At its core, Kingmaker is a perfectly decent Baldur's Gate clone in a market currently starved for good ones. The D&D 3.X system isn't the most accessible thing in the world, and the combination of overtuned enemy combat encounters and undertuned pre-built companions with "recommended" choices that vary from decent to useless makes it even less accessible than it needs to be, but if you come in aware of the basics and/or are willing to consult the odd guide, it's not that hard to muddle through until you get access to big, flashy spells that trivialize the later game. Puzzles are sometimes fun and sometimes a good reminder that you used to have to look a lot of this crap up back in the day. The survival mechanics, while much more in-depth than usual for the genre, are a decent enough way to limit some of the worst excesses of the fifteen minute workday, even if they're married to some really ungenerous carry weights and the like. And hey, the inventory, always the bane of games like this, actually benefits from a bit of modernization, with item type tabs and a vague "pool" of items carried between everyone until someone specifically puts something in their hand or on their belt.
Companions are unfortunately kind of uneven, but all of them at least have strong core ideas even if the execution could usually use some work. Harrim, for instance, has one of my favorite concepts for a dwarf party member ever and a personal story that's great on paper... but then most of his actual characterization is wasted on lame, repetitive jokes about his whiny nihilism that weren't that funny the first time. With that said, I wouldn't call any of them flat-out duds, and none of them are so incompetently built that the player can't get anything out of them without using mods to completely respec them... although I did take advantage of them once I had them, without completely remaking the characters. I also appreciated how some alignment choices lock out some kinds of content, although I wish to high heaven that being too good didn't make you stop being lawful and the like.
Unfortunately, the part everyone complains about: the kingdom management. Speaking as someone who actually likes 4X games and wrote a whole review about how Birthright is an amazing and overlooked campaign setting, it's mediocre at best and downright awful at worst, which is way too much of the time. It enforces stressful, punishing time limits on every single quest, it swings and zig-zags wildly in difficult, it's largely based in luck rather than skill, thought, or foresight, and very little about it is optional. Also, the best rewards you get for it often require specific character builds to enjoy and long and unintuitive quest chains to complete!
Mods can address most of these issues. Mods will let a player rebuild the companions, either sand off or eliminate the worst excesses of the kingdom management, shred off the frustrations of carry weights, avoid alignment related foolishness, and even designate specific stacks of items as something to automatically sell at shops.
But I don't believe that mods fixing an issue to make the game actually fun should be a blanket shield against legitimate criticisms, especially when the game makers could have easily just not included the unfun things in the first place and did anyway.
I am looking forward to the sequel (when it's finally finished anyway), but I'm also worried. I've heard many of these frustrations might not be totally gone... and also I wanted to play a bloodrager and apparently the custom mythic path they came up with for that class both sucks and is evil-aligned.
VideoGame One of those games that's plenty of fun once you mod out all the awful, unfun parts.
At its core, Kingmaker is a perfectly decent Baldur's Gate clone in a market currently starved for good ones. The D&D 3.X system isn't the most accessible thing in the world, and the combination of overtuned enemy combat encounters and undertuned pre-built companions with "recommended" choices that vary from decent to useless makes it even less accessible than it needs to be, but if you come in aware of the basics and/or are willing to consult the odd guide, it's not that hard to muddle through until you get access to big, flashy spells that trivialize the later game. Puzzles are sometimes fun and sometimes a good reminder that you used to have to look a lot of this crap up back in the day. The survival mechanics, while much more in-depth than usual for the genre, are a decent enough way to limit some of the worst excesses of the fifteen minute workday, even if they're married to some really ungenerous carry weights and the like. And hey, the inventory, always the bane of games like this, actually benefits from a bit of modernization, with item type tabs and a vague "pool" of items carried between everyone until someone specifically puts something in their hand or on their belt.
Companions are unfortunately kind of uneven, but all of them at least have strong core ideas even if the execution could usually use some work. Harrim, for instance, has one of my favorite concepts for a dwarf party member ever and a personal story that's great on paper... but then most of his actual characterization is wasted on lame, repetitive jokes about his whiny nihilism that weren't that funny the first time. With that said, I wouldn't call any of them flat-out duds, and none of them are so incompetently built that the player can't get anything out of them without using mods to completely respec them... although I did take advantage of them once I had them, without completely remaking the characters. I also appreciated how some alignment choices lock out some kinds of content, although I wish to high heaven that being too good didn't make you stop being lawful and the like.
Unfortunately, the part everyone complains about: the kingdom management. Speaking as someone who actually likes 4X games and wrote a whole review about how Birthright is an amazing and overlooked campaign setting, it's mediocre at best and downright awful at worst, which is way too much of the time. It enforces stressful, punishing time limits on every single quest, it swings and zig-zags wildly in difficult, it's largely based in luck rather than skill, thought, or foresight, and very little about it is optional. Also, the best rewards you get for it often require specific character builds to enjoy and long and unintuitive quest chains to complete!
Mods can address most of these issues. Mods will let a player rebuild the companions, either sand off or eliminate the worst excesses of the kingdom management, shred off the frustrations of carry weights, avoid alignment related foolishness, and even designate specific stacks of items as something to automatically sell at shops.
But I don't believe that mods fixing an issue to make the game actually fun should be a blanket shield against legitimate criticisms, especially when the game makers could have easily just not included the unfun things in the first place and did anyway.
I am looking forward to the sequel (when it's finally finished anyway), but I'm also worried. I've heard many of these frustrations might not be totally gone... and also I wanted to play a bloodrager and apparently the custom mythic path they came up with for that class both sucks and is evil-aligned.