Review Kingdoms of Amalur, "Babies' first Skyrim"

Yeah, no...he'd have a point if he didn't beat off to Skyrim.

That's Amalur in a nutshell.

Game didn't have enough pull to make ppl stay though. There's something about WoW that made me run past a lot of places, do things, explore, mine, craft as I explore Goldshire all the way to Duskwood, Stranglethorn Vale till Gadgetzan SOLO with occasional pick up groups for boss quest etc - nothing about Amalur gave that feeling of progression. The level tied quests were pretty poorly paced, and loot table is out of whack. It's not as good as WoW in solo questing and that really is worrying for a single player game.

Not as good? It's da bomb, bro.
http://www.metropulse.com/news/2012/feb/29/kingdoms-amalur-reckoning-sounds-wake--call-rpg-ge/

"Somewhere in England, Fable series developer Peter Molyneux is crying into his tea, or sobbing at a soccer match, or whatever it is that British people do when they’re sad. Whatever form his lamentations take, he no doubt knows an awful truth—the Fable game he always wanted to make has finally been made, and it had nothing to do with him.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a vast, immersive fantasy epic that has a lot to teach the self-proclaimed visionaries of the industry, having seemingly come out of nowhere to blow many of their best creations out of the water.
...
But where the Fables were each variations on the theme of the buggy, disappointing mess, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is at once massive and streamlined, simple and complex, familiar and utterly new.

Attribute at least some of this to the inclusion of fantasy author R.A. Salvatore as Reckoning’s resident loremaster. A best-selling fantasy writer since before many of Reckoning’s players were born, Salvatore made his name as one of the first authors to turn the idea of RPG-related fiction into a viable career. Having him write your game’s backstory is like having Abraham Lincoln come to San Dimas High and narrate your world-history project.

Salvatore’s mark is easily discernible here. Reckoning’s Faelands are the stuff of old-school high fantasy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by way of World of Warcraft. It’s a world completely unafraid of its own stereotypical nature, with layers upon layers of beautiful (if in no way unexpected) scenery at every turn. Forests give way to steppes give way to mountains give way to deserts, all littered with villages and ruins and undercut by caverns and tunnels.
...
Reckoning focuses on that single player’s experience, which allows combat to be tighter, skill progression to be more dynamic, and the game’s story to be told more in a more robust fashion.

Reckoning features expansive character growth options, forgoing a strict class-based setup in favor of several loosely affiliated skill trees divided between warrior, mage, and rogue archetypes. These trees can be mixed and matched with few restrictions, with a series of extra perks and noncombat skills granting bonuses and gameplay options on top of a character’s chosen skill set.

This allows players the freedom of a system that offers as much choice as possible without burdening them with an overabundance of complexity. When stripped of context and analyzed strictly mechanically, Reckoning’s system appears similar to other adherents of the classic warrior/mage/rogue triumvirate, but as implemented within the game, it feels a shade more intuitive than the systems of its predecessors.

That gives Reckoning a level of freedom rare in modern RPGs. There’s a lot to experience here, so having some of its fundamentals be content to get out of the way—and do so effectively, instead of attempting and failing like the Fables and their ilk—is refreshing in a gaming environment too often focused on micromanaging and number-crunching. In a game with a lot of strengths, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’s greatest is perhaps its ability to actually be played."

"......ability to be actually played."

Hahahah.

Yeah, like there's a difference in difficulty or required skill between KoA and Skyrim.

It's p. shitty. And ugly.

I hate to compare shittiness to shittiness but I found Amalur's grindy shit to be a bit more tolerable than Skyrim's hiking repetitive shit.

Then again, it's Yahtzee we're taling about, and he has the attention spell of a rodent needing a meth fix.

So, come on. Don't be afraid. Come out.

Yes, I'm referring to YOU! YOU, the Codexers who gave the minimum of positive comments
In Amalur's first previews and interviews!

Curious to see what sales figures were like for it. After the initial week of hype it seems to have pretty much fallen off the table. The problem with making a single player MMO type of game is unless you actually make the quests, dialogues, and content deeper than actual MMOs why would people bother playing it? The only advantage Amalur has over WoW is the fluid combat (WoW doesn't have skill based aiming/dodging/blocking) and even then WoW arguably has a superior overall system. So if someone asked me whether they should spend $60 on Amalur or $20 (or less) on baseline WoW that comes with a free month of game time then WoW is the obvious answer. You'd get bored of Amalur in a month, anyway, and at least in WoW you can play multiple classes and do an occasional dungeon with people.

I played a bit of Amalur at a friend's PC and it seemed pretty good especially compared to Skyrim. I tried Skyrim... That 20 minute unskippable slow ass wagon ride at the begging before you even get to create your character and do anything... seriously, if I wanted to see shit like that I'd play Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid. Skyrim is still there on my PC but I really don't want to come back to it at the moment, that painfully drawn-out begging really left a bad impression. I didn't get the same feeling in Amalur. And the combat there seems more fun than anything Bethesda can possible come up with. Too bad Amalur devs are huge fuckheads cause they made the game unplayable on xp service pack 2, so I have to either install SP3 (which I don't want to risk cause of that advanced genuine protection of theirs) or install Vista or 7 - no thanks. If there is anything Skyrim is better at than Amalur it's fucking running on XP SP2.

Intro cutscene really is the least of what is terrible about Skyrim; the sequence immediately following the wagon ride is pretty fucking terrible, and then the whole god damn game starts. Wizardry 7 had an obnoxious opening cinematic, too. I think this is a really terrible way of judging a game. What I mean to say is if your attention span has atrophied to the point that you can't stand that short wagon cutscene, you probably would have thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the game.

EDIT: And holy shit; I get the faux-KKKodex edginess of using a decade-old OS and then complaining AAA devs are doing them an injustice by only supporting modern OS's, but maybe it's time to bury that particular hatchet? It's not like Kingdoms of Amalol is a trendsetter in this regard.

Trust me they delivers it, skyrim has much more depth than kingdom of amalur, as much skyrim is mainstream, its even more extreme in kingdom of amalur, skyrim has simplistic combat yes but it allows you free roaming, choices, and real exploration in a really good graphic environement, koa is on rails and cartoon like. I can understand some dont like skyrim, but i cant possibly understand why anyone would like KOA. Try it and you will loathe it with passion, from the wow like graphics to the quest mark on npc, dumb cliché story without any surprise,no tactics required for anything lightyears away from titles like dark souls, its everything went wrong in the gaming industry but magnified and streamlined even more.KOA is a crystal you obtain when you put mainstreaming and dumbing down under high pressure.Its EA trademark and flagship.

Lawl, now that is funny, getting accused of being an edgy "I do it for the KKKs" guy despite actually hating this kind of behavior. Listen, I use and like games and software because I like them/am used to them, not because I want to fit in with some crowd of internet people who rage about stupid shit nobody cares about all day. Fascinating, I know. I am complaining because Amalur is the first game I encountered that does that and because Amalur is one of the few games released in a long while that I actually wanna try.

And I'm fully aware that judging the game without actually making past the opening cut scene is meaningless , and I will go back to Skyrim when I have time to see what it has to offer, but first impressions can be powerful. it's just that from what I've seen of both games I'm pretty sure I would enjoy Amalur more.

I thought Skyrim was "Babies' First Skyrim"...

I really liked System 7 but I learnt to let go. Just make a Win7 partition or something.

100 hours and and no broken quest, bug or crash after first patch; While Skyrim is barely playable after 4th. In Amalur I can say fuck you to quest giver.... Someone which made Skyrim a hore to play, you walk to close to City Guard and got 5 quests open.... quests with no choice and rails in 80% of cases. Kill some dude and fetch his magic pantalones from mine/burrows in farthest corner of map.... or vice verso. Atleast in Amalur you got some real choice from time to time. Level scaling is shity though... Makes epic equipment shit when you found all parts. Nevertheless worth playing while waiting for AoD Demo.... and Playing real RPG... Crusader Kings 2.

By that you mean: not take the quest? Yeah, you can do that in WoW, too.

You actually preferred Amalurs generic pasty level design to Skyrims open world? Back to the crack pipe you syphilitic hobo

And holy shit; I get why you'd refer to what's still the most commonly used OS in the world as if it's some obscure old piece of software that most people haven't even heard of, but maybe it's time to stop calling people crazy for bitching how arbitrary and baffling it is for certain games to withhold support for XP when XP seems to game exactly the way 7 does.

I was reading the rest of what you quoted for lulz, but this part really destroyed me.

9/10, my medic asked me to avoid reading it again.

Yeah walk over to some glowing stone press F, and suddenly a music plays as some voices narrate some poetry.
What. the. Fuck? This passes of as in-game lore nowadays?

Not asking too much, but not being able to see item stat from a mouse-over is already a HUGE hint this is a half assed console port.

So how's the combat? Is it better to any degree than what we usually get in an ARPG? If the combat's enjoyable enough I may have fun with this game, otherwise it looks like no.