Decent game. Once in a while one of the little written passages is the best part, like those ones I got screenshots of at some point. Buggy as all get out... crashes too often.
Combat
- The fighting is OK, not great, not as good as the old Pool of Radiance-Ruins of Myth Drannor (and that other game), but it's decent. There is a lot of it IF you turn on the "auto Kingdom mode" which I totally recommend. Otherwise you'll be spending half your time walking / burning time... I do not like burning time/grinding in games, it is dull as fk. So yeah the fighting is I think a little better than Baldur's Gate 3, which was lackluster and got boring b/c not enough fighting by a long shot.
- BTW, Buggy buggy bugs. Crashes a lot. Crashes during a screen change/save a lot. On PS4, you can easily have too many saves, and have to go delete half your saves in the PS4 interface to get disk space back to save again.
- Finding the right difficulty areas was a hassle at first, a super big hassle, b/c using a thousand potions often never made the difference. If you aren't close to the right level with your party, there is nothing you'll be able to do, generally.
- Mostly it's rinse and repeat tactics. Get the super high AC fighter out front. Flank to get sneak attacks, but then screw yourself when you realize fireball is going to hit the flakers.
- Mostly I do turn based, but sometimes if it's easy I just flip on the "zerg swarm attack move" setting.
- Fighting Defensively on your one super high AC dude.
- Charge to get in a hit on round one is common.
- AoE is a little disappointing sometimes in the fact that it is too rare to get that perfect "nuke them all" with a big AoE. I mean once in 20 hours you'll get to do it, it's not quite enough. Normally you'll hit 2 or 3 guys at most, b/c the programmers set up the enemies to be super smart about spacing. Maybe if Chain Lightning exists in this game, or something similar, then it'll open up a few super nukes. It's not terrible right now though, just needs more variety. Like now that I have the Dragon Breath spell, and so many energy types to choose from, I want more resist to X and vuln to Y stuff, but all the fire-resistant trolls are gone already.
- Melee, besides sneak attacks, is fairly boring. There are all these supposed "options" that aren't very useful, like rarely at least. A single attack instead of 2 for the fighter that does extra dmg... in theory that'd be better for the Damage Reduction monsters... but his To-Hit is so bad while fighting defensively, I rarely use it. And if the enemy isn't hard enough to need his AC to be maxed out, then the trouble of clicking the button and/or the DR (damg reduction) just isn't a thing for that particular fight/monster.
- Magic Blasting - Early on Burning Hands was fun for all the "gotta get close but not die" stuff. Later Fireball is better than the Cones (I got the 60 foot cones even) or Line attacks 98% of the time, which is a disappointment, because I'd rather variety. Maybe I should change my "specialization/aka extra dmg" to the Dragon Breath cones and lines to force me into variety, cuz for now it's on FB and it's super damn good. If I don't try to be interesting and flank, heh.
- Flanking - actually it's so HARD to control exactly where your guy is moving to, they allow flanking if you are just at a right angle from your friend, not directly behind enemy needed.
- Wolves are flipping annoying and probably the hardest thing in the game, stupidly. They don't go for the high AC fighter, they are super smart and surround and attack mage and priest types. You can never AoE all of them, which would be SO SO FUN to do once in a while, but they never NEVER let you do that without hitting your whole party. They knock you down, and in PF1e when you stand, Attacks of Opportunity. Ouch. Sometimes I am able to run around in circles with the fighter to waste the AoO from the wolves, but when I don't, basically my low HP or low AC guys are dead.
- Reminds me, I did a custom difficulty to just auto-resurrect my NPC party members b/c it's just too much of a hassle with the crappy pathing and crappy positioning problems with the interface. I would much prefer a hard grid, that'd be tactical and accurate!
- The NPCs they force on you are mostly annoying as hell an not what I'd want in a party. You can spend gobs of gold to get your own mercenary party members... I ended up getting two mercs and so my party is:
- My main, a sorcerer. Horrible ugly portraits to choose from for elves basically, so he looks terrible and goofy.
- Merc Barbarian dude. Crappy portraits to choose from. B/c I got sick of the barbarian chick yelling in my ear, having a sword the size of a boat, and the fact that it's silly she'd be doing more melee damage than an elder Godzilla. Drop her as soon as you can and pretend you never saw her... but they annoyingly keep showing her story and her sword that is bigger than she is on load screens, grrrr. Go away lady!
- Cleric-Dwarf NPC they give you. He's fine. Although I get annoyed at some of the forced "making fun of the goth-kid dwarf" dialog they give you. He's more combat and less healing, so I literally have 4 melee folks, 1 priest, and 1 mage. Not what I would think i would need. The dwar-cleric is terrible at healing, his AoE heal will heal the enemy, whereas the priest will not heal the enemy. And the single-target cure xyz wounds is OK, but low healing numbers and there is some crappiness around pathing/visuals where sometimes ANY spell can be accidentally not cast and a turn wasted b/c you though you had the distance correct when targeting.
- Speaking of crappy pathing/visuals, you can't walk 30 feet and cast a spell reliably. Best to walk 29 feet then cast... I've lost so many spells looking a the green line and 30 number only to be smacked down by the game.
- Rogue-wizard. 90% rogue chick. She's fine. They give you a half-elf who is double-classed with 2 levels of wizard. I just went pure rogue from then on... I forget I could pay to respect her, so maybe I'll do that and make her all Rogue, but then that'll feel boring, I dunno. She used to be able to Vanish as a spell and it was nice for a one time guaranteed sneak attack, but damn if it randomly stopped being castable, I haven't figured out what went wrong... wearing armor but then I took that off this morning b/c her Bracers are +5 Armor and don't overlap with body armor.
- BTW, Weird b/c my "perfect" team of 6 characters only has one blaster mage... I should have two. Hmm.
- Merc Fighter dude. High AC. Stays on "Fighting Defensively". I got rid of the chick in armor high AC tower-shield-fighter and went the same build with a dude. Amazingly I actually got a half-decent portrait, though his expression is that of a worried child... and that's better than 95% of the other portraits you can pick yourself believe it or not.
- Priest. He's fine, the one they give you. He's a heal heal heal, buff, heal heal heal guy most of the time. Have him carry an everburning torch.
- The NPCs I keep out of my party:
- Half-orc. I don't do half-orcs and especially not mage half orcs, give me a break.
- The halfling? gnome (halfling?) chick with the super giant feet. Halfling I think. No thanks.
- The gnome alchemist bomber dude. Tried him for a sec... his bombs suck, you HAVE to target an enemy, meaning splash always hits your friendlies. Useless. And he's annoying to listen to, OMG, he has to be the worst personality in the game. Snobby, snooty, snotty, and whiney. Nearly killed him when I met him the first time on the road just due to pure annoyance.
- Barbarian chick, mentioned how annoying she is, and the stupid giant sword.
- Armor plate mail chick. No thanks.
- The black dude ranger. Was gun-shy with worrying it'd be a political message device... b/c a) the fact that all the melee folks are chicks in the default game and b) the way the last 5 years of video games have been with "the political message", but this guy is totally cool. His dialog was smart and believable, despite him sticking out and being a foreigner... they address it and make it make sense instead of just pretending human races and foreign countries aren't a thing like in the recent games and movies (the year is 2026, but this game was made in like what, 2017 or something). I found that I really liked his beginning dialogue, he sounded smart but used phrases/words that were believable for a foreign person who learned a new language. Very likeable dude, IMO. Well done game maker folks or whoever did his stuff! I heard his wolf-dog is a super tank, but haven't tried him/it out.
- Forgetting someone or two....
- Loot.
- Half-way or 2/3 of the way through the game, it's starting to get really repetitive. Everybody in the 6 person party has +2 natural armor amulet, +1 resist cloak or better, +1 saving throw ring or better, etc. Not much variety on wearable items as the game goes on.
- Found only one boots of elvenkind
- There is a unique helmet from the first miniboss that looks cool, but doesn't do a lot
- Weapons. Weirdly, I'll get like one upgrade once a week, and then all these weapons that seem like they should be good just get sold b/c they do 2 pts less dmg per attack or whatever.
- Ranged attacks - seem pretty not great. Maybe if you build a perfect ranger it'd be good.
- Buggy buggy bugs.
- Crashes a lot. Crashes during a screen change/save a lot. On PS4, you can easily have too many saves, and have to go delete half your saves in the PS4 interface to get disk space back to save again. Hilarious, I'm rereading that the old Pool of Radiance - Ruins of Myth Drannor crashed too much... sheeeit, it ain't got nothing on this game's constant crashing.
Random:
- Tip vs verdant chambers
- https://www.gamerguides.com/pathfinder-kingmaker/guide/walkthrough/chapter-2-dire-narlmarches-expedition/a-just-reward
- I have been suspicious of the dryad. Is this a fight? Gotta solo from super far, inconvenient.
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