Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning?

[Metro]

 

[felipepepe]

I have no ideia how to define DMC besides "Action-game"...Beat-em-up sounds too underwhelming. But anyway, where are on ye old codex habit of discussing genre definitions again...let's focus.

One thing that KoA seems to do right is to mix DMC combat with open-world & quests...IIRC that's new stuff, or was done before?

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

Question though, why did the corrupted Fae sound like they were an eye-patch away from being pirates the few times they talked? I honestly expected a 'Yarrgh' to come up somewhere.

 

[Menckenstein]

 

[Marobug]

That's not isometric.

 

[MaroonSkein]

And... as I said, ARPGs have already 'caught up.' The ones that have just don't use the 'combo' style you're looking for. The ones that haven't are just mediocre to poor games. Fable 1 wouldn't be made any more challenging by having combo attacks.

The ones that have are the minority, and they tend to be relatively low-budget games, largely ignored by the mainstream. KoA is the first AAA American ARPG to have any tangible depth to its combat mechanics. If it succeeds, the likes of Bethesda will find it a lot harder to get away with substandard combat.

 

[The Boring Incarnation]

Have you played the new Batman games, MaroonSkein? i thought they had a fairly elegant combo system, and a decent enough move variety.

Anyway, I enjoyed the demo, even if a power outage made me go through the entire tutorial again before opening up. The combat is good, the art style is okay (even if it has too much of the "McFarlane" touch) and judging from the worldmap there's a lot of ground to cover, and I found some quests on the main road while traveling to another settlement (don't know if I could reach it, time ran out before I did). Don't know if character progression was significant, but I guess 45 minutes isn't time enough to feel the difference.

One thing that bugged me was the way people treated the Well of Souls: So this gnome guy's plan is to create a machine to bring people back from the dead... And everyone that knows about it is OK with that? And the Fateweaver dude thinks he "respected the Fates"? Isn't death a significant part of someone's fate, and dodging it is kind of fucked up? Has Salvatore never played "Torment"?

Also from the quests I played I fear this game maybe has no alternate paths to complete them. Also maybe unfair after just 45 minutes, but it was one big things that turned me off of Skyrim.

Probably won't get this at launch, see what other people talk about and if positive maybe pick up on a sale.

 

[Ivory Samoan]

Question though, why did the corrupted Fae sound like they were an eye-patch away from being pirates the few times they talked? I honestly expected a 'Yarrgh' to come up somewhere.

haha... I noticed that - You expect elven folk to be all wise and profound, this lot sound like they just finished up a kegger on the Jolly Roger and are off to scour the Faelands for some 'wenches..

 

[Metro]

Gotta admit I glossed over all of the dialogue. I tried to follow it at first but it just seemed to be generic nonsensical fantasy tripe.

 

[anus_pounder]

Well, tried it out for myself and....well. To say I'm impressed would be an overstatement, but I don't think I was disappointed. The combat is fun, I suppose and the world is...well its alright I guess. I don't like the WoW-ish artstyle to be quite honest, but I'm not going to let that stop me from enjoying the game. All in all, I think its just good fun. My stance about the this entire argument is neutral. I think MS and co. are giving the game too high a rating, but to say this game is deserving of Skyway's patented 'Banal, Shit, Boring' would be a huge overstatement.

Still, I have enjoyed literally every single game I've played, Daikatana included. So I guess I'm just easy to please. Won't buy for full price, but I think its worth a discounted price at best and a torrent at worst.

 

[Metro]

It's not a bad game by any means, just nothing revolutionary. If it were $30 (and not rife with bugs) I'd probably preorder it. I'm sure it'll be discounted within a month after release same with most AAA games. The $60 preorder/release hook is just to draw in the impatient idiots.

 

[sea]

One thing that bugged me was the way people treated the Well of Souls: So this gnome guy's plan is to create a machine to bring people back from the dead... And everyone that knows about it is OK with that? And the Fateweaver dude thinks he "respected the Fates"? Isn't death a significant part of someone's fate, and dodging it is kind of fucked up? Has Salvatore never played "Torment"?

That one really bothered me. The gnomes are all like "the Well of Souls lets us cheat death, isn't that nice?" even though Fate with a capital F seems to be the basis for the beliefs of everyone in the entire world. Then again the gnomes are said to be scientific and seem to be kinda disowned/feared by the rest of the people (see the alchemist in the town) so who knows, maybe the gnomes just don't give two shits about Fate.

The dialogue itself kinda bothers me, though. It's generic, but not in a good way. I don't mind simple straightforward dialogue of the voice-acting is alright and it's kept fairly short and to the point (see Fallout), but in Reckoning I don't really get a sense of personality from anyone... at all... ever, and instead they just ramble endlessly about the same five or so topics. "I'm just a simple washerwoman, but here's a volume of information on the Fae..." I like character interaction and always feel compelled to interrogate every NPC fully, so being met with so many boring responses that were all inevitably 2-4 lines each was not very fun. Some of the NPCs even repeat the exact same pieces of information if you ask about different topics, which is bizarre. Frankly, if someone doesn't have anything interesting to say in an RPG, they shouldn't be talking at all. I want my dialogue meaningful, full of interesting options, and it needs to help me learn about the game world... not just spit the same pieces of information at me again and again.

Maybe it's also just an issue with how the game handles exposition, but it's not very good at presenting the lore of the world. It might all be jam-packed in books, and I guess I appreciate the fact that there aren't too many obligatory exposition bombs ("as you know, the Tuatha are our mortal enemies, from the Faelands, who have fought us for years..."), but even after playing through a few times I'm still not really sure of what the fuck is going on. I don't get any sense of history to the world, I don't know who the various political powers are, how the lands are divided or governed, who the big factions are, and so on. In fact, the actual role of the "new races" seems completely downplayed in favour of all the Fae stuff, which constitutes 99% of what people talk about. If that's the case, and the Fae are thick even five minutes' walk away, how the hell did all the humans, gnomes etc. even manage to develop as far as they have?

 

[Metro]

"I'm just a simple washerwoman, but here's a volume of information on the Fae..." I like character interaction and always feel compelled to interrogate every NPC fully, so being met with so many boring responses that were all inevitably 2-4 lines each was not very fun. Some of the NPCs even repeat the exact same pieces of information if you ask about different topics, which is bizarre. Frankly, if someone doesn't have anything interesting to say in an RPG, they shouldn't be talking at all. I want my dialogue meaningful, full of interesting options, and it needs to help me learn about the game world... not just spit the same pieces of information at me again and again.

This was my biggest problem with the dialogue. There's simply no point in engaging in the non-highlighted (blue) branches (other than the persuasion ones that will get you a few extra items) aside from generic exposition.

 

[Jaedar]

I played the demo. Impressions follow.

I like the art style. It's colorful and vibrant and it looks nice. A bit generic, but I can live with that. As for the combat, it is definitely pandering. Every single attack has some majestic! flashy particle effects to go with it. It actually looks pretty cool and is sortof fun to play, but I wonder how long it will take for it to get boring. There doesn't seem to be much depth(spam LMB and then occasionally block/roll/cast a spell) or difficulity. Maybe it's the fact that the demo is limited to the starting area(I ran as far as I could before I ran into a wall saying that I needed the full game to bypass it) but there was nothing that was ever really threatening. When I unlocked "flame mark" a second tier mage spell, I one-shot most enemies. And it's an aoe spell. Real shame, cause I think mindlessly hacking through the enemies will significantly shorten the time before I get bored with it. Hard difficulity might help, but I doubt it will solve the problem.

Dialogue and voice acting is really dull and generic. I skipped pretty much all of it. Interface is workable, and the ability to immediately compare and sort loot upon finding it is a good idea but the implementation is clunky, why can't marking something as junk have a hotkey binding? Why do I have to right click to compare? The loot window barely takes up 30% of the screen.

On the RPG side of things it works like this: each time you level up you get 1 non-combat skill point and 3 combat skill points. The non-combat skills all seem decent enough. combat skills are divided into might/sorcery/finesse with the sort of talents you'd expect in each place. Seems solid enough for an arpg. The cards which represent classes seem decent but aside from the different kinds of teleportation you can get, they're only +%X type of deals.

 

[Kraszu]

Blade of Darkness did have combos.

That was actually the thing that I had disliked about it, despite finding it good overall. Learning to execute combos is tedious, challenge should be in being able to adopt to what your opponent is doing, not in repeating the same combination of buttons over, and over just to muscle memorize it. You might fail at combat, and repeat it couple of times as well, but combat is never exactly the same, and you can try to approach it differently.

 

[MicoSelva]

I've played through the demo (although I stopped before the 45 minute limit run) and yeah, this is what Fable should have been.

Combat is decent, and the character system looks rather promising, although not nearly as revolutionary as it was suggested in the previews. Basically, You build one of 7 available classes during the game (pure Warrior/Mage/Thief, a hybrid of two, or a hybrid of all three), investing three points per level into the skill tree. You need a certain amount of points invested in each branch to unlock better skills.

There are also non-combat skills, like Stealth, Persuasion, Alchemy, Blacksmithing, FInd HIdden & others. You get one point per level for these.

Still, this is a hybrid game, can't call it an RPG with a straight face (unlike Risen, for example) - again, like Fable or Witcher 2. Starter sword does 9 damage, but I already saw a hammer with 38. Very JRPG-like. The amount of dialogue is similar to Divinity 2, for example. The writing, as little as I have seen of it, looks passable enough.

I like that harvesting is based on Your skill. I failed most attempts. Want ingredients? Invest in alchemy. It remains to be seen if potion-making is useful. Although, health regeneration is very slow, almost non-existant. Unlike Witcher 2 You won't get Your HP back between fights. I also had to use my health potions pretty often during combat with more than two opponents. I really suck at action games, though.

Mana regenerates slowly, unless boosted by equipment, but using spells (ok, spell - I only got the basic lightning thing) really makes a difference. At least it did for me.

Armor grants really weird bonuses like +10% critical damage for leather boots (or leather anything, basically). Yeah, I know it's for rogues, but this makes very little sense. Better equipment has requirements like minimum level or amount of points invested into each skill tree. This would make sense for magical items for sorcerers, but how much expertise do I need to wield a better hammer, if I'm proficient enough with the hammer I'm already using? Not a fan of such systems.

Overalll, could be decent. I somehow managed to finish Fable, even though it took me 5 years and I suffered a lot. This one looks much better, but also probably longer. We'll see in due time.

 

[Twinkle]

I dunno, I feel like combat system is the only good thing about this "game". Sure, enemies are punching bags on normal, but there is no way to test if it remains true on hard difficulty. It's really freeform, with different weapons having different combos and attack properties, plus there are wide possibilities for mixing and matching to develop your own preferred combat style. Sadly, the complete lack of challenge makes it pretty insignificant in the big picture. Everything else... it's a typical streamlined quest compass chaser with an "open world" being just a bunch of interconnected narrow corridors. Huge exclamation marks over quest givers, dialog wheel, retarded lockpicking and dispelling minigames, clumsy inventory, ugly and annoying post-processing effects, level and loot scaling - keep this shit in your Oblivions kthxbye. As soon as I got "break 10 crates" mission I wiped this turd from my HDD without regret.

 

[Xi]

I Downloaded the demo off steam, however I cannot get it to work correctly. It goes to a black screen upon giving me control of the character (I can hear combat sounds - grunts, etc) but I cannot get it to display video. Apparently, the game has issues with ATI video cards. That's going to be problematic, imho. Desire to get this game is declining.

 

[Twinkle]

Disable post-processing, it's annoying as hell anyway.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I dunno, I feel like combat system is the only good thing about this "game". Sure, enemies are punching bags on normal, but there is no way to test if it remains true on hard difficulty. It's really freeform, with different weapons having different combos and attack properties, plus there are wide possibilities for mixing and matching to develop your own preferred combat style. Sadly, the complete lack of challenge makes it pretty insignificant in the big picture. Everything else... it's a typical streamlined quest compass chaser with an "open world" being just a bunch of interconnected narrow corridors. Huge exclamation marks over quest givers, dialog wheel, retarded lockpicking and dispelling minigames, clumsy inventory, ugly and annoying post-processing effects, level and loot scaling - keep this shit in your Oblivions kthxbye. As soon as I got "break 10 crates" mission I wiped this turd from my HDD without regret.

You're pretty smart man, figuring out all these things about the combat system and the open world just from the 5 minutes of tutorial it takes to get to the crate breaking quest.

 

[Zed]

Okay, that's laying it on a bit thick... If you skip past all of the cutscenes and opt out of all the dialogues on the first choice then the tutorial area is maaaaaybe fifteen minutes long. Probably not even that.

I guess I was pretty much done when they asked me to burn a spider's web with fire then. I couldn't play any more. I tried again but I can't play it. The way the character turns with the camera makes the game impossible for me to play. I have never had any problems with nausea before this game. The camera zooms in/out and changes slightly for every single variation in the terrain.

 

[Twinkle]

I dunno, I feel like combat system is the only good thing about this "game". Sure, enemies are punching bags on normal, but there is no way to test if it remains true on hard difficulty. It's really freeform, with different weapons having different combos and attack properties, plus there are wide possibilities for mixing and matching to develop your own preferred combat style. Sadly, the complete lack of challenge makes it pretty insignificant in the big picture. Everything else... it's a typical streamlined quest compass chaser with an "open world" being just a bunch of interconnected narrow corridors. Huge exclamation marks over quest givers, dialog wheel, retarded lockpicking and dispelling minigames, clumsy inventory, ugly and annoying post-processing effects, level and loot scaling - keep this shit in your Oblivions kthxbye. As soon as I got "break 10 crates" mission I wiped this turd from my HDD without regret.

You're pretty smart man, figuring out all these things about the combat system and the open world just from the 5 minutes of tutorial it takes to get to the crate breaking quest.

Indeed, I am. Crate smashing is a part of one of the sidequests in the first "town".

 

[Gerrard]

Camera is fucking terrible.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I dunno, I feel like combat system is the only good thing about this "game". Sure, enemies are punching bags on normal, but there is no way to test if it remains true on hard difficulty. It's really freeform, with different weapons having different combos and attack properties, plus there are wide possibilities for mixing and matching to develop your own preferred combat style. Sadly, the complete lack of challenge makes it pretty insignificant in the big picture. Everything else... it's a typical streamlined quest compass chaser with an "open world" being just a bunch of interconnected narrow corridors. Huge exclamation marks over quest givers, dialog wheel, retarded lockpicking and dispelling minigames, clumsy inventory, ugly and annoying post-processing effects, level and loot scaling - keep this shit in your Oblivions kthxbye. As soon as I got "break 10 crates" mission I wiped this turd from my HDD without regret.

You're pretty smart man, figuring out all these things about the combat system and the open world just from the 5 minutes of tutorial it takes to get to the crate breaking quest.

Indeed, I am. Crate smashing is a part of one of the sidequests in the first "town".

Wait, they have another crate breaking quest?

 

[Metro]

Okay, that's laying it on a bit thick... If you skip past all of the cutscenes and opt out of all the dialogues on the first choice then the tutorial area is maaaaaybe fifteen minutes long. Probably not even that.

I guess I was pretty much done when they asked me to burn a spider's web with fire then. I couldn't play any more. I tried again but I can't play it. The way the character turns with the camera makes the game impossible for me to play. I have never had any problems with nausea before this game. The camera zooms in/out and changes slightly for every single variation in the terrain.

The camera can be horrible at times. I didn't notice it at the point you're talking about but when I was in the overworld and in combat the camera would zoom out to crazy distances.