I’m currently going through Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is my first experience with the Pathfinder system.
While I do enjoy it right now, the beginning was kinda rough (super long rant incoming). Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. In hindsight, this wasn’t that bad, just some missing information on my part and maybe bad tooltips, because the poison was supposed to go away after resting, but it didn’t. What the tooltip fails to mention, the stat penalty can stack and every 8 hours of rest removes one stack, so you might have to wait around for a day or so, before you’re back to normal.
Then, while I was still recovering from that (mentally and in-game) I stumbled on a text-only event, where you’re going through some marshes and find a seemingly evil idol. Me, being the Lawful Good monk that I am, of course decide to destroy it, but get cursed in return (-2 constitution). Curses are of course permanent, until you can start to remove them at level 5. I was level 2 at the time. Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor. These potions are also super expensive and the vendor had just two of them, while I had four or five people in my party. Thank god my character is also a time wizard, so I cast Quick Load, and was good as new.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn, but that was basically it. No idea why the devs chose to put these quests and events super close to your starting base.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management. After you become a baron, you have to start managing your lands, which is fine in general, but I don’t think the devs have found a good balance, because there are just so many events that are constantly popping up, and I felt like I was making no progress with the actual CRPG part of the game. Regularly I’d leave my capital, just to get a notification that something happened, after like five seconds. So I go back to check it out, and it’s always some unimportant stuff. Experienced players might know that you can ignore these things for a bit, but as a new player, this was just super annoying. Then you also have some projects that force you to skip 14 days of in-game time, while your character is busy, and a few times, when I did that, I got notifications for like eight new things that happened. That’s when I called it, pulled out the mods and basically nerfed the shit out of that mechanic. Events now take only a fraction of their normal time, I can’t fail, and most importantly, I can manage most things, while out on the road. I’ll probably have to skip a ton more days manually, but I take that over the default implementation. FYI, you can turn down the difficulty of the management stuff in-game or even completely automate it (that way you lose some throne room events and interactions I think), I just had the mod installed already, because of a different reason, so I just used that.
Anyway, I still enjoy the CRPG part of the game. The combat is fun, although for a complete beginner to Pathfinder (and little experience with DnD) some tooltips are really lacking information. There are tons of keywords and mechanics getting thrown around, that I have no idea what they do. On your character sheet you’re presented with tons of different scores, and for half of them I don’t know how they got there (the others list a neat breakdown for each bonus you get). I think there are also some bonuses that only apply in certain cases, but aren’t reflected on your character sheet, but I wouldn’t know, because it’s not explained. I’m playing on normal or whatever is the recommended difficulty for newcomers to Pathfinder, and it’s not that difficult, so you can get by.
Other than that, I did “finish” Wolfenstein 3D and killed Hitler. There are more episodes and an expansion, but I’ll skip them. Like I said last week, I found the game kinda boring, it’s just too basic for me nowadays. Just a handful of different enemies, just three weapons, and the levels look all the same.
Now I’m deciding on the next retro shooter, that I want to tackle. Right now I’m thinking either Ion Fury or Doom 64, but something else might catch my eye.
Ohhh, one of my favorite all-time games, only surpassed by the successor.
So first off: Wrath of the Righteous is far more approachable. Better tooltips, better tutorial (including a dynamic one that pops up when relevant), better interface. Just in case you feel like more pathfinder. Note that the powerlevel is far higher in WotR because of mythic powers.
Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. I
Fun story: This encounter was heavily nerfed (twice actually, once shortly after release, and then overhauled a few months later). It used to be mandatory and much more brutal :D It literally made some people stop playing :D
Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor.
Hah :D So essentially the potion is a spell in a bottle. Wait, not essentially. That’s what it is. It has a caster level that depends on the creator of the potion. So with that caster level when drinking it, the spell casts Remove Curse against the DC of the curse. And that is what can fail.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side ;) Owlcat generally overhauled quite a lot of the encounters to remove difficulty spikes.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management.
That is a very common complaint. I liked it, and the time pressure it added. Though only for the first few hundreds of hours (1283h played in total, and without beta testing), later I did what you did.
I’ve read that, but I was planning on playing both anyway, so I decided to start with Kingmaker. Depending on the game, it can be hit-or-miss to go back to an older release by a developer. I just played Divinity 2 after BG3, and missing a lot of the changes and QoL additions that Larian has made, was a bit of a pain at times.
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side
I might have gotten it today (two undead, level 14 and 17 or something), but I was already level 9, so it wasn’t a huge deal. Actually, I’m surprised at how much higher level enemies the game throws at you, but you can pretty comfortably win against, as long as you’re prepared (I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system). A few times I had to reload and get a different weapon to actually kill an enemy or change and refresh my spells, because I wandered into an unexpected fight, but did manage to get them down.
Yeah, it was a good idea, as usual, for the reasons you mentioned. I just wanted to shill the successor a bit just so you won’t skip it because some things with PF:KM irked you ;)
(I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system)
You are smarter than 90% of people playing the game ;) It’s crazy, their games have super detailed difficulty settings, and presets with explanations. And yet people go, play on the brutal because they like Dark Souls and then complain it’s too hard. It’s like there’s some mental health pandemic with gamers. /rant
but you can pretty comfortably win against
Besides the difficulty, TB vs RTwP also influence this. I play on Core (actual setting in WotR, requires manual changes for KM, essentially as close to tabletop as possible; then some mods to bring it even closer to TT), but a lot of fights I could not do with RTwP, but they become far easier once I play the game in the way the system was designed.
It was painful ;) TB actually started as a mod, that was later with permission taken by Owlcat and improved for the enhanced edition. During the development, there was almost an even split between devs preferring TB and RTwP, and RTwP barely won. So with the mod having laid some groundwork and it being extremely popular, it was easier to pitch the addition.
And yeah, I’m an old school RPG fan, I love TB. I actually stopped playing RPGs just before RTwP became popular with the Infinity Engine games, and only returned to them with NWN2.
I bought Kerbal Space Program 1 for $14 when it was in version 0.16 I think, before it was in early access on Steam. I’ve received all updates and DLC for free since then because I got in before a certain date, logged definitely thousands possibly near 10k hours in it, and it is by far the biggest bang for my buck I’ve ever gotten from a video game ever. Thank you HarvesteR and original dev team!
I guess Diablo 2 but I didn’t have the possibility to buy it back in the day. Buying games wasn’t as straightforward as buying a CD of music where I lived.
The absolute best value I ever got for a video game was for my old Atari 2600. I got a Solaris cartridge at a flea market for just a few bucks. It was cheap enough that I bought it despite never having heard of the game before.
The graphics capabilities of an Atari are laughable by today’s standards, but in terms of overall fun and hours played, nothing has ever beaten Solaris.
Every time this goes on sale, I’m debating on whether to buy it or not. Like you, I’ve never played one of the Ace Combat games before, but some arcade style gameplay could be fun.
I joined a Linkshell (guild) in FFXI a few months ago and they’ve been great to me. Everyone is always helping one-another and we run weekly events every Saturday night. I don’t have much of a social life in my 30s so it’s been a great time for me to spend time with folks.
Oh, that sounds pretty sweet. I played quite a bit of FFXI many many years ago. I was late to that party because I played Everquest for so many years, but I had tried FFXI when it launched. It was pretty fun! But just wasn’t enough to pull me away from EQ. But at some point in the late 2000’s I went back and played FFXI for like a year or so on and off. Did you start fresh in FFXI? This piques my interest. I would strongly consider playing again if it’s new player friendly.
I played through Far: Lone Sails and really enjoyed the light puzzle and management of the machine. It was super atmospheric and I really loved the game overall. It was a perfect casual game that really absorbed me into it. Going to play the sequel as well soon.
I think that most of the games that I’ve really enjoyed have been ones that tend towards the “full price” side money-wise, but which I have played for a long time, replayed a number of times, not just done a single pass. Gotten DLC on. Often modded.
Think:
Fallout 4
Oxygen Not Included
Caves of Qud
Civilization V
Stellaris
Noita
Kenshi
Nova Drift
Kerbal Space Program
Rimworld
Mount & Blade: Warband
The amount I’ve paid per hour of play on those is tiny.
My real constraint is the amount of time I have. I mean, I haven’t really been constrained by what it costs to play a game. I have a backlog of games that I’d be willing to play.
The waste, from a purely monetary standpoint, is overwhelmingly games that I buy and touch briefly, and don’t find myself playing at all. Frostpunk sounded neat, because I like similar genres (city-building), but I completely disliked the actual game, for example. A few Paradox games (Stellaris) I’ve really gotten into, but a number I’ve also found completely-uninteresting (Europa Universalis, say). There are apparently a number of Europeans who are extremely into the idea of their historic people taking over Europe, for example, and Paradox specializes in simulating those scenarios. I just don’t care about playing that out. Sudden Strike 4 – I’ve really enjoyed some real time tactics WW2 games, like Close Combat, but couldn’t stand the more arcade-oriented Sudden Strike 4.
If you could give me a Noita, but high resolution and with some neat new content and physics I’d happily pay $100.
I’ve played Nova Drift for about 180 hours. That game presently sells for $18. So I paid about ten cents an hour. The price of the game is a rounding error in terms of the entertainment I got from it. Paying ten times as much for a sequel or DLC comparable to the stuff in the original game would be fine as long as I were confident that I’d enjoy and play it as much as I did the original game.
Sudden Strike 4 is about $20. I played it, forcing myself back to it, made it to about an hour total. So I paid about $20 an hour, or about 200 times the rate for Nova Drift. And I didn’t enjoy that hour much.
In general, my preferred model would be for publishers to keep putting out DLC on highly-replayable games as long as people are interested in buying it: when I find something that I know I like, I want to be able to get more of it. If the Caves of Qud guy would hire more people to produce more content and just sell it as DLC, I’d be happy with that.
What you’re asking about here is value, which is a purely subjective thing.
Here’s the thing: we all play games for our own reasons. Some play for an interesting story, some play for challenging mechanics, some play to be scared, some play just for something to pass the time. How much you enjoy a game will depend on how well it meets your goals and that’s often hard to quantify.
If your sole purpose of playing is to pass the time, then sure $/hour is a great metric for how good a value it is.
And let’s not forget that people all have different amounts of disposable income. For someone with a lot of money to spare, it takes a lot less to make $60 “worth it” than for someone without reliable income.
At the end of the day, everyone has their own idea of value and it will change over time.
I guess I take for granted that extended time spent in the game contributes more to the subjective value. Otherwise, why play? Of course there are a plethora of reasons to keep playing. But if we disregard that for now.
There are edge cases. E.g. a lovely small title that isn’t replayable and barely three hours long. That one could bring the average up a bit, depending on the price. But I’m not asking for a universal rule, rather where the ratio starts to hurt subjectively for people.
Or well, I guess what I really wanted to know is how people compare the price of games to other recreational joys. Especially considering the timespan of the compared activities. Though maybe a bit poorly phrased. :)
For me personally, I tend to compare it to movies. I have no problem going out and paying $15-20 to go be entertained for 2-3 hours. By that metric, a $60 game needs to keep me entertained for maybe 10 hours for me to feel like it wasn’t a complete waste of money.
As I alluded to before, I tend to also value how entertained I am during that time. A good movie or a good game doesn’t have to be long to be worth the price of admission. And conversely, there are games that I have more time into that I feel like were not worth the price (coughDiablo4cough) but I kept playing because of a combination of sunk cost fallacy and trying to find what all those other people thought was so good.
I was younger, too young to work, so one summer break I joined up with a European guild to raid with. Lots of fun, learned a but about British (primarily) culture. Lots of fun, even when I joined another guild I raided with them from time to time.
The other was a family guild. It eventually fell apart as the adults got busier with their careers and kids and shit. But the inner circle, so to speak, were invited to a bulletin board and we all talked for years after that. Eventually lost contact with them as I grew up and got busy with life.
Lots of fond memories, and a couple not so fond (RNG hates me, in every way). But they were along when RNG screwed me time and again, and were always willing to try again. Lots of love for those folks.
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