Slotharingia

And yet that meta knowledge would mean the game is much easier for PnP Pathfinder players than those who are not, hence the option to toggle it is a no-brainer.

Yup. I backed the game and am banned w/o ever having posted there. Apparently it's because of bots. You have to msg someone on the forum or on Discord (I think), but most people will not find that out. I'm stubborn and refuse to do it, because I think it's a terrible way of dealing with things, so I'm stuck on the badly designed Steam forum. As for classes being useless, while you might not suddenly get a useless class in Kingmaker, I'm going to bet it's pretty easy to make a crap one from the outset if you don't know what you're doing xD I'd definitely say a game that lets you use storymode, auto kingdom and premade characters should let stuff like this be toggled on and off. Either a game is playable by people who are clueless or who don't want to memorize/look everything/study battle logs, or it's not.

The companion's ai is terrible. Besides Octavia, all they do is autoattack, and you can set one skill for the AI to use but unless it's legit spammable, it bugs out and they just stand there repeating it pointlessly. Besides that, the inventory is abominable and needs to be constantly resorted. It's also hard to tell whether a character is still casting, and enemy HP is only sometimes visible. Items in stash seem unsortable, the way skills are listed is cluttered and confusing, and skills repeat themselves. The only thing it does better than other games is the pop up with the loot or stash from an area. I don't want to sound like I'm bashing the game, but PoE does it better in about everything unless you know the Pathfinder rules inside out. In PoE you can hover over an enemy and see what skills work on them, etc. Kingmaker tells you "(attribute)negates" for a skill, but you never know what enemy has what stats. OFC I might be doing everything wrong, but if I am, it still suggests it's not exactly intuitive. And that's not mentioning the 10 gazillion loading screens and always having to go back and forth unless you memorise everything. xD

I'm not sure they are targeting a specific audience, or one that's radically different from PoE. You could equally say they are targeting P&P players, even more specifically of Pathfinder, but aside from their sticky note about how they've redefined normal to mean hard, they've also said the game is for everyone, and you can play it on story mode.

No idea! Maybe lots of Russians play it? I like the game and would probably love it were it not for quite a few things lol, BUT it has a ton of really serious issues, both intentional and unintentional and as far as playability goes POE2 was so much better, they aren't even in the same universe. Kingmaker feels like it was made by people who don't know what they are doing on a number of levels. I played Deadfire 2.5 times when it came out and I can't remember coming across any really serious bugs, besides one quest but it could be fixed with console commands, and another one they fixed in a patch. It also has a lot of loading (is that a Unity thing?, but nothing like as bad as Kingmaker. Maybe the really long intro and the imo very boring slide shows with the gods ruined it? The incredibly slow walking is a feature. Who knows why anyone would think it's a good idea. As for class info, it's severely lacking in most departments. You can mix and match almost anything, which is gonna surely produce some terrible results, especially since the pros keep stating you have to min-max the characters to not totally suck. There's nothing useful written about the elite classes and the info on skills and weapons etc is also terrible. They have weapon proficiencies in weapons I've never even seen. It's like you have to know in the first few levels what wep you want to use and then doggedly stick to it. I picked bow on my second char, but probably should have gone for light crossbow as he only has 10 STR. I've only found enchanted composite crossbows, and they require higher strength to shine, or so I've been told.

Hm, weird. The sadistic mage from the troll chapter (Bartolomew) can only be Treasurer or Grand Diplomat for me. yeah I might have that wrong. He doesn't like my characters ;P

No idea. I hold tab.

councillor the other 2 are the lamashtu priestess and the one old bat you can take as an envoy. Magister is the sadistic mage in the troll chapter. High priest, again the Lamashtu priestess. Regent, the teen you can take as an envoy. As you can tell, I'm bad at names and too lazy to look them up lmao. Oh and the undead cyclops can be magister.

got to admit I gave up on BG due to having newer games to play, but can't you run away from stuff in that game?

You can't really wonder THAT far off track in Act 1 though right? I got this insane encounter between Oleg's and Technic League camp, and if you can deal with the actual content in the area, it suggests you aren't way out of where you should be, imo. If they popped up to imply: WHOA: UR 2 Lo Lvl Bruh. Get outta here! it would make sense xD Also, the evade encounter seems to have a higher chance of failing on the OP encounters.

W00t! Maybe I can get on with the main quest on PT1 then, even if the other bugged quests I have are not listed.

I picked CG on my current playthrough and was CN last time: I've come across a number of different things although the alignments are not that different. Anyway, I'm starting to move into the "GM hates the players " camp. After having had to quit the first playthrough due to a bug in the main quest that will not let me progress (along with numerous other quest breaking and other bugs), I restarted. Lovely things I've enocuntered thus far are: An Elder Earth Elemental in a random encounter the game didn't alow me to skip at level 1 when the party consists of 4 people, another similar enocunter at level 5 with poisonous manticores or something. These things might be possible for some people to kill, but they are way harder than the bosses as they do masses of damage and take none. I killed the stag lord and the boss at bald hilltop w/o a single death/gameover but these things wipe my party, so it ends up feeling a bit like "you didn't save? I'll teach ya, *evil laugh". Then when I got to my barony, I got unrest after 3 in game weeks when I'd done everything on time and even avoided starting anything that blocks my advisors or mc at the end of the month. I'd also built stuff and so on, none of which I did in my first playthrough where my status never went below stable the entire time. On my first pt, I actually did multiple 2-6 week projects that blocked my MC and adivisors at the end/beginning of months, didn't build anything for ages as I didn't know how, ignored events that popped up while questing as I didn't know you could access the kingdom management en route, I didn't even notice I had the outskirts until I'd got 2 other regions, I didn't get the treasurer until right at the end of the chapter, and besides the barony being underdevoped, I never ran into any issues. This is on the same difficulty setting and I'm inclined to say it makes no sense unless someone would enlighten me as to how it does. It feels more like a survival game than an rpg. I've also had my main character's skills show up on the NPC's character sheets and even his (alchemist-only) skills pop up on their level up screens. At least I'm pretty sure Regongar couldn't pick bomb related spells in my last pt. Additionally, it's hard to understand for people who aren't pathfinder or D&D nerds as the game lacks vital info. What enemies are chaotic/good/neutral/evil, for example? The weapons are badly described (you have to click on "info" to know what they actually do), you can end up with the same spells twice, and so on. In its current state the game simply has too many serious bugs to be able to pull off so many "challenges" and opaque mechanics. You shouldn't be able to mess up your barony within 3 weeks on the normal setting, and especially not if you followed their tutorial (I didn't, but only because doing so would have blocked my MC for 4 weeks instead of 2 and at least one of those would have been at the beginning/end of the month, and I'd likely have started running into main quest timers ticking). A tutorial should not tell people to do things that will make another quest fail, or warn them as tutorials are for people who don't know what to do xD A failing Barony should be reserved for people who've made numerous bad decisions and/or neglected numerous quests and events. You shouldn't run into impossible monsters you cannot escape from either. And then there are the minor bugs, like abominable spelling, bad english, people calling you "baroness" in act 1, when your toon is male no less. I really want to love this game, but it should not have been released in this state and I also personally find the dev's insistance on reinventing the term "normal" to be stubborn and bizarre. Normal means what most people do, not what some hardcore gamers who don't want "filthy casuals" playing their games think most people should do, or what games were like in the 90's xD If we're gonna compare, Deadfire was incomparably better on release, even if I vastly prefer the companions, story and general set up (barony being a lot more interesting than the boat) in Kingmaker, but at least you could actually finish the game without running into bugs or opaque mechanics that prevented it, and at least it's comprehensible without having 20 handbooks or asking people on forums. And at least you can access the forum, unlike Owlcat's that autobans all new accounts because of bots lmao.

Not good, evil. I got an option to threaten to kill everyone or bluff my way in. I chose to bluff and the second I walked in, one guy screamed bloody murder and the whole place turned hostile. I tried savescumming for other paths to sneak in, but they operated the same. The second I cross the fort wall, get spotted, entire place goes hostile. Nope. Never saw anything even slightly like this. Nobody talked to me other than the gate guard. Who only opened the door. I scouted the entire surrounding area beforehand. Just didn't kill all of the Bandit Brawler/Alchemist groups. I avoided them. So much for brute forcing! Only 1 of these 3 I could get and it required savescumming. Only party member with Nature is Amiri. She failed half the time I tried to make the check. And the Owlbear didn't actually bother doing much to help. He stayed in his cage, I only finally got some help because enemies wandered too close to him. Not because the Owlbear actually went out and tried to help. The only way I beat this fight is because I savescummed a nature check that got an NPC to fight for me. Last time a DM was throwing boss fights at my group that had to be won by NPC, I was rather nonplussed. But at least that NPC was actually there to help and wasn't basically an environmental trap I only got if a single character won the roll. So did I try to brute force? No, I tried to talk through it. And my party got killed. Then I tried sneaking. Killed. I tried cutting the alarm, not an option. I tried setting a trap, except the Stag Lord ignores initiative and in the middle of someone else's turn he shows up, calls in like 5 other guys, buffs himself, and teleports. So I had to resort to MMO pulling. And got lucky when the Stag Lord wandered too close to the Owlbear while out of sight. All in all the game has a lot of stuff that's easy to miss. On my second pt I found things for the bandit fight at Oleg's that made it way easier than on my first pt, where I missed them due to a dialogue choice.

Not sure that solves anything, since even if the hotfixes create new bugs, they fix existing ones meaning you are as likely to get a gameover bug whether it updates or not xD Also, I did find a way to completely stop the autoupdates on Skyrim, but it was a pain in the ass xD

Regongar and Octavia are hanging in the Technic League camp too if I go back there, with them on my team. And by the Old Sycamore there are some radishes, which if I try to pick them a kobold starts a convo with me. The thing is though, the kolbolds there are all dead xD The game is so bugged at this point I'm a bit at a loss for words. Well I'm playing on easy and I have 104 hrs.

Yep. They released a fix for the problem with Amiri people were reporting, but I can't even start that quest as the person you are meant to talk to doesn't react to click. another quest involves Amiri but she's currently gone and a third one requires some people to spawn somewhere but they don't XD

Heads up to anyone near the end of the game: I'm at the beginning of what I think is the last chapter and cannot advance as every single quest is bugged to the point where it simply cannot be done, except the one involving Tristian, but even that leaves him in an infinite dialogue loop at the end and has a point where the load is so long it can cause the game to crash xD

The bugs multiply after Act 3. I've seen people complain about that one though, so with any luck it'll soon be fixed.

Lots of ppl complaining about the hiring issue on Steam.

So to respond to the initial statement in this post and having actually got through Act 1, I'm inclined to hazard a guess that the game has more playtime because you spend an inordinate amount of time getting from a to b, having to rest what feels like every 30 secs on the world map, dungeons being designed to force you to walk around them multiple times at Deadfire slogeffect pace, wasting time on unwinnable fights or fights that force you to traipse back to the trading post, etc. I'm enjoying the game (after cranking the difficulty down), but I don't think I've ever played a game where I spent so much of my time just sitting there staring at the screen. If you thought sailing was a bore in Deadfire, wait till you have to navigate the world map in Kingmaker. Also, they advertise resting as being interesting due to convos, but you get one short banter per rest, and only if you aren't resting from the world map. Plus the companions complain they are tired and then go off to hunt for up to 18! hrs even if you are lugging around a ton of ingredients, so you aren't so much kipping in a tent, you're undertaking a survival weekend in the wilderness xD.

Everyone who bitched about Deadfire being too easy needs to buy this. I'm on normal and not far enough to really say (my orc thug hasn't gone down yet, but one of the companions did - luckily she left the team shortly after), but the reviews/steam forum are teaming with peple complaining it's too hard, so it should satisfy all those people who complain about filthy casuals and too easy games I'll likely end up on story mode if they are right

I wasn't suggesting his or anyone else's traumas would go away. I was talking about experience and context altering priorities. About him trudging into sordid battles in swamps and fetid caverns infested with maggots and corpses, being regularly covered with stenching entrails and gore, sleeping rough with smelly people all the time (and no doubt being smelly himself) and yet making comments like he doesn't want Serafen sleeping near him. I don't think a companion's BO or whatever he's referring to would be his top priority. He can be mistrustful and fuss over his own hygiene etc, but those types of comments make him come across as shallow to me. I'm sorry if this opinion offends anyone. Also, as an aside, no one knows what people in forums have or have not experinced IRL and someone's opinion on how x character is portrayed in a fantasy setting in no way suggests anything about their life.

Maybe because it's new?

Just to butt in on data-mined audio files, there are audio files for Solas+male inky in DAI too. I even managed to get a glitch where my female inky asks him to dance and she suddenly has the male voice.

I don't agree with some of your opinions (I love Tekehu and hate Maia), but your take on Aloth is spot on. He's accompanied the Watcher in both 1 and 2 in the most sordid scenes of violence and squalor, he's traveled to many places, suffered physical and psychological abuse, faced the reality of having been involved in something destructive, lost control of his own body on many occasions, lived a lie more than once, experienced many things and read more, and yet he's a whiny, shallow wussy bitching about other companions' proximity in quarters. Even if someone was like that initially, the many baptisms of dirt and horror would eventually change them. There are other aspects of his personality that also ring hollow to me, even if according to some that means I "don't understand him". For instance, his fawning over people who follow orders irrespective of their nature, his disapproval of the Watcher role-playing in certain situations as he thinks it's "Irresponsible" (while blowing one's cover and risking everyone's life apparently isn't), his disdain of others unless they pass certain superficial "duty" triggers, his complete lack of interest in matters of moral import (slavery, racism, abuse of power) juxtaposed with his obsession over crap that's irrelevant (sum1 joked n it woznt funneh), and so on. All in all he came across to me as a character that had regressed rather than progressed, as someone who's incapable of differentating between what matters and what doesn't, but at least the has the odd scene where intelligence rather than the permanently disgusted dork shine through. I still like Aloth for old time's sake, but if Deadfire was my first POE game, he'd stay in the ship or with the animancers. I'm sure there are those who will argue that this is how he "copes", but it just doesn't work for me and I experience him as a caricature at best and at worst as a concept that could have worked but doesn't unless you fill in 90% with head canon.