I spent an inordinate amount of time in Baldur’s Gate and sequels, Neverwinter Nights, and many others.

So I was delighted to see Pathfinder: Kingmaker coming out. I’ve been playing off and on and there is a bit of an adjustment. I think the most interesting detail is how easy it is to die. I don’t think this is a bad thing. It happens to be an adjustment to thinking that you shouldn’t expect to go wandering everywhere and expect it to adjust to your difficulty. If you get in over your head, you will suffer (looking at you Viscount Smoulderburn).

The other challenge is the apparent absence of a manual of some kind that breaks down options, races, classes, etc resulting in a lot more exploring of the system to get answers to questions.

There are some minor annoyances that you can’t seem to throw grenade like missiles (alchemist’s fire, for example) at a location–it has to have a target. Which typically means your party has a chance of getting damaged. Ideally for area affects like this you could turn off targeting of enemy creatures to avoid snapping of position (control maybe?) so that you can place things exactly where you want.

Finally, I did take a poke at character creation with my memhack tool (after upgrading it to 64 bit). It looks like Unity, relying on relocating assets in memory make it harder to hack this way. But it turns out not to be necessary. The save games are zip files (just rename the extension), unpack them, change them, rezip them and create a new zip. You’ll need to restart the game to have them show up in the list.