How is it?

This is one of the few recent "Baldur's Gate likes" I didn't back.

Anyone play it enough to see if the writing and combat are decent?

I was a backer, haven't played it yet but am planning on putting in a couple hours sometime this week. I'm very interested in seeing how much Chris Avellone influence there is in the writing (they're crediting him as "lead writer,") how they've managed to adapt the Pathfinder ruleset to a video game in all of its bloated, overwhelming glory, and how much dynamism and reactivity there is in the story itself. I've heard a lot of good things about the original Kingmaker module, so it will be neat to see how they try and translate what is supposedly a very sandbox-y adventure into a CRPG format.

Of course, being that this game was made in Russia and is using a ruleset filled with a billion different options, I also would not be the least bit surprised if it's super buggy at launch. I'll figure it out soon.

As someone who plays Pathfinder and enjoys learning the lore (even if Paizo makes this difficult) and is by no means an expert on mechanics, and as a fan of Chris Avellone, and as someone who thinks the Pathfinder rule set suffers from bloat and too many incredibly specific options with spells and feats, I was interested in this game. I backed it at the $40 level.

Wasn't able to get my key last night, so I'm gonna try again. I plan on playing a good bit of this over the next week or so, so I'll post my impressions as soon as I'm able to.

I've played a few hours so far. Enough to gather a small party so far and finish the intro mission, then set out on the main quest.

Right away, I have to say this game has a feature that I absolutely adore. I don't know when this started (the first game I can think of using this is the first Pillars of Eternity), but I love it: Important lore text is highlighted. You can mouse over it and a little pop-up will give you some useful info that your character would know. Being a fantasy game, there's a ton of names of people and places that get thrown around, so it's a great way to recall some info you might've forgotten, or to fill in gaps between the player's knowledge and the character's knowledge. I know this is such a minor detail, but it's something I really appreciate.

For character creation, I was somewhat disappointed that the available player races are so limited. It has the Pathfinder core races: elf, half-elf, half-orc, dwarf, human, halfling, gnome, with the addition of aasimar, for a total of 8 races. What it lacks in race variety, however, it makes up for in class variety. There are 14 classes, and each one of those has the standard class, plus three additional archetypes to choose from. If you don't want to be bothered with choosing options when you level up, you can have the game automatically advance your (and party members') chosen class/archetype along a preset "best" path.

As with all such games, combat occurs in real time, but you can pause whenever you want to issue orders. The game does a great job of showing ranges and areas of effect for abilities. So far the combat isn't great, but that may be a function of how limited level 1 characters are in these games. The combat plays out quite differently from the tabletop game, as is always the case in the digital versions of these games. While a "turn" is still six seconds long, every character acts simultaneously, with a tiny second counter over their heads. It looks like initiative rolls only affect how quickly after combat starts that a character begins to act. It's difficult to keep track of a character moving, using a swift action, and attacking in one "turn."

The voice acting is pretty campy, but I don't hate it. Some of the dialogue isn't that great.

I'm having a good time with it so far. It looks great - maybe not as technically impressive as Divinity 2 but it has a good art style that feels appropriate for the setting. I'm kind of cruising through it on Normal difficulty and haven't found anything too challenging yet but I'm only 40 minutes or so in. Got stuck on some sword/statue puzzle and shut it off late last night but I'll be heading back to it this weekend. So far it seems well worth a 40 buck purchase, though.

@bladeofcreation: How do you like how the skill load outs are handled. I'm in the first area of the Stolen Lands and I think my choice of Magus is too squishy for the usual ten enemy assault. Unfortunately some of the skills I chose to protect myself with are not appearing as available. My Magus seems to receive a full volley of damage at the start of most encounters and dies while the rest of the team mops up the enemies. Maybe I should re-roll as something tankier. Also there is a chance I'm 1/3 encumbered. That might also be hurting my chance to evade.

I backed this during one Kickstarter session but haven't downloaded it yet - what I am reading sounds very promising.

@merxworx01: I'm doing a magus as well. That encounter at the trading post started with every single enemy getting aggro on me. Part of it might be the fact that characters in Pathfinder's early levels are pretty squishy across the board. I'm hoping that as I level things will even out a bit more.

@bladeofcreation: I was planning on using a protection skill that suppose to be a limited, level one ability but it's not appearing in any of my bars. You getting that too? It's the one with the blue glowing shield icon.

Liking the game so far but the story is very vanilla and the opening part of the game feels exactly like the beginning part of SwordCoast Legends..

Apparently a meeting of heroes commonly falls prey to an attack by a group of mysterious combatants. Also the story feels basic sort of like Swordcoast.

I'm also still wishing the Eleven scythe wielder joins my team, alignment be damned. Oh well.

I'm finding the combat really hurt by the lack of good scripting options, you can set everyone to have basic automatic actions but these combat systems are rarely good if you have to manage everything too much.

Pushing through though because everything else is extremely my shit.

@merxworx01: I'm about to start up the game for a couple hours now, I'll definitely being taking mental notes and let you know what I see.

I still have Sword Coast Legends in my backlog, but yeah...look, if it's a party of adventurers brought together by an important named NPC, you just know that it's about to be attacked. And that one of the people you met in that intro is definitely a spy.

Just an FYI, there was a HUGE patch last night (Steam says 1.3 GB), so if you want to play this weekend and have limited time, make sure you download that before you sit down to play!

So, after a couple of hours, it definitely seems like it has the potential to be the Pathfinder CRPG I always wanted in my head, but it also has a couple rough spots. I think Real Time with Pause is a slightly unwieldy style of combat for something as dense as Pathfinder. It's not as much of a chaotic mess as something like Neverwinter Nights 2 (which never felt like it was remotely designed for you to micromanage a party of 4 characters) but there's still a bunch of shit to juggle between 6 characters, each with their own action economy and less-than-ideal AI scripting behaviors. Perhaps as a result, I've been getting my ass kicked pretty damn hard on "challenging" difficulty (which also throws in such delightful P&P authentic features as not healing all the way after rest and group encumbrance slowing down travel time) and am seriously considering dropping it down to Normal.

The writing has been... okay, thus far? You can definitely tell this is based on a module from the way it's set up and structured, which honestly is giving me some serious Temple of Elemental Evil vibes. I know a lot of the complications and twists in the plot come later in the adventure, and I have to imagine the bulk of the original writing comes from the NPC companions, so I'm going to withhold any sort of serious judgement until I put more time in. Even if the scenarios you have to go through are very P&P-ish, if they can make the characters likeable or interesting beyond their initial archetype I'll be on board. I'm immediately a big fan of the chaotic neutral nihilist dwarf who worships the god of final destruction. That's a fun use of Pathfinder lore right there.

This all said, I think my actual biggest problem with this game might just be that I was spoiled by Pillars of Eternity II earlier this year, which has a somewhat more elegant ruleset and higher production values. That's perhaps a bit unfair, especially since Pathfinder still looks and sounds decent even if they don't quite have that "entire cast of Critical Role clearly having a lot of fun" voice acting money, but I never did get around to finishing Pillars II and this is doing a really good job of making me want to play that instead.

@arbitrarywater: The thing that's absolutely killing me between those rule sets is spell slots, I was never a fan of them but I've realized how much I hate them after Pillars 2 and other games have just instead decided to make it a hard limit for each encounter.

I'm sure it's a system that feels different in actual table play but it has never translated well into any video game.

Fortunately there's a cheat engine table where I can decide my own limits on how often spells can be used, if any at all.

@merxworx01: So I just realized that I was completely missing the level 0 spells, because when you pull up a character's spellbook from the ability bar, there are tiny tabs on the side that let you switch between spells of each level. The UI isn't the most intuitive. For example, you can't assign spell slots while camping, which is of course when it makes sense to do so. When my magus expands points from her arcane pool to be more accurate or enhance weapons, for some reason that doesn't show up in my list of active effects.

Thanks ! I barely noticed that tiny pip next to the bar that summoned up by another pip and that also has several pips to its left and right. Also I just realized despite the fact that most spells have been adding to my main bar, the personal shield spell had to be memorized. Basically dragging an icon from the one spellbook within the character page and placing it not in the bar but a separate area. Now I'm ready to really eat dirt.

P.S. I think I need to keep playing more to understand what your last sentence means.

Edit: Also have you read any of the scuttle with enemy boosting? Seems like the devs are veering a bit from understood enemy stats and they've made the enemies have increased damage and AC. Seems to be alot of complaints about it. Going to keep playing and see if I'm seeing this in higher levels.

Kinda picked up Valkyria Chronicles 4 first, but this is definitely on my list next, especially as it seems it would benefit from some patches in the meantime. But it's great seeing all the feedback here.

I really hate that the Steam reviews have long since stopped being even remotely any kind of barometer of a games depth of general gameplay quality and would rather be a bitch fest over some few stumbling blocks or protest tantrums (deserved or not).

Refernce- I got past the tutorial and to the point you reach a home-base where you can talk to your party-members. I come into this with extensive knowledge of the system the game is built on (I could quote you most of the pathfinder 1.0 rules by heart). I've played a lot of games like this in the past. I didn't kick-start this one (I never have/likely never will) but it is very much in my wheelhouse.

My biggest thought so far are "This would be way better if it were fully turn based". Like with most Baulder's Gate style Real-time with pause games built around a D&D (which for those not in the know Pathfinder essentially is a very close spin-off of) game..the lack of turn-based hurts.

Example in pen and paper. "Ok I am gonna cast a sleep spell that will hit these 3 guys" translates in the game too "Target an area, wait 4 seconds..oh everyone's moved, miss most of them drat". More realistic, yes, but when you don't update the spells and other character actions to account for real-time movement.. Like, remember in FF1 how if you aimed at an enemy who died before your turn came up, you'd swing at empty air? That was realistic, but completely un-fun and rightly changed in the later games. It's that kind of disconnect.

That said, the combat is fun enough despite this, its another one of those games based on a system that you've got to learn if you want to play. It has all the same issues BG did. The difference in survivability from lvl 1 to 2 is staggering, casters are gonna go from useless too extremely over-powered and so on. The plot, though it seems pulled straight from the source material perhaps, is buoyed by the npc companions and their stories which as far as I've experienced seem interesting/well written.

Over-all. If you like CRPGs, and are familar with the system either Pathfinder itself or D&D (as its very similar) then this is a easy pick up and play. If not, your looking at the same kind of hurtle as getting into the other games of this genre, from Baulders gate on up.

Gonna echo what other people are saying, this game is good, but the adherence to some P&P rules seems like it would get annoying on higher difficulty levels. I'm playing on Normal with no character death, so at least resting restores full hit points. My Pathfinder group tends to play like that (minus the character death, which DOES happen), and we don't track the weight of everything in the shared party stash, as long as the group buys a couple of bags of holding.

The simultaneous turn is the most annoying part of the combat. Obviously the way turns work in P&P isn't realistic. I get that. It's just that the spells are designed for that system, and haven't been tweaked enough for this game.

It's interesting that you have a limited amount of in-game days to complete the first chapter. That's certainly different from most games that give you a time-sensitive objective, then let you do whatever you want.

I started Pillars of Eternity again in recent months, and I guess between that, Kingmaker, and PoE 2, I'm gonna be playing this type of isometric game for a while!

@bladeofcreation: Time limits seem real ever present as it seems like generally every major plot crisis is accompanied by one.

I was real worried about it at first because usually there is nothing I hate more but I honestly don't know how anyone could possibly run down the timer on the prologue and the other one's Ive see so far are similar.

My only remaining concern is that if the realm building stuff gets complicated enough as to cause constant back and forths to solve those issue on top of a less generous timer.

The UI is definitely a little weird especially with spellbooks. I haven't gotten past the trading post (haven't had any time to play), but I was really annoyed at the design there. I traveled from the tutorial city to the trading post and two of my characters got fatigued along the way, but I couldn't rest at the trading post nor could I leave back to the world map to rest there. You have two fights at the post before you can go inside, and just from an RP perspective the second fight was super annoying. You know the bandits are going to return later but you don't bother to close the huge gate outside the trading post or let your party get into some kind of ambush spot or at least get out of LOS of the archers? I got wiped out a couple of times here just due to the dozen enemies, and while I eventually got past it, it was annoying because it felt like the game was setting me up to fail in a way that made no sense from a storyline perspective.

Hopefully that kind of issue doesn't repeat itself! I'll check it back out in a couple of weeks when I get back from vacation; hopefully they've made some balance changes by then.

@rorie: An ambush is one of the options after the first fight though, you can walk around and interact with objects to spread tar and set up bear traps, and I think there's maybe a skill check or something to convince the dude to set fire to the gate?

I think it also intends for you to rest after the first forced encounter along the road but that tutorial seemed easy to miss.

Was there a forced encounter along the road? I remember fighting some wolves but I don't think I saw a prompt to rest, but maybe I was clicking through too fast.

I definitely didn't see any ambush options in my dialogue, but then I was a fighter character without much INT, so maybe that was why. I'll reload it sometime and see double-check; I went through that dialogue tree until everything was grey, though, I was pretty sure!

@efesell: That's good at least. I'm curious to see what happens if you don't complete the prologue one. Just...not curious enough to rest for 24 hours for 90 days in a row haha.

@rorie: Yeah, you're supposed to do the camping/resting tutorial after that wolf encounter. If you're clicking through quickly, or if you don't have the tutorial tips turned on, it's gonna be easy to miss that. That second fight at the trading post sucks. I chose the dialogue option that was basically, "I'm ready for a fight," and then all of a sudden my character draws aggro on a dozen archers and goes down in the first turn. One of those balancing issues in regards to video game encounters versus P&P encounters, I suppose. Early level characters (even player characters) are extremely squishy. I'm running a campaign module right now that had the player characters start at level 1, and it's crazy to see how easy it is for a player to go down. One or two solid hits from a goblin is enough to reduce most characters' HP by 50%.

@rorie: Yeah you can rest ALMOST anywhere in the game by pressing R, so encounter maps or in dungeons or whatever. But it's a real quick sidebar tutorial in that forced wolf encounter and when it didn't work during the castle attack I stopped assuming it was like NWN and spent too long just thinking you had to rest on the travel map only.

@bladeofcreation: Yeah, that's always been the case for D&D stuff, unfortunately. I hear a lot of PNP campaigns start at level 2 or 3 to avoid the "wizard with 2 health" awkwardness at the beginning.

@efesell: Thank god camping supplies/rations are incredibly cheap. I was burning through potions at a pace of seven or so per fight early on. That adds up post fight. Trying to recoup the costs of potions by selling everything the enemies drop means carrying every thing and getting fatigued and potentially getting into a fight with a debuff which turns into a circle of wasting healing items.

I'm really enjoying the game so far, even the very strict adherence to the PnP rules (except the time Harrim got caught in a permanently-placed web trap and I waited over 4 real-time minutes waiting for him to finally pass a dex saving throw), but my god is the game buggy. They've put out hotfixes every day and some of them have broken all new things. I'd highly recommend waiting for a major patch or two (first one is this Friday I think) before picking it up.

I backed this on Kickstarter and have it installed but want to try it. I stopped playing the Pathfinder tabletop years ago because of how bloated it is (and I hate the 5 year plan design of character creation) but the Golarion world has a lot of really interesting lore behind it. Hopefully being a spellcaster isn't as annoying as it is in the tabletop...

@fezrock: Those web traps suuuucked.

I encountered two big bugs last night. When you go to Tuskgutter's Lair, Amiri talks to you about letting her kill it on her own. If you choose any dialogue option that amounts to fighting now, a party selection screen pops up. After this, Amiri now shows up twice in party selection screens. This is actually better than a worse version of this bug that I read about that says Amiri straight up disappears. She disappeared on me the first time so I reloaded a save and did the conversation again, this time opting to leave Tuskgutter's Lair for now. After this dialog, she still shows up twice in party selection screens, but at least she can be added.

The second bug is also super annoying. I hit level 4 and when I went to level my spellcasters, all of the previous level spells show up in the list. Magic Missile pops up as a level 2 spell, for example, and if you select a spell you already have selected at a previous level, you forfeit learning a new spell for that slot. Easy enough to avoid, but super annoying, and yet another indication of what is overall not a great UI.

After a week or so of not playing (in part because when I sat down to play there was always a patch), I finally got back into this a few nights ago. The two bugs I mentioned previously were fixed.

I'm not playing on a hard difficulty because I'm not a huge fan of the "everyone acts at once" nature of the battles, as I mentioned previously. Most fights are easy enough to let the AI spam attacks, although I do occasionally assign individual actions.

I've explored most of the areas in the first chapter, hit level 4, and have more than 50 in-game days to defeat the Stag Lord. When I continued my game from before, I had to re-do a fight that ended with a cutscene I didn't see before, so I'm not sure if that was a bug last time. I also didn't get the story dialogue revealing the location of the fort time.

I'm enjoying the character interactions quite a bit. These sorts of games always have the same TYPES of characters, but what makes them interesting or not is in how they're written. Overall, I'm enjoying learning about my companions and I hope they all have individual quests.

Like The Bard's Tale IV, I think I've resigned myself to not playing this game until the developer patches the everloving hell out of it. They've been releasing hotfixes at a rapid clip to fix major issues, but it still sounds like parts of the game are still super janky or broken. There's also something of a kerfuffle over inflated monster stats too, since on the higher difficulties you have Kobolds with 20 AC and like +8 to hit at level 2, which is another thing they've talked about addressing.

In any case, this definitely seems like a game I'm going to really enjoy... in a couple of months.

@arbitrarywater: I haven't been keeping an exact count, but from what I recall off the top of my head, the game has head AT LEAST 11 GB worth of patches. That's from what I actually witnessed it downloading, not counting what might've been downloaded on occasions when I didn't even look at Steam. One patch was 3+ GB and another was 7+ GB.

I'm a good chunk of a way through Chapter 2 now, actually probably finished most of the narrative beats, just left with kingdom management and waiting for events to unfold, for the most part. Party is at level 7. I'm really taking my time with it, ever so slowly and diligently, doing a lot of learning and experimenting with builds (by giving characters 20 levels to see how to structure their feats/spells etc, then reverting to earlier saves).

That's one thing this game is heavily missing is an easy to see and navigate as well as a properly linked UI character system like Pillars of Eternity 1&2 did. Spells do effects but can frequently not even describe what said effect actually does, you can't easily get a feel for where you want the class to go, unless you know pathfinder like the back of your hand (or do what i did above). A massive amount of stuff is left unexplained unless one specifically digs into the simple encyclopedia thats not linked to anywhere or the pathfinder rule set itself from outside sources. (despite it being build on 3.5 that shit was a long time ago bruh.

I still really like how the pathfinder systems feels. The devs clearly did a lot of impressive work translating it to a videogame. it's biggest asset is how significant the leveling up feels in this game. Every time it happened so far, the party can feel like its sudennly on a whole other level (hur dur). At least so far in these early goings. Parts of it however do feel very archaic PnP type stuff that was kinda just solved in videogames over the years. Where for example PoE had the advantage of building up its systems from the ground up in mind with how people play videogames, or what would just make more sense or just be a smoother functioning but still robust sytem. (god 3.5/pathfinder weapon proficiencies suck ASS in a vg form as opposed to tabletop where you might have a DM that will at least somewhat tailor loot to the party)

Despite all the numerous fixes, the game is still buggy as all hell. There is just a smorgasbord of broken quest steps, non functioning items, improperly working spells, feats not applying as they should. It's a minefield. I generally have a very very high tolerance to bugs, and this is still rough going, I have never and i do mean that, actually ever seen so many different and numerous bugs in a game I liked, ever.

Which is a shame, because I feel like there is a very solid and interesting game that's doing many unique things, clever things, and just real hearty crpg shenanigans, underneath all the bugs. Like I'm loving my time with it, and it's very clearly my type of jam (and peanut butter) , but it's not something i could even remotely recommend to anyone yet, it needs a LOOOT of bugfixes. IF they get there however, hoo mama, this has the potential to be one of them greats.

But hey, i'm still enjoying it way more then say Wasteland 2 for example, despite all the bugs. The solid core is clearly there, it's got soul and promise.

It's still kinda hard to talk about the story/narrative as it's all still up in the air at the point where im at in the game. That's one aspect I am still worried if the game can do well in the long term over it's whole duration.

I have been running somewhat of a bad boy party (including my main PC) with the exception of Linzi, because even a mostly self serving but shrewd "entrepreneur" recognizes the value of a good bard on hand when the story will be told, ahem. And there have even been a few interesting situations. One of my favorites was coming across a band of robbers/highwaymen, red handed, and the leader having his head on his shoulders recognizing the baron and offering his services to the new kingdom instead, since the previous bandit lord is dead and all, so of course the only reasonable and forward thinking thing to do was to accept them as underlings. Criminals cease banditry; have a chance to rehabilitate; serve their new land; no blood is spilled or human lives lost; no jail money wasted; a growing barony gets a boost in able bodied militia and tax collection improves; in one fell swoop, just by being reasonable. The (soon to be replaced) "not a paladin" stick up a ... ahem, party member, chimed in to protest such outrageous "unlawful" conduct; but clearly: A. everyone benefited instead of lost B. I'm the law anyway. Right? Right.

this game is incredibly buggy,for every bug they patch out they seem to create another. im currently at chapter 6 or 7 and ive had to stop multiple times for them to fix a bug they stopped me from progressing and im currently not playing due a bug that keeps crippling my game, otherwise its a mostly fun game.

The kingdom management is frustrating me to the point I going to set to automatic so I can actually explore the map if it isn't broken. I just don't like time pressure in my games. The game just constantly dumping kingdom problems and taking forever to resolve anything through your advisers. On top of that, I find I have to save scum to get any progression due either running into difficult fights or just npc or events being broken. Also so many feat skill not working properly made me download a respec mod for the game to avoid those bugs.

It's nice they're fixing the game, but the patches are too much for my measly internet connection ranging from 500 mb to 22 gb. I think Bard's Tale 4 patches have the same problem as well.

I love the story and the characters, but it's best to hold off until the game is relatively bug free and few more quality of life are added like item highlight toggle or the ability to rotate buildings when you're trying to construct your kingdom.

Shout out to a recent patch for making one of Linzi's bardic performances--you know, the whole reason to have a bard in your party--stop working. That's a fun one in longer/difficult fights.

I killed the Stag Lord, took his stuff. Also gonna give a shout out to the NPC and creature that I dealt with before the fight who were supposed to help me. Apparently they never aggro'd to the Stag Lord.

The management stuff isn't bad, and I'm glad the game gives you some time to explore before the next timed quests start popping up. I was worried that making party members into advisors would remove them from play and prevent their use in exploring, but thankfully that's not the case. You can assign party members to missions and still use them while exploring. Doesn't make much sense, but I'm not complaining.

One thing that really annoyed me is that Jhod wants to fix up the temple and he's the only one who can do it. It's one of the first conversations you have about what things will be like in your kingdom, so it feels like the game kind of expects you to do that right away. Unfortunately it takes 60 DAYS to do so, and in the meantime another quest pops up that only Jhod can do, and expires well before he gets done with the temple. That's frustrating.