Kingmaker - Owlcat goes Indie
 

Owlcat is an independent studio now:

Thanks purpleblob:

More information.

"Focus on core competencies". They don't talk like an Indie studios. How about just say "focus on what we do best" instead of using business-speak?

In other news: Owlcat was not indie until recently!

Best of luck to Owlcats and I'm dying to hear the announcement for Pathfinder 2 :D

They did it to annoy you, just enough to make a post.

At least I'm commenting on the actual article, and not someone's else comment.

rip..

Why RIP? MY.com remains their investor. Also, I'm ready to support them if they go crowdfunding route again and I'm sure there are many others like me.

Owlcat delivered big time, as far as Im concerned. In their case I would make exception to my personal policy of not paying before release. Looking forward to their next project very much.

Uhm….

Owlcat delivered. The vanilla.
Then they made a few low quality DLC because of course they did. Instead of concentrating on a sequel or TW3like expansion. An utter disappointment on my side.

Is their future spamming the market with DLC:The Game products and be remembered as one hit wonder remains to be seen. Going independant won't change whichever operating model they've already decided to pursue.

I liked their first DLC and bought it. The second one was also of decent quality but not part of the main campaign so I skipped it. I can kind of agree about third DLC that seems like it was left unfinished and unbalanced from the comments around the internet.

The game didn't really need big expansions like TW3 because it was already huge. But they could have added more DLCs like the first one.

Its just plain speculation, but i assume it required tremendous workload to patch and get game into the shape after release. So not much time was left to work on DLCs, not to mention real expansion.

I hope they learned their lesson and that future projects have smoother release then Kingmaker. In my eyes this developer has highest potential to deliver next cRPG which I will like. Or not … wouldnt be first, neither last time of wasted potential, but thats life, right?

Is that one dude at the table holding a Switch? Console release confirmed? :P

rip! Nice comment, loser! Hurhurrhurrr.

It's way too early to know if this will actually work out for them, but I wish them the best of luck and hope to see more games from their studio in the future.

Well good luck with that. Independence is nice, but risky too. At least now they'll have name recognition and some street cred.

Best of luck to the makers of the best spiritual successor to Baldur's's Gate yet.

Pathfinder : Kingmaker was pretty good. I would fund them again.

Kingmaker needed about 6 months of patches to be really great. Pity I finished way before that. They are still patching and the DLCs seem nice, so overall it was a positive albeit frustrating experience.
KM2 will not need such work since the bases are ironed out and could be playable from day one.

Well Gothic 3 and VTM needed 6 decades of unofficial patches to be really great… :p

Anyway, I've waited till 2 DLC get released before playing so didn't notice any critical bug after all the patches that were released in the meantime. The third random generator DLC I wasn't interested in so more waiting was pointless on my side.

The game was great gameplay wise, but unstable and bug ridden at release.
I had to rollback to Savegames from a previous chapter in the game twice, because i had encountered bugs at Chapter 3 and 5 that blocked any further progression in the main storyline, competly blocking me off the main quest after the third time it happened in late Chapter 5.
I had restarted the game 7 month after my first try and was finally able to finish the Storyline, without any of the old bugs.

What i totally didn't like about Kingmaker was the Kingdom Building System paired with the sometimes too short delays between chapters and events. You were constantly rushing through you Kingdom, trying to micro every encounter to minimize Unrest in your Kingdom. It soon became tedious for me.

Hope things will work out for them and that they'll have enough resources to really get a good release for their next game.

You can always set the kingdom difficulty to effortless/easy. With enhanced edition, Owlcats also introduced crisis point which lowerd DC to succeed in kingdom projects - you now earn crisis point everytime you rank up the kingdom.

Personally, I enjoyed the kingdom management quite a lot, especially in my replays - it was a lot easier to handle since I knew what to expect and artisan rewards (which are tied to kingdom ranks) are really great.

They've done a pretty amazing job of fixing everything since then though, apparently. I started my first full play-through a few weeks ago, now I'm ~200 hours in and I've really only noticed 2 bugs worth mentioning the whole way:

1. Game was locking up a lot on me in Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Switched to Borderless Fullscreen, problem solved.

2. Part of Valerie's companion quest was presented to me out-of-order for some reason, but it didn't break anything.

I played it on normal Kingdom difficulty when the game was just released and got stuck in too much unrest after Chapter 4, early Chapter 5. Because of the constant dc23+ Skillchecks after Chapter 2, my dice rolls were failing too much, considered that i already had advisors with +5 to+8 at that point already, i had a lot of bad luck involved in it too.
To be honest, i didn't expect the game to be so harsh about random numbers in my first playthrough and i tried playing it as a regular Party based RPG, which was a big mistake back then.

??? Never seen that dialogue. In all my runs:

I reported it through the in-game bug report, maybe it'll get fixed if they're still fixing Kingmaker stuff.

Yes! Count me in!
However, I am somewhat worried about what that separation means in terms of the studio being able to develop more PF games…

I am not a game developer, but I agree with you on that. I think that they already have a solid base for a new game.
I would just like to point out that if they release a new PF game, that would probably not be named King Maker 2. I would guess something like Pathfinder 2: Rise of the Runelords?

Yep.

Kingmaker and Rise of the Runelords are so called Adventure Paths for the Pathfinder P&P game. There are a lot more.

Wow, this thread gets into crazy RPGCodex territory :)

We don't like this game, because we actually like this game…
What?! Don't understand? Then f*ck you, we are the hardcore and we have the right to get critical!

Or something similar. ;)

/amused

Correct. In fact, I guessed the Rise of Runelords because I think that if owlcat really decides to develop a PF2 game, maybe they will implement the new PF2 ruleset, and I think that the rise of runelords is one of the few adventure paths that have been released for PF2.

Considering I benched this game about a year ago now, I really need to get back and complete it. Maybe this will be the next game up after I finish my current jaunt through the world of Xeen.

From what I saw on Discord, Owlcat will use PF 1e ruleset for their next game as well, not 2e.

Good to know. I'm currently playing Pathfinder 1e P&P and I wouldn't like to have to dive into another ruleset yet.

Good to know. Thanks :)

But is a new game confirmed?

I did play a one-shot adventure playtest of PF2. It is not much to judge but seems a good system too.

I heard the announcement will come this year ;)