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So what are folks thoughts on the game so far.

I enjoy it, but feel it's got some pretty significant flaws. Namely in the kingdom running aspect.

Adventure wise, it's got that great Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter Nights feel to it, and it feels like a worthy successor. The story line is engaging, if a bit color by numbers at time. Character generation is great. Skills are the only area they skimped on, and I'm ok with how they combined a large number of them into single options. The majority of the feat catalog seems to be there though, allowing for very unique character builds. NPC's are a bit lack luster, as their options as very limited, and often times hand tying.

Running the Kingdom is where i'm having the hardest time though. There is so much going on, and so little direction and guidance. "Go find my kid. He's somewhere in this giant kingdom that takes days to cross. I can't tell you anymore." Then you've got a limited selection of people to deal with things, but the game throws an unending stream of problems at you, that if you juggle right you can barely keep treading water, but leaves no time to work on any projects that help expand the kingdom. My kingdom sank after a year because of a monster invasion event that it gave me nothing to work with to try to figure out how to stop.

I think I'm going to give it a break for a month, and hope they do some patching on the thing, then try it again. Overall, I enjoy many aspects of the game, but as of now, the kingdom running is one big flaw.

It's got a lot of bugs. Though they've got a lot of hotfixes happening, and they are addressing things, so it has some promise.

Big problems are difficulty balance issues. For an adaptation of a PnP system, the game developers didn't know what they were toying with. Even on normal difficulty, they've added arbitrary bonuses to monsters that straight up break the math of the system.

I initially went to challenging difficulty, but turned monsters down to 'normal' and still had level 3 skeletons with +14 to hit and +9 to damage, which is frankly absurd to deal with at level 2 or 3.

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Kingdom management is also a big problem. Mine went into a death spiral mid chapter two and I had to turn it to automatic or get a 'kingdom failed, game over screen.' The causes still aren't clear to me. I got hit with several waves of the 'curse' damaging the kingdom because the event popped two weeks earlier than I thought it would and all my advisors were busy (and there isn't any way to recall them). I think that started it, and then the penalties made event failures more likely, and, well, events failed, the kingdom status (and penalty) got even worse and there was not a single thing I could do to affect it.

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Even without the curse event shenanigans I had, the event system is basically another math failure like encounter difficulty. Iterative probability puts failures on d20+x rolls as a statistical likelihood with enough rolls. And this game gives you lots of event rolls over time, and not enough ways to increase your +X (and most of those involve investing even more time, so more events).

Basically, a death spiral due to kingdom events is statistically likely to happen at some point, unless you sit and save scum every event resolution.


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Plus, honestly, the kingdom management isn't very good. Event card pops, you assign one of maybe two possible advisors to it, and that's the whole of the decision making.

The actual adventuring is largely fun... at least to the end of Chapter 2, then it goes really bug<expletive deleted>. At that point their messing with the system math became really apparent, and in chapter 3, sooo many things are hitting my AC 35+ characters on a 5 or higher, for 40+ damage each. It's really absurd.

And chapter 3 has the encounter variety go way down for some reason, so its largely the same fight over and over again. Winnable, but a lot of reloads when the random number generator goes wibble, and a Greater Dread Zombie Cyclops crit-cleaves half the party.

But chapter 1 and the first 3/4s of Chapter 2 were really fun. I especially liked the troll fortress and investigation part of the monster problem. As well as most of the wilderness encounters.

Though the wererat cave and the 'mature jaguar' that can solo a full party by itself were fairly absurd.

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But like you, I'm taking a break. I really want a 'pathfinder standard' (ie, as written in bestiary) difficulty, as the computer game already gives more fights with more monsters than is assumed under the challenge rating rules and how the game system is designed. Giving them additional bonuses to hit, AC and saves is just messed up. The system has a lot of promise, but the devs feel like they don't have a lot of experience with the Pathfinder or d20 systems, or are really out-to-get-the-players DMs, and are out to punish you for feeling competent.

Though with the 'weaker than normal monsters' setting it does go to fairly normal stats for a lot of random encounters. At this setting, if you encounter trolls as a random encounter, they will have bestiary-accurate troll stats, but with a few feat swaps (notably weapon focus). But anything with 'templates;' champion, forged, greater, dwemer, or whatever is still way off the normal system math. And most of the NPCs aren't built as min/max characters (a couple are openly awful), so you really feel underpowered. And additional custom characters are at a lower point buy for starting stats.

Sounds like your kingdom hit the wall at the same time mine did.

Yeah, really hope they can figure out how to make it more playable.

A good tutorial, codex or reference system would be good. The game is utterly terrible at explaining anything.

Even having a lot of experience with 3.5 and a fair bit with pathfinder, there were still times I was puzzled.

For the systems unique to the game... yeah, its just awful.

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And some quests. The end of chapter two comes to mind. You get a riddle that has nothing at all to do with what you need to do first. I found absolutely nothing that explained it in any way at all, and had to look it up online. And even that didn't explain how to go about it, just the steps required.

And after all that, then someone pops up to tell you how to really do it. :/

It's so buggy, I know they've been hotfixing like mad.. But that seems to cause problems too!

Doesn't help that the game is surprisingly lacking in info when it comes to things. If I hadn't played PF/DnD I'd be utterly lost with a lot of systems.

A few hotfix related problems. There was a day or two where all spells were invisible on the character creation and level up screens. That's been fixed, happily.

Supposedly there is a big patch coming (in addition to hotfixes) towards the end of the month. I can really only recommend sitting on this one for the time being. It has a lot of promise, but its honestly a mess.