#i'm just pissed off i have to redo my whole budget

[sitdwnandstudy]

Move in T-3 days and of course I'm not done packing yet

The news is:

a) I finally finally got my visa letter showing proof of funds from the school

b) the school was like surprise I hope you weren't planning on using the money you actually budgeted based on our website because actually that was wrong and you have less :/

c) I may have finally achieved course sign up success

[8bitsupervillain]

8bit Reviews: Pathfinder Kingmaker

The first five or six hours I was having a grand time with it. Just loving it from top to bottom, sure the combat was a bit clunky, but aside from that I was having fun. Then I unlocked the kingdom management section of the game and my opinion dropped sharply. The lie that you can set kingdom management to auto-resolve itself is a massive lie because if you leave this bastard alone for too long you will get slapped with an inevitable failure message and have to redo potential HOURS of stuff just to get back to before you doomed yourself. Nevertheless I stuck with it, maybe it'll get better, I thought as I was very thoroughly not having a good time. Twenty hours passed, then thirty, at forty I decided enough's enough I'm done with Pathfinder. So it went for a couple of months I played other better games I became mesmerized and spellbound by other stories that respected my time.

But eventually the bastard thought wormed its way into my head to give it another shot why not? You had time away, surely now's the time it'll be fun! You tried and bounced off some other CRPGs, so who knows, maybe Kingmaker has that secret something to get you back in. Fifty hours passed, sixty, and once again I vowed I would never return to Kingmaker, I uninstalled it from my laptop and desktop. I even went so far as to delete the saves off of my laptop (where I'd been primarily playing Pathfinder). September rolls around, I fall deeply, madly in love with Baldur's Gate III, but eventually I have to go back to work, and my laptop isn't quite the youth it used to be, and storage space is at a premium. Back to Kingmaker, I guess. Reinstalling it I find that because I never deleted my saves off of my desktop the cloud storage for GOG Galaxy kept my saves up to date.

What fun, now I won't have to redo a whole bunch of stuff or start from the beginning. Has the combat always been this aggravating? Be fair, you might just be unfairly comparing it to Baldur's Gate III, the Pathfinder guys did this at least five years ago, and had a fraction of the budget. Comparing the combat to Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny was similarly disastrous because I recall feeling the combat in those was a lot smoother than Kingmaker. Then, disaster strikes, sixty-nine hours into my save file the game declares that I've lost, and I cannot continue the game. Sixty-nine fucking hours down the tubes, nearly three actual days. Literal months of time wasted for this? FOR THIS?! No, NO! Fuck that! Fuck this! I'm done! I'M ABSOLUTELY DONE. FUCK PATHFINDER KINGMAKER, FUCK OWLCAT, FUCK EVERYONE WHO SAYS THIS GAME WAS WORTH PLAYING! And so I uninstall it, again.

Bullshit game, I hate it. The combat, trash. The characters, generally unlikable garbage! At least in other games when there are villains they're well-written villains, you might not like them, but at least they provoke a feeling other than vague irritation. Fucking game, absolute waste of my time. Why did I try to respect the game for so long as I had? What did I gain from it? Our antagonistic relationship was clearly one-sided, Pathfinder was never going to try to meet me halfway and be something decent.

Time passes, it's October and I'm looking at nexus mods. You should see if there's mods for Kingmaker, sure none of them will magically make the game good, but you know, just for a lark. Sure enough, there they are, the whole spectrum. What's this? Cheat mod, well with this I could theoretically reach an ending in Pathfinder. Wouldn't that be something? Get revenge on the game that pissed you off so? I could, theoretically, do that. But why? Why should I shove my hand back in the bear trap? Hadn't I suffered enough? Shouldn't I just leave well enough alone and move on and put Kingmaker (and Wrath of the Righteous) firmly in the rearview of memory?

So, once again, for the last time let's reinstall Pathfinder. This time I'm done pretending to care about beating the game honestly. I want it to be over with. Weight limits? Gone. Barony rolls? Win them instantly. Sure "I'm robbing myself of the experience" of finishing the game "legit," but I am so far beyond caring at this point. You know what the hell of it is? The thing that makes this all so very much unbearable? It wasn't worth it. Eighty-nine hours and seventeen minutes later I finished the game, I got my unsatisfying conclusion, and… that's it.

Back when it first came out I got very very annoyed with Bloodborne. I could not for the life of me get past Vicar Amelia, it got to the point where I stopped playing the game for months because just the sight of it pissed me off. But eventually I powered my way through it, and I now regard Bloodborne as one of the finest games I have ever played.

The sense of satisfaction I got from triumphing over it was exhilarating. Pathfinder Kingmaker gave me no such feeling. Yes I'd finished the game, but there's nothing there. Just another game to add to the list of games I've beaten. For all the self-inflicted agony I've put myself through I got roughly the same satisfaction as when I beat something completely forgettable that I played for roughly a week. I feel more satisfaction finishing Little Nightmares 2 than I do Kingmaker, and I didn't particularly care about Little Nightmares 2.

I guess what I got out of Pathfinder Kingmaker is I really need to get over my absurd feelings that I'm somehow letting the developers down if I don't play a game I hate to completion. Blackguards is probably a better game than this, and I don't particularly like Blackguards.