«I’ve been reading this old Turkish spell book. There’s an old conjuration that the ancient Turks used to communicate with the dying.»
«Oh yeah. I think I’ve read a translation of it.»
«There’s a translation of it?»
Dawn and Willow in Buffy – The Vampire Slayer
I recently finished playing «Pathfinder: Kingmaker» — after more attempts than it took to finally read «The Lord of the Rings». But it was worth it, I think. It’s a nice story, has nice side quests and the like. Nothing even close to the beauty of «The Witcher 3», but still.
And yeah, I did cheat — a bit. Not only reloading frequently, but also editing my characters. The save game uses .json files, so it was quite easy. It was only after I had finished playing the game that I noticed that there are a lot of mods for this game. Including a … well, cheat mod called «BagOfTricks». Not only can you easily edit your characters during the game play (including during character creation), you can also change a lot of elements of the game itself (need for rest, camping material, weather, etc. pp.). Even more impressive, it integrates other mods that allow you to rotate the game camera and zoom in/out further than the game originally allowed. The last two changes would have saved me a lot of grief during gameplay.
And even better, it can remove the alignment restrictions on game choices. In dialogues, certain dialogue choices are only possible if your character is good, neutral or evil, or lawful, neutral, or chaotic, or any combination of it. You usually set this alignment when creating the character, but I never agreed with it, nor did I like that you cannot even see what the responses would have been (only that you cannot say something because you are, e.g., not «evil»). So you can turn it off.
BTW, why do so few games allow the player realistic «evil» choices? And why do they reward players for seemingly altruistic «good» choices? I mean, you say you do something for free and get rewarded anyway (if only by experience points). Would be nice to actually do evil choices or not being rewarded for good ones. Anyway, something for another posting.
Not sure whether I want to play the game again — it took ages and I am quite happy with the ending I got. But, still, impressive mods. The mods in «The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim» were impressive enough, but that they work in this kind of RPG, nice.
BTW, if you want to mod «Pathfinder: Kingmaker» on the Mac (I would not recommend playing it on a MacBook, it works, but not very well), this github page shows how you can install the BagOfTricks mod.
Just create a folder in /Applications called Mods. Unpack the BagOfTricks mod into it. You find it on Nexus Mods.
Now you only need to tell the App to use the folder by manually installing the Unity Mod Manager. Download the UMM-PathFinderKingMaker-Mac.zip from the GitHub site and right-click the Pathfinder Kingmaker application (Application directory), select «Show Package Contents», go to Contents/Resources/Data/Managed/ and copy the unpacked files into it (it will overwrite UnityEngine.UIModule.dll, rename it into UnityEngine.UIModule_backupFile.dll first).
Afterwards the Unity Mod Manager should start when you start «Pathfinder: Kingmaker». You can change the keyboard combination there. BTW, you have to click on the Bag of Tricks entry to unfold it and see the entries.
Nice.
(Not sure what impressed me more — that these mods are possible or that they work on a Mac …)