Quoting: Patola

Quoting: NeverthelessI decided to give Pathfinder Kingmaker a pause after >150 hours, because it's so incredibly big that there is no chance to finish it anytime soon. It has very bright sides and some questionable design decisions, but was totally worth playing!
I'm now playing The long journey home on Proton. It really reminds me of one of my all time favourite games: Starflight from 1986, that I played on Amiga around 1991..
Edit: typo

Please convince me to like this game (Pathfinder Kingmaker), expand your impressions. I want to like it but so far I've seen some gameplays and it seemed boring, with lots and lots of windows and inventory and skills management, and very few environments, all very much alike, and generic fights. I want to be proven wrong, you can insult me if it helps.

Also I took a glance at The long journey home. Look amazing, although it does not have a good rating on Steam but I have learned to be skeptical about this rating anyway. Can you tell more?

It took some time, like I said. It was a busy week last week... but here is what I think about Pathfinder Kingmaker. I always wanted to write a Steam review about it. I'll use this one now :). It turned out to be longer than I thought...

What is PK?

Pathfinder Kingmaker is conveived as a CRPG much like Baldurs Gate. So my opinion of the game is adressed at you only then, if you like that kind of games. The predominant part of the game plays a lot like the Baldurs Gate games, but of course is a lot more modern in graphics and interface. You create one character yourself, who then travels with up to 5 dev-made companions to earn the title of a baron over a wild bandit- and beast-controlled piece of land called "The Stolen lands". Your group travels greater distances represented by a symbol, following roads on the map, encountering new roads, road forks and areas to explore in ISO perspective, just like it was made in the BG games. Sometimes random encounters take place (more or less often, based on the attributes of your group members), which can be friendly or lead to fights, sometimes they are even scripted narrative events progressing the main story. After some travelling, based on attributes and backpack weights, your group members become tired and eventually have to rest. Resting means having to eat and to sleep. The party can either hunt for food, which takes time (again based on attributes), or use up rations, which are quite heavy in the backpack. In dungeons hunting is impossible and rations have to be used. Owlcat Games take the games archetype, no not just Baldurs Gate, but even more the Pathfinder table top RPG (a spawn of AD&D) very seriously in PK. You can hear and feel dice throws everywhere. Every possible obstacle in the game is linked with a virtual attribute throw, often leaving you the choice between 2 different skill-checks and therefore ways to continue. In my opinion this creates a more vivid imagination of the world of Golarion than even the most stunning graphics could do. For me in PK presentation and imagination work together very well! It inspires a sense of adventuring very early in the game. Exploration of the map, resting and random encounters even add to the atmosphere. Combat is tactical, as you would expect from a game with an AD&D like ruleset. Crowd control from “Grease”, “Web” or “Hold Person” (etc.) mage spells and the use of tanks / damage dealers / healers work quite well. Difficulty can be fine tuned in a number of ways. The whole game is made to spend a long time with it. Character creation and development alone can take countless hours. This is all solid classic role playing mechanics, and with a lot of motivation, but CRPG is not the only genre in the game..
The other face of PG is a build up strategy game. Both genres share the same map, the same timeline, acting persons, sometimes even in double roles, first as party members and also as advisors or ministers of the barony, and it all starts as soon as you have succeeded becoming baron of the Stolen Lands. In this part you can expand your lands by incorporating regions into the barony. More regions, more exploration, roads, areas... Each new province can have one village. Each village can grow into a city by adding buildings to it, which also add points to categories like stability, loyality, economy, culture, community.. which you can level up at certain values. Your talents as barony leader are tried by emergencies, request for help from citizens, political events brought up by concerned advisors, and all kinds of positive and negative incidents. To solve problems or take advantage of opportunities you either delegate them to the most fitting advisor, who then tries for a given amount of days to bring them to a good end, or ignore them. Successes add points to the described categories, failures or ignored problems have negative effects. Total failure in the barony part of the game happens when certain values drop to zero, which end the game completely.
The buildup strategy part is not the most fun part of the game to be honest. It is quite simplistic, but it gives the whole game one big benefit: Problems with the management of the barony often create very credible quests, and thus contribute even more to the motivation and atmosphere on the CRPG side. It also holds some interesting moral decisions, which sometimes have direct consequences in the game, and sometimes just leave you knowing what you‘ve done... It gives you the chance to be the leader you want to be, or the one, you think you have to be (if that‘s a difference to you..). The whole game makes quite some use of the AD&D alignment system, giving you choices based on your characters alignment, logging all your decisions, possibly changing your alignment later accordingly.

Known problems and solutions

Pathfinder Kingmaker had a rough start, especially on Linux. It made the impression of a game that was released much too early. Countless hotfixes were needed in the first few weeks after release to fix lots and lots of often game breaking bugs. On Linux it took months to fix a soundbug that just consisted of the delivery of the wrong version of a library. Now, with the release of the enhanced version the game is very stable, loading times have been reduced, but can still be annoyingly long.

The intertwined genres can lead to some strange moments. While it is not possible for an advisor to pursue more than one goal at a time, it is perfectly possible for her or him to travel with your party through the Stolen Lands at the same time. This way it can happen that a party member and advisor asks you (while you are at the far end of the barony with your party) to meet him in the throne room because he has something to tell you about his barony efforts. So you have to travel together to your capitol to hear him out.

Some people don‘t like the fact, that most quests and barony assignments have end dates. So you are always under a little time pressure, and the number of tasks is often higher than you can handle. So you always have to decide which to choose and which to ignore. However it is possible to defuse the difficulty of the barony buildup by putting it to „easy“ or „effortless“ in the settings. It can even be completely switched off.

Resting and random events have some positive effects for the immersion, but can be tedious and annouying when you‘re 150 hours in the game, have a deadline to keep, and the group rests for 13 hours to be healed and fresh again.

The biggest problem of the game was and still is its accessibility. You have to watch gameplayvideos, read wikis or work yourself into the game for quite some time, to have a feeling of control over PK. This game would definitely could have used a huge manual as it has been common for such games in the old days. Especially for such an epic game like this, which most people will probably only play through once, it would have been important not to force the user to try out, find out and repeat all to much. Thankfully the enhanced edition introduced the possibility to re-skill characters. Three times for free, then for in game money.

Conclusion

Pathfinder Kingmaker is an epic and a troubled masterpiece. I've rarely played an RPG that spreads so much tabletop atmosphere, with a solid role-playing system, solid writing (no Planescape Torment, but solid stuff!), tactical combat, detailed character creation and maintenance, comfort features, like the collective backpack. Despite its problems Pathfinder Kingmaker is one of my favourite RPGs so far. If Owlcat games can reapeat their efforts with (maybe) PK2, or a different project, with all the expieriences they made with PK, if they have the time and funds to really finish developing it, the next project could result in a true masterpiece!

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That should be interesting!
Vive la résistance

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: NeverthelessI decided to give Pathfinder Kingmaker a pause after >150 hours, because it's so incredibly big that there is no chance to finish it anytime soon. It has very bright sides and some questionable design decisions, but was totally worth playing!
I'm now playing The long journey home on Proton. It really reminds me of one of my all time favourite games: Starflight from 1986, that I played on Amiga around 1991..
Edit: typo

Please convince me to like this game (Pathfinder Kingmaker), expand your impressions. I want to like it but so far I've seen some gameplays and it seemed boring, with lots and lots of windows and inventory and skills management, and very few environments, all very much alike, and generic fights. I want to be proven wrong, you can insult me if it helps.

Also I took a glance at The long journey home. Look amazing, although it does not have a good rating on Steam but I have learned to be skeptical about this rating anyway. Can you tell more?

I don't know if I can convince you to like PK, but I'll tell you what I think of it so far. This game is a bit complicated to judge, so I might need some time to write it down, but I will!
I'm not very far in Tljh at the moment. I'll let you know when I know enough to talk about the game!

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Quoting: tmtvl

Quoting: sub

Quoting: eldakingJust today I finally reached Big Boss 1 on Dota Underlords, which is nice.

I have recently decided to give Pillars of Eternity a try and its really good, but I am not really into RPGs. I'll try to finish this one though.

And I have recently gone back to Crusader Kings 2. I think I'll do a super-religious France roleplay run and maybe get a few achievements.

Pillars of Eternity is a fantastic game very close to the classic Baldur's Gate games.
Yet, way(!) too much text for me, much more than BG1+2 had.

Pillars of Eternity 2 is really, REALLY good. PoE1 OTOH, not so much. The end is neat, but the entire story feels too gimmicky to really work. The real killjoy being the insane amounts of combat against enemies with about 3 times the hp they ought to have.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been playing some Ittle Dew, which is a neat action adventure puzzle game.

I liked PoE1 at first, but I then came to hate all that repetetive fighting. Having to fight always the same groups of adversaries, every time getting less experience points, having to rest my group so often, using up rare camping equipment, having to travel for more... It made the game more and more tedious to me..

typo again ->

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I decided to give Pathfinder Kingmaker a pause after >150 hours, because it's so incredibly big that there is no chance to finish it anytime soon. It has very bright sides and some questionable design decisions, but was totally worth playing!
I'm now playing The long journey home on Proton. It really reminds me of one of my all time favourite games: Starflight from 1986, that I played on Amiga around 1991..

Edit: typo

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Uhh Red Dead Redemption 2 comes for Windows on Steam. The fact that they plan to release it on Stadia too, makes me hope they also use Vulkan for both versions!

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Quoting: constThis may well go up to European court level and then it might effect the whole European Union. And there is no reason this will only affect games. I'd assume this would hit digital movie distribution even harder then games. And I assume it would hit AAA much harder then indie games.
Still, I hope this will happen. There will surely be chaos at first, but it will be a much fairer market in the end.

It would hit AAA harder in measure of money, but it will still kill lots of indies, and it will make AAA evade the problem alltogether.

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Quoting: AciDFor a website promoting Linux, and hence the freedom it brings, I'm ASTONISHED by the very, very narrow views some of the commenters are trying to explain here.

A law will give the consumer more liberty, and you see that as bad?!

Please.

Also, for those who keep repeating 'stores should drop the French market', you first need to understand how the EU market works.
Scratch that, those of you talking about how X could affect Y should first take a deep breath, then learn how a free market work compared to one with monopolies (which you are promoting).

I still can't believe we are seeing those type of comments on a Linux website!

The problem is that this could be a right do harm. Also. there will be no benefit. Big players won't simply give up parts of their income. They will simply change the rules to something we most probably have less rights in than ever before. At the very least it will lift prices.

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Quoting: sub

Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: pbThat's it, I'm telling my son right now to stop dreaming of developing games. This basically legalises keyshops and now even allowing you to sell the games you're already played and finished, if it wasn't bad enough before... Piracy killed Amiga gaming, socialism will kill PC gaming?

Can we maybe not be so dramatic? Some of us are old enough to remember that that’s how it was for the majority of video gaming’s existence. And books, DVDs, cars, etc. Sure it would be a disruptive change, but as long as it doesn’t open the door to duplication (piracy), the market can adapt. It might not be pretty for a while, but it won’t just die like that.

I'm not yet having a position on all this yet, tbh.

Being honest, this pure digital distribution is different to what
we had back then for games or even more for the book example.

If you sell a used book, it's used - no matter how hard you try.
Those old game boxed were usually plastic sealed and you had to open them.
From my experience the cardbox boxes suffered as did the jewel case plus the CD.

All I want to say is this: Usually a used product is not mint anymore.
It shows signs of use that is represented in the price when you resell it.

This is completely gone for digital products.
You sell something that's perfectly the same as you bought it first hand.
There is no price on the consumption of the game anymore, which is what the
developer actually wants to get paid for - and that's fair, isn't it?

It's a dilemma.

What I basically want to do is have fun with games that don't interfere with the functions of my computer and that don't spy on me. I most definitely want to give the developers of the games their fair share for development (otherwise I would prefer free software), and I want the games to be distributed in a comfortable, and secure way. For that I also really, really want to give distribution channels like Steam and GOG their fair share too! I really don't need to sell the games after that. I also wouldn't expect a developer to add feature patches (or gameserver services) to any game I purchased as used software.

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Quoting: Jiskin

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: Jiskinoh my... I saw so stupid comments I don't know where to start...

Valve and developers will be more profitable to abandon the entire French market

France is like their 7th market, how this could be more profitable?

I see many devs including Ubisoft leaving France, losing hundreds of jobs just because people want to resell a game they get for 15$ for 5$ bucks.

If a second hand market would crash a business, we will not even have cars... There are many reasons to leave France as a company, like taxes, strong social laws, etc., so just don't say anything you don't know about.

This will hurt everyone.

Too many arguments I don't know what to say...

There is a difference between second hand cars and second hand software: Cars tend to catch scratches. Second hand games are indistinguishable from new games.
There is another one: There are no DRM free cars that you can simply keep when you sell them.

Second hand cars do not need servers. Games will have to be detached from accounts, to be able to sell them. So Valve could simply charge a percentage fee for detaching keys. I on their side wouldn't help to sell the keys, just detach and deliver them.
Developers still won't like the idea. They will sell less copies. Lifting prices would make second hand games even more attractive, but would also lift the detachment fee.

So yes, I think one result would definitely be higher prices for games.

Yeah yeah... And when you have issues with your second hand car you can fix it because there are factories that keep constructing pieces, with paid and trained people. It involves money too.

If you have a second hand game on steam, maybe you will not have the steam success, etc.

And as far as I know, the French Court hasn't prevent Steam to lock the resell to their platform only and to add transactions fees.

The problem is to compare games to "real" goods, like cars or pants, for the obvious reasons..
Valve sells games on the Steam platform. If Europe law forces them to make their products resellable, then of course those products will still be Steam games, which are, and most probably will, be handled by Steam keys.
All that Valve had to do to make the games movable is to unattach the Steam keys from their owners accounts. This is a service they can charge a fee for. I don't know how high the fee could legally be, but maybe developers could get their share from this too...
If there are legal limits, Valve had to decide if it's better to have s used key section on Steam, or if they want to get resellers involved, which at least will add their own share on used gamss prices.

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