Recent reviews by Slifar

If you like games like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Knights, or Icewind Dale, you will love this game.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a CRPG pulling from the Pathfinder ruleset, which you probably already knew if you're here reading this in the first place. However, one of the first things that sets it apart is how faithfully it captures these rules. Those who have played Pathfinder before will immediately find themselves right at home, with the majority of the rules and mechanics working exactly as they do in the tabletop version. While the game does naturally offer fewer character options compared to the pen-and-paper game (Pathfinder has so many of them now that it'd be impossible to implement them all!), it still manages to offer more options than most any other game. And we haven't even seen the DLC yet! Each of the core classes is present, and they're joined by some of the "Base" classes such as Inquisitor, Magus, and Alchemist. Each class also comes with three additional archetypes that change up certain aspects of how the class works, such as making the Sorcerer cast using his INT stat instead of his CHA stat or making the Magus go from a melee-weapon class to a ranged-weapon class. It might not perfectly scratch every single itch imaginable, but it manages to give the tools to make the vast majority of character concepts one might think up for this sort of fantasy setting.

However, the game is not a complete 1:1 translation of Pathfinder. Some classes have been modified, usually minorly but sometimes more significantly, to try to help bring the overall power levels of all of them to a more even point. Those familiar with the tabletop game will know that in Pathfinder classes and archetypes tended to have a rather wide range of overall usefulness in power, ranging from the powerful Wizard that could easily chew through most problems to the Eldritch Scion Magus, who could be easily outperformed by other classes in all aspects. In fact, the Eldritch Scion magus is one of the more extreme examples of things that have been changed during the translation from tabletop to videogame: If the original Magus was a Wizard, then the Eldritch Scion is now a sorcerer, complete with regular Sorcerer bloodline and other goodies, as opposed to the strange wannabe-Bloodrager it was before.

The story is that of the Kingmaker module in Pathfinder, of course, though the developers have made small tweaks, and expanded and fleshed it out even further. It's not entirely new, and it's not the sort of super-amazing storytelling that we'd go on forever about, but it is GOOD. Characters have distinct personalities and motivations, and will respond to your actions and decisions in their own way based on that. Many initially appear as the stereotypical cliche's, but sitting down and peeling back the mask on the surface by listening to their banter, doing their quests, or even just talking to them, often reveals that, just as an actual person, these characters have more to them than the simple personas they project to the world.

Now, the game isn't all sunshine and rainbows. As of right now, it does have a few bugs. Most of these are fairly minor in my own personal experience, largely consisting of tooltip issues, but there are a few grosser ones that could require you to reload your game. Fortunately the game autosaves fairly regularly, and you can always easily quicksave by pressing f5. That said, the game's still in a much better position than many major titles. In my personal experience I've not even run into any bugs that affected my ability to play the game. They almost entirely consisted of strange behaviors with the tooltips. There was a single instance where the game forgot to place my character properly on entering a certain area and required me to reload, but the game also autosaves on area transitions so this didn't have any real impact on my progress (The bug has also since been fixed, it appears.) It may have its share of bugs, but if you're used to the messes that major titles like Assassins Creed and Elder Scrolls are on release than you probably won't even really register them. And the devs are working on fixes pretty quickly!

The game also doesn't do the best job of explaining many things to you. It'll tell you enough to get you to where you can play the game and explore its systems, but otherwise you're largely on your own. For example, it will recommend feats and spells for you to pick when leveling up, but it will never explain WHY it recommends these things, and occasionally the recommendations can seem a little odd. (Why is it recommending I take archery feats on this character that uses a melee weapon?) It also might not really explain how to actually use or work with certain features or options. For example, there is a Cleric archetype called Ecclesitheurge that grants the cleric the ability to change his second domain to any offered by his diety for purposes of preparing domain spells. The game tells you this, but what it doesn't tell you is that this means that the game implements this by simply allowing you to prepare domain spells from any of the deity's domains. This isn't too big of an issue since realistically the descriptions are not particularly important outside of the leveling up process since the game takes care of most of the book keeping for you, but it can be annoying for those that like to really dig into their character development.

Buyer Beware: 19/20 of the times you die in this game will be due to a hacker.

Despite their claims to be implementing anti-cheat measures, the amount of players running wallhacks (Seeing players through walls), aimbots, and no recoil hacks is absolutely absurd.

Upon getting killed by a VERY obvious aimbot user (Killcam showed his camera snapping onto me through the cliffside multiple times) I went into the Replay section the game provides and viewed the replays for the last 20 games it has (It only keeps the most recent 20)

I was unable to find a single game in which there was not someone very, very obviously hacking within the replay. The most common hacks were wallhacks (Players would very obviously track other players through walls, to the point of managing to follow them halfway across the map without ever seeing them regardless of hiding places/changes in path/obstructions in line of sight/etc) and no recoil hacks (It was very common for people to just hold down the trigger and spray without their reticle ever even slightly leaving their target, regardless of gun used.) Behind these two, but still often enough, were aimbots, which were at least courteous enough to be really freaking obvious by just snapping their crosshairs to players as they look around and "cycle" through their potential targets. This occurs even if they have no line of sight to said target, mind.

It's a shame, really. The problem is so bad that it's starting to become a defining point for the game itself, and that's never a good thing.