RPGWatch Feature - Pathfinder: Kingmaker Review

You seem to be forgetting both Deadfire and D:OS2 has been in market for much longer than Kingmaker. Looking at howlongtobeat and general comments out there, Kingmaker is much longer than Deadfire.

But everyone is entitled to their own opinion. You think its overpriced, I think its one of the best valued game considering amount of fun I had. Agree to disagree.

edit: actually I retract what I was saying before. I was actually comparing Kingmaker with a 25% discount and Deadfire with a 40% discount. Based on that I think the current price is actually reasonable (once they fix the bugs).

RE: your point about time in the market. For the month of December 2018 Original Sin 2 outsold both Kingmaker and Deadfire despite being in the market for the longest of all three. Then again it is not surprising considering how successful OS2 has been (top 20 sales out of all games on Steam for 2018 - despite being released in 2017).

I never consider sales as indication of quality. Especially valid for niche market production. My personal value meter which is mostly based on fun factor says that Kingmaker is pure gold. Also if compared to PoE or DOS or Head over Heels on ZX Spectrum. IMHO anyway.

Originally Posted by bjon045
edit: actually I retract what I was saying before. I was actually comparing Kingmaker with a 25% discount and Deadfire with a 40% discount. Based on that I think the current price is actually reasonable (once they fix the bugs).

Again, I never saw Deadfire with 40% discount (currently on 35% discount) but I will take your word for it.

Originally Posted by purpleblob
Again, I never saw Deadfire with 40% discount (currently on 35% discount) but I will take your word for it.

The obsidian edition is currently 40% off and is the best value as it includes the Season pass.

Ah I see. Not interested in season pass so will pick it up when the base game falls around $30AUD

Originally Posted by Andrew23
I never consider sales as indication of quality. Especially valid for niche market production. My personal value meter which is mostly based on fun factor says that Kingmaker is pure gold. Also if compared to PoE or DOS or Head over Heels on ZX Spectrum. IMHO anyway.

Yes it's forgotten again and again, saying that The Witcher 3 or SKyrim are boring is making many people wonder on your level of madness.

That's democracy time, democracy decides, so there's a constant push to, what's good is what's approved by democracy, so it's what is enjoyed by the most people.

But it's more complex than that obviously.

For me Kingmaker is a fail because of the last two chapters, and I'm sad when I see players supporting such awful crap design.

Help make the dev sell a lot to have them make more RPG? I don't see the point when it's dev that can think their design of last two chapters has anything good, I don't include the end that seems well done. That next RPG can be anything and everything, not for me, I stopped care.

Originally Posted by Dasale
Yes it's forgotten again and again, saying that The Witcher 3 or SKyrim are boring is making many people wonder on your level of madness.

That's democracy time, democracy decides, so there's a constant push to, what's good is what's approved by democracy, so it's what is enjoyed by the most people.

But it's more complex than that obviously.

For me Kingmaker is a fail because of the last two chapters, and I'm sad when I see players supporting such awful crap design.

Help make the dev sell a lot to have them make more RPG? I don't see the point when it's dev that can think their design of last two chapters has anything good, I don't include the end that seems well done. That next RPG can be anything and everything, not for me, I stopped care.

… and is the game consist of last two chapters only? There are 7 chapters, with first 5 providing more than 100 hours of fun gameplay.

You are sad that people support this game? I'm sad people bad mouth this game based on small portion of the game.

Originally Posted by purpleblob
Ah I see. Not interested in season pass so will pick it up when the base game falls around $30AUD

Got to ask but why? Did you play BG without Tales of the sword coast and BG2 without Throne of Bhaal? The White March was a great expansion (better than the main game) for Pillars of Eternity and the Forgotten Sanctum is again some of the best content Obsidian has produced. Obsidian does DLC very well indeed.

Thats what I heard too but as you already know I didn't enjoy PoE1 (without expansions). I'd like to try out base game first and if I enjoy, happy to purchase season pass/DLC seperately. Don't mind paying more for games I enjoy, happy to support the game I love.

Edit: I think I played both BGs without expansion first couple of times. My brother owned the expansion for both but didn't install it for me, asking me to try out base game first. Aahhh.. good old days with boxed editions + manuals. Back then I didn't even know how to install the game, needed my brother's help.

It's also a miracle that Owlcat did what they did with $900,000 from Kickstarter. You're comparing that to something that had millions behind it and was a sequel from a popular first game. Imagine if Owlcat had millions that Obsidian had, we'd see something so great our tiny little heads would probably explode.

Originally Posted by purpleblob
… and is the game consist of last two chapters only? There are 7 chapters, with first 5 providing more than 100 hours of fun gameplay.

You are sad that people support this game? I'm sad people bad mouth this game based on small portion of the game.

It's my opinion, ok this one is your. :-)

Small portion of the game? It was no small for me, it's two true chapters. For in game chapter 7, the last dungeon is perhaps not very well filled, but huge anyway and with 3 big and difficult puzzles and some other tricks to manage. Before that not only there's a fair amount of stuff, but also you have a lot of time to play more stuff, as to achieve the Lieche quest, or the dark queen quest, or eventually finish some companions quests you failed finish in previous chapter.

Ok chapter 8 is perhaps smaller, but no magic during a quite long part, sorry but it's an insane design.

Mass of players never ever forgive Bioware for ME3 ending, it's hugely worse for PK. And if they deeply fix all this crap design, myself I'll forgive them, Bioware fixed it for nothing, most haters ignored the fixing efforts forever.

For me ME3 ending was a detail, just few minutes and I was enjoying the unexplained aspects keeping some mystery, and the heroes death concluding perfectly an epic and heroic destiny.

In PK it's not some minutes, it's 20H of boredom play to finish this game. I can't forgive that, but ok Im' sad that Biowere get bashed so hard for ME3 ending, so I can imagine you have a sort of similar point of view for PK.

Originally Posted by bjon045
Got to ask but why? Did you play BG without Tales of the sword coast and BG2 without Throne of Bhaal? The White March was a great expansion (better than the main game) for Pillars of Eternity and the Forgotten Sanctum is again some of the best content Obsidian has produced. Obsidian does DLC very well indeed.

Yeas it makes no sense, pick now only PoE2 is picking an incomplete game, like playing Early Access.

Originally Posted by Dasale
It's my opinion, ok this one is your. :-)

Small portion of the game? It was no small for me, it's two true chapters. For in game chapter 7, the last dungeon is perhaps not very well filled, but huge anyway and with 3 big and difficult puzzles and some other tricks to manage. Before that not only there's a fair amount of stuff, but also you have a lot of time to play more stuff, as to achieve the Lieche quest, or the dark queen quest, or eventually finish some companions quests you failed finish in previous chapter.

Ok chapter 8 is perhaps smaller, but no magic during a quite long part, sorry but it's an insane design.

Mass of players never ever forgive Bioware for ME3 ending, it's hugely worse for PK. And if they deeply fix all this crap design, myself I'll forgive them, Bioware fixed it for nothing, most haters ignored the fixing efforts forever.

For me ME3 ending was a detail, just few minutes and I was enjoying the unexplained aspects keeping some mystery, and the heroes death concluding perfectly an epic and heroic destiny.

In PK it's not some minutes, it's 20H of boredom play to finish this game. I can't forgive that, but ok Im' sad that Biowere get bashed so hard for ME3 ending, so I can imagine you have a sort of similar point of view for PK.

Definitely very different point of view. For me, the ending of ME3 was last straw but not the main problem. But now we digress.

As I mentioned in the review, I also disliked the last 2 chapters a lot, to a point it lowered my perceived score from "very good" to "good". But I am giving credit where its due, the other 5 chapters are excellent and fun. Proportion wise, chapter 6 + 7 are quite small % of the game.

I also hope Owlcats will fix up the final two chapters, so we can agree on that.

But I didn't mind the *gimping* in chapter 7 - actually enjoyed it a fair bit so that's another thing we will disagree on.

Originally Posted by Dasale
Yeas it makes no sense, pick now only PoE2 is picking an incomplete game, like playing Early Access.

Why should I spend more money on something I may not enjoy? As I said, happy to spend extra on DLCs if I enjoy the base game.

Originally Posted by purpleblob
Why should I spend more money on something I may not enjoy? As I said, happy to spend extra on DLCs if I enjoy the base game.

It makes sense, if you are short in money, or hate waste any single penny then you have no choice, or if you hate the idea to give money to the publisher or the dev.

But, for example, have done that for Gothic 2 would have been a terrible error. But I doubt it's the same for PoE2 DLC, it's more true for PoE1 DLC. I would ask to the forum first, if it worth have first play with the DLC.

I have asked around enough so thanks for your opinion but no thanks. I will wait for more hefty sale for Deadfire.

Originally Posted by TheRealFluent
It's also a miracle that Owlcat did what they did with $900,000 from Kickstarter. You're comparing that to something that had millions behind it and was a sequel from a popular first game. Imagine if Owlcat had millions that Obsidian had, we'd see something so great our tiny little heads would probably explode.

There's no reason to believe they developed the entire game based on the funding. They probably either had funding of their own, or got additional funds from Deep Silver who published it.

I seem to recall it was fairly advanced by the time the Kickstarter came out, so I suspect they invested quite a bit of their own money, which is not uncommon for such projects.

Originally Posted by Maylander
There's no reason to believe they developed the entire game based on the funding. They probably either had funding of their own, or got additional funds from Deep Silver who published it.

I seem to recall it was fairly advanced by the time the Kickstarter came out, so I suspect they invested quite a bit of their own money, which is not uncommon for such projects.

They had a publisher, private investors and $900,000 in backer money.

So we can speculate they probably had a final budget close to a few million. Being in Russia probably also helped keep development, and daily operating costs low.

So TLDR it probably had a decent budget close to PoE & Torment Tides of Numenera.

I think that development budget is not interesting when considering quality of video game. At least not for me. I would rather put it into fun fact basket, but even that is not really possible as information we have are mostly speculations.

If I wander in speculations department I would probably think about behind scene information which I gathered from forum discussions, wikipedia, etc, which indicates to me that management of Obsidian never really wanted to work on niche games like isometric RPGs. They just took the chance when they saw it. From that I deduce the outcomes are not really labors of love. Very similar case is Fargo and inXile, to me clear calculation. And I have to say, I somehow have this feeling when playing their games. First Pillars was probably most boring game I ever finished. It felt as if developed by someone according to given checklist. Deadfire is better in all aspects, but still. And I feel completely different when playing Kingmaker. Totally subjective thing, of course.