Kingmaker - Gameplay Mechanics
 

An update for Pathfinder: Kingmaker has been made available about the caharcater building and difficulty gameplay mechanics.

More information.

This customization of features is a new trend showing devs are giving up on providing balance.

It is not given to ensure the balance of a whole system. It is even less to ensure the balance when you can withdraw at will key mechanics from the system.

Another benefit brought by the troop of the like it, it is fun: any discussion on balance issues is going to be morphed into a dislike feature, it can be removed.

Nice deal for devs, they announce a complex system that can be scrapped from key elements. It is no longer needed to bother about balance, players will have to deal with unbalance by taking out the elements they think are the causes of the unbalance.

Bad hairday?

The game is not supposed to be MMO. Which means, unbalanced stuff will be appreciated.
Don't we all play games exactly to find something that unbalances the whole thing so we can abuse it to our cause? Haven't you ever climb something hard to kill trashmobs cannot reach so you can dispose of them easily? And aren't the best games exactly those that are aware of players being curious, players trying to abuse stuff (Dishonored instantly comes in mind). Wasn't lava pit (later patched sadly) the most imaginative strategy to destroy D:OS final boss - something similar exists in recently released Regalia (partymember with a skill that can return debuff back to any hostile lined against a miniboss that casts instakill after one turn passes debuff)?

Sure, there are designers like Sawyer who's mindset is in MMOs and think singleplayers need a perfect balance too. So they waste time on it instead of fixing numerous bugs that plague thier releases.
That's not fun. That's pathetic.

Hmm… no? What's the point of doing that if it trivializes combat. Might as well just go to youtube and watch the cutscenes. I like my combat challenging, thanks.

Josh Sawyer just wrote a big blog post about balance.

It's pretty long and follow wolfing's comments. He also points out that D&D is already balanced and gives some IWD QA stories about that.

Hmm…there are a lot of great things about D&D 3rd edition and the pathfinder system that is based off of it. But most would agree that balance is definitely not one of them.

The point is exactly to reach the point of trivialized combat so it's not timed dodges or a second job any more. In other words automation taking over automatization that took over manualization.
As I said above with an example (Arkane), and you missed it, certain developers are aware of broken balance possibility and deliberately make different contnet mechanics to still keep the game challenging if it gets "broken" and "abused".
Others either don't care or waste time on balancing instead of adding more different (and challenging if possible) content. That's where we get ourself a repetitive grinder with nothing but praised dodging (Dark Souls) or balance patches and mods instead of broken quests fixes (insert any Josh Sawyer game).
A perfectly balanced game is not instantly a masterpiece. In fact, but I've said that before, a masterpiece cannot be completely perfect, it has to contain a flaw or a few. Of course I don't mean making Umbra Sword available to a player in first few minutes then pwning already boring game.

Why would you ever go youtube a singleplayer game?!
But anyway, you probably have a different idea than me what a challenging combat is.

It's boring.
How about a blog that reveals designing different/nonrepetitive content instead. How about explaining why his superbalanced Lionheart never reached PST status.
I can understand some people wanting MMO designs in singleplayer games. I just don't care about that stuff.

D&D has over 40 years of balancing by now. There was balance change between 3.0e and 3.5e. There are balance changes between each editions. WoTC holds testing when they make new editions to balance everything, these are just not public so you don't learn they made.

How do you believe D&D ended up with Wizard with d4 HP and Warrior with d10 HP and different attack rate? That's called balancing.

Are D&D trying to achieve perfect balance no, because that's not possible regardless of how paranoiac some people seems to be every time the term "balance" is mentioned in regard to video games.

There's never been an interesting RPG with anything like perfect balance.

That doesn't mean crazy imbalance is great - and something like 1st Edition AD&D was an example of a completely whack system. I mean, the Thief could contribute absolutely nothing - because even his tiny arsenal of contribution could be done much better by a Wizard - which also happened to utterly destroy the Thief in combat.

But ever since 3.0 - DnD has had a decent basic balance - and while you can create some amazingly powerful combinations - there are many, many ways to counter them and there are so many combinations that no one can fully claim to know them all.

To me, a large part of the fun of building a character is to come up with unique ways to overcome challenges. That's not always about straight-up powergaming - but more often about creative and fun ways to deal with both combat and non-combat situations. For computer games, the former is often dominant, however - and that's fine with me.

I could play a Pathfinder game for years and not exhaust the character build possibilities.

I've played PoE for something like 60-70 hours - and I already feel I've seen everything interesting about it.

NWN came out 15 years ago - and I can still go back and come up with a new neat build that I've never tried before. I've played that game for thousands of hours, by the way.

Nah, the PoE system Obsidian came up with is a complete joke in comparison. It's not very fun, very rich - or particularly balanced.

Now, I don't mind that it's not balanced - because, as I touched upon, imbalance can be fun.

The problem with PoE is that the designer(s) THOUGHT they could balance it - which is never going to be possible with a system that complicated.

You don't really have to go much beyond Chess to find yourself in a tough position in that way, as a designer.

PoE SMACKS of having been designed around limitations rather than opportunities. It's like they would rather have you bored out of your skull than stumble upon some kind of exploit - and even with that in mind, they largely failed.

Not impressive.

Balance in a PnP game does not necessarily equate to balance in a video game. The lack of a human referee to balance out the play on the spur of the moment surely makes it more difficult to achieve. That doesn't mean it's not possible, but, with a complicated game requirement like an RPG, it likely does make it more of a challenge than it might at first appear even with a pre-existing rules set.

Get real. D&D has been around for 40 years. It's had generations of people tweaking it, adding to it, and attempting to fix the multitude of garbage rules. Naturally it has a lot more content going for it than a two year old game system barely out the gates. You might as well be comparing Pathfinder to first edition D&D.

Different versions of D&D placed different emphasis on balance. The goal of every version is not necessarily to find perfect balance, but to try to achieve the proper mix of things seeming fair and things seeming interesting, different, and/or realistic. Perfecting balance is not always considered a desirable goal and balance has not always improved with each edition.

Third edition D&D is pretty infamous for not caring about balance as much as later editions, and having vast power differences between classes and builds. This isn't necessarily bad or a flaw, it's just not what that edition focused on. There are plenty of other things about it that made it great. But it definitely shouldn't be used as a model for creating a balanced system.

The only balanced RPG is one in which there is little or even *no* choice in progression. There was one D&D cRPG that did something like that (you went up levels but the game chose everything for you) and it was terrible.

And yes, cRPGs are missing the real life DM who can either tweak things or Just Say No.

I'm talking about the core rulebook with only the core classes.

The amount of content isn't that much greater than any other core ruleset from DnD for the past few decades.

PoE had everything in the world to pick from - and they still utterly, utterly failed to create a compelling system that compares favorably with DnD.

PoE had no excuse not to learn from "40 years" of garbage rules. Also, no one asked Obsidian to create terrible combat AI, pathfinding, ZoC rules, multiclassing, "recovery" system, and on and on. All those things are complete crap in that game.

So, you get real first - please :)

Balance in tabletop RPGs? Total myth. There is none and never has been. Those that think there is either don't understand where the base line game actually is, or they are playing in games where the GM is really good at catering to different character power levels within his own group. What little balance exists in the first few levels is quickly left behind as key classes get access to things that flat out break the rules (as written).

Pathfinder is coming up on a decade of life and the power curve has been steadily upward since the beginning. It's been a little less of a steep incline than what was around in 3.5, but the arms race is alive and well.

There's only one gauge that's useful for tabletop RPGs… is everyone at the table having fun? Yeah? Then it doesn't matter how you are playing or where your table's power curve is. The same can be said of single player CRPGs. Is the game enjoyable or not. Of course, both tabletop and computer games have to be fun enough to drive purchases. If they're accomplishing that, balance discussions are meaningless. Folks that prefer balance will gravitate to those games, and those that like less rigid systems will play different games. Making balance items configurable is no different than having a good GM that can keep a group of disparate power levels/styles engaged.

Sawyer just continues the mainstream trend that "game cant "punish" player for any choice". So player dont have any responsibility for his own choices. He dont need to think about his build or play style.. whatever he choose it must be "equally good" for him.

Note - I wonder how much time will designers lost to ensure all options are "equally good". I would say that despite best effort they will often fail.


It seems he would prefer "worse options" to be clearly labeled as "inferior options" - that is nonsense. This way nobody would think about them so it would make no sense to include them at all.

Secondly - who could instantly say which option is better or worse for your hero and party and gameplay style? Judge which option is good or just interesting for you is part of the game. To make every option basically the same doesnt make the game better - it makes this judging and thinking less important and less interesting or in worst cases pointless.


Sawyer also contradicts himself:
So according to him its common that options look ok but quickly turn out to be "implicitly awful even in the best circumstances". Really? So player has no chance to see it? I dont think so. Of course, some newbies and children will choose badly BUT I dont expect newbies to be able to master RPG instantly without knowledge! If Sawyer thinks that every newbie should be able to master any hard challenge in RPG then he in fact says that game must be designed and simplified to allow it. Imagine Dark Souls designed as a game where every challenge must be mastered by noobs that make bad choices - welcome to the world of Josh Sawyer.

Secondly - I dont really believe his words about "awfull options in best circumstances" that many players cant see. Its more likely Sawyer's rhetorics to justify his approach to design.

I don't like that there is no fun to be had. Dark Souls follow a similar path (well the dark side path that leads normally to your demise) in that whatever build or weapons you have, you only tweak your attributes by +-0.1 which has little or no effect, leaving matters to player's reflexes. Nevertheless, they balance things out and add a bit of mystery and fun with the varied enemy attributes and defence towards the various raw and elemental damages to keep the players on their toes.

A little unbalance is fun as long as newbie can finish on lowest option. Letting folks play how they want is also good. One reason to prefer single player experience.

Sawyer probably got his ass handed to him a few too many times by powergamers and now spends his time designing horrible systems to punish them! ;)

Considering the guy designed hard mode content/mods for IWD and Fallout NV…I doubt it very much.

He had to endure IWD QA testers who couldn't even get through half the game because they understood nothing to D&D though.

Am I the only one worried that this is too good to be true? I love tons of mechanical options, but I'm worried. Its clear they're going to have a successful kickstarter, but the type of mechanics they seem to want to implement are very complex, which means tons of potential for bugs. I'm not sure what they're overall budget and timeplan is, but I wonder if they aren't going overboard with prestige classes, extra spells, extra feats, and what not. For example, many of those things came in the addons to NWN 1 & 2, and not so much in the original campaigns.

From my experiences, Russian dev studio generate x4 the amount of content in half the time it takes a NA studios to do it and with just x2 the bugs. They also tend to design for the more "hardcore" gamers.

It's hard to know where they are at in the game development right now, but going by the KS's pitch and some info from the Paizo's forum, all the base Pathfinder stuff is already in the game (or close to it). The KS is to add "more companions, wilderness/dungeons areas and quests", not game mechanics (excluding stretch goals).

Yes to both statements!

It really sounds good, doesn't it? Almost too good. Let's hope they can pull it off.

Russian devs don't mainstream their games that much and I like it. Make it hardcore and give the young'uns their "story mode." Two times the bugs sadly also is true quite often. Though, many of the devs worked on great titles in the past and have quite some experience. That makes me confident.

Arkane indeed followed the same slope: provide a tool kit so that players achieve what the devs did not bother achieving: balance.
Tweak this, remove that.
The issue here is that players do not get many runs out of their products, two or three, certainly enough to feel imbalance issues, not enough to understand how to fix them.


This leads to stereotyped courses of action: spot an imbalance and hammering it over and over again. A type of play bots can take charge of.

Bots usually are involved to relieve players from sitting to their desk and remain behind their screen. Players leave the bot do the stereotyped course of action to dedicate their time to something they find better to dedicate their time to.

On the other hand, gamers prefer games, that is an activity that makes the presence and the involvement of people a center goal, not an element that must be ridden of.

If people have such a thirst to keep repeating the same pattern over and over again, working on a chain is still an opportunity to grab.

More cool info and gameplay videos here: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2017/06/0…ur-dd-rpg-itch

Wow, I like what I see! This looks already great for an alpha.

This could definitely be the Baldur's Gate we were looking for (which PoE sadly was not).

Time for a Watch fundraiser?

Looks like fun, but 2 questions:
1) is the no overland exploration? It looks like you move from encounter to encounter on the world map….
2) were those spell cool-down timers I saw!? As in you wait for a power/spell to recharge? I hope not. I don't mind this in a 'new' rule system, but its definitely not Pathfinder, which is basically DnD 3.5++.

Edit: ok, looks like those weren't spell cooldown timers, which is a relief. It really does look like a re-skinned Tyranny though, as azarhal mentions below…

Those video pretty much confirms they are running on POE1 engine (well Tyranny considering the dialog glossary linking stuff and the map) which means it's going to have a lots of the same issues (some even apparent in that video) and all you are going to get that sound like BG are names that also show up in D&D.

In fact, I was reading some stuff about Pathfinder being turned into a video game yesterday and seems like they can't use the Pathfinder rules that come from D&D 3.5e because the open gaming license it use can't be ported to video games… :/

I really really hope that this game does well because the Pathfinder world of Golarion just oozes tons of opportunity. Pretty much any fantasy trope you can imagine is in Pathfinder. There is obviously your typical fantasy, elves and dwarves etc. Then there are different areas that are absolutely bonkers and probably would be tons of fun. There is a permanent gate into the Abyss called the Worldwound that holy crusaders go to fight endless waves of demons. There is a mountain sized crashed space ship with crazy technology and a society built around that. There is tons and tons of political intrigue as the many kingdoms fight against each other for domination. The Golarian world has endless possibilities that could start another video game franchise if done well.

1) there is overland exploration similar to fallout that then loads into local zones.
2) Game has turns, that was just waiting for turn to end so new action can begin.

I just watched those videos as well. In the last/third clip, one of the companions went down but then got right back up after the combat - are they using the system where everyone just get back up as long as PC is alive like NWN2? And I think I saw insta-heal spell. Those bother me a little.

I think that video was cut there. And characters don't die when they hit 0, they start bleeding on the ground and you can heal them.

There are multiple interviews where they say they are NOT using the PoE engine, they have built their own using Unity.

I'm a lot less enthusiastic about backing when I see I'm paying $8 more than people who happened to hear about it earlier. It always annoys me when I see that kind of early bird thing.

I'll believe that once they rework all their UI graphics and functionality to not be a direct ripoff from Pillars of Eternity/Tyranny.

They basically just inverted the gears icon of the option menu, use basically the same "globe" for time of day/pause, use the same "sneak" icon, have similar "target arrows", have a similar icon system showing the next attack, have the same problem with not seeing your character when they are behind large/lots of enemies *it's a camera angle issue*, have dialogue text glossary link like in Tyranny and similar pathfinding issues,
etc.

So you think they're lying about not using the PoE engine?
What would their motivation be in doing so?

Not lying, because I haven't seen them say they weren't using it directly (even when asked the question directly on reddit). They say that they were building their engine on top of Unity which is totally accurate even if Pillars/Tyranny engine was used as the base to speed up development.

Although, funny enough, POE used Unity base pathfinding engine at the beginning (somewhat revamped a bit later), so even if they started from scratch and just copied POE UI elements some stuff would be the same (but the copied UI stuff is kinda lazy to me in that case).

This is what I've seen:
And from a Reddit AMA they did:
I guess maybe you could interpret the 2nd one there as a dodge if you're inclined to, but I don't think so about the 1st one.

There isn't really such a thing as the "PoE engine". PoE used Unity. Yes, it was a version modified specifically for PoE, but it's still Unity.

It sounds like these guys are doing the same thing for Kingmaker. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to share the same pros and cons though. It's going to depend on how they modify it.

How dare you show up here with your logic and facts!