Kingmaker - Chris Avellone Interview
 

Chris Avellone was interviewed by Gamespot on why he is involved with Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

More information.

I'll probably pick this up unless it gets horrible reviews. I'm on a Mac for work reasons, but have been mostly gaming these days on my PS4. I know the Mac is not ideal, but I just don't have time/money/space for a dedicated gaming PC. Someday I will.

The Avellone name doesn't influence me much one way or another these days, TBH.

I can see that, alot of his freelance contributions recently simply amounted to "additional writing."

It's going to get horrible reviews.

Look at all the negatives:
- Russian-made
- complex game mechanics with lots of numbers and choices
- 100+ hours of content
- old school pnp story and characters
- involved combat that requires the player to pay attention to what is going on

I love Chris's interviews, this one is no exception. The game is sounding great and I look forward to the goblin character. :)

It might as I remember when every European RPG got lower scores from journalists. Of course that was before Kickstarter, and the whole Old-School RPG renaissance.

Yet the more I think about it's definitely possible.:nod:

It's only at risk of getting bad user reviews if it's buggy.

Critics wont blast it too much because it's based on a P&P game.

It's more the content and the source material that concerns me. A while back I picked up the Pathfinder Campaign Setting: The Inner Sea World Guide. I thought it was very poor. The world is like a theme park, with dinosaur land, robots and lasers land, the land of vampires and werewolves, and so on. I thought it was all very cheesy and generic.

Yeah, the game looks fundamentally solid, but I have to agree the setting does seem somewhat generic. I've watched a lot of recent footage, and I'm just not seeing anything that makes me want to run out and get this anytime soon.

I'm also a little skeptical about the amount of content they claim and how much is unique vs repetitive filler. I can't see playing something like this for 120 hours.

Having all sort of wacky stuff all over the place is the opposite of generic, but it is a theme park. What's wrong with cheesy?

Saying that, I found this Inner Sea World map to be awesome personally. I got it from this reddit post.

I received that module/setting (The Inner Sea World Guide) free as part of my preorder pledge. Not sure I'm going to bother with it though.

I got my key for Kingmaker so I'm super excited at the moment!!! :D

As I mentioned many times, I spent 90 hours on beta alone and that's just first two chapters. It didn't feel repetitive for me at all. Each combat was tough and required proper strategy, kingdom building will take time, and the story was engaging.

Also, no one is forcing you to play for 120 hours. Main content is roughly about 40 hours.

That about sums up Pathfinder. It's an over-the-top parody of the Forgotten Realms.

No, it isn't. It is rather like they've tried to shoehorn lots of different campaign settings into one world, each of them being extremely generic. To me, it makes the whole thing feel rather plastic and inert. Worlds like Middle Earth or Westeros have a coherent sense of place and history. This feels like a cheap copy of dozens of clichés, pasted onto a map.

I refuse to believe a game can be 120 hours long and not feel repetitive. I've yet to play a game over 40 hours long that doesn't fall back on some repetitive design patterns.

I played Baldur's Gate 1 for 100+ hours the two times I finished it. I imagine this game will be similar - slow, at-your-own-pace exploration, looking for secrets, questing here and there and spending time in the wildnerness and talking to people, finding people in the wilderness and also in cities. No doubt I'd get 100+ hours out of it if I get that far. Hour numbers in RPGs like these are not all strictly quest content and combat. You don't run from quest to quest or combat to combat, there's a lot of roaming in these games. Not to mention dungeons, etc..

Baldur's Gate also has a drastic switch mid-game where you go from mostly wildnerness exploration to a huge city, so that kept it fresh for me. There are tricks to make a longer game have new and exciting surprises. I'm sure Owlcat knows that and the game will not be a 100 hour continuous loop of the same thing.

Can we talk about how stupid the developers are for not making this turn-based?

Uh, no? Why would you want a huge Baldur's Gate clone to be turn-based? It would take 300 hours then. BG/IWD were great with RTWP combat and this game will be no different. For turn-based they'd have to lower the scope significantly and make a totally different game, i.e. a modern Goldbox Pool of Radiance or something (which, I think there is a market for and it would be cool, but this game ain't it.)

I don't really have a strong view on the game itself, at this stage. I thought it looked quite interesting, which is why I had a look at the resource books, and was disappointed.

I mean, I expect most RPGs to be derivative to some degree, and Forgotten Realms certainly was in its day. But, there was quite a lot of imaginative and compelling stuff in the mix, too. I dug out a couple of old source books - some FR, and some Warhammer 40k. I was reading about the Underdark, the cultures of the Drow and the Mindflayers, and the Warp and its effects on mankind. It's all pretty good stuff.

The Pathfinder material is a poor substitute, IMO.

1. It's based on Pathfinder, which is a turn-based game

2. Baldurs Gate would of been better if it was turn-based like its source material. It was okay despite being RTwP, but not because of it.

Why would they need to lower the scope? There's a lot of mechanics in turn-based Pathfinder that can't be translated into real-time. This is dumbed down if anything.

With Baldur's Gate being as large and diverse as it was, turn-based would just make an already slow game even slower. People would be falling asleep on their keyboards.

If anything in the Infinity Engine games bored me it was the terrible combat. Tactical turn-based combat would of been so much more engaging.

I'm not prejudicial against RTwP either, but if you're going to create a videogame adaption of a turn-based game, then make the videogame turn-based as well.

If the game doesn't interest you, don't play it and stop bitching :) plain and simple.

It does interest me ;)

I didn't know "boring and generic" game is interesting :rolleyes:

I never said it looks boring, but it does look generic. That's okay though, as long as it has…

- Good writing
- Strong encounter design
- Well designed quests
- Choices and reactivity
- Feeling of exploration
- Decent balancing

If it can deliver on those six things, then I'll overlook how generic and unoriginal it is.

I'm actually hoping it will confine itself to the River Kingdoms, which is your fairly standard fantasy pseudo-medieval setting. That generic fantasy setting is not a problem to me - it's more that experiencing the world of Golarion as a patchwork of genres, rather like zones in a Mario game, would be immersion-breaking for me.

What does the immersive mode under difficulty settings do?

The Kingmaker adventure module only takes place in the Stolen Lands, which itself is based heavily on the Savage Frontier from Forgotten Realms.

The problem with rtwp is that you have to get it just right…that isn't easy. Pace is super critical, and Baldur's Gate actually pulled it off successfully. It was slow enough to actually observe the battle as it happened, and enjoy the tactical aspects, but fast enough that it didn't get boring or take too long. They definitely somehow hit upon the Goldilocks principle, where it was damn near perfect.

From what I've seen, the combat looks somewhat fast in Kingmaker. Almost like you just direct your party at the monster, and they are smooshing things and there isn't much else to it. Maybe its because I am seeing low level enemies and low level battles in the videos, but it doesn't look very compelling like a Baldur's Gate style rtwp combat.

Anyway, I'm also somewhat surprised to see silver coin taking such a hard line position in favor of turn-based. Considering he is always singing the praises of Pillars of Eternity 2, which is also rtwp combat.

Anyhow, I do think there are several promising things about the game - the user interface design is fantastic, the rpg system looks very intricate and complex and interesting, and the world graphics- though a shade cartoony - are pleasing to the eye. It just comes down to if they totally missed the mark on the combat or not. If they screwed up the combat, I will probably skip it. If the combat is done to a point where it is consistently engaging and fun, again, like the Goldilocks Principle - not too easy, not too hard, not too fast, not too slow, but…just right. Then I will very likely get the game. :thumbsup:

The difference is that they're trying to create a real-time game out of a turn-based system, whereas PoE2 was always designed to be real time. It reflects in the mechanics.

Pathfinder is meant to be turn-based, it's more fun turn-based, and I don't understand why they feel the need to remove the turn-based element. Same with Baldurs Gate.

Turn based combat would just kill it. Talk about boring and slow :p

There goes Silver Coin confusing his opinions with facts again. :)

Especially with dice-rolls. Misses, critical misses, ugh. ToEE was about the limit I could take of that sort of slow combat where a boss encounter could take an hour, mostly because of missed attacks.

Fair enough. I guess I was getting a wrong impression from some of your posts, I was thinking maybe you were taking the stance that turn based is always superior or something. There are some old school rpgers who do take that view, and seem to despise any combat system that is not turn based. I tend to prefer turn based, but am open to rtwp if done right. Or when playing an action rpg.

People dissing turn-based combat on an oldschool CRPG forum

https://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-conte…ohn_oliver.gif

So, release time at 4PM CET. So that's 10AM EST USA if my calculations are correct. Who cares what time it is in Europe, anyway?

So by the time I get home from work tomorrow, this will have had plenty of time for the freak out and bad reviews after 9 minutes of gameplay and start to settle down. Probably will buy it.

Kingmaker is using round and character turns like in BG. They originally went with 6 seconds per rounds (it's the canonical value in D&D and I believe BG used it). I can't find mention that they changed it so I suspect it is still 6 seconds.

A lots of the beta videos are probably on normal which favor the player (instead of being core rules) with low level enemies.

By the way, you can pause on round ending and character turn ending…and many other things.

:lol:

huh, interesting stuff. I definitely will be checking youtube game play vids and reviews and comments here for all the first impressions! There is some excitement around this game, no question.