fact that I am all that knowledgeable about 5e or any of this stuff that's new okay so I just want to ask a question real quick what level would you need to be in order to have been given twenty-two thousand gold coins what what level do you think is appropriate for that amount of gold in no I just mean in general like how long do you think it would take you in a game to amass twenty-two thousand gold pieces level level ten really okay so I'm level four he's giving me this scrunched up face look is it because here's here's it here's a funny here's a funny thing full plate plus one is only twenty six hundred gold he just he just walked away he's getting the books now he's getting he's getting the pathfinder books he's like cussing I'm glad he's having the same reaction that I am right now this economy is out of [ __ ] whack so in pathfinder i have my big book of pathfinder here the core rulebook right and in the core rulebook it says heavy armor full plate is 1500 gold plus one i don't know what that would be like i would make that like 8,000 gold like yeah you would you would have to be like really busting your ass and even 1500 gold is cheap look at my AC it's 26 [Music] constitution 22 it's [ __ ] crazy man that the stat blue in these games is the most insane thing so if i had to express why I hate this stat blowed things so much is that from just talking to my son and just thinking about it it encourages way too much men maxing which I know I've said this before in my pillars of eternity video I think that men maxing is the [ __ ] devil and it's like the worst thing that you can encourage in a game because the players are no longer role-playing their character building in like the worst kind of way right I just don't understand why you would want to encourage that kind of play in your game especially when for me character is all about the weakness of the character I blame anime for this the games that have like you have 35,000 health and you do 12,000 damage per hit the only reason I bring all this up is that the first time I got a +1 anything and a Dungeons and Dragons game I was super [ __ ] stoked because I knew that that was like super important but now I have I have gotten a plus one of everything almost every single weapon in a plus one flavor I've also gotten a short sword it does one six electricity damage none of this stuff feels like it's important or that it's good that I'm super happy I found that item I'm just like okay it gives me a little more AC cool I'll use that nothing is important when it's this numerous and plentiful you have to create rarity I mean that's the reason why loot boxes work in the first place why interval rewards work in the first place all you're doing is just making it so plentiful that it doesn't feel like it means anything and you're just constantly chasing a high of getting a new item a [ __ ] Borderlands there's a hidden cost to all of this stat blow to that might not be too obvious when you first look at this but the hidden cost to this is that most combat no longer feel special after a certain amount of time monster rarity counts just as much as weapon rarity let me explain when you have this severe stat load your player characters are constantly getting stronger and stronger and stronger and ramping up what happens is that they get to a certain power level very quickly that you can no longer throw lower level enemies at them anymore and be a challenge so what you see in both this game and in pen and paper is suddenly every fight is with some rare creature that shouldn't be as numerous and plentiful as they are but you keep seeing them so in this game you'll see different kinds of giants wither UNS manticores every assortment of rare mythical creatures right and what happens is just like weapons when you are constantly supplying the player with these rare creatures that they should only fight on very rare and special occasions you degrade the special feeling that players get and when they actually fight those enemies I found at the beginning of the game a very good short sword my character is specialized on long swords the only longsword i've been able to find so far that has any kind of enchantment on it is this +1 cold iron longsword right got it the cold iron just is good against demons and Fae creatures right which can come in use you know there's some use to that but for the most part not a whole lot of uses of this but this just does more damage so I'm going to use that before I use this the issue is is Tet like I want a longsword but there's hardly any long swords in this game which is really odd because in most other games let's just take baldur's gate since this game is being compared to it so much games like Baldur's Gate those things are way more than numerous they're all over the place so there's no reason why there shouldn't be more long swords in this game and that's when I'm noticing there's a severe lack at least in the early game I'm on chapter 3 or 4 right now there's a severe lack of those kinds of things there's a severe lack of weapon variety as far as weapons that you might actually use so once again I went on the internet to try and find an answer to that question of why haven't I found a longsword this entire time when I've been playing and apparently long swords not the safe choice to go with in the early game they don't actually start selling long swords that are any good until chapter 5 so you have to get more than halfway through the game in order to get a longsword for your longsword character so awesome why wouldn't you have more long swords in a game that's like the safe choice for C RPGs like that's what every C RPG since the beginning of time has had at least a longsword I mean they literally in Planescape said when they were designing a game they were like there's not to be one long sword in this game because they wanted everything to be unique and different from other C RPGs if you're making a C RPG and you want it to be a classic C RPG long sword long sword long sword it is a staple it is a staple of the game and don't tell me [ __ ] one-handed bastard sword don't tell me that I don't want an exotic weapon proficiency to take up one of my feats now I want to talk about the graphics in this game this game has very pretty graphics and has a really interesting lighting system but this lighting system comes with some pretty major drawbacks so let's talk about the lighting now I also want to talk about something that has really super annoyed me in this game before and that's the lighting system in these dungeons I have the first time I played this I wandered around in this dungeon for I would say over an hour looking for where I was supposed to go only to find out that I didn't see one really dark passage leading up to the north when I first came through here typically in games when we're trying to get a player to go to a certain location we light it a certain way in order to draw the players eyes to that light right this is an old trope and a lot of design is that you do it this way in order to attract the eyes of players because we are naturally attracted to light or like moths and in this game these dungeons are just pitch black in which I understand why they're pitch-black I get it it's because you want them to feel like a dungeon that's great but that doesn't mean that you can't have lights in certain locations to inform players like eh you could go this way this is like a possible way you could go maybe it's important you might want to go here here's another thing man these dungeons are so [ __ ] dark that like I have to navigate by this more often than I do when I'm actually in because there are certain passages that are so well hidden in the dark that you can't [ __ ] and see them so you don't know where the hell you're supposed to go half the time you spend most your time just wandering around the dark hoping you found the one dungeon passage that's the one that you're supposed to find so I've been wandering around for a while now and I'm trying to find a way to get into this area again I had to come up through here because I thought that maybe I could get up to there because you see this is all black so I thought it was just an open area but it's it's [ __ ] not it's a series of [ __ ] tunnels so why why is it that the map the actual map that I look at for [ __ ] guidance is absolutely positively [ __ ] useless look at this [ __ ] dead it's a disaster it's all [ __ ] black because they use the same graphics on this as they do when you're in the actual game when I come into here it should be the Auto map - the darkness light it up let me see [ __ ] this is [ __ ] useless why even have it if it's gonna be looking like this [ __ ] god this is like a basic [ __ ] so basically the result of all of this [ __ ] is that I have to sit here and I have to go to every single corner of this map and make sure that there's not some passageway that I might have missed because the auto map is so [ __ ] terrible so incompetent so shitty that I have no choice with the wander around [ __ ] aimlessly clicking in the middle of darkness to try and find out where the [ __ ] I'm supposed to go next is this a house is this a hallway it is a hallway see I would have passed right past that because I wouldn't even seen it dude this is terrible I understand that you want the dungeons to be appropriately dark but god damn it this ruins the experience makes a shitty now I'm not gonna spend too much time harping on this but there was actually a very easy fix to this you'll notice that the cone around you of light that reveals passages around you is very small in order to fix this whole problem even to a degree fixed the auto map is to just increase that sight range increase it significantly so you can actually see what's going on around you and see hidden tunnels and as a side effect fix the damn map because now passages will reveal themselves at the sides of hallways that you might not have seen when you were walking past them the map then becomes useful all right now let's talk about the UI for a minute this is something that I'm gonna complain about but I'm not necessarily faulting the game for this because nobody has actually done this yet as far as I can tell but when you select spell focus you get this list of spells right and unfortunately this list the spells is kind of dog [ __ ] or spell classes I should say because you don't know which spells you that you're using all the time what school they're in and there's no way to actually look here like I can't click on spells right now that's that's been for some reason you know grayed out would be really nice if I could look at that but I can't so it would be really nice as if like if like right clicked on this it just showed me a list in here of the spells that I currently have that are in that school of focus that way I can make an informed decision around the one I want to actually focus on without having to like click out of this hit yes go into my sheet will get his spell book and then go to the actual spell that I want like so this is conjuration alright cool so now I know can we can we get that is that like a feature we could get in some game in the future please so here's something else I just realized I was leveling up these characters none of these skills actually tell you what they do as a kingdom management skill right pretty sure these skills have to do with Kingdom Management so here's what I'm gonna do because I want to confirm this real quick before I just assume let's see regent is charisma [Music] it's ability based so their bonus is dependent upon their stats hmm that's gonna influence things a bit the weapon set system is pretty nice but it's missing one key feature and that feature is being able to equip the same offhand weapon in two slots so there's no reason for me to have to have my second set be an entirely different set like I have to have two different shields for that set like I can if I want to if I'm going for a specific bill for instance if I'm doing a cold iron longsword I know that I'm gonna want things that are gonna protect me from evil so let's say I have a shield that protects me from evil right because I'm gonna be fighting demons with this right well then I can have a shield in there that protects me from that kind of thing but if I don't have anything like that and all I want is for this shield to be in both slots I should be able to do that there's no real reason why I can so that's just a kind of silly little thing that maybe you don't think about that when you're designing it but if you were to let's say do user testing that would have came up at some point here's something I just noticed and I thought it that these chests that are locked sometimes require a key to get them open but know what's actually happening here is that you are failing to pick the lock but the game isn't telling you that you even tried to pick the lock most of the time it won't even show you an animation of her trying to unlock the thing and she won't even play her oops I didn't do it sound effect when she fails to do it so there's no way that the game is telling you oh by the way you didn't pick that lock so now it's locked forever the only way you can see it is if you look down here and you see already failed to pick this lock so it's just like a little UI thing like maybe let us know in some better way than just something down here in this already bloated ass information screen tell us you know oh you tried to pick a lock but you didn't maybe show the animation and have her say her voice line for failing that way we know up she failed that sucks so I didn't even know that this was a thing I'm like super excited to deal with this now there's a town building mechanisms but I didn't even know about this is incredible I'm super stoked so like what's gonna happen am I going to be able to visit the smithy am I gonna be able to visit the orphanage and what kind of events are gonna go on there you know like can I visit the shrine in the herbalist house like I'm stoked like I want to see how this all turns out I have a renewed interest in his game that opening was rough but this games starting to grow on me now so I'm realizing now that even though I built all this stuff in the main square these buildings and everything well they're not built yet so maybe that's the problem I'm gonna give it a little I'm gonna give it a little bit and see what happens and when they're actually built I'm gonna see if I can actually explore these areas if I can't I'm sorry I'm gonna be super [ __ ] disappointed guess who was super disappointed this guy now that we've completed the sections of the video now we want to talk about stories this is the part that I was talking about this is the by far the longest part of the video because I'm going through beat by beat on this and just having all of my thoughts laid out for you as I am experiencing either frustrations or joy sometimes there's actual joy in this game this is for the hardcore people who just want to hear me talk about this game more if you've watched up to this point great you could turn off right now but so if you want to see what the [ __ ] I'm talking about keep watching and you will see the dramatic conclusion of this entire video so where I'm starting this story section of this video is we're currently in the caves right now looking for a tower tuccio I in this playthrough mistook Tartu CHEO for suit scale but I had just executed suit scale and these are kind of my thoughts as I did this and you might be asking yourself why is he leaving in all the mistakes well I'm leaving in the mistakes so that you can see what my mine frame was while I was playing it if I get rid of the mistakes that doesn't really help seeing us research we want people to talk openly about what they're feeling we don't want them to feel stupid and we don't want them to worry that they're doing things wrong if they're doing something wrong then maybe there's a way we can help them do things right through UX design but we got to know what the problems are first I'm confused now so it's said on the journal entry that just got updated deliver Tartu co2 Kesten dead or alive but we were gonna have to give him let him run away I thought that our whole job was to deliver him alive or dead this is so [ __ ] confusing I'm thinking what has to happen is we have to let him go then we could capture him again and then we could bring him into justice this just doesn't make any [ __ ] sense so I need to explain a little bit why I'm so confused here because it's actually embarrassing to listen to this because in retrospect of course I understand that that wasn't our tuccio but I'm super confused about it because see Tartu CHEO seemed like he was acting as the chief for the coal bowls he was leading them he was telling them what to do he was the charismatic leader of them but then they also had a chief so I'm thinking that chief and our tuccio are the same thing and I think what could help clear up this situation is if I had met Tartu CEO and suit scale before I actually fought suit scale that way I could tell the difference between the two of them and by meeting them I don't mean seeing them both in a cutscene I mean actually having a conversation with Tartu CEO and having a conversation with suits Co that would have helped me tell the difference a little bit better but because I joined with the mites and not the Kolbe olds I never got a chance to meet suit scale so therefore my confusion she was just increased from that point Tartu Chiyo is leading them but so is the chief so there's two different people leading the same group so it just confused the hell out of me and it was completely unnecessary why even have suit scale when you have Tartu Chiyo already it's like to me they both serve the same function so why have two of them other than to pad out the gameplay make me walk from one end of the map to the other and then have to walk all the way back to the other end of the map to kill suit scale or to kill Tartu Chiyo I'm just I'm so [ __ ] confused this is such a confusing [ __ ] quest and because I'm supposed to go find us help guy right and everything I'm doing is everything but going to find this guy recommended we wait until the fog clears so I guess we have no with the wait until the fog clears right so I'm gonna I'm not gonna do the Queen's mission I'm not gonna do her mission I'm gonna move on with life and I'm gonna see what happens let's see if the [ __ ] quest fails let's find out it start to chi oh that we're after only because he found some relic that we're not even sure has anything to do with anything it looks like in order to trigger the fog to actually clear instead of what the game is telling me which is just wait for the fog to clear I gotta go do this mission in order to make the fog clear and that might not even be the case I might find out that the fog clears anyway even if I don't do that [ __ ] that's why this is so goddamn confusing and frustrating it's not clear I want it to be more clear oh my god I'm supposed to be finding this stagg Lord and instead of finding the stag Lord I'm waiting for the fog to clear right so the game has told me twice now wait for the fog to clear okay I'll wait for the fog to clear well chances are that fog is not gonna clear until I do this mission but the game doesn't tell me that the game told me I did what I need to do now I just need to wait for the fog to clear which is it I need a way for the fog clear do I need to go do this mission how long is it going to take for the fog to clear like I keep looking through here none of this tells me anything it just tells me that I'm gonna fail in 59 days in one hour if I keep waiting says wait till the fog clears okay well which is it so I'm gonna go fight this guy I guess we're gonna see what the hell happens here oh my [ __ ] god are you serious okay this actually looks like it might be a challenge Jesus here we go I just put his ass to sleep Wow he just like killed all of his own dudes all right so I've completed that quest now finally after having to go back and forth three times alright so after killing cartucci oh I come all the way back here and I get greeted by the nymph now the fog fades so it is a scripted event so why does the game tell you wait until the fog fades if the fog won't fade until you kill tar tuccio or is it that the fog will eventually fade even if you don't kill tar tuccio now I have to go online to see if that's the case I [ __ ] hate this I hate this so much it is a case you have to kill tar to CHEO in order for the fog to lift and many people have been having this problem like there's there's pages of this stuff on the internet you can find with people were like what the [ __ ] going on the problem here is that the quests are not in water people quite a few of them end up going to the elk temple first if you go to the elk temple first you get a red herring in the form of oh you've already completed the quest that you need to complete because you know you cleared the fog now you just need to wait for it [ __ ] clear but that's not the case and it's it all has to come it all comes down to journal entries it all comes down to the fact that no events happen that tell you what you still need to kill Tartu CHEO because apparently the fog won't fade until you do that but here's the thing literally nothing happens after you kill tar to see oh that's special it's just an event that you need to do in order to get it to [ __ ] clear it has absolutely nothing to do with the quest you just have to do it orbit rarely and unless you go out and check like these people did if that's the thing that you need to do unless you go out and check to see for sure that that's what you need to do you won't know and a lot of people have been missing the fact that you need to actually go track down to are to geo and kill them this is just this is like quest design 101 one again once again I'm saying this is like basic quest design I don't understand how you could [ __ ] this up and it's a really bad first impression and I think that this is the this is why I stopped playing this game the first time because this quest was so bad and so frustrating it just killed the stag lord and exited the area after looting every single corpse and every single secret area came out with a ton of loot and got to this loading screen and it just wouldn't stop loading then I thought to myself okay I'll just give it a minute maybe it's some [ __ ] I don't understand and it came back in after smoking a cigarette and well you know the game [ __ ] crashed thank god the game didn't completely [ __ ] lose all of my progress I still have all the weapons and stuff that I got from before so thank God for small miracles I didn't lose any progress I'm looking around for a very specific option I want to turn off the companions banter during camping because camping is such a numerous and often ordeal that you have to just keep doing that every time I have to hear them talk to each other I want to rip my [ __ ] ears off my face I really wish there was a way to turn that [ __ ] off man because I don't want to keep hearing it I just want them to stop I just want to rest and move on it's never like I'm resting so that I can hear them banter and talk I'm resting so that I can keep playing the [ __ ] game oh my god that's really [ __ ] it irritates me ok so here we go what will you do when you sit on the throne Cobra Kali please don't say you haven't thought about it there's lawful neutral which I'm not a lawful neutral character there's neutral evil not a neutral evil character and then there's just whatever happens I hope you're beside me appreciate your help and I appreciate that I appreciate you yourself Valerie what if I don't give a [ __ ] about her what if I just want to say a lawful good response man god dammit dude the dialog like and I'm paying more attention unfortunately to what the alignments are because I'm a paladin I'm paying more attention to the [ __ ] alignments than the actual dialogue so I don't even know if the content of the dialogue is what it's supposed to be it's just that god it's so [ __ ] frustrating so I wanted to touch on something here and a story so I killed the stag Lord right that was my main mission my first thought after I killed him was to go and tell Jomon D right to go all the way back to the castle and say hey he's dead we did it right when I got there nothing happened so I had to go into my journal to find out that no in fact I need to go find this dude's father for some reason what so now I'm talking to Oleg let's see what he has to say rest all the weights so I had to go and tell him that so that I can get back to rest off Wow see what I mean it doesn't make any sense why do I need to go talk to an innkeeper and not you know the person who gave me the [ __ ] mission doesn't make any sense okay I want to give credit where credit is due I actually like this bit of dialogue here for a couple of reasons because I don't know anything about Berets history and I was about to just like go out and find it on the internet but you actually get to ask so I'm gonna see how this plays out well I got to say the game just just renewed my interest in it all this political intrigue is actually pretty fascinating and I'm I'm all over it I'm really interested in learning what each and every one of these different states has to do with this what they want what their games are I'm really hoping that they go into great detail with all the other houses and what their motivations are because that is going to keep me playing so we'll see what happens today we are here to honor three brave people who have done the impossible they've tamed the stolen land victory the stag Lords dead and the capital of the new Baron II has been built in place of his fort that was how the long and challenging taming of the stolen lands began oh boy Hey okay well that was a waste of [ __ ] time Thanks game you beat rolled me okay so this this game totally [ __ ] trolled me again you know the NIMH says come by yourself so I'm imagining in the world that I live in like the world of you tell me to do a thing I'm gonna do it head if I go there with a bunch of other people I won't be able to do the mission right because I was told to come alone I come alone and it's trap and the trap is that it just [ __ ] kills me because I get hit with a [ __ ] drain level spell right but you could avoid it by not taking the middle room then I'm thinking okay well then I could just continue forward and see what the [ __ ] going on here the brightest flowers also the most poisonous there is nothing you can change well I imagine I'm gonna [ __ ] die am I gonna out walk these guys no I am NOT I am going to die alright cool I guess I'll reload the game it's my own stupid ass fault for even thinking it was the thing I could [ __ ] do but you know see what I think of is fun is when the game makes you like just completely waste 15 minutes of your life doing a thing just to see what's gonna happen and then put you in a situation where you can't possibly win where your only choice is to run but you can't even run because there's something huge blocking the exit and you're bound to get killed by it before you could get out like I really love that like I love having to go through a whole list of auto-saves to find the one where I didn't waste my time doing that right that's my definition of fun absolutely like you can't even talk your way out of it you can't convince her to just let you go you can't do any of that stuff you have no choice but to reload a safe that is the definition of fun absolutely so here's a funny fact people in medieval times didn't say things like we've lived here since forever it's like when I this I thought I must have added in another word we've lived here since like forever because when I read it that's all I could think of there this is like the second time I've run across dialog where I was just like did a valley girl write this alright so I just got a mission from this phage ik and she's got these guys held hostage so I get this mission and it says you know to ask the Dryad Tori Jie who lives in the normal marshes to give you some these handful of feather tokens you would think that we just got a mission person wants us to go get something for them you'd think that she would tell you where exactly she is but here I am on the [ __ ] map I am anywhere Norrell marches or beyond I am just not seeing it so that's a lot of fun right that's a lot of fun so I just get to what just walk around the Norrell marshes until I find this [ __ ] place like you would think if she wants these feather tokens so bad she would tell me where to [ __ ] to get them like tell me specifically where to get them marking on my [ __ ] map you'd think good no no just wander around until you find them meanwhile she's gonna be what just sitting there holding those two guy hostages or is that never going to cease to be a thing could this go on for months how long will it be that she's gonna hold this guy hostage I've been playing this game for a little while and I got to the point where I am the baron of my lands and whatnot I'm just kind of going about the day and all and I'm starting to realize that like the game is suffering a bit from like a lack of direction so we got introduced to a guy who's obviously influencing the events that are happening right now but he's kind of really really far in the background and I want to use baldur's gate to is kind of like my example of what a really good villain who's absent really is a really good villain who's absent introduces himself in a very bombastic way right like let's take the example of Baldur's Gate to where you meet this villain he's a [ __ ] douche but he has these kind of interesting motivations he wants you for some reason but he'll settle for your sister and because he has your sister and because he's so powerful and able to kill all those Amish mages you find him to be an immediate threat but you think that the immediate threat is taken care of because he's in prison but you also kind of know better because you know that that guy's kind of a threat and the way that they handled his development is to show you bits and pieces of what he's doing currently in prison and you know that his imprisonment is not gonna last long but your character doesn't really know your character just knows that his sister is currently in prison and he wants to break her out because that's important to him right or maybe it isn't whatever your characters motivations are in this game the guy's not only absent but he's completely absent you see him for one second and that's it it just seems like there's just a lack of motivation it's like okay I have a barony and I'm running the barony and I'm doing little tasks here and there right but there's no connective tissue tying the story all together and giving you the motivation to find out what happens next and I I mean I know it sounds like a small gripe but this is about the time when I stopped playing the first time when I stopped playing this game the first time after I bought it I was right at the troll area where I went through the whole troll mission and everything beat it and then I just kind of never came back to the game because there wasn't any real strong motivation in the story driving me forward to do it so admittedly this game did something pretty cool here just now this quest what it has to do if is you're trying to figure out what the source of the trolls fire immunity is and when you come and talk to this guy he tells you why it's been that they've been stamped or branded by some artifact to give them what is essentially just a really low-level wizard spell and he's concerned about it because of the intellect behind it somebody's actually amassing this force yet you know why but the thing about this quest is that it forces you to actually talk to this troll because you now have to make some moral decision about what this guy is doing experiment wise because he's experimenting on the stroll cutting its limbs off just doing some pretty pretty rancid [ __ ] that his troll and I think it's good because it has a bit of a moral choice to it right but the chaotic good thing of course and I totally agree with this would be that they're sentient beings not cattle what are you doing is humane sin for you right here's the thing though I'm a lawful good character I care more about the law but I still don't like what he's doing that choice is not here and that's actually a really difficult choice to write honestly but they should have written it they should have written see in these kinds of situations what I like to see is a very philosophical argument happened between the two characters but in this game the way it handles things of course because of this morality system they're trying forced down our throats is it doesn't give you time to really explore the philosophical ramifications of these things you're just supposed to make a snap decision right away before you know all of the things about this before the person even has a chance to tell you or argue his point you have to make a decision right now I understand that up here he tells you why he's doing it and everything but that's not the same as having a debate with somebody in older si RPGs this was like a back of the box feature it's like you're gonna have philosophical arguments of people Planescape torment even to a point baldur's gate like you would have these conversations with people and then you would make a decision you'd be like okay well you know what given on everything you said fine right or given all the things that you've said no I'm not cool with this and then the conversation would go on from there usually the structure would be you can learn everything you go back and forth you'd argue about the philosophical ramifications or whatever they're doing and then you get a chance to decide what you want to do right and sometimes you can decide to convince them that they're in the wrong and if your charisma was high enough or your intelligence was high enough whatever the case may be you might actually convince them that what they're doing is wrong that is interesting choice these choices and Pathfinder are the farthest thing from interesting choices and that sucks because this had the potential to be super interesting but unfortunately alket failed to make that an interesting choice oh well oh my [ __ ] god and then the game goes and [ __ ] ruins it are you serious so because she has a problem with this now all of a sudden I'm supposed to change my [ __ ] mind neutral that doesn't concern me but since this is so important to you to what what happened to the lawful neutral option from [ __ ] before what happened to that now all of a sudden I'm supposed to change my mind because I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna [ __ ] perform a neutral evil action and where does this game get off telling me that this is a neutral evil option neutral evil people are only concerned with themselves they're only concerned with themselves what exactly do I get out of telling octavia to mind her own [ __ ] business aside from a very pissed-off companion I just do not agree with so many of the decisions that this game has made I'm to the point where I'm actually bad right now I want to point out something about this troll quest so we were supposed to go find the mage guy and find out what he knows about the trolls all he did was tell us information but he didn't tell us how to defeat it or anything so that whole thing not only just completely optional but a waste of time he just told us stuff that we're gonna find out when we actually do the mission and as far as I know that information he gave us isn't going to help us in any way what is up with this game dude this is a devii woo designed it don't understand that there has to be a point to why you're doing things it's these moments when the game really shines in the moments when you're actually sitting on the throne making decisions the game is it's really starting to shine to me mainly because the options of how to deal with certain people are pretty robust and they never railroad you into making one single decision which is great so far and this bold hilltop quest is actually pretty interesting so I'm gonna see where this all goes but I'm it's like I wish this was really most of the game and I wish but I just wished that there was like like I said before some connective tissue like we are fighting against an enemy like I think potox is the enemy we're fighting but I'm still unsure of that are they the ones that I'm supposed to be upset with I don't know there's no real enemy here aside from Tarr tuccio which is just like whatever that's just like a side thing almost it doesn't feel like some big threat all right this is day four of playing Pathfinder I took a day off yesterday because I was just super exhausted I've been kind of burning the candle at both ends with the book that I'm writing and with this I kind of been up until like 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning every day and I had to get up at like 7:00 so so I just needed to take a day off because I was super irritated with like everything yesterday and I didn't want to play this game in that mental state because I have a feeling I'd be just overly harsh on it so here we are you know what I just realized in that conversation I just had with her I asked her what happened to the village before I even got to the village and knew anything about it I think the order of events here is a little wrong [Music] so far it seems to me that this game really runs on a very simple structure and has a semi interesting game loop but it's not anything to write home about from what I could tell so far the way this game structure works is that you found your kingdom you build your kingdom through the BP build points you do certain little missions for the kingdom and then every once in a while you get a really big mission that you gotta go do but for the most part what I'm finding is that most of the game time and this is so padded out with the traveling on the game map going from place to place doing fetch quest the game never rises above the level of simple quests so far every quest that I've done so far has been yeah I'll do that for you if you go get this stuff or I'll do that for you or I'll tell you this if you go get me 10 [ __ ] mushrooms from this forest then you travel halfway across the map get there good thing travel all the way back and most your time just spent staring at this [ __ ] map and hitting the rest key and then listening these this inane banter between the two party members it's just like the game has not yet in the last 10 hours of gameplay pulled me in and made me look forward to playing anymore see I'm playing it because I'm doing a review but I want to play it because I like it but so far there is just nothing interesting going on here it's just in main side quests and and to clarify I don't necessarily have a problem with fetch quests in their entirety I have a problem with fetch 10 of these kinds of things it's like it's such a waste of my [ __ ] time you know I mean but fetch quest in and of themselves are not necessarily bad like there are some fetch quests where like hey I need you to go to this dungeon and get me this thing right that's in the dungeon right but it's the main reason you're there it's not like oh go to the side room and pick up this thing on your way while you're doing this other thing it's go get me this thing in this dungeon it's being guarded by something or another and so on and so forth he could be as creative with those kinds of quests as you want to be and you can make them as complex as you want to be right but going and collecting of X is not a creative side quest is not something that makes me go ooh the writing and this is really good so the four days these guys just been standing here literally just four days just been standing here waiting for me to go get those feathers it's been several days it's it's had to have been at least two weeks since I've been back here an entire two weeks they're just standing there they're not tired or nothing they're just standing there no one started a fight no one's got tired of waiting around they just stood there like nothing else is going on okay recon team hostages now all right that was that was an awful lot of work for very little reward and to clarify here I don't mean the monetary rewards because obviously a ring of protection plus two is pretty damn good reward for something like that but I'm just talking about like I feel rewarded in a different way usually when I'm doing missions like this like I prefer a cool event to happen or a really good piece of dialogue or an interesting dialogue choice for just anything that's interesting other than get here have this really expensive ring I don't know I just I have not found one single thing that I have done in this game yet to be all that interesting I got to go find this gen LED I guess good finish this mission this is the only thing honestly that I've done that actually is holding my interest at all is this one quest and I have a feeling that they're just going to mishandle it it's interesting to me if it turns out that this lady did something to her kid because at least that's not as predictable as so many of the other quests in this game so far at least that kind of brings up some interesting questions at least okay so uh predictably nothing interesting at all she says she got mad at her son and I told him to go drown himself in the candle mirror lake Oh Oh No how could this have ever happened oh I'm such a terrible person right another reason this was so disappointing to me is not because I'm like some kind of [ __ ] sadist or something and I wanted to see her killer kid or any of that kind of stuff but it's because I saw at the end of this quest like out there on the horizon that what was gonna happen was that I was gonna get to finally make some kind of real moral decision about what to do with this woman like if she had done something to her kid then I get to mete out justice against her I get to put her in prison or I get the executor or I get to actually make a decision as a baron about what to do with her and it let me down because like with many of the other side quests this quest just ends it ends with a wet fart so of course wherever the kid ran away to it doesn't actually say on the map so now I gotta go looking around Candle Mirror Lake so I guess here we go right the [ __ ] is this okay all right then okay so I found the kid apparently apparently he went to go live with lizard people all right color me intrigued let's see where this goes so this is a weird one because I chose to use diplomacy first and failed I can no longer go back and do the option where I just use my alignment and now the only way I can talk to this person is to attack them or leave well I obviously can't leave unless them just don't leave the kid there so now I got to kill them oh well here we go guess you guys got to die [Music] I honestly do not know how the [ __ ] I managed to beat everybody in here with one character but I think that that shows you that having an AC of 33 is a little overpowered and yes I used probably every single potion I had my bag but she literally killed like eight creatures on her own this game has some really [ __ ] up weird things going on attack these two guys over here these three guys appeared from below here and then I scroll over and then there's three of these guys over here and I'm like okay well you know what I could probably handle this nope no can't handle that gonna [ __ ] die I just got done fighting these three guys over here so you would think if I fought these three guys here that these guys would all come running right at that point but no they literally don't come running until you fight these guys and then they come in ambushed he's [ __ ] it to Thor's standing off to the back [ __ ] is ridiculous man this is why I don't like playing on normal cuz it's like it [ __ ] like this where it's like how the [ __ ] would you ever ever survive this [Music] all right god damn I really did not think it was gonna be possible to win this all right well there you go [Music] I have no choice but to give him this lizard no choice at all doesn't seem like a very good action or a nice action I didn't have the ability to do anything else to suss out who this guy is or maybe figure out a way to make him reveal himself nothing like that or at least nothing that was very obvious to me I'm sure there was a way to do it and gave him the lizard and then the boy just runs off he's like alright I'm gonna go see my mom now it's like kid do you know how many [ __ ] things I had to kill to get here to get you and you're just gonna run off and [ __ ] like that [ __ ] there have been maybe I don't know dialogue or some [ __ ] with the kid maybe like you know maybe we should take him back to his mother I don't know am I being too picky here it's just weird all of the quests kind of end without like a whole lot of closure you know what I mean so now there's just this evil presence just kind of walking around at [ __ ] I'm sure that he has something to do with that candle lake whatever the hell it is keep in the middle of the lake and at some point I'll go there and figure out what the hell that's all about maybe that'll lead somewhere but every mission in this game so far has just ended without fanfare or [ __ ] applause or just anything it's just they just end and that's it it's not very satisfying to finish a mission in this game I keep wondering like am i just am I just being a dick [Music] well you know what a shoulder shrug er of a [ __ ] quest that was man it ended with a her rump you go through all this effort you travel all this way you spend weeks of in-game time trying to like do that quest right and yeah it's just oh thank you you're so great I love you oh you're so awesome no lessons to be learned nothing No why did you do this to your son none of that guy's just this just yeah thank you get three loyalty cool see ya that's what this this game is missing it's missing writing it's missing writing and stakes it's missing stakes nothing at stake and this is this is about this map this is I gotta say this is the most annoying thing about this game can this go any faster like I'm gonna look in the options right now and see if there's any way to make this [ __ ] go any faster because this seriously is so [ __ ] annoying like that is the slowest most painful thing to sit there and watch I feel like most of my game time is spent watching that [ __ ] bigger move across the [ __ ] world map and it is the most annoying thing ever no no there's no way to make that go any faster and it's like you're either you're either traveling or you're resting it's like I love the way that other games handle this where it's like all of this kind of [ __ ] is not really a thing that you got to worry about it just sort of happens you know I'm saying you pick a place you want to travel to your characters travel there and if they're tired when you get there you're tired when they get there you just rest now to watch my slow drive from all the way down here to all the way up here for Valerie's personal quest so that I can have a conversation I guess man I sure do complain a lot like if it moved at this speed I'd be happy oh my god I'd be so happy if it just moved at that pace all the time [ __ ] me that'd be great I think that's about all I can do tonight or I should say that's about all I can take tonight I'm gonna rest my characters up and then I guess I'm gonna go write that conversation between those two was fairly interesting you know but it was between them too I kind of had nothing to do with it I made some decisions here and there but they weren't like impactful decisions they didn't mean anything and the dialogue that I got a chance to say was far from interesting so it's like I'm wondering if maybe if my intelligence was higher if I'd have more intelligent things to say in that case but it's like at the end of the day I don't want to play through this entire game again just to see with all of the frustrations and things that are culminating with this I just don't know that I want to play it again there just doesn't seem to be replay value in it for me like maybe if that world map was different and you could just auto travel to places and then it would calculate how long it took you to get there or it would calculate whether or not you ran into something on the way and just spared you all of this mindless [ __ ] I might not have a problem with it but it just wastes too much of your [ __ ] time with worthless [ __ ] okay so I feel like I need to talk about this so it's day four and my cat is crying it's day four and I'm at this point with the game where I feel like I'm really irritated by it and I'm he rotated by a lot of the systems in it and I'm just I'm generally just not having a good time at the game and I'm starting to think that maybe it was just my opinion like I'm just not in a good mental state to play the game or something else right so I never do this but I went out and I looked up other reviews now let me tell you why I don't normally do this I don't normally do this because I don't like to have my reviews tainted by other people's opinions I like to come at it from a completely clean perspective not knowing what it is I'm getting into so I figured on the fourth day if I'm not enjoying it like and everybody is recommending it to me and telling me to play it then maybe there's something to this like maybe I'm just not having a good time because of external reasons or something but sure enough I went out there and I saw that all of the complaints that I was having were the same complaints that other people were having that the stories dry it seems to take too long to get going the map screen is a chore to go through some people didn't have that complaint they had complaints about the stability I haven't had any stability problems yet but of course I haven't gotten to a point where I can't finish the game because of a bug so yeah that could still happen but I'm generally not running into stability problems I'm just running into problems generally with all the different systems in the game so I'm not sure what the deal is but it seems like a lot of people have agreed you know it's a 6.0 which 6.0 is on review sites that that usually means it's a 4 it's just not a good game below average at best and that's pretty much what I feel like it is I feel like it's like a 4 even in its current state after as many patches as they put out I still think it's like a 4 and it kind of hurts a little bit because I was really looking forward to a game set in a pathfinder campaign setting I didn't realise though just how bad the campaign is and just how overly complicated the character progression system is and Pathfinder like I use a homebrew when I do tabletop sessions and I just wasn't prepared for just how bland that this was gonna be so we're all I'm just really disappointed I'm gonna keep playing it but it's like I'm forcing myself to do this you realize all right so this is day five of this whole journey with this game and yeah I found an error finally you know I thought maybe I was gonna get away with this game without actually finding a [ __ ] bug but here we are and the problem is is I'm not even sure if it's a bug it might have been designed this way intentionally but if it was what a stupid [ __ ] design so I started creating an alchemist house before I even knew I could get bakit right and bakken one of his requirements are is that you go find him some berries and [ __ ] you know standard goddamn RPG fetch quest [ __ ] you do it and then he says okay well I'll come work for you if you give me my own place my own Alchemist house so I created his alchemist house and but I had already started it before I started his quest guess what I haven't I am NOT able to tell him that I have created his place for him so I am never gonna be able to get bakken simply by simply by the fact that you know I created the house beforehand so I'm gonna go back to town and I'm gonna see if I can actually destroy the house and then recreate the [ __ ] house losing the BP that I put into it but we're gonna see if that works to house Leto I just found out that bakken is not actually an advisor I had to go online to figure this out even though it says he will work for your court as an alchemist and all he needs is a house he never actually moves into the [ __ ] house he just stays at Oleg's so how is he in any respect working for you there's just a lot of things that this game doesn't take into consideration when it comes to user experience and it's super [ __ ] frustrating it doesn't take into account that there are certain things that I the player am expecting to happen what you say in the game is what you do so don't tell me to do things like wait for the fog to clear and then [ __ ] ruin my game because I expected the fog the clear at some point don't tell me that you're gonna come and work for my kingdom and then stay all the way up north with Oleg even though I you a [ __ ] house several days away from where you currently are living it doesn't make any [ __ ] sense so much of this game doesn't make any sense is [ __ ] perplexing his [ __ ] and unfortunately I think about these kind of things if I just played the game it didn't think about it then that'd be one thing but I unfortunately think about these things I'm expecting certain things to happen and I'm pretty Johnny won the [ __ ] spot when it comes to making sure they happen and unfortunately what I'm finding is that nine times out of ten when the game says it's gonna do something may [ __ ] it doesn't it's lazy design it's not only lazy design but it's also at times on intuitive design because I have a feeling this game was just not user tested it was beta tested and a lot of emphasis was put on the beta testing part of it without the forethought to think that well maybe we shouldn't put so much you know emphasis on what people think because people don't really know what they want I know Blizzard said this and got a lot of [ __ ] slack right but here's the thing it's true now I should probably clarify this because I babbled on about this for a while I never really made a whole lot of sense but the reason the whole reason that we do user testing and not just push out a bunch of beta tests all the time is that in fact players can't really at times express why they're angry with a system why they're frustrated with it they just know that they don't like it right so when you do a survey of these players after they've played the game you're usually asking questions like how did you feel about the x y&z system right and then no rated on a quantitative scale of like one to five one being I hated it you know five being I loved it and they'll rate their responses and then every once in a while you have a qualitative question which is essentially a subjective measurement and subjectively they're supposed to express their feelings but what you find is that it the players really do struggle with expressing why they didn't like something so it's then the researchers job to interpret what it was they were having trouble with either through looking at the video of them playing the game and seeing what exactly they were struggling with and then interpret that data and then presented to a dev so that they can then come up with solutions to that problem to keep people from struggling with it that's what user testing is good at and this game just smacks of not having had any of it done so here's a fun fact when I first played this game I had my advisor because I went to the fort across the skunk River now I thought that area was an automatic trigger but apparently it isn't I don't know why I saw it the first time I must have just been going to every place but I had actually been to this place beforehand as you can see I've already been here and there's a guy that you're supposed to get from here and unfortunately I can no longer get that guy because I had been to this forward already and for some reason he doesn't spawn anymore his cart doesn't get stuck in mud I just have missed that event completely even though I've already been here I've missed the event completely I don't have a treasurer and I'm not sure if I can actually get a treasurer now I now have to go online and see if there's another way to get a treasurer because there's so many events I can't do because I don't have a [ __ ] treasurer was there any forethought put into this game at all like I really don't understand this there's so much that you can't do because the game designers thought it would be a good idea to lock you out of certain whole swathes of the [ __ ] game by missing an event I'm sorry that's [ __ ] [ __ ] like you could get away with that and pen and paper because it's much more forgiving but you can't get away with that in a video game you simply cannot I am oh my god dude like if I counted how many times I have had to go in the internet to see what the result of one of my actions were because the game didn't tell me I have if I got paid to do that I I wouldn't have to work game is hilarious I can't even I can't even think it seriously anywhere it's so [ __ ] hilarious such terrible design such terrible design I don't even I can't even be bad at it anymore it's like I've never surprised when I read [ __ ] online now I'm never surprised so apparently if if I do these events in the wrong way even though the Ford across the skunk river is a mandatory event and you're supposed to trigger it on your way to troll trouble if it doesn't tree automatically and you end up doing chapter two without recruiting jubileus because it didn't trigger automatically on my playthrough he [ __ ] vanishes from the game and you don't get somebody to fill that spot until Bartholomew Delgado comes in but when does he come in I don't [ __ ] know at some point at some point who the [ __ ] knows when at some point we'll get him on [ __ ] real it's the height of too much look at the reviews on this game people are like this is the best game 8 what [ __ ] game are you playing is it a different game that I'm like this game is [ __ ] broken it's simply [ __ ] broken I mean it doesn't work and the stuff that isn't bugs this is what's this is what [ __ ] blows my mind the stuff that isn't bugs and is actually intentional is the worst stuff that's the worst stuff that has the worst impact on the game it's not even the bugs that have the worst impact it's the stuff that they planned the stuff that they planned and wanted to happen oh my god I'm sorry if you liked this game I'm sorry you're probably thinking wow this dude you know to [ __ ] he's talking about dude this is the experience that I'm having I'm having this experience where I'm just like I don't understand why there's things that aren't happening and I'm playing the game and there's things that are happening that I don't understand why and the game's not telling me and I have to go and depend on the Internet to tell me what the game should already be telling me oh look look at all this [ __ ] that I can't do look no treasurer can't do it right now there's some of these that are treasurer ones no event no available no available no available no available no available no available no available no available like it's there's like two or three of these tasks that I just can't do and and are they gonna run out like am I gonna lose [ __ ] because I didn't do this in time probably I don't know who knows maybe right because I have no treasurer so I can't I can't do anything about that oh my god somebody just [ __ ] murder me now man I got like 30 hours let the play at his game what was the point of that like you just you like you put an icon on my map to show some Bogard hunting-grounds and then I go in there and I just kill a bunch of burgers that's it just that's it I understand that not everything has to be some big sweeping epic and [ __ ] but I don't know maybe that maybe have something maybe then I'm like I'm at a loss for words like so many of these quests are just go here and kill some [ __ ] that's it just go here kill some [ __ ] my least favorite thing about this game is the combat so I'm I'm not exactly like playing this game for the combat I'm I'm playing it because I'm trying to get something else out of it if all I was playing this for was the combat I'd be pretty bored honestly nothing you do is like any impact it's really strange it's like for a game where if you miss an event you [ __ ] miss that event permanently you'd think the things you do would have a little more impact this is so frustrating I just I can't find I can't go five minutes without having some [ __ ] frustration with this game so look the cyclopses hitbox is so [ __ ] big it's literally a square right it's it's it's so big it's the fit all the way to here and then all the way to this corner but you can't see it because these guys are in the way their hitbox is interfering I want a Miri to move to this side of the Cyclops right I can't do that I can't get a Miri to move to the side of the Cyclops that out like having her go all the way to [ __ ] over here right because there's no place to put her I could maybe make her go there but I'm not sure that's gonna get her out of this cone of attack with the Cyclops right jesus [ __ ] christ look what she's doing why why are you going that way [ __ ] oh my god this game [ __ ] sucks so apparently this dude has a 360 cleave with his [ __ ] weapon cuz he just killed him II stand behind him [ __ ] me look now she finally finds her way to [ __ ] over there right and I'm dead doesn't matter dude this gameplay loop is so tedious walk around the open world [ __ ] tedious going from point to point to point to point to point slowly opening up more of the map than having to come all the way back to the kingdom to do some management [ __ ] cuz you can't let that go for too long because if you let that go for too long you might miss an event that you need to do and if you missed the event and your kingdom suffers and if your say if your kingdom [ __ ] fails then you fail and and it's just like it just forces you to go out do a little tiny sliver of a thing and then come back do a little tiny sliver of a thing and come back it's it's just a it's just a tedious [ __ ] grind man this is so tedious tedious tedious tedious tedious I feel like I'm having to critique every single bit of this game so the way that this game does exposition is that it just dumps it right on your lap without ceremony without any trouble on your part people tell you the most secret and intimate details of their life without even asking you if you give a [ __ ] now in other games like Baldur's Gate which this game oddly enough is being endlessly compared to as the spiritual successor to and baldur's gate you really had to like gain that companions trust you needed to ask them about it and sometimes they wouldn't even tell you sometimes you'd be like no you know what I'm not in the mood to talk about this and slowly and over time you would get these details about their lives now I know that she's mad because she found this guy and she saw that her dagger was in there and I get it that makes sense but the thing is is that there's another way to do this which is much better for me right as the player when she comes to you with this guy it would have been more like I want you to do something about this man he had my dagger in his bag and so on and so on and then it would be a kind of back and forth where he would be like look I can understand I can I can explain and then she'd be like no there's no explaining what you did I know how you got that dagger and that's all that matters this man deserves death whatever and then I would have to then investigate why she thinks he has the dagger why that's important and if I had enough trust with her she would tell me about the details of her death how she died how she was brought back and how she was missing all of her gear and how the only way he could have had that as if he was the guy who killed her what that would have been fine but the way this game does it it just dumps it right on your lap she's like here here have some have some exposition have some more okay that was a bit of a hot take born out of frustration but let's really talk about this so my idea of good dialogue is a back and forth a argument a debate a conversation whatever the case may be there's usually a back and forth here the problem with this game is that what happens is that it dumps you a bunch of exposition the person tells you how they feel tells you all of the circumstances of the event without being asked to and then you have to make a decision and once you make that decision that decisions final this is what happens and that's it and then usually the dialogue ends very shortly after that without you being able to redirect questions or ask anything else or what have you so my problem with this is like take this scenario I'm a PC and this other guys in NPC and I'm talking to him and he says you don't understand why I'm doing this I think it will help me understand I want to know why you're doing this and he goes well the people that I will save by doing this or in numerous you have no idea and I'm like yes but how many people are you going to sacrifice to save how many other people he goes as sacrifices are necessary to achieve my goals and then I say no sacrifice is ever necessary have you ever thought about another option of course I've thought about other options there you go well have you thought about this and then at that point when you get to that dialog then you have a list of things that could possibly be better than the thing that this guy is currently partaking in and then depending on what you choose you may very well sway this person right and then all those dialog options that you have they might be determined on how smart you are or how charismatic you are and that gives extra weight to the decisions you made in a stat screen you might want to give your barbarian a little bit of a charisma boost because you want to be able to convince people with things right and and that will then minimize the men maxing that you see you actually see people really role playing in the game but there's no chance for you to role play in this game because the dialog is so straightforward it's so binary or they might just get angry with you because you think I haven't thought of that of course I've thought of that right but that is a back and forth that is a conversation that not only helps you learn more about the other person in an interesting way but also gives you an option at least you think at the time to sway this person's beliefs or at least instill a sense of doubt in them that they know what it is that they think they know because that's what a hero does a hero tries to convince the villain that they're wrong and that's the problem that I have with this there's no chance for a back and forth there it the dialogue doesn't ever feel real it just feels like people talking at you and then you get to make a decision I asked my son I said what makes good dialogue to you and he said it's based on the impact that a decision I make has and I said but what determines that impact and he stopped for a minute and I went through this scenario with him he was like [ __ ] you're right that is it it's because I was engaged in the dialogue back and forth with them so that's the real problem I have with so much of the dialogue and that it doesn't flow organically and it doesn't feel like real people are talking to each other that's the real problem I have with this but this dialogue is literally some of the worst exposition dumps I have ever seen mishandled and just bad there's a reason why you use dialog branching in an RPG one it makes the player feel like they are actively searching for information they're actively doing something aside from just reading also there has to be conflict in the dialogue not conflict between these two but a triad now I've talked about this in my writing videos a lot a good conflict always has three people involved these two people have a conflict and I have a conflict with either the party member or the other person right but I get to choose that because I'm the player who do i side with who do I not side with now it seems like this has that but it doesn't have that until the very end like every other quest in this game I get to make one choice that's it I don't get to make a series of choices that will then influence the final choice like in any other RPG you know like Baldur's Gate which this came is being endlessly compared to I get to make one choice in one choice only so now of course I'm going to go do that quest because I want to make sure I get it done just because I never know when that quest is gonna disappear in this game you just never know [ __ ] it might have disappeared just by the mere fact of me [ __ ] resting who the hell knows so many things in this game just disappear without warning or fanfare done and done [Music] okay so I am completely getting ground down to a nub by this game and it's writing and it's let's just call it special logic that uses I don't want to get copyright flagged so you have a suspect in a crime in a possible crime and you bring them before the court and you have them testify but instead of holding them while you investigate their claims you just let them go let them go out and go about their business so that they can run away really this is medieval times man this is the Dark Ages people were put in Chains and put into dungeons until they awaited trial and you didn't just let them go about their [ __ ] business for this exact [ __ ] reason so the game is telling me that my character was stupid enough to just let that guy go run wild while we go investigate his claims okay sure I guess so there is no real end to this mission and I knew they were gonna [ __ ] it up at least that's what it looks like so far you know time will only tell but basically he disappears and now Jay Thal is gonna go and investigate and find him herself she says so that can mean a bunch of different things that can mean that she's just that that missions over and done with and what's it that missions done now as far as I can tell so maybe it might come up again or maybe it's just the kingdom mission that I have to assign or two so I've made a decision I am no longer going to worry about the kingdom management stuff because it is an absolute [ __ ] drag so and you'd also notice I've I put everything down to easy because I am just so I am so [ __ ] tired of even worrying about this so we're just gonna put it on auto I don't care about the kingdom I only care about exploring so I was just not gonna worry about it go ahead and just do whatever the hell I need to do just to have fun because the kingdom management I'm realizing this just it's making this game worse to play I don't want to feel like I'm angry all the time playing this game I just want to play the [ __ ] game I don't want to worry about the kingdom [ __ ] the kingdom if the kingdom management [ __ ] was fun that's one thing it's not it's it's boring it there's nothing to it so I just don't [ __ ] give a [ __ ] so I'm not gonna worry about it [ __ ] it I also want to point out right now that I have no clear goal I have no clear mission like what am I even doing right now what am I supposed to be doing I don't even know like I'm just I'm waiting 137 days for the next event to happen like this is so [ __ ] boring this is the most boring [ __ ] I've ever done like I'm just trying to find the bug right now that's it like I'm just trying to find something fun to do I'm gonna look at my journal real quick and see what it is that I'm actually supposed to be doing cuz I have no idea like I I killed the trolls and there's no new threat you know I mean there's no new threat I guess I have to go do this mission the game is not telling me I need to it's just telling me that I should as with the other quests when you don't do the entire quest you fail the main mission so I'm wondering if I don't do a just reward if I will fail the other [ __ ] that I'm supposed to do and of course here we are again with this like this never cleared so obviously it didn't happen even though I built in the laboratory and what's so frustrating about this is that this is this very simple change this is a very simple fix basically any mission that can make you fail and make your kingdom fail or just make you fail at the game should be marked differently in the map and it should be marked differently very clearly I'm not talking about a different stamp on the paper or something like I'm talking about text in red letters saying if you don't do this you will fail like requirement quest or something like that it's a very easy visual thing that you could do that could fix this problem of confusion what quest am I supposed to do which one's a main story quest and so on these are all easy questions to answer visually I don't know maybe a laboratory is different than the herbalist Hut I don't know I guess maybe I need to go take another look at that do you understand what I'm saying like there's no clear like goal here just you know just do [ __ ] go do [ __ ] what is it that I'm supposed to be doing right like in most journal systems they have here's the main quest this is the main thing that you're supposed to be doing go do that right and you can do nothing but that and just follow the whole game through and play the main mission but in this game it's like nah just get to this [ __ ] whenever you feel like it but no don't just get to it when you feel like it because if you don't you're gonna [ __ ] lose so why don't you tell me that why don't you tell me that if I don't do this thing this urgent [ __ ] thing that you're gonna make me fail the game [ __ ] tell me okay so I had to go on the internet again to find out whether or not I was missing something and apparently what happens is that you finished the troll quest and then you just spend literally months of in-game time [ __ ] around are you [ __ ] serious are you [ __ ] serious I gotta spend months of in-game time just [ __ ] around I don't like any of these quests that I'm doing right now there they they end unsatisfactorily the kingdom management [ __ ] is boring as [ __ ] there's a I'm not having fun with this game right now so I have to continue having not fun with this game for months of in-game time until an event finally decides that it's gonna spawn you know this is what I find ironic people gave Dragon Age Inquisition a lot of [ __ ] including myself for locking the main missions off behind power grinding it was a way to artificially pad how long that game actually was because in reality that game maybe had seven maybe eight main quests it was a very short game like if you could find a way to maximize your power output you could beat that game in like under 20 hours like no [ __ ] right or if you could find a way to hack the game that just give yourself infinite power and just go through the story missions that game is not long at all right and that was one of my criticisms was that I spent a lot of time doing a bunch of side [ __ ] and the main mission which has urgency with quote marks doesn't seem urgent because I'm I'm out doing a bunch of other [ __ ] that has nothing to do with this main thing I'm supposed to be doing this game doesn't even have the courtesy of having a main thing its main thing is [ __ ] around its main thing is we're trying to be a pen and paper game but we're not gonna give you any direction or any story to follow just go [ __ ] around and do things now that might have worked in a pen and paper game where the DM can cut through a bunch of the [ __ ] and decide that okay this is what we're doing and can spawn random events and things that are fun to do but in a video game I need a direction I need to find something that is keeping me occupied with the game unfortunately this game has none of that it has a bunch of [ __ ] around a bunch of [ __ ] around and that's it I am severely disappointed in this game so this is a little disappointing I started going into all the houses here in my town the houses seem to have gotten an upgrade they've gotten bigger which is kind of cool visually but when you go into these places none of the citizens have anything to say and I realize that all the houses just they're just empty houses essentially a lot of them don't have anybody in them when they do have people in them they don't say anything to you you can't gauging conversation with them and for some reason I went into this house whatever this house is and when you go in there there's a chest upstairs that has plus three full plate and when I get struck with a melee weapon that people get one D for slashing damage against them that's a really good piece of armor too just fine laying around in a chest in some random person's house where nobody lives so you know it behooves you to go inside these houses sometimes you'll find the best armor in the [ __ ] game in them but it's just odd to me that nobody says anything there's no conversations to be had in any of these places they're just empty just empty vessels everything is an empty vessel here it's sad because they could have done so much with this like it would have been nice if these if these houses were a way for you to pick up missions that you could do for the town's folk that way you actually felt like a baron like it made you feel like a baron like spider-man makes you feel like spider-man you know I mean like initially feel like you were doing something instead again the game just is rife with just [ __ ] kill missions and fetch missions nothing of substance so now that I've turned off all of the kingdom management [ __ ] let's see how this game plays let's see if everything that everybody's saying is true that when you turn all that off it's much more fun let's find out so I'm having some problems with rest off they want to try and tax Oleg's Trading Post and they're not giving me at all what I'm supposed to be getting right so I'm gonna go to rest of and I'm gonna see if I can actually engage in conversation with those people directly or if I need like an advisor to go do it for me so we're gonna find out here and see if we can actually do what makes sense like common sense let me go talk to them and see what the deal is so I'm not allowed to go back to rest off never again like I can't just go to rest off and talk to them and be like hey stop [ __ ] with me or have any kind of diplomatic relations with them I'm not allowed to do that person personally face to face with them without the game being like oh it'll end the game if you do that like what what kind of logic is that so at this point I've pretty much given up on just [ __ ] around and doing things missions stuff like that I've kind of just given up because literally every place that I've been to so far has just me been me going into a place killing everything there looting bodies and leaving that's [ __ ] boring there's no story to any of these places that you go to there's no quest there's no nothing you're just supposed to sit around and wait so guess what game I'm not gonna do this [ __ ] anymore you've broken me I'm going to skip a hundred and some-odd [ __ ] days just so I could get to the next event I don't care what [ __ ] happens I don't care what I miss I'm sick of this [ __ ] are you are you serious so now the game is going to give me a chance to skip time until the next event [Music] okay what is this what is this what is this temple of elk is been restored the back of their bed and uh what is this our investigation carries a curse well the day your barony is expanded now because South Laurel marshes okay this is absolutely tedious I just I just want to get to the next like story mission can I do that so at this point I felt like the game was actively fighting me like it was keeping me from actually doing the main story mission and when I was looking at all the barony things like did you notice that none of them had headlines none of them actually had the headline of what they were actually doing as far as like quest and barony assignments and things like that none of that stuff was labeled and it gets even worse that in later in the game you'll literally have boxes that are empty and say nothing and you'll have no idea what it was that happened so this whole system seemed like it was half-baked and it was it was made to patch a really big problem in the game for a majority of the audience that just didn't like the kingdom feature okay once again I get to a point where I'm not sure if this is a bug or a [ __ ] feature normally when I click on manage kingdom Affairs I am able to manage kingdom affairs but now when I click on it it says do you want to skip the time until the next event if I hit cancel it does nothing if I hit okay a day passes and I'm I'm not sure what the [ __ ] is going on is this what happens when you set it to auto I was very confused by this whole system of automatic kingdom management so what happened here what you just saw was me trying to figure out why it was that when I hit skip to the next event it said in the output in the little menu down there at the bottom right that only a day had passed when you can normally skip a day in the kingdom management why it was doing it this way and not actually skipping to the next event because you'll have to click that table several times in order to actually get to the next event so once again the UI it kind of eyes to you sometimes you'll skip and it'll go a day passes you'll be fatigued because for some reason you were standing around for however long time and pass and like ten days will go by and sometimes twenty days ago by sometimes thirty but no events happen at least that you can see happening or at least that the game even reports to you and then like on the fifth or sixth time you hit that table then that little barony management screen will pop up and it'll tell you what events have passed but it's inconsistent and that's the common refrain that I have about this game is that it's inconsistent its inconsistent in the things that it tells you it hides certain things in the background that it should tell you and it expects you to just know that it's not telling you these things there's so much that is left unsaid that could explain so many things and all they need to do is just message to the player that these sort of things are happening right now right it's it's most of this game's problems are UI related specifically and so much of this could be fixed by just fixing the journal so that it tells you how long it would be for you to be able to do certain quests when they will open up not assigning new quests when you can't do them that'll come later but these are just a few really easy ways to fix a lot of the problems in this game because this is kind of shitty this doesn't do what it's supposed to do when I set something to auto I expect me to not have to do [ __ ] but this game is now telling me that instead of it being automatic like what is said in the [ __ ] options I literally have to come here and manage this [ __ ] manually because because the gig because the game still requires me to come back here and click on his [ __ ] table so I got to go into the options and turn this off because what I want to do what I desire to do is to just push through the [ __ ] and get to the end of it what is going on am I not allowed to set this to non auto anymore it's not letting me click it it's not letting me what what dude what the [ __ ] oh my god am i [ __ ] now I can't go back to non-auto oh my god no no no this can't be no come on there's no [ __ ] way they would do something that stupid there's no [ __ ] way cuz how do I know if I'm gonna like it on autumn management when I hit it oh my god I got to go any internet again I got to go in the internet again to find out oh my god this game is so [ __ ] disaster so apparently you can't turn off kingdom management you're stuck with this for the rest of the [ __ ] game okay I'm fine irritated with this game and [ __ ] [ __ ] dialog god dammit I asked her a question I said did you steal the money she said I didn't steal it I didn't take a single coin of it for myself I please let me explain you see I've always dreamed of bauble blah blah blah she bought a [ __ ] print house right at least that's what I'm getting out of this she hasn't actually said she did it so I don't get a chance to say did you or did you not steal our [ __ ] money right instead I have to go and choose a [ __ ] decision right now no idea why she's doing it no idea what benefit it would be to me I don't get to ask her any more questions I just get to say yes or [ __ ] uh oh my god why is everything solved in one or two dialogue choices can there be some depth to this dialogue system [ __ ] is it begins and then it ends as quickly as you could [ __ ] possibly believe don't give me that look I trusted you and you're wasting my treasury on toys you are so sorry [ __ ] I should put you in [ __ ] prison I feel like I'm just running around babysitting people I feel like it's what I'm doing I'm just running around babysitting land going here killing everything going here killing that coming back listening to people complain is this what a king does cuz it [ __ ] that man who wants to be a king this is annoying and and this [ __ ] I can't I can't do anything about this I literally have to just sit here and keep doing this to pass the time as slowly as I possibly can it's just so bad it's just so bad this was a terrible way to handle this I just I don't what do I I can't turn it off it's like it's the whole game is ruined now I have just lived with this or go back hours from before I said it so a good way to have fix this problem is to not let people choose this in the middle of their game because the problem with this is that when you allow people to set it in the middle of the game you're setting an expectation if that expectation that they have fails and they have no way of reverting back those changes except to go back to an earlier save they're not gonna be happy so you make people set the auto mechanic at the beginning of the game and that's the only time you can set it you either have to live with it just managing itself or you have to restart the game that way people waste a hell of a lot less of their time now if I was in charge at this project and I had an unlimited budget which I'm sure this would require at this point because this kingdom building mechanic is so coupled with everything else in this game I would decouple this built this King to be a mechanic completely from the main storyline and allow people who want to just experience the story to do that in a seamless way and the people who want to do the built Kingdom building mechanic can experience the game the way you designed it [Music] [Music] so what you just saw there was me trying for the first time to beat this encounter with these guys and losing and then reloading and then fully buffing my team with every buff that I could possibly find and still losing and even losing sooner to these three war wisps okay now here's the problem I don't know what these war wisps are right so I'm gonna have to go into the bestiary and look this up because the game doesn't tell you on the game screen while you're fighting the [ __ ] things what exactly they are and how they can hurt you and and in fact I don't see a war wisp on here so I'm just going to assume it's a willow wisp and look at this big-ass entry that they have for this now here's the problem this doesn't tell me anything I mean yes it tells me all about the creatures what they are what they look like all that [ __ ] but it doesn't tell me anything useful like what are their immunities what kind of damage do they do what kind of damage are they immune to why am i [ __ ] dying to them constantly am I not just [ __ ] trouncing them what level are there are they what level should I be before I start trying to fight them anything that is [ __ ] useful does not exist innocence cyclopædia so once again I have to go get my Pathfinder books and look this [ __ ] up okay so here's what I'm eating in my bestiary book I have the first edition bestiary for Pathfinder right not bestiary one through ten but I have the first one okay so it only has an entry for will-o-wisp in here as well but here's what it tells me it tells me that a willow wisp is a challenge rating of six have no idea what the [ __ ] that means I'm assuming it means you need to be level six to kill them it says that they have an AC of twenty six they have a dexterity of twenty nine it tells me that they're also immune to magic so that's good to know there are me into all spells and spell like a bit abilities that allow spell resistance except magic missiles and maids I can magic missle them I have plenty of those and they have natural invisibility so they can kind of phase in and out right that's what's happening to me right now so okay so they're immune to magic here's the thing I'm not hitting them with magic so now again I have to go any internet and find out what war wisps are and what their abilities are and all that [ __ ] because they're obviously different than a willow is okay that's just the willow wisp that's not a [ __ ] war wisp what the [ __ ] man killing me here so there's no I can't find any information on a war wisp yeah no [ __ ] they're [ __ ] deadly Wow oh my god so I have to have immunity from electricity well let's see how do we figure this out so I guess there's probably a cleric spell that has immunity to electricity because that is what's kickin my ass so let's find out if we have anything like that or if I have to go all the way back to town to find something like that energy that isn't it just energy again I think old electricity oh [ __ ] awesome that's exactly what I need so we'll just go ahead and rest again and this is all allies within a 25-foot burst Center doncaster it lasts 10 minutes oh that's great okay so we're gonna try that and we're gonna see what happens who will prevail [Music] [Music] so it would seem that of course having a spell that will make you basically immune to lightning damage is quite good against creatures that only attack with lightning so yeah that's that's pretty great so I actually have a different opinion of this combat now I I think that I have been spoiled by other games that don't do [ __ ] like this where certain enemy types will just wreck your [ __ ] if you don't go in prepared so now I'm going to go about this game a little different now I'm gonna be super prepared for everything just like I used to be with other games back in the day I'm gonna be way more prepared for what's happening from now on so the combat is actually pretty [ __ ] good now that I've noticed and realized this but the problem still remains the problem being that in order meat for me to find out all the information I needed to know I needed to go dig up a pathfinder book that's a problem and that's a problem that a lot of people apparently have been having because it's just not obvious to people just like it wasn't obvious to me it should have been obvious though I was seeing lightning arc across all of my characters and [ __ ] just wrecking their [ __ ] I should have known that I'm gonna give this game's combat a little more respect than I have in the past it's actually pretty damn good it requires a lot more of you than just click on this so I'm pretty impressed I'm digging the [ __ ] out of this so far as far as the combat is concerned it took me up to now to realize it though and that's I think part of the problem that's that's part of the problem a lot of games do things where they will gate off content like this until you've learned the lessons that you need to learn and that's game design 101 the game designers of this game obviously cared more about this feeling like a Pathfinder game than did feeling like it's a game so that's I think that's my biggest problem with this so far now what's funny too is that they actually did something really fun and really smart at the beginning of this mission they introduced you with one willow s1 willow wisp that you should be able to kill without dying right they did that so that you wouldn't immediately get your [ __ ] pushed in that you would see oh there's willow wisp here mmm maybe I might want to put up some lightning resistance right but I wasn't thinking in that mind frame at the time so I'm gonna start paying way more attention to the combat because that seems to be the best thing about this game now that I've experienced what it can be like and what it requires of you as a player I'm kind of fascinated by it now I kind of want to go back in time and play the game again with this newfound knowledge so I know what you're saying right now you're saying what the [ __ ] is this guy talking about does he not know about the inspect key well yeah I didn't know about the inspect key here's a funny story I was editing all this footage together and a thought occurred to me I said to myself wait a minute what if there's actually a key for this I had written all this dialogue and everything for it and I ended up having to go back through the video and erase it because I went into the game as I was editing all this and the first tutorial screen on a loading screen it popped up was hit the Y key to inspect creatures I hit the Y key and what you know all the information for that creature displayed prominently for me now I want to talk about UX right like UX design is the or the UX research at least is the research into player behavior right so players typically they don't go through all the options and read what each and every single key does the reason why is that most players don't have a need for that ever since games stopped coming with manuals people stopped caring about what things do what tutorial ization in games as well has made it so that people just expect the game to tell them what it is they can do if it's important enough to know we find that in research that a lot of players don't even look at the options menus unless they come up against the problem that they want to find a solution for it right but this is a problem that I was just assuming there wasn't a solution for so what I propose here is that that first mission in the castle when it's being attacked in the very beginning of the game the first enemy that you fight the first thing that the game should tell you to do is hit why to inspect before you could do anything just that tutorial alone would change the tide of most combat scenarios in favor of the player because they have access to information they wouldn't know they already had now I'm willing to admit that not seeing a key and all that stuff that's probably my fault and it's probably every player's fault that doesn't do that but that's not the point like UX design is trying to predict player behavior so that they could design systems that will keep the player from hurting their own experience right that's the goal here and as far as I could tell in the first mission where they do this tutorial is a ssin which they do they don't mention at all that you can inspect monsters which this is the perfect time to do it they may mention it later on in the game but by that time chances are the players already hit disable tutorials because they get in the way and they're annoying so when you're designing tutorials you really have to design them to be compact quick explanations not huge big pages of text and the best way to tutorial eyes is to do it by example actively telling players they could do this and then allowing them to do that we're setting up a scenario where if they don't inspect this person they might not find out that their immunity is this and they can't progress those are ways that you can tutorial eyes a thing right I don't know if they're the best options or not but it's better than not knowing at all there was something that felt incomplete about that mission now first I want to start off positive here because I feel like I've been on the negative way too much so I want to start with something positive about this that was a pretty damn good mission from the structure of what enemies are around you the fact that I had to actually think about like what items I was using what spells I was using all that stuff to even just like the the enemy types the motivation of the main villain there and that story all of that stuff was superb I thought that was just fantastic but there's something that felt very incomplete at the end there and that's the fact that no matter what I discovered no matter what I discovered over here which is what I thought I was supposed to discover the fact that I discovered that it's NASA gah goo yaagh sawed-off Nagata whatever the [ __ ] it is that's not the god he thinks it is and even though I discovered that and then went back to talk to him I didn't get a chance to tell him hey dude this god you're thinking of bringing through is actually an elder god he's he's going to kill you he's just manipulating you I didn't get a chance to say that and I have a feeling it's probably because my stats aren't high enough and some regard or I just didn't pass a religion check but that's kind of the problem with a lot of the missions in this game is that I can never be sure why I can't do a specific thing and it's it makes it very difficult to do an analysis of this game when the game's not giving you information about why you failed to do a certain thing and I can only imagine what it's like to play as a brand new player to these types of games it must be absolutely befuddling because I can only imagine like if it's giving me a hard time and I've played nothing but D&D probably since I was a teenager I can't imagine what it's doing to other people I can't imagine what it's doing to brand-new players it's it's just something that I wanted to point out like because that could have been a really cool mission if I was able to bring up the fact that he's worshiping another god that he think he is just even if I could bring it up you know if I could bring it up then I would have felt really satisfied even if I didn't convince him that he was wrong I would have still been satisfied by the fact that I could bring that up but of course that's not something I could do okay so finally the second part of this quest the bald hilltop quest has begun from what I understand from reading on the internet because unfortunately that's what I needed to do to figure out the [ __ ] going on I have to finish this in order to get to the next part of the game but in order to get to the next part of the game I had to wait all of those days before it would happen so here we go we're gonna finally get to do the last part of this [ __ ] game or at least the last part of this chapter I think I'm only on chapter 3 and I think there's seven chapters I mean this game is overly long I've heard some reports that it took people over a hundred and forty hours to complete that's just too much [Music] [Music] [Music] so unlike in other games where when you rest in a safe location you don't have to worry about status effects they just go away unlike that convenience some of these effects are permanent like until you actually cure them with a spell the problem that I have with that is that you're not able to do that in town right so you literally have to go to a place remove all of the spells in your spell slots replace them with remove blindness rest remove the blindness and then you could go do whatever it is you need to do because right there I just screwed myself I started that mission without having removed the blindness first there are certain things that like I get with this game like I totally understand that they want this to be a really authentic experience and everything and I get it but there's just certain things that that are from pen and paper that just don't really work they're just not fun or engaging to do in a video game pen and paper game totally works because there's not systems that are hard and rigid they keep you from doing certain things there's hard and rigid things in a video game that a DM just can't just go now you can ignore that go ahead you can rest there it's fine let's just clear your blindness right but that doesn't happen in a game if it's a hard and rigid rule that's it really to fix that they should have just allowed status effects like this just fall off when you rest in a safe place meaning back at town and in in or in your own bed for [ __ ] sakes I mean make sure you die yes make sure that you walk back and forth back and forth until you die cool good job dude there I just want to remind you that all I wanted to do is just remove my [ __ ] blindness and Here I am dealing with this [ __ ] and this this happens a lot in pen and paper as well so I'm not gonna really complain that much but it's still it's [ __ ] it's [ __ ] annoying sorry I think this kind of [ __ ] is super annoying like she's not even using her sword this is what I mean like is she using a sword right now like do you have your sword equipped I can't tell I feel like nobody was using their sword just now because nobody had it in their hands guys one more [ __ ] time alright hopefully that worked okay I still have to rest one more time in order to heal everybody's blindness because just don't have enough spell slots for that what you're doing is you're just adding inconvenience to this whole process and again this is something that can be handled within the options menu like status effects clear when you rest in a safe place like you can make that be easy or normal difficulty default right but as far as I can tell there's no way to turn that on or off and the options so that's just like a it's just like a quality of life thing for people who don't want to deal with that right and you can make it even better by making it so that whenever you rest right for the people who just want to play the story and don't want to have to run back and forth from town to town to get you know 50 scrolls of restoration quality of life quality of life say it with me quality of life so while I was doing this while I was healing my blindness my kingdom stats went down because ravenous man-eaters are still rampaging and I haven't started the main questions because I'm too busy doing this stupid [ __ ] healing [ __ ] blindness oh my god [Music] that mission was pretty damn good now I'm gonna see what the ending of the mission was but it was pretty good I liked the combat was really good I had to really you know stay on top of things I had to be on my toes nothing was too overwhelming nothing absolutely shredded my group I had to make use of buffs as you can see here I had a bunch of buffs I had more than this on all of my characters at all time they used the time limit to great effect actually in this one because I was constantly aware that if I rested too much I wasn't going to get all of the trophies now whether or not that's true or not I don't know but it seemed true and therefore was very careful about resting so instead I actually started using some of the xt items in my inventory like potions and things that I wouldn't normally use healing spell scrolls spell scrolls in general I made use of a lot of different things in order to stay ahead of everybody else who was hunting that was great that was a great example of what this game can be like when the frustration sort of isn't in the foreground so that's great I really enjoyed that mission [Music] I just have a minor complaint here about this mission and I figure since I've been complaining so much I might as well complain about this when I first came to this mission area it was daytime and I came in here and I walked all around and I couldn't find anybody because the place was completely empty in the daytime I walked around couldn't find anything and I was like okay I guess I have to come back here at night so I had to exit the level watch a loading screen wait for the map to load in hit rest because I couldn't rest here the game wouldn't let me rest here and just do it the easy way I had to go outside rest outside pick night time so not even rest just wait come back in and now it spawns it's just one of those like little things where it could have been solved by a little icon right here that you click that says wait until night simple as that guys simple as that [Music] not a lie blown up all them people with their [ __ ] that [ __ ] was fantastic God there's nothing more satisfying than seeing like 30 people come running at you just to watch them all just go kablooey just burst in flames body parts flying everywhere odds fantast their minds of me and Nam something I'm starting to notice right now is that from this point on all of the missions that I have done so far have been great now I don't know if that's an effect of me just turning the kingdom management [ __ ] on to Otto and not having to worry about it or if it's an effect of the fact that just the mission structure and everything else just got better but I've noticed that I'm less confused now than I was before about what I'm supposed to be doing at any given time so it seems like just the writing of the quests has gotten better all of a sudden which is great because now I'm actually enjoying myself alright so here's the situation now that I fully understand what's going on here the when you set the kingdom management to Otto here's what happens instead of you just wandering around for hundreds of days exploring the map and doing little inane side quests stuff you will basically click the table as many times you need to until somebody comes up to you and says hey I got a new mission for you and then you start doing the mission here is the problem with that every time you click that table add a passage now not just a day passes a day passes without you getting any sleep so you get fatigued and you become exhausted if that happens and a mission begins immediately after you've done that and you haven't had a chance to sleep guess what you are that's right [ __ ] [Music] straight not not that's all and in its day proof I found nest untouched with eggs it be assigned alright once again the dialogue here rears its ugly [ __ ] head I don't know anything about what these guys are doing here like I know the minimal amount of information they're worshipping some lash to lamashtu there's some chief that's being an [ __ ] knowing some very little bit of information I am supposed to now make a decision but of course this decision is a allignment choice so while these are typically evil creatures I only have the choice of letting them live because if I go chaotic evil and kill them or lawful neutral and kill them well then I start to become more lawful neutral than I am lawful good and it's I don't even get to ask any questions like what are your plans if I let you live will you promise to stay in line things like that I don't even get to pursue that line of questioning I just have to make a decision so I'm gonna kill them because why would I take a chance it doesn't make any sense it's funny it's when the game gives me no choice but because I have no information about what a creatures plans are and it gives me a choice of whether or not to kill them nine times out of ten I'm gonna kill them because like if I don't know anything about what their plans are what they're doing here any of that stuff I'm gonna kill them but it's like you want that to be a moral choice that's not a moral choice that's a lack of information so the game wants me to and I quote come back to the shrine of Amash - on moon day whatever that is the first day of a week so the first day of what we how exactly would I figure out what the first day of a week is well your guess is as good as mine because I have no [ __ ] clue I open up the camp menu I am not seeing anything about these are the we there's just no information here there's just no information here so I kind of don't have any choice but to continue resting over and over and over again until I stumble upon the day of the week that I'm supposed to actually go there because neither does the journal or any other information is given to me for me to know otherwise so I can't make an informed decision aside from rest come in here watch a load screen talk to the dude find out this ain't the day go back out rest watch another load screen come back in watch another load screen talk to the guy my god oh my god this is so [ __ ] bad this is so bad this is like simple [ __ ] right here I got to once again a pattern is forming here once again I have to go on the internet to find information that should be contained in the [ __ ] game all I did was put in first day and it was like first day of the week yep we've got plenty of results for that I want to include this footage because I want you guys to see that I'm not the only one having this [ __ ] problem this is a big problem before the closest thing to calendars I've seen hold on a minute god damn it first thing I've seen are the counters at the top of the kingdom planning and camping screens but neither list like what day of the week it is is there a more sensible calendar somewhere the controls menu says that there's one behind the CK when in Kingdom planning mode but it isn't coming up for me I was just looking for this myself since I couldn't find any info about it I just went there and it worked I don't know I don't think the first of the week means anything might be they wanted days to be in the game I mean just look at all this stuff this is a bunch of people just like guessing guessing what it is but not being sure I mean it's stupid unknown day of the week the deadlines for dealing oh my god okay well I don't know I have no idea how to figure this out so here's what I have to do and you're gonna get to watch every bit of it I am going to have to camp until it works hooray b-roll footage of me resting and Kel Lesly going in and out of this [ __ ] place [ __ ] finally what a goddamn chore that was man you guys like seriously all this would have taken is a wait here until Monday icon I know I've said this twice now but that's literally all it would have taken for this to not have been a [ __ ] chore is [Music] [Music] [Music] I did [Music] [Music] [Music] now that was actually an example of what I would call a good mission like it was well written the structure was really nice it wasn't solved with a single dialogue choice there was levels to it I actually felt like I was actively investigating and I actually felt like I didn't know who was responsible at first like when I finally stumbled on to the fact that there was somebody in the back room and that they were working for those two people I actually thought it was the two people until I saw that she had a limp I actually felt like I solved that not that I just picked the choice it wasn't obvious it was just just really well done so what this tells me is that our cat is more than capable of doing this kind of thing the problem is they had way too much to do they had way too many quests to design way too many quests to write way too much dialogue way too much padding and filler and if they hadn't done any of the filler stuff made a smaller map with less [ __ ] on it they would have been able to make probably one of the best RPGs of this year that's a shame that's a real shame it's a real miss because this moment really shows me that there are times when this game absolutely shines and then there's other times when it's just terrible and unfortunately it's all due to the fact of this the size and scope of this game was just too much for them to handle it's goddamn shame [Music] once again a single dialogue choice solves all problems not a series of dialogue choices back and forth with the rioters to try and calm them down and talk sense into them no just one dialogue choice saves the day so at the close of day five I feel like I've learned a lot about this game there's a lot of things that I do actually like about it but it's just it's a shame because it's far outweighed by the things I dislike unfortunately and a lot of it comes down to I guess what I only I can describe as lazy design just lazy design that puts all of the onus on the player and none of the onus on the systems that are there to support the player just some of the very obvious design choices that were just obviously bad that got left in there because it would just be easier to leave them that way the fact that you could tell that al cat actually is capable of doing good quests but for some reason choose not to 90% of the time the fact that they are capable of doing good dialogue at times but again 90% of the time choose not to it just smacks of overwhelming the designers with way too much work I work in the industry so I know how these things go down when you have too much to do it's not a fact of your working too hard you're working too many hours of course there is that issue it's the fact that there's only so many hours in the day so when you see that they were struggling basically to get that much done it makes me wonder how many hours these people were working a day I've worked at places just in being an IT where people will sleep at their desks now I'm not saying they do that at EA i I've never seen anybody do that at EA I'm sure I'm sure people do it's funny to me they tried to do this much with this game succeeded in doing that much but at what cost the cost was the quality of the game and if they had just done less the quality of the game would have been so much better I think that there's a problem in game design now where what's being required of video games now is these these big sweeping world's full of [ __ ] to do and what ends up happening is that these games get designed with a checklist series of designs where we've got to have we got to have side quests that we gotta have a certain amount of side quests are we gonna have a certain amount of land mass for people to explore because people like to explore right and it's just like all you're doing is just putting in the same thing that everybody else is putting in and it waters down the quality of everything else around it now I know I've said this in other game reviews and a lot of people snort at that and they go cool huh yeah you're just miserable because you don't like video games whatever the [ __ ] the reason people get pissed off at me for having an opinion but the reason I did this review this way is so that you can see firsthand every single thing that I'm talking about oftentimes when I'm doing these reviews a lot of these little tiny issues I don't even write them down because it would take too much work to sit and write them down and I figured showing you the issues as I'm experiencing them seeing my thought processes while I'm doing it and seeing how these issues can cause the issues that they cause might help you understand why I come to the conclusions that I come to okay so day six funny story is actually looking forward to playing this game now so I think that we might be over the initial I don't know growing pains I guess we'll call it of the initial journey up to this point I'm no longer feeling like I have to complain like every five minutes about something so that is progress apparently I've spotted peaceful travelers oh [ __ ] please please let me find this dragon Lich oh my god this will become immediately my favorite [ __ ] game were made if you will let me find this [ __ ] dragon Lich oh my god here we go god damn it's game why must you [ __ ] on all of my hopes and my [ __ ] dreams why why must you [ __ ] on my hopes and dreams [Music] [Music] how in the [ __ ] was I supposed to do anything about that okay let's try to figure out what it was it happened here we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 we had over 21 enemies attacking us all at once [Music] [Music] [Music] so here's a fun fact web traps they can last [ __ ] forever I stepped away like let's say five minutes ago because he and her were both caught in that web trap he is still caught in that web trap five minutes [ __ ] later alright so we're gonna have to control fireball his ass hopefully that just destroys the web and it doesn't so Fire doesn't destroy the web let's just hit him with a fireball [ __ ] that even with a fireball but didn't get him out of the [ __ ] web so is he just doomed to never be able to get out of this [ __ ] web ok so here's a bug report that was reported in 2018 funny as hell so if you happen to be very low dexterity on one of your characters and gets hit by permanent dexterity debuff and then stuck in a trap then just hope you got a spell scroll or other two unhindered cuz he is getting stuck permanently stunned so look I understand exactly what you're going for here I'll cap but I want to speak to you directly right now some things just don't translate the games and I know that you think that this isn't a bug I know that you designed it purposely that way it's not about it being designed that way it's about it being needlessly a pain in the ass and not making any logical sense so it's like you want to adhere strictly to the rules of Pathfinder right well in Pathfinder I can burn away web this web is not made of glass it's not made of crystal it's made of [ __ ] web if I set fire to it it should burn away right so if you're gonna have a strict adherence to the rules have a strict adherence to the rules the other problem is that it's inconsistent so other permanent effects will not fall off if I rest but for some reason if I rest the permanent web effect will fall off that doesn't make any logical sense it's permanent right do you see what I'm saying here you don't even have logical consistency in your own rule set I have come to a place in this game now where I'm stuck right there was no safe place to rest in the city because the city was in [ __ ] ruins so I couldn't rest there there's no place to rest on the way here and I'm thinking the entire time that I'm under some kind of time with it like I have to get to this or shits gonna go real bad in a kingdom right I wasn't able to rest my guys are completely [ __ ] right now they need to rest in a safe place and get restored and the only place I could do that is Oleg's Trading Post which is two days and 14 hours away and it's not just that it's two days away it's that it's two days away and however much a way it is for me to do camping and all that [ __ ] on the way I really hope nothing [ __ ] bad happens to the kingdom because there's really nothing I can do about this right now [Music] come on I just want to yeah the lack of towns in this game is astounding I really don't understand what the point of not having towns in this game is so what I have learned from this experience is that not only do you need to have oh my god are you are you are you [ __ ] kidding me seriously come the [ __ ] on is there not one way to get across this [ __ ] River [Music] look okay I'm trying not to lose my [ __ ] here ah but it's real [ __ ] hard man it's real [ __ ] hard to not lose your [ __ ] [ __ ] I'm so goddamn mad right now dude I can't even I can't even [ __ ] stand it I'm so [ __ ] mad right now oh boy okay having what you think is enough supplies is not enough supplies I had 20 count them 20 healing scrolls 20 of them that was nowhere near enough I had 10 camping supplies my fault I didn't realize that wasn't gonna be enough it definitely [ __ ] wasn't enough so here I am paying the [ __ ] price for it never again will I ever leave town without the maximum amount of [ __ ] that I can afford to take with me that's what I have learned because you never know when the game is gonna screw you out of being able to resupply which it just has screwed me completely out of being able to resupply can I ask camping supplies end rations camping supplies and rations why why are they [ __ ] bundled together you don't use the camping supplies every time you camp you only use them when you're in a place where you can't hunt so why aren't they just rations and why do they weigh ten [ __ ] pounds shits ridiculous you can't bring the amount that you [ __ ] need because it weighs you down I'm literally gonna be carrying 300 pounds of [ __ ] that I don't need to carry all right so I've basically bought out everything that this guy has that's of any kind of use I'm just gonna have to stock up on these [ __ ] and carry about 56 pounds worth of the [ __ ] [Music] unfortunately I am not seeing anything for antidotes which really sucks ass because man are those things numerous in this place that I'm in currently so I might as well just buy a shitload more at ease like I have no place to resupply and me and this guy has [ __ ] this guy has nothing [ __ ] I'm completely [ __ ] right now I don't know if I'm gonna be able to even finish at least I'll be able to rest somewhere safe hopefully hopefully hopefully they haven't disabled being able to rest here that would oh my god that would break my heart oh thank god I mean this really points to how careful you need to be when you're designing your quests man because I can see an instance where this would have completely destroyed somebody's playthrough look at the amount of dexterity and constitution that my [ __ ] guy has right now I'm having to use so many of these restoration potions to get him back where he needs to be god I thought I only needed a few I'm glad I know better I'm glad that I know how bad this game likes to [ __ ] you because my god does it like to [ __ ] you I mean this is ridiculous like I'm sorry but this is absolutely ridiculous you know what my favorite part of a role-playing game is having to do this kind of [ __ ] constantly and all the time it's great it's so much fun so much fun and this looks like fun I can understand having one or two of those spiders that use that venom that basically can kill you but I've run into no less than [ __ ] 40 of these goddamn things in this place no less than 40 and they have killed me several times just once or twice [ __ ] several because you can't chug potions in the middle of a fight you can't chuck a bunch of restoration potions in the middle of a fight the trespasser you saw Nate Kingdom Isaac something same pathology as you saw to steal a kingdom for yourself so unless you do again a thousand times over true I'm gonna see if I can put this on easy the easiest mode there possibly can be because it requires a diamond to resurrect somebody and even on the easiest difficulty it still requires a [ __ ] diamond to resurrect someone do I have a scroll oh my god I do have a scroll I wonder if the scroll requires a [ __ ] diamond as well oh thank god it doesn't alright yeah did you notice that even though she was dead she came back with all of her debuff saans thanks game you're a [ __ ] [ __ ] wow that was an absolute word deal I gotta say that overall that mission was a lot of fun had a lot of different levels to it like I said I kind of liked that kind of thing it definitely had way more depth than just about any other mission that I've partaken in so far problem is those fights were not very well balanced I mean every single thing in there applied Constitution and dexterity damage so I basically had to use all 35 of the potions of restoration that I had gotten I had to use all 30 [ __ ] five in order to just make it out alive that's a little crazy man that's a little [ __ ] crazy so but overall that was fun that was a lot of [ __ ] fun I had a great time so I gotta say from where this game started to where it is currently it's fantastic now if this game went from being the worst experience I have ever had to being one of the best experiences I've had in a very long time that says a lot because the first 10 to 15 hours of this game is an absolute log but once you get past that man is this shift fun oh my god is it [ __ ] fun and I can't wait to play it a second time with a different kind of character just to see if there's a different outcomes for some of these missions because I'm pretty sure there is I mean I gotta say they had first impression after their first impressions over whoa game real the game gets real good after that but it's a matter of whether or not you could get past those first impressions first impressions are real hard to get past real hard to get fast I wanted to give up several times in this review and just say [ __ ] it I'm not doing this review like that's how bad it was so I'm real conflicted man it's like on one hand I want to recommend this game but on the other hand I know how much pain and frustration I was in playing it the entire time so it's it's I'm real conflicted this is what day 7 now unfortunately I have bought out all of bakken it bought out all his stock and used all of the restoration potions in that dungeon I mean every single one of them and now I have to rely on Scrolls which are real expensive Scrolls of restoration not even lesser restoration because that doesn't work on permanent effects at least that's what it says on the scroll so basically I have to go through the rest of however long it takes for him to replenish his stock without potions of restoration not to mention potions of like antidote and [ __ ] like that the problem with that is that every single enemy that I have run across in this chapter is poisonous like every one of them adds permanent afflictions to your character so it's it's real difficult to get through one or two flights without having an affliction on you and unfortunately these afflictions hit you for a lot of status affliction damage because the poison that they inflict inflicts that damage on you every turn or so so you have to make a fortitude save each time but unfortunately some of them are Constitution based and I believe that brings your fortitude saves down so ya get [ __ ] kid and the other problem with this is that this interface here is not very good at telling you when your characters are low on any given stat the only way you know is when your character dies and that's it so what the game is expecting you to do in the middle of a fight is like click the character and hit C and like look at their stats and say okay he's getting low I guess I better hit with a restoration it's it's ridiculous and the other thing is like look how much look how much my alignment has shifted simply because I cannot always pick a lawful good response like I'm about to shift over into neutral good and I and like through no fault of my own through no fault of my own completely the game's [ __ ] fault as far as I'm concerned because you haven't given me a chance to use lawful good responses so as far as I know when you shift alignments you basically lose all of your powers as a paladin because your god no longer speaks to you now I could be wrong but that's how I remember it working so I have to keep a really close eye on my alignment now first things that are just outside of my control again the dialogue rears its ugly head neutral good I can probably count on one hand how many times I've gotten a lawful good response choice it's mostly neutral good and chaotic good like I literally I don't know how I'm supposed to keep my alignment like do I choose neutral like if I choose neutral than does the circle come back around of the circle I don't know I don't know for a fact and the alignment shifts so minutely that I'm just not sure what I should do right now this is this is the problem that persists throughout this game I constantly am saying I don't know I don't know and I'm constantly having to go out on the internet find the information that there should be in the game so this is kind of a kick in the nuts right so I saw that there was a town not too far away from me it's Meg or varns town right I come here thinking oh you know maybe there's another place I can come to resupply only to find out that literally there's not a single building in here that I can enter not a single merchant in the entire town and all I get out of maegor barn is a couple lines of dialogue like what is the point at this town there's no trade to be had here I'm forced to come here instead of going wherever the hell I want like if varn hold opens up later and becomes like a bigger deal right then don't show me varn hole don't even let me go there don't waste my [ __ ] time now the part that I don't understand is that here's this thing that I'm supposed to be doing right it says the shirk is searching for his brother Tommen the missing man was last seen in our capital he'd meant to head for varn hole but never made it there so I'm thinking I gotta go on my way to Varna maybe somebody had seen something on the way but know nothing I came here for no [ __ ] reason at all so just don't know why this game wastes my time all the [ __ ] time like if if I was supposed to search my town maybe make that a little more clear to me because if you tell me he was on his way to varn hold I'm thinking he left my town but it's so the the quest entries and this is part of the problem is that they're so vaguely worded that you really just have no idea what it is you're supposed to do let alone even where to start looking so it says he's searching for his brother Tom and missing man last this was last seen in our capital he'd meant to head for varn hole but never made it there so does that mean he meant to go to foreign hold but never left my town what does that mean you know saying like if they had said never instead of never made it there but that he was never seen leaving the town then I know that he's in the town and I got a look therefore instead of giving you this vague [ __ ] and then having me travel all the way across the [ __ ] map on a wild goose chase and here we go here's another this is another reason why I say these poison creatures are getting on my [ __ ] nerves because there's so much goddamn poison in this area that any time one of these creatures hits me I'm just gonna assume I've lost some constitution anyway fun fun so I just wasted a shitload of time running all around town trying to find out where this guy went so I was right it is in varn holds lands except that and and and this is just the most infuriating thing about all of this okay I have no other main quests to follow this is the only one here's the problem I had to go any internet again what is this like the 20th [ __ ] time I've said this to find out where the hell this place is it's in Varna except you can't get there and you won't be able to get there without an escort for several weeks after they've already given you the [ __ ] mission what the [ __ ] why why who in their right mind would design a [ __ ] quest like this who would design a quest that you can't even [ __ ] do for a certain amount of time why would you give me the quest when I can't even [ __ ] do it why would you waste my [ __ ] time like that I am [ __ ] flabbergasted by this game they're like I said earlier on in this video there are times in this game shines like a [ __ ] jewel and there's other times when it's dog [ __ ] and this is just another and a [ __ ] many line of reasons why this game is [ __ ] broken and it's not even broken in a traditional way like buggy you know quest break or whatever not anymore it used to be that way it's just broken from a logic standpoint like I cannot for the life of me logic up a reason why anyone would design a quest like this [ __ ] ridiculous and I know what you're probably saying right now well why don't you just click the table and wait that's not the [ __ ] point dude in the comments with your come hither lips the point is is that I don't know that I'm supposed to wait weeks I don't know if this guy's in my town or not I don't know if he's laying in a ditch somewhere on the side of the street on the way there the point is is I don't know what the game [ __ ] expects of me as a player that's a problem there's no logical reason why you would give me a quest before I can actually [ __ ] do it and that's not to say that you can't give me a quest that's out of my level fine whatever it'll just sit in my [ __ ] question right like look at The Witcher 3 when The Witcher 3 doesn't want you to do a quest it tells you what level you need to be to do it right and I still hate that there's all these quests in my journal that I can't [ __ ] do but at least I know I can't do them at least I don't waste my [ __ ] time trying to do a goddamn quest that I can never [ __ ] do because I haven't met some arbitrary time limit that the game has going on in the background it wouldn't be so bad it wouldn't be so bad if I literally didn't have to wander around and do [ __ ] nothing for days at a time when I'm in the kingdom management when it's not Auto but it's even worse when I have to sit there click the table click the table click the table click the table waiting as weeks go by one click at a [ __ ] time so once again I've gotten another mission then I'm not exactly sure I can actually do because it's in our old once again and I could take the chance of crossing all of this here and see if there's a way over but I'm not gonna do that I'm not gonna waste my [ __ ] time I'm going to do the smart thing and just [ __ ] wait I'm gonna wait for the game to tell me I can go to var and hold and if it never tells me I can go to varn hold then you know what I think this is where I stop playing the [ __ ] game really I'm that fed up with the [ __ ] and the wasting of my [ __ ] time because honestly I don't have that much life left to live you know I'm getting old I'm getting too old for this [ __ ] but seriously man this games this game loves the waste your [ __ ] time [Music] all right I thought I was gonna be able to get through this fight without an annoyance but you see how [ __ ] huge this water elemental is because his hitbox is so [ __ ] big it starts here right and it goes all the way over here so the only choice that I have and because her I snap to her [ __ ] hitbox too and her hitbox is too [ __ ] big I can't place this fireball where I want so I either have to target it on him or I got a target in on her and unfortunately what I want to do is hit all of these guys in him and her with a fireball but I just cannot place it anywhere that makes sense get your opinion on this now that I've just passed the threshold of chapter 5 I guess this is now I have read online because I had no idea so I had to go out and look because I made my character a long sword paladin right long sword is like your your best bet when it comes to see RPGs because there's always more long swords than basically any other weapon in the game it's the most common weapon ever I mean it is really but I'll tell you I found no less than four different bastard swords with like really good properties I found no less than three great swords with really good properties maces daggers cook breeze out the [ __ ] ass all these exotic [ __ ] weapons but not a single [ __ ] long sword of note a plus one at most and a cold iron one for killing demons which I don't think I've [ __ ] fought one demon in this entire game so far so that's completely pointless but I've heard that in Chapter five you get access those long swords that are like +5 so what do you think about that it takes five five just to get the most common weapon ever nights used them for [ __ ] sakes man I this game has tried at every turn to force me to quit and I'm just not willing to [ __ ] do it man you're not gonna beat me game you're not gonna [ __ ] do it I'm gonna win you [ __ ] it doesn't want to be played it wants you to give up you're not gonna win game I've beaten shittier games than you friend you will not win I will win I am your master I don't understand this like so there's chaotic good and chaotic evil choices here and a choice that if I was you know writing this this would be chaotic neutral my Maya talking crow now if you said anything worth hearing that'd be impressive indeed right sounds like something the chaotic neutral person would say right but instead it's these two choices and this one right here which is I don't care where they go or what happens to them is somehow not a neutral option that's your that's your way to not shift your alignment right and you don't know this because you haven't been watching that long right but my alignment is [ __ ] borderline shifted I'm finding that this game is much better played with just having a website open with a walkthrough on it I feel ashamed that I even need to do that but the fact of the matter is there's so many obtuse and frankly opaque systems in this game that the game doesn't inform you of correctly now there might be something in a loading screen that says this but I found that that quite a few of these sub quest missions and quite a few of some of the main things that you need to do in a game they don't pop up unless you pass a perception check so let's just say that for instance you needed to go to this ruined Tower here for a mission but the first time you pass this area you didn't pass a perception tag check and instead of you know going from here to here and here and here again to find it you don't know that that ruined towers there you just know that it's somewhere here in Dunn's Wald Dunn's word right so you're just searching all around Dunn's word at this point looking for something that's here that you've already passed but it just so happened to not pet pop up when you did your perception check the first time so there's a good chance that you may never pop back over here to find this right and I've actually seen this with some of the main areas in the game where it's like can you imagine being a DM who works on a campaign for like five months and all your your friends are going down the road and everything and a Miss a perception check but because they missed that perception check if they didn't get to experience a whole party or module do you think that that DM is gonna just be willing to let that go do you think that that DM is gonna be like oh that's okay yeah they could just miss that whole part of the the quest that's fine I mean I worked on it for a month but you know whatever they didn't see it they didn't see it no most likely the DM is going to tell them in some way by either redirecting them there or by clues or just creating an NPC out of thin air that will direct them to that area in that location so that they don't miss that content right because that DM worked very hard on that and they don't want them to miss that content right and that's part of the problem with this is that it's very easy to miss content in this game because you just didn't pass a check that you didn't even know is happening and that's part of the problem see when you design a game like a pen and paper game the way that they did they're trying to be as close to pen and paper as they possibly can and there's a couple of problems with that first problem is is that a video game is a very rigid system it's either yes or it's no you either pass or you fail there's some room for grays in between but the way that this game is designed it's like if you fail that first time you fail and in the respect to these perception checks if you fail the first time you have to just inherently know that you got to go down this road two or three times maybe before you actually see something pop up that's just not intuitive to a person so what a DM will do is you'll go past something and they'll say hey roll a perception check and when they say that you're like what's up with that why are you making me roll of perception check that's weird right and then you roll a perception check maybe you failed maybe you passed but the DM is like yeah you don't see anything but you know something's there right now a good DM will say uh yeah there's nothing there and maybe there isn't anything there right but you're just doing that to kind of throw them off of your scent because you don't want them to know that every time you tell them to do a perception check that there's actually something there right but the game doesn't have that benefit the game doesn't stop you and go hey do a perception check real quick it doesn't do that it just does the perception check in the background and you're none the wiser to it so if you fail it you don't know you definitely want the player to know that something is up you don't want to lead them by the nose but at least tell them when they fail a perception check especially if they fail a perception check for a quest area that's just ridiculous I keep saying to myself god I wish I could stop playing this game because I don't like having to play with a strategy guide because I like there to be some [ __ ] surprise in the game but the only surprises that I've seemed to run into in this game are surprise you don't know where to [ __ ] you're supposed to go next surprise this system doesn't work as it should surprise the quest directions in this are obtuse at best and hard to understand those are the only surprises I get so I just like I don't want to continue playing it but I'm like forcing myself to do it I went and did a little bit of the next mission which is in the valley of the Dead it takes forever to get there because you have to go through mountains and basically the entire our time is just you waiting for the [ __ ] icon to get to the place you're supposed to go to it's tedious as [ __ ] but when I got there I very quickly realized that all the traps almost all the fights you're gonna be taking permanent ability damage I might have gotten into the second room before I realize like yeah [ __ ] I need to have way more supplies to prepare for this since none of the stores of restock they can't get potions but what I did do is I spent about 70 grand on restoration scrolls greater restoration schools the scrolls which are fantastic they will clear everything but they are really stupid expensive as you can see because it's about twenty-two hundred a piece [Music] picked up a bunch of these kind of scrolls just for emergencies just in case I run out of stuff I mean I should have plenty of potions but you never know man this game has been surprisingly resource intensive and I bought I have about a hundred and five diamond dust just in case I run out of restoration Scrolls which I'm pretty sure I will if this is anything like the last dungeon I had to do so I picked up like 105 of that unfortunately the restoration spell it requires that you have diamond dust too in fact it wasn't too expensive is about six grand I think for all 100 but that really starts to add up a lot so I sold off all the equipment I got from the last couple of missions and I ended up having about a hundred and seventy thousand gold unfortunately I don't have anything to spend it on but this kind of stuff I don't know it's just kind of disappointing like every time you use one of these scrolls or just like well that was 2 grand just like you know I mean every time you use one of these greater restorations you're just like oh yeah I just just pissed away $2,200 but anyway this is all just in preparation of the mission that I'm gonna go out on tomorrow hopefully so that'll be the end of day what is it 7:00 now alright this is day seven day eight I don't know I've lost track it doesn't matter so the next mission that I'm gonna do as I said before I've already seen the beginning of the mission and I did not like what I saw lots of status effects cloud kill while you're fighting [ __ ] giant zombies just overall just not a fun experience so and as you can see my guys already have status effects on them which is delightful so we're gonna find out what exactly I can do in this mission we're gonna find out how how big of a pain in the ass it is just to clarify I think that there's a way to make a challenging encounter that isn't a pain in the ass this is definitely not the way to do it [Music] [ __ ] this [ __ ] man what the [ __ ] okay so he tells them to go to the capital and for some reason I have no choice but to let them go to the capital so now I got goblins in my [ __ ] capital causing trouble and I I had to do it like I literally had to let them I had no [ __ ] choice like I could have done a lawful evil action which is expel them somehow that's an awful awful evil [ __ ] action how is that evil to send goblins away from your [ __ ] town how is that an evil action I do not understand this game it doesn't make any sense how is that an evil [ __ ] action so I tell knock-knock to deal with the [ __ ] problem and he says yeah you guys go to the capital and I just let them go I have no choice but this I can't stop them he go no no no no no no you're not going to the [ __ ] capital [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so I assume that you saw basically how long it took me to actually get to this place this is part of the problem with the travel system in this game the entire way from lamashtu lamashtu is tuned all the way to the actual location is through mountainous areas right so instead of making the time go by faster to signify it taking of a much longer time to get through that area and allowing your little chess piece to move faster which would have been more convenient to the player they make the chess piece move slower and time goes the same amount but you just move slow so you have no choice but to sit there and watch as this piece goes slowly to the next location but you also saw that I ran into no less than four or five random encounters on the way had to rest no less than six times on the way there nothing about that whole situation screams fun to me you know they didn't design baldur's gate 1 & 2 the way that they did because of a lack of you know like a lack of technology or limitations on their part they designed it the way they did because it was fun they didn't want the game to be a [ __ ] monotonous drag on your life and resources [Music] [Music] do I even need to go into why that was [ __ ] like literally she has what one of the highest perceptions that you could possibly have she has [ __ ] 20 perception he has 18 this guy has 14 she has 14 if every one of these guys was trying to detect whether or not there was a trap here why did none of them find it it just seems preposterous to me that you could possibly have a person with +20 perception who can possibly miss that there's a [ __ ] trap right in front of them you saw how long I was standing there too that's what's so frustrating with this game like am I supposed to kick something off manually that looks for traps is that how this works somebody [ __ ] tell me something [Music] [Music] what [Music] [Music] I was pondering what to do this pathetic creature Mahyar farmed this fool dared to claim the lands that belong to me [Music] no you look at me as if I committed some blasphemy hard they define my lands so I defiled them into [Music] well I gotta say I'm surprised by that mission it was surprisingly well done as far as the twists and turns that everything took surprisingly good even with all of the frustrations of the status effects and everything though I still find dialogue options to be the biggest downer in this game there's not a whole lot of good dialogue options for you like that dialogue would vortac I could have been so much better if I the player who was able to like explore more of his motivations also take it take a look at how many days it took me to get out of this valley but overall that was that was a really fun mission I mean if this game was nothing but these kinds of missions I I think I'd be okay with that unfortunately it's not and look a new place just revealed itself after I've already been through here twice I'm on chapter 5 now and they have restocked sort of some of these guys have some of them haven't I was hoping that I would find all manner of longsword but to my dismay no I found a call a cold iron longsword plus one which is barely useful as because as I said I don't think I've fought in one demon yet so cool yeah I'm the game I don't even know what to say at this point I've run out of things at critique so I swore to myself I wouldn't record any more footage because I'm just kind of tired of complaining but I ran into what is called a primal shambling mount now when you go and search for this on the internet you'll see final shambling mount in the temple of elk bloom primal sham is shambling mount unkillable screw-you primal shambling mound and just all these things for this be even a goddamn video just on killing this primal shambling mound now killing it is not the problem as you can see the [ __ ] is down I've got him down I have tried every kind of damage that I can try on this thing right I have tried every type of damage that I can to kill this guy and I tried fire ice lightning just makes it regenerate for some reason fire acid cold holy I'm getting ready to try right now we'll see if that [ __ ] works but literally everything I've tried has not killed this damn thing they said try inflict wounds let's try inflicting some [ __ ] wounds how about that problem is I don't think anybody has inflicted wins so we'll have to do this we have harm as well that might work try inflict wounds the problem is that there's a 50% chance this spell will fail so [Music] nope didn't kill him inflict let's see that it actually hit though let's see with inflict wounds it hit it hit it says spell was lost so I can't tell if it hit or if the spell was lost make up your [ __ ] mind game [ __ ] Christ right let's try two more let's waste two more spells on this goddamn thing let's see if it actually worked bail was lost again [ __ ] goddamn it oh my god do you see what I'm saying here this [ __ ] [Music] whoa okay [ __ ] inflict moderate wounds actually worked on that thing Nerissa trauma the first faithful promised him in all his followers apparent but Marisa ordered me only to lure you to the trap she never forbade me to protect you that's why I fought by your side in that battle so I'm supposed to find our Maggs tomb our Maggs tomb is actually right over here I looked it up on the internet because as you can see I've explored this entire area and I've been passed our Maggs tomb about I don't know five times went past it several times it never popped up so what I'm gonna do here real quick is I'm going to show you what I'm talking god I'm talking about so here's the flintlock Grasslands here's our Maggs tomb so like I said sometimes things don't pop up it's a perception of 24 some things think sometimes things just don't pop up for you and if I hadn't looked this up I would never know where our mags tomb is here's the thing there's a little side quest over here that you could do and if you succeed it's supposed to help you find our Maggs tomb that much easier the problem is is that this quest is bugged hi I was looking it up I was reading about it and it's bugged so I don't know if the quest is bugged out on me or if I just got really unlucky the last five or six times I went past this area so we're gonna do it again see what happens and if I just can't force it to appear oh my god there's so many [ __ ] random encounters in here look at how many are on the board right now okay anyway I'm gonna go pass it a couple more times and I'm gonna see what happens but I'm I'm certain that the game has either bugged out or this stupid [ __ ] perception system that they use to make things appear is a really dumb idea I mean can we agree that it's a really dumb idea to lock people out of main missions by a perception check that you cannot see and don't even know is happening in the background can we all [ __ ] agree to that I saw somewhere on the internet that if you log out and log back in then you'll be able to get this to appear so I'm gonna exit come back into the game and see if that fixes it if it doesn't then I'm stuck and honestly I think this is where I'm gonna draw the line like I'm not gonna force myself through this game anymore so we'll see what happens okay so I've restarted the game I'm back in let's see what happens [Music] no it's just not gonna come up time to search for the spot to rest no it's just not gonna come up yep the quest is either bugged out or I'm not actually supposed to do it yet it's either way I don't know yeah you know what I mean like the game isn't telling me one way or the other if I'm supposed to be doing the mission now or not so I really don't have much of a choice game's not leaving me a choice I [ __ ] quit I give up you win game you [ __ ] beat me finally you beat me the [ __ ] down just like I'm so tired of [ __ ] struggling against this game like I just want to play the story mission stop making me do dumb [ __ ] oh my god I feel like if like I just took a giant [ __ ] you know I mean you know how like when you just like all day you're sitting in your office and you can't leave the desk cause you got to get stuff done but you just got like a turd pressing against the [ __ ] two small ear back you know and you're just like oh my god I gotta get the [ __ ] out of here and like take care of this but I gotta finish what I'm doing and you finally take a [ __ ] and it just feels so good that's what I feel like right now it's like I don't ever have to come back and play this game you know what is so perplexing about this is that like I said when it's good it's good when it's bad which is for most of the runtime of this game so far for me when it's bad it's terrible it's absolutely [ __ ] when I go on the internet and I go to Pathfinder sorry it's really late it's like 2:20 in the [ __ ] morning and I look up reviews for this game and I see that this game in in its current state the way it is currently for me as I play it right is absolutely [ __ ] right and then I come here and I see I come here and I see a Metascore of 73 and a user score of 7.4 I can't help but say to myself am I missing something like am I missing something was like I don't understand like game star 86 game space 80 you know PC gamer gave it a 69 which that's even high for me man if I was to rate this game I would rate this game at like four four point five maybe I mean there's just too much that's wrong with it there's just way too much that's wrong with it too many frustrations too many systems that are tedious way too much tedium way too much tedium way too much time spent on that [ __ ] map way too much time spent on that map way too many things completely left up to RNG and way too many bugs game-breaking bugs in fact like bugs that you cannot [ __ ] get past like look at what happened to me 60 hours into the game and I can't proceed forward and I'm not sure if it's the game that's broken or or that the quest designer who made that specific quest is waiting for some artificial timer to go off in the background either way they're not telling me [ __ ] and I'm left completely in the dark just wandering the [ __ ] around trying to find [ __ ] do in the meantime while I wait around for the main quest like ask yourself like was Dragon Age Inquisition good was all that tedious grinding and [ __ ] for power levels good at the end of the day when you put all of the quests together in Dragon Age Inquisition that were related to the story was the game longer than 20 hours no and it's the same with this if you took the world map out and you made it like a baldur's gate world map where you just click on the place you want to go and you [ __ ] go there right and quest didn't take an artificial time limit to open up and there was no Kingdom mechanic how long does game be it'd be like 30 40 hours maybe tops all the other [ __ ] is just pointless man and again like I look at these scores and I just go what is it that I'm not understanding here like it's giving me it's giving me an existential crisis like but then I look at the actual user scores and I'm like okay I guess that makes sense you know the critics are mixed for the most part right but the user scores are just like insane like 221 people thought that this game was it was ten or over an eight look how many tens people were given his game ten tenten tenten tenten tenten tenten tenten why what is the ten about this it's a perfect game it's a perfect game huh perfect huh well you must have played a different game than me you must have played a completely different [ __ ] game to me because I had nothing but frustration bugs and [ __ ] so at the end of the day I just want to say that okay you know while I admire what you did and I do I mean this was a huge undertaking that you undertook I mean converting that rule set into something that was playable is a feat unto itself and there were genuinely some things that you did that I haven't seen a triple-a studio do because they're afraid do it and while this sounds like I've just been nothing but negative I want you to know from me to you that what you did is incredibly [ __ ] impressive I just hope that you see this and you decide that if you decide to do you know I don't know Rhys little room words next that maybe you take the lessons from this game and then you pour it over only the things that worked which is the mission structure the story and some of the dialogue I also hope that you strongly consider releasing mod tools' for this because seriously this whole effort was incredibly impressive the last time I've seen a direct port of the ruleset like this was in Neverwinter Nights Neverwinter Nights is of all-time my favorite RPG not because the games that released for it but because of the mod scene because of the DM toolset because of the fact that I was playing Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 online with my friends for several years after that game was released because it was the online dragons Dungeons & Dragons experience and you guys managed to pull that off with your game now give us the toolset and let us do it seriously please consider that because I know that this has been nothing but negative but god damn it what you guys managed to do is [ __ ] impressive there's just some things I'd like to see quality of life things that I'd like to see and I'd like to make my own and your [ __ ] engine I'll give you all of my money all of my money just please consider releasing a toolset Jesus please for the love of [ __ ] God please release the total set but anyway if you set through all that well I gotta tell you you're a [ __ ] trooper and I appreciate your time hopefully I didn't waste it like this game wasted mine and hopefully I saved you from wasting your time on this game and if you watch this and you were like you know what this all looks like pretty fun to me cool seriously I don't want a dished I don't want to you know abuse you your beliefs go go right on ahead and play you might like it right but this just wasn't for me you know this just was not for me it was funny Teague is like the story was good like it actually pulled me in when it was working but when it was bad it was just anyway I've said enough this has been a ran from strategy and now do you heard it go play some games

Channel: Strat-Edgy Productions

Views: 258,361

Keywords: Pathfinder Kingmaker review, Pathfinder: Kingmaker | A Look Through UX Eyes, uxresearch, ux, Pathfinder review, pathfinder video game, UI, GUI

Id: FDtkNokJ10A

Length: 220min 44sec (13244 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019