While the English-language Kingmaker community was struggling through bugged 100-hour playthroughs to figure it out, FreeSergey simply datamined the information. There are 16 curses and to get the secret ending you need to have researched 13 of them, though it doesn't matter which 13, as discovered by a Russian player named FreeSergey. "Yet it turns out they're actually one of the main requirements for the romance." "People were right in that you could safely ignore most of them-from the standpoint of a normal playthrough," says Alice. Standard advice was not to bother with most research, that it was one of Kingmaker's many "noob traps" for new players to fall into. "You're going to put your Kingdom underwater if you try to do this from the outset," Prototype00 says. Each curse requires weeks or even months of research to understand, during which the chosen advisor will be unavailable to deal with disasters or improve your kingdom, leaving the land in a weakened position. A hunter has become a werewolf, a murder victim is doomed to return as a zombie, a dryad transformed into a big evil tree. You can also assign your religious advisor (the high priest) and your arcane advisor (the magister) to research the curses you repeatedly stumble across in various quests and sidequests. You assign advisors to deal with events and opportunities as they crop up, and when they're free you dedicate them to long-term projects-making trade deals with neighbours, upgrading roads and infrastructure, training a military, and so on. Kingmaker is about that dream, and kingdom management is how it simulates the day-to-day running of your land. Then you slowly build up a domain and spend the rest of your days dealing with the problems of the local citizens.įew ever made it to that endgame, but the dream remained part of the collective unconscious of longtime roleplayers: Some day we will clear a hex and build a keep. The endgame of D&D in its early editions was clearing a hex on the wilderness map, getting rid of all the monsters, and building a keep there. Half of Kingmaker is a game where you go on adventures and fight trolls, "and then you have Kingdom Management, where you do taxes," as Prototype00 jokingly puts it. Clear a hex, build a keep, become a research wizard You had to choose non-aggressive dialogue options when talking to Nyrissa even after her betrayal, for example. Some of what they understood was obvious. In the thread that followed, the communities' combined knowledge of what it would take to unlock the secret ending was brought together. She compiled everything she and other players on Discord had figured out, then posted it on Reddit (opens in new tab). Several patches later things smoothed out enough for Alice to finish Kingmaker with one of its normal endings. If you got there and didn't have the right spell to do that? Too bad. Act 5 might not even end (opens in new tab), and parts of a climactic dungeon called The House at the End of Time were so broken players had to teleport past certain areas to avoid their game breaking. In the early weeks after Kingmaker's release, getting any ending-let alone a secret ending-was almost impossible. The real puzzle was knowing all of the conditions to succeed." Kingmaker's launch bugginess made these conditions trickier to figure out, however, "since no one was sure if any complication either stemmed from a design decision or a bug." "It was the game's biggest secret," says Alice Wu, who joined Kingmaker's Discord to talk spoilers, "but there were plenty of clues to its existence. These players figured out what Komzolov called the "secret romance ending" was possible, but they were only just beginning to understand how to get to it. On a Steam forum thread (opens in new tab) where players theorized about the possibility, one suggested you'd be better off romancing literally any other NPC, since they "don't look like lettuce." A player who was more intrigued by the possibility replied, "She has 36 in charisma so she is a good looking lettuce."
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