Kingdom of Amalur: Reckonings Pages PREV 1 2 3 | |
I had some framerate issues with the demo and I am running a 550 ti. Did you have issues with the demo that were fixed in the full version? | |
It's a great game, and a promising IP. I hope it sells well enough to get some kind of a sequel. | |
Just like everyone said, the game plays like fable, combined with the design choice and graphics of warcraft 3. I had issues with the camera being too close and then suddenly shifting weirdly during combat, stealth being useless, guilds feel padded, sorcery, blacksmithing and sagecraft are OP, also when conversations arise, and boy do they arise, they talk too slow, and I can't just click anywhere to skip, I have to press the skip button down at the bottom left corner. I know the last one was more of a nitpick, but hey, it's still an issue that other games fixed easily, why can't this game do it right? Finally, the thing that bugged me the most was that, the moment I saw the actual Fae, in the forest, with blue skin, communing with nature, it reminded me so much of night elves that it made me feel like I'm playing a Warcraft campaign in third person. If you're going to buy this for PC, get Skyrim instead, because mods. | |
For me another big thing that puts this above Skyrim is that The Fateless One's special powers (ie: fateshifting, being able to alter fate when everyone else is locked into it) is explained much better than The Dragonborn's ability to absorb dragon souls and use their language. In Amalur, your fate was finished when you died. Being resurrected means you are outside fate's plan, giving you the ability to alter said plan. In Skyrim, you somehow have the soul of a dragon, apparently it just happens sometimes. Maybe it's explained better further into the story or in some bit of lore from previous games but it just seems like there's no good reason that it happened. | |
I thought the demo was pretty decent. I might pick it up secondhand when I can get it for under $20. Not a chance in hell of buying it new though. | |
What the hell are you talking about. In Skyrim, dragon shouts were an ancient art that dragons could use that humans stole like the fire of Prometheus and learned to master. The main character is a genetic anomaly that can use these shouts easier for being a descendent of the first human endowed with draconic power by the god Akatosh. In Amalur, you have no fate THEREFORE YOU CAN SLOW DOWN TIME AND MAKE GIANT FUCKOFF WEAPONS APPEAR AND BE INSANELY POWERFUL AND MASSACRE SHIT IN VARIOUS DRAMATIC WAYS THAT GIVE YOU MORE EXPERIENCE BECAUSE REASONS. Somehow, being free from fate means you can suck up other people's fate (which is apparently a sort of energy) and use it like some sort of gasoline to fuel your giant fuckoff weapons that just appear outta fuckin nowhere. Yes, explained much better. If by that you mean almost not at all. But enough of that. Lemme write my own opinion on Amalur in general, and why I think it fails in many ways: The game is a bit broken in a lot of areas. Even on hard mode, depending on which skill tree you choose, you will eventually become an unstoppable machine of destruction if you're even a slight completionist and actually do sidequests. Blacksmithing is broken, allowing you to save-scum your way into getting insanely powerful gear that is better than anything you find or can buy, including the special unique weapons. Some people talked about how getting hit interrupts you and having to time your dodges and whatnot. Well guess what, going into the Might tree gets you a skill that you can activate to be immune to said interruption, turning the game into a mindless button masher. Magic doesn't even need that skill - your spells are ranged and already powerful enough to make short work of anything you encounter provided you chose the right skill path. As for finesse... daggers and faeblades both have skills and moves that can let you teleport and jump around. The problem with the game is that there's too much of it. Specifically, they aimed for an Elder Scrolls-like ton-of-content experience without making the game actually open-world. The game is open in the same way an MMO is open: there's no level scaling, and there's only one or two ways to go to progress to next areas. It's not like skyrim or fallout where you start off in one zone and you can go left, right, north or wherever you want. The game mostly guides you through its quest hubs and levelling areas in a VERY linear fashion while only branching off a grand total of once in the entire game, where you're supposed to choose between rolling glass hills and a red-brown desert valley as your questing zone. The quests are awful. I mean by god they're awful. There are very few quests here which are fit for a single-player game, most of them being taken straight out of your grindiest MMO. Go there, then there, then there. Collect bandit armbands. Bring random NPC ten rat tails. Go into this dungeon and fight the boss at the end to get the item someone needs then go there and there to finish the quest. Activate 3 monoliths around the map. Escort this guy out of this dungeon. And so on and so on. They're tolerable, but by the time you reach the last area (and even before that) you will be absolutely saturated with useless bullshit filler quests that have no purpose other than to pad out the gameplay time so that the developers can say "this is a 300 hour game". I like doing sidequests and finding out lore about the universe I'm in. As such, any game where I stop doing sidequests out of sheer boredom raises a heap of giant alarms in my head. That the combat becomes utterly boring and trivial to the point of where I had to gimp myself with a subpar build and a random set or armor with about 1000 less armor rating than the one I crafted and STILL had an incredibly easy time beating the game says volumes about the type of game this is. In conclusion I'd like to quote Brad from GiantBomb in his presentation of Kingdoms of Amalur when he said "If you buy this game, don't do all the quests. If a quest sounds boring, it probably is". EDIT: maybe I should have made an article/review out of this. Oh well, enjoy the rant, ye who have the patience to actually read it. | |
Wow angry wall of text much? I get how the Dragon Shouts work. That wasn't my issue. My issue was what makes me The Dragonborn? Because it CAN'T be solely genetic as there's no possible way that a Khajiit (my bro's character) or an Argonian (my character) can be descended from a human as it's murky at best whether they can interbreed with the other races. The others maybe but even then I have my doubts. Just because you found the game dull and easy doesn't mean everyone else will. When I bought Skyrim many of my complaints about it were echoes of your complaints about Amalur. | |
No, not angry, just amused. Ranty, if you will. I can understand a random person having the gift once in a while through either divine intervention or some other unexplained mechanism better than I can understand suffering a series of events that make you unique and then attributing some senseless, illogical powers that are never explained solely because gameplay needs them. I mean really, where do the shiny weapons come from? Why is fate related to slowing down time? Why do you get more experience when you fateshift something? And then getting a partial explanation for that by the end of the game that raises more questions than it answers. My point was that no, the fateshift mechanic is in no way explained "much better" than the Dragonborn's soul devouring. One of them is randomly having the power to absorb souls, the other is having no fate therefore somehow going into god mode at times. They're about the same contrived thing regardless.
I have no doubts that the average gamer who has played RPGs and action games before and is used to the mechanics will find this game dull and easy. Just as there are people who find Dark Souls a piece of cake, there will no doubt also be people who are having a really hard time finishing this game. This still doesn't justify you saying that the game was only easy for me and I can't speak objectively, though. From a design perspective, the game is packed with first-order optimal strategies (as by the Extra Credits definition) that break its difficulty over its knee (read: severely reduce the complexity of the combat making a lot of moves unnecessary and taking away from the intended experience by encouraging players to adopt a style that is much simpler than intended). A well-designed game does not have this, no matter how much you'd try to bring this into the subjective spectrum. The game is both objectively, and comparatively, easy. | |
I played about 60 hours of Skyrim before I just got bored with it personally. It felt repetitive, nothing I did seem to have any weight in the world whatsoever. While there was a lot to do, it quickly became a case of 'too much is just as bad as not enough'... totally lost sight of the main quest and nothing was really interesting anymore. Combat is pretty dreary, where all you do is block, power attack and then trade out smack with the other guy hoping he dies first. The first few dragons were fun... the music start blaring, pumping you up and the dragons create some weird interaction in the world (i.e. Most npc and mob will fight it) but even that got a bit repetetive (I once got 5 dragons attack on my way to something... yes, it was a long way... but it did break the whole 'rare and special' aspect of dragons). I find it very funny that people say Blacksmithing can ruin the game in Amalur... because it can't in Skyrim? Having full Dragonbone Armor enchanted up the waazoo and a Daedric weapon makes you a walking juggernaut. People say Amalur is easy, but with a 100 Blacksmithing and a 100 Enchantment, I have to say Skyrim was pretty damn easy too. I regret having gone that route in Skyrim and instinctively avoided blacksmithing in Amalur so far... which might have helped in making the game more fun for me. When I found a new little cave and instead of going 'oh sweet! exploration time!' I went 'Bah... what's the point?' I knew I was done with Skyrim. To be fair, I played as a Shield and Sword kind of guy (with a bow to tackle dragons), maybe the combat system opens up if you play as a mage or rogue type. I also played it on Xbox, so no mods. I do not think Skyrim sucks, I enjoyed it and played over 50 hours of it... but I don't understand people who can still be hooked up to it after 100hours. As for Amalur... So far (20 odds hour in), I'm having a blast (than again, 20 hours in, I was in love with Skyrim too). Combat is a lot more fun and varied. It's a lot more fluid and fast... you are not plodding around and meekly swinging a weapon around here. While the game is pretty easy overall and you can indeed get out of a lot of tight spot with bashing... you don't have to. Combat is a lot more fun and rewarding if you roll around, block, combo your ability and so forth. The fact that you don't have too, doesn't mean you shouldn't really. I guess a lot of this is going to be on how much effort and with what attitude you go into it. I like the art still of Amalur better. Everything looks different and magical. Skyrim looks a lot like Fallout's Wasteland when you think about it, except it trade the gunmetal grey and dust brown for snowy white and rock gray... it's empty, it's barren. Amalur is vibrant. NPC interaction is MILES better in Amalur. The fact that the screen closes in make it more personal. NPC have more range of movement. Voice acting is waaaaay better. The dialogue option is better as well; you can ask several question (usually between 4-10) to npcs and they will give you their own answer... you can ask the same question to two npc (Say, about the village they live in) and get two different answers, giving you a better overall feel for the world. Furthermore, has more stuff happens in the world, it is not uncommon to have 'talked out' npc have new dialogue option appear. Unlike Skyrim where most npc have 2 things to say and then revert to spouting about how they got an arrow in the knee. Also, after you complete a quest, npc 'greeting' dialogue change. If you saved them will be grateful when you past by them. Or you screwed them over in a dealing, they will be harsh instead. Unlike that redcloak in Skyrim who stills dishes you for never going to the cloud district once you're a fucking jarl! It is such a tiny thing really, but having npc say 'oh, it's you!' with an happy tone or 'Not you again...' with spite and disdain when you walk past them serves as a constant reminder that you have done stuff that has affected people... whereas that redcloak was a constant reminder that nobody gave a damn about what you did and who you are. The devil they say, is in the details. This combined with the art direction helped make Amalur a much more 'alive' place for me... despite the fact that it looks a lot more like a 'videogame world' with clearly defined zone and much less exploration out there. Amalur makes me feel like my action actually matter and the npc actually feel like 'people' instead of piece of talking scenery. As for the story... for what it's worth, I think the idea of predetermined Fate and the song of the fea is more interesting than the Douvakin. I actually care and want to know what will happen next in Amalur... while in Skyrim, the Greybeard quest was just another dot on my minimap that I eventually never got around to. The fact that npc are feel more than cardboard cutout (Argath and Alyn may not be the most original characters, but at least they ARE character) makes me want to know what they have to say next. In hindsight, I don't think Amalur's story is better necessarily... but it is told better. And that matters a lot. | |
It looked like crap on the demo because there were no config options. I don't remember having any other issues other than a little choppiness during videos. | |
You mean in the full version you get a real graphics menu? | |
It's very good and incredibly addictive. Combat can be a little repetitive sometimes, but it's not bad by any means (although I do find myself never using block, instead I just roll everywhere). The art style is nice, colorful and varied. The Lore is great too, especially the Fae. Be prepared for a big time investment though, it's a massive game. | |
Zhukuv and myself have both been totally honest about our experiences I think. It could be that: I'm going to try out 1 and 2 later. | |
This is the most awesome thing I've read in a while. Kudos for making my day. | |
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After playing the demo I decided not to buy it until there was a sale. Then I got a little bored. I bought it and am glad I did. Easily the best RPG I have played in awhile and it ranks up there with Mass Effect and Skyrim. For me the strengths are it's very unique world and story which I have not seen anything like before. I probably haven't played in such a creative world since Plancescape: Torment.
I will say that I find myself playing games in bursts lately being as busy as I am and I think the game would get old fast if I played for long stretches of time(which is typically the case for me).
I would also like to put out there how wonderfully this game runs on my computer. Too many games lately are incredibly poorly coded or rushed and run far worse than they should while doing much less than Amalur does. I have never had a crash and load times are nearly instant. Even if I leave the game alt tabbed for hours I can return and it runs great. We need more of this level of technical polish in PC gaming.
I am have played 30 hours or so and am only at the plains of Ersomethingoranother so there is plenty of content here if you play in bursts and don't allow the content to get repetitive. That said, I prefer Skyrim over Amalur but this is a great game and should not be overlooked.