Well, if you insist on talking about Kingmaker... Kidding, but having played this many hours I have observations.
Firstly I think this is an excellent game, and also a game of excess so massive that it is also a very bad game.
Let's give credit where credit is due. Kingmaker is a great TTRPG adaptation. Not sure you can do more faithful than that. That comes with our first sign of things not being perfect: when you read spell descriptions or what have you, they are just that short of telling you to ask your GM if he is ok with that.
I also imagine it's both a perfect adaptation for fans of the system, and a fucking min-maxer wet dream.
It can be super hard, but again, no surprise, the enemies use the same ruleset as the characters and aren't shy of going ham with their spells or skills.
Performance is horrible, no two way about it. At the beginning all is flowers and unicorns then saves keeps getting made and potentially useful items stashed in the party chest. At the end of the games every save/load is a tad long and my chest was barely usable (I may or may not have thousands of items in it).
The writing is super meh, not to say mediocre. I'm not that hot on the main plot, but it has great moments... but that's a legacy of the original TTRPG campaign. The original writing for the game, the dialogs, the narration, is not offensive but there is really nothing to write home about. And for a game this long it's not helping keeping the flame of interest alive.
Did I fucking mention it is a game of excess ? It unfortunately shows even on the map. There are dozens of minor locations with copy pasted layout. Some of them are also laughably evidently there just to pad up an already bloated game. No big deal, but when you finish a location and say to yourself 'well, there was a single just above average mob and that's all', it's a clear sign you are in a game that loves to just pile up shit upon shit. Quantity over quality. Not to say the quality is not there, but the quantity certainly is.
The game is so dense, so rich with shit to do, that I have no shame (quite annoyed though but what can you do) to admit I missed a whole fucking region. I was so preoccupied by my kingdom affairs, the occasional companion quest etc that I ended up going to the point of no return by traversing a region that... wait... I have never been here ? Fuuuuuu...
We talked about it the other day, but this is also one of those game that I feel is unreasonable to play without several guides on the side. There are far too many opportunities to fuck your playthrough, it goes beyond wanting a particular ending. I mean toward the end there is a chain of event that I suspect could wipe most of your characters. You can create other party members, but yeah. The day I finished the game I lost half my open bookmarks. And believe me, you will make love to the stupidest one, a calendar of the game world.
It's quite horrible, it's a terribly draining experience and I'm super not surprised so many people drop the game partway. Infuriatingly it's also one of the best CRPG I played in years. The best and the worst, I can't decide, that's super dependent on the player. Certainly not for newcomers, it's just too dense, too long, there are far better introductions to the genre. But on the other hand, you can't do more CRPG than this.
The game shines all the way through Chapter 1 and 2. It's a wonderful experience. But there are
And it's pretty evident that after having been so brilliant, the game is all can't stop, won't stop.