(2.5 / 4)
Also on: Linux, Macintosh
THE CURSE OF QUANTITY
To get things started, let me coin a possibly new term for a huge game - Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a real "blogbuster". I spent a total of 266 hours on it, during which all my writing stopped dead in its tracks. Now I'm finding it hard to get back into the groove. The content of all those hours spent included everything from having the time of my life, to experiencing the agony of restarting the game from scratch after roughly 40 hours, due to a bombardment of game-breaking bugs.
I've experienced a number of the games that inspired this one, and loved them all unequivocally. The Baldur's Gate saga, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment and Neverwinter Nights are classics I've returned to time and time again. Some of them rank among my favorites, as do the newer additions Pillars of Eternity and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. Albeit a must play for fans of the genre, in my book Pathfinder: Kingmaker ranks at the bottom of the list.
Writing about it feels like summarizing all the seasons of a long-running, highly uneven TV show in a single review, through all its highs and lows. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Now let's hope I won't have to live through them again, and yet I probably will someday.
THE WORLD OF GOLARION
The game begins in the world of Golarion, where you create your hero according to the popular Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Pathfinder ruleset. You recruit what companions you find, and embark on a quest to rid the curse-infested Stolen Lands of its current bandit lord, only to pick up the mantle yourself. From there you proceed to rule an ever-expanding barony, gaining allies and solving one crisis after another while growing in power through experience.
The game creates a rhythm, a cycle of questing followed by kingdom management and preparations, then back to questing again. The world map is huge, with tons of locations to visit, different monsters to fight and loot to find. Exploring is surprisingly and confusingly free-form, with a lot of time passing between major events with no major quests and apparently nothing going on. Without spoiling anything, the story eventually involves the Gods of Golarion and the First World of the Fey. This is a land of savage beauty and your rulership is undesired by its ancient, powerful lords.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker plays out through the familiar isometric perspective where you look down at your adventurers and the environments from above, as if being a God yourself. This makes the game feel suitably tabletop, as if the struggle is between yourself and the other Gods, acting out through the pawns on the board. Character control is indirect, with you giving the orders and your subjects trying to act accordingly. Whatever action they take, a roll of the dice determines success or failure.
I've been of different minds about the semi-realtime combat system since its dawn in Baldur's Gate. On one hand, it makes those easy, boring random battles pass thankfully quick. On the other hand, harder and longer encounters tend to clutter the screen with enemies and spell effects, making the situation an incomprehensible mess. Pathfinder: Kingmaker handles it neither better nor worse than its predecessors.
Technically, the game is a mixed bag. I admire the character portraits that make the personalities of every companion shine through, strengthened even further by the splendid voice acting. Amelia Tyler, the actress voicing a character called The Guardian of the Bloom, deserve special praise, displaying an astounding vocal range.
The musical score brings forth the fairytale aspect of the story, but fails to create the immortal, captivating tunes Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale did. Most disappointing are the bland environments. Although prettier than Neverwinter Nights', they evoke the same feeling of prefab building blocks scattered across a few maps on endless repeat. Very few locations stick to memory.
ONE GAME SPLIT IN HALF
But the further into the game you get, the more it expands. What initially seems like a straightforward computer role-playing experience becomes one of the most intricate and ambitious marathon games I've seen. It even divides into two different kinds of games after the first chapter, the major one being the familiar isometric CRPG and the other one a rudimentary kingdom management simulator. Both of them are brutally hard on their own, and combining the roles of adventurer and king is strange, thankless and overwhelming.
You might say Pathfinder: Kingmaker suffers from the curse of quantity. The bigger your game, the more flaws it may hold. A passion project for the small, first time studio Owlcat Games, it was published in late September 2018 by Deep Silver to little fanfare. It was initially in a truly sorry state. A series of glitched out, unwinnable side quests might have seemed like trifling matters, perhaps, until players reached the final chapter of the main story, where the consequences of not completing said side quests would make the game virtually unbeatable. Mind you, this was after playing for hundreds of hours. I started nicknaming the game "Patchfinder: Kingbreaker".
Granted, the people at Owlcat immediately set to work, hotfixing and patching the game into playability. However, the game starting to work as intended served to further illuminate some serious design flaws, particularly in kingdom management and encounter difficulty. These are especially prevalent towards the end, a part of the game that still can break any unexperienced player's campaign and throw it into a downward spiral of doom. This very nearly happened to me, although I'm somewhat experienced with the genre.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker communicates its systems very poorly. Consider finding all of the following out for yourself through trial and error: Managing your kingdom, you must heed the passing of time. Time is a precious resource in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Waste it needlessly - by resting after each fight, for instance - and you won't have time to train your advisors and prepare for unforeseen major events. If you fail some of these events, your populace might start worrying. Keep failing and they will riot. If they revolt, your kingdom collapses and the game is over.
To restore order, you need to spend a fortune in build points, the currency used within the kingdom simulator. Through weekly income you earn build points organically, but very slowly. You can, however, buy larger chunks of them through a specific merchant, using gold obtained through questing. This is very expensive, and will quickly drain your treasury. However, since there's not much else worth spending gold on - apart from backup spell scrolls - you might as well buy build points.
Does it sound complicated? Now, imagine nothing of the aforementioned being sufficiently explained in-game, and you get a sense of how abstruse this game really is. Granted, there are droves of difficulty options, even one that puts kingdom management on automatic. It's worth considering, if you came solely for the CRPG experience. You would miss out on the immersion of being overwhelmed with responsibility, and not much else.
A HEART OF TRADITIONAL QUESTING
These flaws also seep into to the heart of the game - the questing part. Balancing an RPG is difficult, since you have to consider stuff like numerous playstyles, player skills, difficulty settings and character level. That does still not excuse some of the absurd difficulty spikes you'll encounter, particularly in the first and last couple of chapters. The game should communicate what you need to prepare for, but it doesn't. Instead these encounters appear out of the blue, and only foreknowledge about what you'll meet can prepare you.
Of course, since Pathfinder: Kingmaker stems from tabletop rules, hardly anything is impossible. If you get lucky with the dice, you can win almost anything. This, however, prompts a whole lot of save-scumming. If you fail a roll, just reload and try again. The game even encourages that approach through a loading screen hint: "When in doubt, save". Recently my stance on CRPG:s have transitioned away from such practices - I mean, what's the point of dice rolls if they all eventually succeed anyway? Save-scumming breaks immersion. Tabletop RPG:s certainly don't work that way. Instead I prefer living with the consequences of a failed roll, making for some memorable, heartstopping moments in games such as Pillars of Eternity.
In Pathfinder: Kingmaker, such an approach is discouraged. Effects that drastically alter the difficulty of upcoming boss battles depend on random number generation. If you fail a certain skill check, the opportunity to nerf a boss battle might be lost. Living with such consequences is not only pointless, it's a downright bad choice. It's like choosing between save-scumming a little now, or a whole lot more later on. I cannot condone such design.
I might come across as a hater, which is certainly not the case. I like Pathfinder: Kingmaker a lot, and it is all because of one, great redeeming quality: its writing. With Owlcat enlisting the aid of veteran computer RPG writer Chris Avellone, the story is the adhesive that makes all the parts of the sprawling experience stick together to a fully-fledged, worthwhile epic.
WRITING TO DIE FOR
Framed like a fairy-tale, with Linzi the halfling bard - one of your companions - as the narrator, the story is surprisingly lighthearted and captivating, inviting you to be the co-author through a maze of complex moral choices. These will determine the alignment of your character and the kingdom you rule, and will have implications on the way the story plays out. There's room for an unusually good, steamy romance as well, with my dashing rogue Flint, king of Flintlands, wooing the charming, likeminded half-elf Octavia, a slave girl on the run from the tyrannical Technic League.
So good and rich is the writing, that I was sorely tempted to forgive all the game's transgressions and award it a full four star-rating. Your companions, apart from having the usual personal quests, play a vital part in the main campaign as well. They are all well developed, easily distinguishable from one another and fill a cruicial role in your governing body. The dialogue is well thought out, with the input from my most esteemed advisors even making me alter certain moral decisions.
Much to my dismay, I managed to miss out on one of these companions, again due to the game's failure to give me proper feedback. I only realised this during a glitched audience in my throne room, when a subject addressed an advisor that was not part of my government. "Who the hell is this guy talking to?" I wondered. An online search made me realise that I had missed Jubilost Narthropple, a gnome alchemist. To recruit him, I would've had to revisit an area I'd already explored. By then, it was already too late. He was forever gone from my campaign.
This one-sided conversation with a missing Jubilost is an indication of the monumental effort needed to design a story-driven RPG like Pathfinder: Kingmaker. In a game with such player freedom, covering all possibilities seems impossible. You cannot embark on such a project without a lot of passion. Owlcat displays all this passion through the splendid storytelling, but unfortunately show they have a lot to learn in other departments - especially when designing encounters, tutorials and environments. They also need to spend a month longer in Q&A before committing to a release.
I'll still remember Pathfinder: Kingmaker as a good game, and Owlcat's passion is the one quality that outshines everything else. We mustn't forget that this is their debut game, and it's an impressive, ambitious and promising one. Sure, they made mistakes, but they owned up to those mistakes by listening to their player base and responding quickly and efficiently. Many of the problems are gone. The ones that remain we can live with, albeit begrudgingly.
With such a mindset, they're bound to learn the industry quickly and raise through the ranks. The future is certainly looking bright for Owlcat, and we need to follow their progress closely.
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