Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
There is also no gear to support heavy weapons, area weapons or melee for ulfar. So he only has access to trinkets and necklaces.
No Matter what you do he will be weaker than Abelard in melee, weaker than Argenta at ranged and he cant even dream of doing what companions like Heinrix or Kibellah do.
It is a very messy companion for sure.
If respec-from-zero isn't an option they will bake in, I hope the feature is expanded to be a buff instead of a massive nerf. Two-haned melee wielded in one hand, reduced AP cost from heavy weapons. Something.
Seeing the rest of his character sheet was the second. Him being a soldier rather than a warrior is a head-scratcher to say the least. Could have just created a unique archetype for him instead.
And then I tried to swap his weapons around and apparently he refuses to use two melee/ranged weapons. I guess they only had one set of space marine animations made or something? Didn't stop them from reusing Kingmaker / WotR's two-handed stance with Pasqal's power axe, making him look goofy.
I wanted to make Ulfar into a dedicated heavy weapons user and instead he's just a weaker Abelard who isn't bound by the dumbass gear restriction. And if I wanted a ranged arch-militant I'd just spec Argenta into two pistols.
First time?
Back when Pathfinder: Kingmaker came out, I facepalmed every time I read a companion NPC's stat sheet. Not only they had bad feat choice (this can be at least somewhat mitigated with levels), but they literally had bad Ability scores for their classes - which was much harder to fix, and made (some of) them instantly inferior to basic mercenaries. I think I had to "fix" the stats for most companions in PF:KM to even make them reasonable (i.e., how they could be rolled by an actual player with a head on their shoulders, instead of an insane "story-driven character" adherent, who thinks that dumping STR and pumping CHA on a fighter is a reasonable move in a D&D CRPG).
The reason for this kind of crap is simple: DEVELOPERS DON'T PLAY AND DON'T UNDERSTAND THEIR OWN GAMES. It's a maxim that gets proven time and again.
Example 1: developers continuously treat CRPGs as "their story", and companion NPCs as "their characters" when nothing could be further from the truth - it's the PLAYER's story, and the NPCs are the PLAYER's companions. So what developers do, is not PLAY the game as players: they perceive themselves as the architects of the game, and players as dumb, mute audience.
Example 2: developers don't really KNOW how the systems they use in their games work. It happens even when they design these systems themselves (like they think of something "cool" but have no idea how it actually works in practice and correlates with other mechanics, because they never play the game). But it almost always happens when developers use external mechanics, like D&D. Hence the massive bugs and even more massive liberties that developers take with the systems for no other reason than not really understanding how they actually work.
When examples 1 and 2 intersect, you get ridiculous characters like a low-str high-cha fighter, because she is supposed to be "beautiful". This shows A) that the developers care about their own idiotic "narrative" and "character" more than about the player actually playing their game; and B) they fail to realise that in D&D Charisma does NOT mean "beauty", and a beautiful woman may actually have low Charisma if she has a bad attitude, abrasive personality, is sulky, snappish, introvert, etc. Charisma in D&D is "personal magnetism" which CAN be expressed as beauty, or oratory skills, or sense of humour, or conviction, or in a hundred other ways. But the dumb developer thinks "Charisma = beauty", ergo if his pet character is beautiful she must have high charisma, ergo she won't have sufficient ability points for STR, DEX and CON, and it doesn't occur to him that physical beauty may still mean a character is uncharismatic, and can be a good fighter with high physical scores (which again doesn't mean she should be a muscle-bound hulk, as Strength is NOT necessarily about pure muscle mass).
Also, it doesn't occur to the dumb developer that if he really, really wants to have a "beautiful = charismatic" NPC, he can design her with an actual Charisma-based class, like Bard or Sorcerer. But NO WAY, the moron wants her to be a "strong independent woman who don't need no man" which (again dumbly!) means that SHE MUST BE A HEAVY FIGHTER. But with low primary stats and a uselessly high tertiary stat. It doesn't occur to those people that in D&D a sorcerer is more powerful than a fighter, because in the developer's tiny brain shaped by "social justice" and "critical theory" courses a woman can only be "powerful" in a fantasy setting if she is wielding a big-arse sword in melee.
Damn, that was a rant. Sorry to everyone who read it.
That said, Owlcat are still an equivalent of a savant child when it comes to design and balancing, at least here the lack of balance skews towards most fights being a power fantasy outing (and, to be honest, I'd be disappointed if a bolter burst *didn't* wipe out everything in its way) rather than having your bare ass repeatedly dragged across hot coals.
One can argue whether more RP builds are good or not in games, that's pretty subjective, but it's really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ weird when a company that obviously, and by their own admission, do mechanics/build-oriented material make RP build npcs for their build optimization games
Like I said:
Developers Don't Play Their Own Games and Don't Understand How They Work.
Once you get this, everything else just "clicks into place".
They're not making games from a player's standpoint. They're making games:
A) To make money, more precisely - make the most money with the least effort, which means cutting corners, hiring people who don't give a damn, etc.;
B) To gratify themselves as "creators", so they view the game as their own "art" with the players as "audience" whose only job is to "appreciate" what they've created.
A + B = developers not giving a flying fig about most anything else (gameplay, game balance, aesthetics, quality control, etc.).
Once you get a company that is actually passionate about making a good game for the players - that's when you get actual masterpieces. In the early days of game industry, it was much more common as the industry literally consisted of gamers and game enthusiasts. Today, it's an exception, and a pretty rare one at that (CDPR and Larian are, or at least were, two examples in the CRPG genre).