Kingdoms of Amalur - Reckoning

[Winnow]

Curt Schillings game is out in single player demo form:

http://reckoning.amalur.com/en/

It's available for PC, 360 and PS3


I tried out the PC version.

Initial thoughts:

It's pretty fun. The artwork is influenced by WoW but it looks a lot better.

The character generator is not that great but you can make a passable character. I managed to create a Dark Elf female looking character that looked decent enough.

The demo is extensive. One warning, there's no way to save in the demo which I found out the hard way...so give yourself some time to play it. You can keep creating characters but you'll get an idea of what it's all about with one character as the demo feeds you with all class armors and weapons as you proceed through the first dungeon.

So far, it seems pretty easy. The game helps a lot with auto pointing your arrows and ranged magic. The mechanics for swinging weapons is smooth and feels good. Inventory, etc all is easy enough to work with. I think this game will work well on 360/PS3. I didn't see an option for controller in the PC version.

It was fun and easy to use a shield to block with and instead of space bar jumping, it's a quick tumble in the direction you choose which worked well against the final boss in the first quest.

It's diabloesque in that you break crap to get gold but not too annoying.

The ability trees and skills looked straight forward enough and useful. The combos you use with your weapons are easy to figure out as well.

Voice acting is passable. Your character doesn't speak but the NPCs you interact with do. You have a Mass Effect/Dragon Age type dialogue tree.

Not too much of a pain with weapon ammo. Arrows, for example, can run out but they replace themselves over time. It's easy to switch between weapons, shield, bow, etc.

When I got outside, the environment was pretty. Sort of an upgraded WoW look. Colorful.

I guess this will eventually be an MMO but they're starting off first with a single player game releasing on Feb 7th.

It's nothing groundbreaking but is easy to pick up and entertaining. There are less bugs than I thought might be there with a new development team headed by Curt Schilling.

Worth trying the demo for sure.

[Aslanna]

They have a few big names.. R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane being the other two man ones. Also Ken Ralston of course. I got the demo but haven't really had the time to try it. I think it's something I'd like but I wont be paying full price for it. I'll wait for it to hit < $30

[Winnow]

They have a few big names.. R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane being the other two man ones. Also Ken Ralston of course. I got the demo but haven't really had the time to try it. I think it's something I'd like but I wont be paying full price for it. I'll wait for it to hit < $30

I knew about Salvatore and McFarlane. It's still the first time they've been involved with an RPG/MMO development.

I'm impressed!

I went back and blew through the initial dungeon tutorial thinking I only had 45 minutes but it turns out your 45 minutes start after you meet "Agarth", the first Quest NPC after existing the tutorial part. I was about 1 minute away from him and didn't know it my first go around. After you talk to him, your 45 minutes start, which doesn't count NPC dialog time or paused time so it's a decent amount of time to check things out. Once you quit, if you want to play again, it will ask you if you want to start past the tutorial and then loads your character up with all three sets of armor (plate, leather and cloth) as well as all starting weapons (bow, sword, daggers and staff) so you can make the best use of your 45 minutes with your next character. Nice way to do things as it allows you to try out the three primary classes as well as fool around a bit with your skills/abilities to see how you like them.

While the tutorial dungeon looks nice enough, the game's visuals are really impressive outdoors. It's like WoW on crack...or maybe how WoW would look to my taste instead of the 5 polygon characters.

Anyone that likes a good RPG/Action game shouldn't be disappointed with this game. The tutorial was linear (not surprising) but the world opens up after that. I was wandering off not knowing where I was with plenty of ways to go. I picked up several quests in the first village I ran into. While your character doesn't speak, all the voice acting is acceptable (not annoying).

The animations for the characters are quite good. They move well on the screen, attack animations are well done as well as general movement.

Here's some screens: (spoilered to keep the thread tidy)

[Show]

Once you've maxed your "fate bar" you can perform acts of fate which are fancy and sometimes involve hitting some keys during a semi death blow animation scene.



It's a colorful world.







I included the above to show the nice form for weapon animations, etc.





Several attacks have you click and hold your attack button which powers up a bigger attack with visuals

Give it a shot. On PC you can grab it off Origin which also allows you to stream some other demos (like On Live does)

Daggers and magic seem pretty fun. I haven't tried out Swords yet.

And for the Demon's Souls people. It's not that. This game is very forgiving with targeting. That said, the shield blocking and dodging are a lot like Demon's Souls so that might be fun.

[masteen]

Also get some armor for Mass Effect 3 for playing and I think a weapon for finishing.

[Winnow]

Also get some armor for Mass Effect 3 for playing and I think a weapon for finishing.

Yeah, got the message that I'd have armor waiting for me in ME3. I think that's platform specific. I played on PC via Origin.

A note about the demo. Many months back, the game code was outsourced to a third party in order to create a demo. There are bugs, especially with textures and some missing lines of voice, which were fixed long ago.

I'm happy enough with the game that I'm going to buy it Feb 7th and then play it until Mass Effect 3 is released the following month (March 6th I think). After that, the closed/open beta invites are scheduled to start rolling in for Secret World, Tera, and Guild Wars 2, followed by the actual release of those MMOs. Wildstar will probably also be in the mix as well for the first half of the year.

[Jice Virago]

Playing it and early impression is that its kind of mashy, but in a good action RPGish kind of way. Graphics are perfect for the game genre target they were going for. Camera still needs some work and some form of target lock would be nice, but pretty fun so far. Just what I needed after spending a week on FF13-2.....

[Winnow]

Been playing this game. It's the most entertaing RPG I've played in awhile. Technically, Skyrim is better but I prefer the colorful look and entertaining loot/crafting of Amalur. Some random thoughts:

Colorful World. It does remind you somewhat of WoW but I hate WoW and like Amalur so don't let that deter you.

Diablo-esque Loot (you're constantly finding new drops with stats that don't make one item the obvious better choice necessarily all the time)

Sagecrafting is worthwhile (crafting in general is fun)

Voice Acting is hokey but quests are fun and mostly not your "kill 10 of these things variety"

Lots of Quests/Content. The open world allows for you to roam and do various side quests. You don't feel pushed into the main storyline. For example, I spent many hours around the first town you run into after the intro dungeon. You could completely pass that town up along with shit ton of quests by going straight to the next main storyline quests. Side quests certainly aren't forced on you but there a lot of them.

Great Ability Trees for the three classes. Skill progression is also good. Detect and Sagecracting lines are most useful. Detect hidden is by far the best.

Be sure to complete enough of the quests in the town where the giant spiders are causing problems in order to be given your first home. Upgrade your home to have all the crafting work tables available in one place.

Lore stones are a cool way to encourage exploration. Each of these stones you discover give a bit of story in the form of a bard like voice talking about lore of some sort. The stones are grouped, I think 5 together so if you find all 5 of the associated stones, stat abilities are added to your character making exploration meaningful.

Tons of Chests and hidden loot make the game fun. Your inventory is big enough to typically not become a pain with the heavy amount of drops. You also have fast teleporting/travel to many locations (once they are discovered) which save a lot of time traveling through the large world.

The "Moves" help menu shows animations of all moves you can get in game making it easy to get familiar with them on the Xbox controller (controller is highly recommended for this game even if playing the PC version)

Menus/UI/Map and and quest system are well done

Low hassle game, fast travel, Nice organized containers for various crap like Sage, crafting, etc

Graphics better on PC, more than usual difference between console and PC.I'm playing the 360 version anyway but it sucks to see the lower quality graphics.

Each Class looks fun,. The caster is pretty powerful so far. I focused on boosting my scepter which is the ranged attack weapon for casters. It fires off like a machine gun taking 5% of your mana each shot but you can add abilities which eventually reduce the cost to 2% of mana which ends up giving you 50 rapid fire shots before you mana runs out. You're not stuck using cloth if your caster. There are no "classes". You choose to put ablity points into any tree so you can hybrid yourself and then decide if you want some cloth pices for more mana or leather for speed, place for AC etc. You can use any weapon (although there are level restrictions). You're not stuck with anything. You can pay a very reasonable gold fee to respec your character. The fee goes up with your level but it's not unreasonable.

There's enough to the world that you'll miss chests, etc if you don't explore some. Take the time to look around a corner and you'll probably find a chest or something. Also detect hidden skill is huge if you want to find hidden chest, have mobs on the map, detect traps (and disarm them with high enough ability) etc.

Get sagecraft up to level 3, make lambent gems that siphon either health or mana for high sell value.

for my caster, I focus on both mana and health regeneration enhancements.

---
Overall, this game is just plain fun if you enjoy RPGs with a lot of loot drops. It's not hard like Demons Souls but the variety of mobs and locations makes it entertaining without seeming repetitive. It's a very casual pick up and play game, making it also a good filler in between other games or if you just have an hour or so. I've played 20+ hours and am nowhere near half done as far as I can tell by looking at the map. You also smash a shit ton of crates, barrels, etc which respawn overnight in towns, etc. They just give gold and can be ignored if you don't like smashing stuff. The ranged targeting in the game is easy so smashing stuff long range makes it less of an annoyance.

Nice first game from Kurt Schilling's team.

[Boogahz]

Never was able to load the demo after reinstalling twice. Well, I loaded it, and at the point where your body is being hauled off, the screen was just black with occasional UI elements. Deleted, and left it alone.

[Aslanna]

Think I read somewhere that EA had a third-party do the demo and there were some who had technical issues. So don't let that hold you back!

[Winnow]

Never was able to load the demo after reinstalling twice. Well, I loaded it, and at the point where your body is being hauled off, the screen was just black with occasional UI elements. Deleted, and left it alone.

The demo was buggy as hell. No bugs in the actual game, at least no major ones that I noticed. The demo was outsourced to a third party to create from pretty old source code.

"There's a lot of tension about the demo, which we didn't build in-house," Frazier told Eurogamer. "It was branched off our code about three months ago. It got a lot of bug fixing. We sent them what we had, but there are a lot of bug fixes they didn't get.

"But all the time the demo was worked on is time we spent de-bugging the main game. It should be clear from the reviews the main game is in way better shape.

[Jice Virago]

I am a good chunk into this game, playing as a Finesse / Mage hybrid. It is very button mashy and low on the challenge, but its very fun. Unlike the technically superior Skyrim, its crafting system does not break the entire game and there is a nice smooth progression through the game. Camera is still wonky, but its easier to figure out whats happening in combat than Skyrim and no "I randomly thunked the retard ally who stood in front of my shot at the last second, so I need to reload the entire fight" bullshit. Controls are very simple but very fluid. Its never going to be considered an all time classic, but its probably the most basically fun diabloesque action RPG I have played in a long ass time.

[Fairweather Pure]

38 and Big Huge Games are now gone. The game was a failure, selling a million units in 90 days and they needed 3x that to break even. I'll pick it up on the low side of 20$! The people that played it all seem to like it.

http://mobile.theverge.com/gaming/2012/ ... tire-staff

[masteen]

It's a fun, polished hack and slash RPG. It is not a game onto which you pin the future of an entire company.

Feel bad for the drones who've been working for free for a month.

The more I read about the deal RI cut, the more I wonder how such utter dumbfucks get into positions of power in government.

[Winnow]

The game is solid, colorful, and well animated. Easy to pick up and play, simple but effective crafting and loot drops galore while not making them feel useless. Nice map and questing system. Great character advancement system. Most of all, it's fun with a huge varied world to explore.

Of the four most recent RPGS, I'd rank them like this:

1. Dragon's Dogma
2. Kingdoms of Amalur
3a. Witcher 2
3b. Skyrim

Unranked: Dark Souls (haven't played it yet but need to based the fun/frustration I had with Demon's Souls)

We've had a wealth of RPGs come out this year. Amalur released during an unusually busy RPG year. The people here who've played it give it a thumbs up but it lost out to the the big name titles. I'm hoping that doesn't happen to Dragon's Dogma. DD is an amazing first effort and deserves sequels. It's an unforgiving game like Demon's Souls though so it may not capture the lazy gamers that want to be spoon fed their gaming experience.

[Aslanna]

It's an unforgiving game like Demon's Souls though so it may not capture the lazy gamers that want to be spoon fed their gaming experience.

I guess I can cross it off my list!

[Fairweather Pure]

I'm surprised this game has not dropped in price much. It's still 50$ on Amazon. Like I said eariler, I'm waiting for a 20$ or less deal but the fact that it is not dropping is making me think I might raise my price to 30$ish. Ashzura's Wrath is another one that I expected bomba prices on but it's also hanging put in the 50-60$ range cor an unexpected amount of time.

There have been a shitload of fantasy based action RPGs in the last 2 years. I've gotten most of them for 15-25$ each. I have enough of these games to play for years since each one is so long, but I still want more. I bet you kill spiders, bats, and wolves in every single goddamn one too.

I just picked up LotR: War of the North for 20$ and I was really surprised at how great it is. It should make for some nice couch co-op with the wife. I heard it gets repetitive the further you play though, but the first fight in the ruins was a great deal of fun. Good graphics too. They take the asthetics from the films. As a fan, I appreciate how it all looks like one world.

[Winnow]

Kingdoms of Amalur is a freebie available on PSN this month. It's worth checking out if you never did.