3 6 people found this review helpful

Not Recommended 297.0 hrs on record

If you played this game on the difficulty that indicates it is "True pathfinder rules" you would be playing a game where it seems like the DM has never played pathfinder/the group playing for them would never want to play with them DMing again. Very early on it is apparent that everything is on a timer. You can choose to do some things and you'll get multiple notices that you're failing at other things because you can't do everything (that's realistic for a kingdom sim) even so far as to give you a game over which would make it apparent you need to reload months back in the game to make the right choices to avoid failing. The default save settings made many people early on decide the game wasn't worth it (only so many auto and quicksaves going back so far, so if you didnt manually save as frequently you had to go back hours into a boring campaign). The story and game play even with all the pathfinder choices in class building aren't actually fun enough nor are they interesting enough to struggle through.



Early on after release, seeing how badly/haphazardly they designed everything they threw in more and more difficulty and game settings options to alleviate this. One early example is going to a location you're given a quest for around level 3 or 4, and there is a willow the wisp with 30+ AC you simply can't hit unless you've done nothing but take magic missile on all of your characters. Right after that it sends you to an entire island full of them which stay invisible until you are upon them in groups of 4-6 that all cast chain lightning. This forces your party to beeline for a specific spell to protect your party from energy damage which then makes the island a cakewalk. Or you can reload save files until you get lucky enough to avoid the unavoidable based on how they designed the encounter (you make a skill check to climb a hill then half a dozen glass cannons nuke the party). Beyond that the kingdom management is cumbersome and a time sink without anything interesting going on until very late game.



Throughout the whole game you have a dozen things in your journal and you're always wondering what it is you're meant to be doing. It will indicate something is suddenly in an area that needs your vital attention or you will fail the game and need to resort to the internet to find out where so you don't inadvertently have to go back several boring hours of the game to try again.



Starting out on "normal" it already indicates that this is "easier" than pathfinder settings. This is false. In a tabletop game no GM/DM would make every encounter in a dungeon so difficult that you had to go and camp or bring hundreds of rations to rest. Even if you do go and rest since there is no real GM if your characters aren't super power gamed to have the stats for resting you'll get attacked while already out of resources. No DM i've ever played with has let you just rest over and over again, not to mention the rest in the game taking 19+ hours go by or the unmodded ranking up of your advisors in the game forcing 2 weeks to go by, when everything is time restricted. Going back to resting and being attacked, if your GM saw you barely survived a fight and then used a random table generator to determine what you were fighting (while out of spells) and thought a dozen level 12 mobs all with templates making them harder was a good idea, well.... I mean maybe a certain group of DND players still finds that enjoyable but for the most part aren't we in it for the story? The combat has never been at the forefront of an d20 based system and making this a non tactical combat adaption of a combat heavy campaign wasn't a good idea. Later in the game, no DM would have every monster you fight have level drain or ability drain forcing you to carry hundreds of restoration spells or rest so your healers could do what the scrolls can. No one would ever play with that GM again.



So from the get go it indicates "normal" is "easier" than pathfinder rules. Yes, there are a few things they buffed but those buffs are far outweighed by the poor encounter building in the game. And what they did to fix it was introduce more and more difficulty settings, and for any real "gamer" you would feel like you're letting yourself down by lowering the difficulty.



I slogged my way through normal without turning it down, with tabletop knowledge going back to the beginning of 3.5 and pathfinder and didn't find it fun I found it a grinding reloading nightmare, I can't even imagine how bad it was before official turn based mode was introduced. (Kudos to Owlcat games for going back to this already released game to introduce it, but even that causes so many bugs that the game is barely playable. Beyond that the community had already fixed this and many other issues players thought made the game garbage) Right now I give it a go every day trying to push through the boring campaign, click through hundreds of crappy events in the kingdom management necessary to continue (which they also made an option to automate because everyone though it was bad), and I just wish it was over a hundred+ hours ago. Nothing that I get to in the story is remotely worth pushing through to get to. You have to power-game your characters just to be effective (which I actually enjoy as an old school tabletop and CRPG player) but that should not be the case on NORMAL difficulty. Not only that, but believe or not, MOST PEOPLE have not played pathfinder and would just click through the character leveling with no clue what the ♥♥♥♥ was going on in the level up screens.



Maybe reassess who you put in charge of creating encounters for a real time with pause adaptation of pathfinder rules to a computer game next time, or perhaps, don't rely on rules written for a tabletop experience that a real life person can fudge to make the game more fun on the fly. If you are going to rely on those rules don't make encounters where you would need extreme pathfinder knowledge to get by or force your party to have a person in party at all times to make the fights manageable. I know its a ROLE PLAYING game but you shouldn't need to leave or reload and reconfigure or go buy scrolls and wands to make it through an encounter at level 5. If you want to play sadistic GM put it in your side dungeon that was optional next time with actual good loot. One of the only times I rage quit while playing was when i cleared 30+ dogs that all had trip attacks and troll blood for a cloak of a resistance +1 after over a hundred hours into the game. I kickstarted this game and the next one and I hope they learned from their mistakes here.