Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Review after 100%

what's going on everybody mortem here this time bringing you my review of pathfinder kingmaker after 100 so if you are new to my channel something i like to do is review games after i 100 them there is a link to my steam page on my channel you can look into if you want to see some proof of that i suppose but moreover i do this to kind of set myself apart from other reviewers on youtube and things like that and in addition to that i love crpgs so i just kind of in my spare time make my way through them and put up reviews and story series about crpg so if you're interested that's kind of what my channel is about i love the divinity series i have a ton of stuff on that as well as like lore videos and things like that so jumping into it what is pathfinder king maker pathfinder king maker is a crpg set in the pathfinder universe where the objective is to of course you know play through the story as well as manage a kingdom as a side activity that's like the big hook of the game is the kingdom management king maker can be real time with pause or turn based you can toggle that on or off something i like to do at the start of these videos is just kind of cover the story just to get it out of the way that said i am planning on doing a story series for this game in like the next week or two so because of that i'm just going to kind of skim through it as opposed to the more detailed version i usually give but regardless uh spoilers obviously if you were looking for a review there's probably going to be some regardless but story spoilers right here i'll try to remember to put a time stamp down below that you can skip ahead on but with that in mind our story for kingmaker begins at a party thrown by one jamandi aldouri she is a member of the sword lords the aldori sword lord they are a member of the country of brevo which is divided into rostland and izia who are at each other's throats the sword lords and their counterpart house sertova are kind of like the ruling parties of those two individual countries it would seem and ever since their like leader who had united them disappeared they've been at each other's throats so jumandi has invited all these people to this party because she is looking for adventurers to send to the stolen lands or they can establish baronies this is a legal loophole that allows jumandi to gain allies in what she suspects to be an upcoming confrontation with house certova of isia that's kind of the setup but what we are actually doing is we make our character and we are one of the people that jamandi is sending out to the stolen lands to claim a bearing our job here is to go to the stolen lands particularly an area called the shrike and take care of abandoned leader in the area known as the stag lord the stag lord is a bandit leader just to be clear the guy's abandoned he's not an actual ruler but while you're doing this you will be helped by a nymph because the stolen lands are a particularly wild area of golarion which is like the world of pathfinder so this nymph kind of gives you hints and stuff is where to go to defeat the stag lord and then once you finally defeat the stag lord you report back to jumandi and you get to establish your own barony from here shortly after this that nymph actually betrays you and tries to have you killed and as you progress through the game you'll find out that as problems start arising in your kingdom that that nymph is actually been cursed by one of the eldest the eldest are sort of like demi gods that reside in a place called the first world which is like a rough draft that the gods worked on before they made the actual world the eldest are the strongest of their creations of the first world this nymph did something to piss one of them off and it cursed her she is required to destroy a thousand nations to make this up to the eldest that she upset and then the curse will be removed this nymph goes around helping people establish nations and then destroy them so it counts towards her thousand nation total we learn this for the first couple chapters of the game and then she starts sending us problems we handle those problems ultimately it comes to a head where you have to either you know find a way to get rid of this nymph permanently remove her from her curse destroy the eldest that caused the curse there's multiple endings all sorts of stuff like that and that's just a brief run through the story because again i'm doing a full story series on it before too long this is roughly where the people who hit the spoiler skip should be rejoining us so let's talk about the rest of the game when we start up a new game we will actually be given a choice to play through one of the two dlcs or the actual main campaign so let me explain this the dlc varnholds lot actually takes place roughly at the same time as the start of the actual game and it involves a neighboring barony that was established because jamandi didn't just send you and your party the neighboring country was of course actually called varnhold and you play megar varn the guy who actually establishes that barony and you kind of go through the events that lead up to chapter four in the main campaign this is cool because you can import the save and consequences from that into your main campaign and kind of see that interact and play out with each other the other dlc is called beneath the stolen lands there are two modes to it there is actually the roguelike mode which if you're picking it at the start of the game is what you would actually be playing it's just a dungeon crawler it's a neat little dlc i thought it was cool it's self-contained for the most part and then there is a separate version of beneath the stolen lands that is part of the main campaign where it's just a dungeon that unlocks as you progress through the main story and you get some extra rewards and cool stuff for the main story as well overall pretty solid dlc once you choose one of those three to start with you can kind of adjust the difficulty settings to kingmaker's credit there's a lot you can do with this difficulty stuff it has presets of course you're super easy you're easy you're normal you're hard and then there's what they call unfair difficulty you can choose last aslante mode i believe i'm saying that right which is essentially just like an iron man version of the game if your party gets killed you are permanently dead it's not as strict as most of these types that i've actually played it offers you multiple save slots auto saves however once that party dies it tends to wipe out all of those saves but it's a little lenient in that as long as you haven't been killed it gives you multiple save slots to choose from to reload from until of course your party's wiped out and then it deletes all of them but tons of options to adjust with the difficulty of this game but i want to say there's also a kingdom management part of the difficulty that i'm going to get in later i'm going to handle that separately that brings us to character creation i enjoy the character creation but unfortunately it suffers from the same problems that most crpgs suffer from and that if you don't have a ton of pre-knowledge of the pathfinder system you're probably going to have a bad time here at least the first go-around now truth be told i personally am more of a dnd guy some things that are specific to pathfinder i wasn't too aware of now for the most part i play a ton of these games i figured it out my point being i've actually made a video about this most crpgs fail this in that they seem to have expected you to have done 20 to 30 hours of reading before picking up and playing this game and that's fine i get it this is the type of game that has its audience with the table top rpg that it's associated with but if you want to bring in new players and actually keep this genre alive i think this is something that long term needs to be addressed other than that character creation i actually enjoy there's a ton of options ways upon ways to build characters each class has several subclasses you can multi-class to a degree there are no mythic paths which is a thing in pathfinder but you can like multi-class so each level you'll get a point so to speak to put into a class from all of these options and i think that's a fun way to kind of multi-class which is actually something you can do in dungeons and dragons anyway but again it's just kind of a cool thing you can do here and then the last two things i want to mention is that it doesn't really tell you this right here but if you are picking a primary spell casting class like a wizard or a priest or something you do actually have to manually prepare the spells you are learning so if you're playing a priest or a cleric or whatever and you have spells that your character is getting through their divine casting ability that's great but you have to go into their character menu to their spell book and manually assign those spells to their spell slots which makes sense it just took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure it out which is why i'm explaining it and that brings us to the last thing about character creation i want to mention and that is alignment alignment normally is just a fun way to role play but king maker takes that to the next level alignment is important specifically lawful or evil or chaotic or good or neutral or true neutral i should say being like neutral good or neutral evil doesn't really make much of a difference this is important because those are essentially in-game tags there will be choices in the game that require you to be of a certain alignment that is to say they require you to be lawful they require you to be evil they require you to be good it's usually not like requiring you to be lawful neutral it's usually like just one of those tags this is important because any decision with those tags has major consequences a lot of the choices in the game do still have consequences outside of that like you know whether or not you pass checks or not but any and every choice affected by one of those tags has huge consequences and usually changes the way either a quest or a situation changes out drastically and almost always affects an in-game slide so that brings us to the world of the stolen lands i want to talk about adventuring the kingdom management section and kind of the world building all a bit separately here so when it comes to world building they did a really good job pathfinder is a deep deep game in terms of lore they've got a lot going on they really dug into the kingdom side of it there's a lot of political intrigue going on in the background of this game which makes sense if your game's called king maker i mean fair enough you know but a lot of the way things are in king maker like you know this political intrigue and then the way that lands and classes and stuff are divided up if you have a lot of that knowledge it's going to pay off and you get to see that in game which i thought was really cool they did a really good job with the world building the other part of world building is adventuring in that world so when it comes to adventuring there's a few things i want to talk about that is the combat obviously and the unseen checks that the game is rolling for you like perception so in this game say you walk up to where a secret wall should be it's gonna roll an invisible check on whether or not you notice that you know wall that goes into another path or whatever that's fine the problem is is that it's never just extra stuff behind those walls it's never exclusively extra things i should say there are moments where seeing that wall is going to lead to better outcomes to quests and things which is normally fine even then you know because like you know did you discover the secret path around the back and then surprise an enemy or something fine okay sure i can deal with that the problem is is that king maker has endings that exclusively rely on you noticing a ton of stuff so to speak and because of that sometimes these unseen checks can opt you out of things that you can literally never knew were even an option which you know as someone who 100 percent at the game required me to go back and find so personally i didn't like that there was no real notice that i was even rolling a check on some of this stuff and that can be a little frustrating when you're going for the hundred percent i would say most people that's not going to probably bother you or you would even notice but you take a game like baldur's gate 3 where you walk into an area and it rolls that check and you will see that visual dice roll above your character's head where it's showing you that it's rolling for something it doesn't tell you what obviously but you know you just rolled and either passed or failed for something so that's interesting i prefer that method personally but when it comes to combat like i said it's a real time or turn based you can turn either or on or off so i always prefer games that have either or option the problem with that though is that it tends to be designed for one or the other this is a game that was designed for real time with paws and i usually try to play the mode that it was obviously designed for and while i'm glad the other option is an option it tends to be underwhelming which is kind of how i feel about the turn based in this game now when it comes to difficulty of the combat none of the difficulty in this game revolves around skill and i don't necessarily mean that in a mean way because that's kind of the nature of tabletop games which is this is based on it's just that combat in this game all ultimately boils down to knowing what you're fighting luck of the dice rolls and understanding the mechanics of what your enemies are doing so on unfair difficulty monsters do like 200 increased damage and stuff which is fine but again ultimately that just comes down to luck of your dice rolls like you know are you getting a crit at an opportune time or are you getting crit at an inopportune time stuff like that now the downside of this is that it makes the higher difficulties less difficult per se as like a skill thing and more that like you just have to go look up what you're fighting so you can use the appropriate spells and defenses to get past it i would say for every combat encounter on the unfair difficulty playthrough i basically just spent a lot of time researching those enemies and what they were weak to and what i could do to counter whatever they were doing so it's again it's less that it's difficult it's just like you gotta go look it up if anything i would say the unfair difficulty is unfair to your time and that's about it and that brings me to kingdom management here's the thing i hate the kingdom management in this game it's really bad so i have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this game and that is because you want to like this game you do it's cool you're enjoying yourself if you're into crpgs you'll be like yeah like this is cool i want to enjoy this and then the kingdom management is like i'd actually prefer that you didn't so jesus so the kingdom management will just fight you every step of the way this is why i talked about the kingdom management difficulty earlier and then i would talk about it here this wasn't a feature at release but these days you can just turn the kingdom management to automatic and that is that the game will handle it for you you can't even access it the only thing you can do is skip time to the next events but that brings me to my next point even if you turn the kingdom management to auto everything and i mean everything is timed in this game every single quest has a timer for the most part it's generous but if you don't know that you can fail even the main quest if you don't go fast enough which again i'm inherently okay with it's just that they are throwing the main quest at you they are throwing the kingdom management at you they are throwing companion quests at you there's like a dozen companions that all have their own quest that they are constantly bombarding you with if you want to explore the stolen lands because it's your first time in game guess what you can't because you are fighting a timer and it will punish you because of that there is an optimal way to play through this game where you will hit everything at the appropriate time as well as get the achievements you need so to speak if you're going for that there is an optimal way through this game and it drives me crazy because they won't just let you play the game so because of that auto mode helps it does help i will say it is dramatically less stressful if you turn automatic on and i highly recommend you do so that said turning automatic mode on actually turns off the associated kingdom management achievements in order to 100 the game i had to engage with this kingdom management system a lot and that's why i have such a strong opinion about it it's it's awful they did not implement this well i could see it maybe doing okay in the tabletop version of this adventure path that pathfinder has made simply because at a table the dm can adjust the rules as necessary to keep it fun a video game is less capable of doing that and i truly think this game suffers because of it so with kingdom management it's pretty all-encompassing you will be taking territories you will be building towns cities upgrading things getting artisans through all your territories like upgraded so they can bring you stuff and even on just basic normal difficulty you are going to be bombarded with tasks constantly again it gets even worse because there's these kingdom events you'll have to deal with which are like problems and opportunities basically problems need to be addressed because they can throw your kingdom into chaos every kingdom difficulty above effortless which is just above auto will cause your kingdom and your game to end if it falls below a certain level of unrest unrest being like a level system for your kingdom that gives you appropriate bonuses and stuff depending on how well your kingdom is doing so in addition to this you can appoint advisors to handle these events for you you get five at a base and then when you upgrade the associated five stats with those advisors you can get up to five more advisors as like a sub advisor to the main one and then from there you can have at a max 10 advisors handling these events for you but here's the thing some of those really only get like one or two people available for the role and depending on your choices in game those characters can die it is possible to screw yourself here if you are not playing on a difficulty where it is impossible to lose because of it i don't want to spoil too much but suffice to say it is again possible to permanently lock yourself into a situation where you no longer have any available advisors for a role and now unless you turn the difficulty of the kingdom management all the way to effortless where it won't actually cost you a game over you've essentially screwed yourself out of again just the advisor but more importantly also certain achievements if you were going for them but like didn't exactly know what to do yet i genuinely did not enjoy this kingdom management system in basically any regard i ultimately had to master it to get some of these achievements and that just made it worse like i hated this kingdom management part most of my deep problems with this game somehow stem from kingdom management i hate it last thing i want to talk about before we kind of wrap up is companions so companions there's a lot of them you don't have to take any of them with you you can ignore all of them you can choose to engage with all of them but in all seriousness i think there's like 10 i believe it actually was there's a lot some of them are dlc locked which is why i don't remember the exact number like i said everything is timed that includes their companion quests if you don't do them in the appropriate amount of time or before certain events happen those quests will fail so because of that once i got the achievement for doing all of the quests in a single playthrough i basically only focused on the companions i actually wanted to adventure with because it's very difficult to do all of them because of this everything is timed mantra that the game seems to enjoy so much all of the companions are pretty good i actually enjoyed the storyline for most of them some of the dlc ones are like a little on the light side you can tell they were just trying to like get it in there whereas most of the companions are heavily involved in the story pretty much all the way through all of them react to things all of them have things to say all of them have their own things going on all of them that can be advisors will approach that role in their own way the companions overall are very good i would talk about them individually but honestly there's just too many to do that without spending like 30 minutes on it so with that i'm gonna wrap up what i didn't like about the game and we will call it a review so things i genuinely did not enjoy as i mentioned kingdom management is at the top of that list it's awful i hate it i wish it wasn't here i get that it's part of the like adventure path for pathfinder so here we are god i hated it so much other things i don't like is that everything is timed like i get it it's again part of the adventure path but it stresses you out especially on your first playthrough especially if you're trying to juggle the kingdom management everything being timed is a real pain without knowing like you know beforehand what the optimal route through the game is you're gonna have a bad time i would bet and if i had to guess is probably why only seven percent of the people who have played this game have actually beaten it that is a real steam statistic feel free to go look it up that is incredibly low most games it runs like 20 to 30 because most people don't finish games nonetheless but seven is probably one of the lowest i've ever seen and lastly one of the other things i don't like and this is again a problem with crpgs is simply that all of the pre-required knowledge to play this game i spent i would probably estimate 20 to 30 hours just researching fights and stuff because i didn't know enough about the pathfinder system to figure it out myself and that's just a bad time and i hope crpgs in general will find some way of dealing with that i'm aware there's an in-game bestiary i probably could have used but sometimes you know it's easier to just read an internet article but my point is games like this have always suffered from a knowledge gap and pathfinder king maker is just another one on the list in that regard overall though is it worth the money if you see it on sale yeah absolutely buy it i would uh caution you going into it to just turn the kingdom management to auto if you don't care about the achievements and just enjoy the story for what it is other than how much i disliked kingdom management it was a good game i had fun playing it besides that so there you go guys there is my review of pathfinder kingmaker after 100 i hope you enjoyed it i should have a story series going up in the next week or two thank you so much for watching may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day you

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 92,743

Rating: 4.8825421 out of 5

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, Pathfinder, Kingmaker, Kingdom Management, Auto, Difficulty, Review, Tips, 100%, Classes, Builds, Story

Id: Gd449xyyZIE

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021