In addition to the main storyline, the Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Definitive Edition set includes two additional add-ons: the Fate of Warnhold scenario and the Secrets of the Stolen Land scenario. The first is a very intriguing quest with an almost detective plot, and the second is an exploration of ancient ruins with constant battles and short stories about the characters who tried to explore this place before you.
If the stories themselves are very well written and fascinating from start to finish, then the journal and the concept of completing the quests are poorly done. The idea is that the quest list looks like a book about your avatar’s adventures that the bard writes. But unlike Divinity: Original Sinwhere a similar approach is used, the descriptions here are as general and often uninformative. Sometimes they are composed in such a way that it is absolutely not clear what to do. For example, when I got stuck on the main quest with fog, the magazine said to wait for news, but in fact I had to explore one inconspicuous area where it was required to start a small scene, and then return to another location, where the plot would not have moved further without it. At such moments, even the guide to the passage does not always help. Another problem arose due to the fact that the quest of one of the companions had to be completed by a certain time, which is not indicated anywhere. I was vividly seen when suddenly the assignment became a failure, and this character’s story ended before it really began. Such shortcomings occur all the time, and this is wildly annoying.
As for the combat system, here the developers have provided two options. The first is smart pause mode and the second is step by step. It should be noted that, unlike Pillars of eternity ii, you can switch between them at any time, which is very convenient. In the active pause mode, the teammates under the control of artificial intelligence practically do not use their active skills, so the player all the time needs to give some commands manually, which in difficult situations makes him constantly stop the fight. The turn-based mode, as it turned out, here feels much more appropriate and convenient, but even ordinary fights take a long time in it, so the best option is to switch between combat mechanics all the time.
As in the tabletop version of Pathfinder, here the success of a particular action relies on the throw of a virtual twenty-sided, which is why battles with powerful opponents are highly dependent on this randomness. Even on an average level of difficulty, fights with a strong enemy can often turn into hell, where your squad constantly misses and goes to the knockout. At such times, the player is required to be very careful and calculate each action, taking into account the high probability of a miss or minimal damage.
More than once it happened to me that the controlled character missed all the time, as a result of which the enemy defeated him. At some point, the hands themselves tend to lower the level of difficulty, because after another defeat it seems that banal luck plays a greater role here than the tactical calculation of the player.
When it comes to porting classic computer games to consoles, many players are interested in the control system from the gamepad. It seems that this is no longer a problem, because such developers as, for example, Larian Studios or Obsidian Entertainment have long learned to adapt everything for controllers. but Owlcat Games decided not to resort to already well-proven schemes and came up with something of her own. In general, the automatic selection of the nearest target and some other elements work fine, but the layout itself is not intuitive. The difficulty comes when you have to manage a squad. To switch from one character to another, you need to hold down the left “trigger” and in the pop-up menu select the desired avatar with the arrows on the cross or the stick. During a fierce battle, when every second is precious, this process seems slow and makes you stop the fight in order to distribute commands. Although even in step-by-step mode, it seems inconvenient. It would be much easier if from a single press of the same left trigger, the character quickly changed to the next in line. One gets the feeling that the teams were randomly assigned to the gamepad and were completely not adapted to the layouts familiar to the players. For example, the right and left on the cross are responsible for opening and closing the combat log. Why use two buttons for this at once, especially on the cross, is a big question. It would be better if they were in charge of switching between fighters. And these are not the only examples of strange decisions. The developers clearly do not play on consoles, and apparently, they are not used to holding the gamepad in their hands, which is why they could not find a more successful scheme for their project.
