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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning?

GordonHalfman

Scholar
Joined
Nov 5, 2011
Messages
119
I find combos more fun in competitive multiplayer games, since there's an added tension which makes the risk-reward calculation more meaningful. It makes it more difficult also and it can be fucking sweet when you pull off something decent to clutch out a win. Doing combos against hordes of punching bag drones is less good.

Also, thread should be nine pages of bitching about how the game isn't turn based. :decline:
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
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Dec 12, 2002
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About 8 meters beneath sea level.
The quests I played were basically fetch quests with speech checks to get bigger rewards. Exploration is alright, but you're stuck in one town and surroundings for the demo. NPC behavior seems okay, but I'm pretty sure quest givers stay where they (particularly hilarious in the case where a person has been stabbed and can agonize in front of an inn for hours in-game). You level one passive non-combat skill and three atributes on the three branches (Fighter, Rogue, Wizard) and no significant C&C, but you only have so much time to do things.


Maps are corridors. And you can kill the whole village and go to jail (and lockpick your way out), but some important NPC are immortal, just like Skyrim.

What should have been: Skyrim Graphics, WoW Map & Fable quests + DMC combo system.
What actualy is: WoW graphics, Fable 1 map, Skyrim quests + shitty combo system.

Well, seems to fullfill expactations wonderfully then. Thanks.
 

Syril

Liturgist
Queued
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Nov 1, 2011
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1,385
Seems this game will be a good buy for 15$ for a console, will wait :smug:
 

Metro

Arcane
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The maps are based on that corridor/on-rails paradigm (complete with jumping/climbing only at rare designated spots) but, as I said before, the over world at least is a lot more open than Fable 1 which was literally just pure corridors.
 

Metro

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Fable had a lot of gimmicks that made the world seem to react to you. How does Kingdoms of Amalur do in that aspect?

You'll have to be more specific. You mean the way npcs would react to you depending on your quests completed, alignment, etc? Never really thought much of that. As far as in Amalur I can't really say given the confines of the demo. 45 minutes basically gives you enough time to do two, maybe three quests. The fact that you'll get thrown in jail if you start killing townspeople seems fairly reactive. I might go back and try some wacky stuff later tonight but it's a bit of a pain to do so given the lack of saving and time limit.
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
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About 8 meters beneath sea level.
Well, do they do things beside stand around? I don't expect you to have seen the full range of behaviour but do the little buggers do anything or do they simply walk from waypoint to waypoint with some of the quest givers always standing in one place with a big yellow exclamation mark over their head?

PS: I always liked how in Fable you could triumphantly lift the severed head of your enemy over your head for some cheers from the populace. Contrasted wonderfully with the cutesy cartoony looks.
 

Metro

Arcane
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Well in the first town there's a scene where some dude is on the ground poisoned or something with a crowd surrounding him and a quest giver asks you for help to get the antidote. Didn't do that one so maybe if you cure him they all disperse or something. Other than that I didn't notice much else except for the occasional milling about and npc conversation like you'd see in pretty much any modern ARPG.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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Killed the whole town except for the immortal NPC and he was still "hello friend, please do some fedex quests for me"...I wound't get my hopes up for ANY kind of reaction from NPCs, they don't even walk around or say random bullshit much.
 

WalmartJesus

Learned
Joined
Apr 26, 2011
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294
Location
Jew York

Even though I've only played the demo and not the whole game to see, I highly doubt the character's moveset will have the same fast sophisticated elegance of Ryu Hayabusa...
NG combat is dial-a-combo, just like God of War. There's very little room for improvisation there. What saves the game and elevates it above the rest of the genre is the aggressive AI.
Demon's Souls and Dark Soul's combat > Kingdom of Amalur's
Not in terms of the combo system, no. I do agree that enemies are stronger, and the difficulty is higher in the Souls games, which is exactly what KoA lacks.

The aggressive and smart AI is all the more reason why NG has more depth...you have to be strategic and think when entering a fight.An approach that is effective against one certain type of enemy....might not be for another.The enemies also wont simply just stand there and allow you to mindlessly wail on them.

Demon/Dark Souls share these same principles despite the lack of a combo system.

When playing the KoA demo,I never once was put in a situation like I described above.I was able to get through by mashing away at the attack button.Sure,the combat was fun in that "instant gratification sort of way"...but it was also shallow and simplistic.
 

Mangoose

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity
I thought it was neat that wolves would jump at you quickly from a length away. And also the bandit-rogues that kept darting out of reach only to make a quick combo every now and then. The regular wood monsters were pretty boring though.
 

Metro

Arcane
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Eh... the first time I played I did the quest where you have to get the daggers of the two bandit leaders. I just ran into the middle of a bandit camp with like four or five dudes, mashed buttons, rolled face, and won. Didn't notice anything special.
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Just some further impressions before I'm done with this game for good (definitely not buying it, even in a Steam/Origin sale).

I don't think there's anything positive I can say about the game. I mean, even with Arcania you can say, "Art and world design are well done, the menus are good", but with KoA: Reckoning there's nothing. Straight away you notice the menus are low-res. I don't even have that big a monitor (1680x1050). They and the interface are awkward to use, I started out with a 360 controller then I tried mouse and keyboard, with either method you're going through a load of menus before you actually get to the item you want to equip.

I know you can't get a sense of the story from just a demo but I had no idea where this was going at all. Intro cutscene was too long and too vague. Didn't know the intentions of the bad guys in the starting dungeon except that they wanted to kill everything. Allies aren't very interesting (if you didn't yawn at least once during any of the gnome conversations then you must have a very high tolerance rate for poor writing and poor voice acting).

Quests seemed right out of Fable, NPCs are stood around with exclamation marks above their heads, the quests they give you are go here, kill this, you didn't even have to pick up the items you are meant to collect as they are magically added to your inventory (do the wolf-turned-into-a-man quest to see an example of this).

Others have said the graphics are WoWish but I disagree. WoW graphics are actually really good, even today they scale well with high-resolutions and high anti-aliasing. The graphics in this looked low-res and blurry.

Ultimately what this feels like is a Fable clone with a failed attempt at MMO combo combat of the DC Universe Online variety, mixed in with a sprinkling of Oblivion here and there. And I think this in a nutshell explains the sudden incline at Bethesda of late. Rolston was responsible for the awfulness that was Oblivion. The fact that he had no involvement in Skyrim explains why that game is so surprisingly good.

I don't care about this game any more, I wasn't really interested to begin with. The only thing I am wondering right now is why R.A. Salvatore got involved.
 
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I know you can't get a sense of the story from just a demo but I had no idea where this was going at all. Intro cutscene was too long and too vague. Didn't know the intentions of the bad guys in the starting dungeon except that they wanted to kill everything.

A cultish group of Fae with a power-hungry leader declare war on pretty much everyone else in the land, and due to their innate mystical nature (which makes them far hardier than the other races) and whatever forbidden shit they've found (enough to hold off their brethren) are kicking ass for two decades straight. Fae are capable of coming back from normally lethal wounds, and the other races don't have anything to match it, so the Gnomes start working on something dreamt up by a crackpot.

If recently deceased folks can magically have a new body created by magic and then joint with their spirit again, they nullify the Fae's advantage. And in the long run making all war pointless because nobody will ever die for good. Basically, yay Cylon.


Previous to the player's 'awakening', the best they could do is randomly recreate bodies from donated templates (IOW actual corpses that were I guess thrown into the Well), and then experiment to try and bring them back. You find a note at one point specifically forbidding any work being done on the originals. Anyway, for some reason it worked on you though only partially because your mind is scrambled.


As of the end of the tutorial, you're not supposed to be sure how or why the dark Fae got there, as the frontline is miles and miles away, and the Well of Souls is supposed to be a secret project.
 

MicoSelva

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some important NPC are immortal, just like Skyrim.
Supposedly, they become killable after You finish their quests, or so the creators claimed.

One another thing that looks promising is enemy variety. I encountered seven types of enemies (rat, tuatha, spider, troll, wolf, bear, kobold) during the half hour I played the demo. One of Fable's (and many other action RPGs, including both Mass Effects) weakest points was fighting the same stuff over and over again. There's a chance it will be different here.
 

MaroonSkein

Augur
Joined
Dec 28, 2011
Messages
347
Location
St. Petersburg, Russia
When playing the KoA demo,I never once was put in a situation like I described above.I was able to get through by mashing away at the attack button.Sure,the combat was fun in that "instant gratification sort of way"...but it was also shallow and simplistic.
It's not shallow and simplistic. The problem is that enemies don't force you to make full use of the tricks you have in your disposal. That said, wolves may be a sign that the enemy AI gets more interesting later on. KoA wolves have only one attack (they stop for a second, then jump at you), but they come in packs and they work as a pack. The trick to them is that they take turns attacking. Immediately after one wolf jumps, the next one gets ready to follow. Basically, as long as there's more than one wolf around, long combos become impossible. You're only given a second to deal some damage to the wolf that just attacked you. After that, the next wolf comes, forcing you to roll, block or take damage.
 

Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
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Djibouti
At first, I thought this game was p cool because it allowed me to create the ultimate Potato Protagonist

2rr7708.jpg


Yup. Meet Boleslaw (originally was supposed to be Gromosław, but this sucky game allows only 8 characters in names). This is what the main character in Twitcher should have been instead of that fag Gerald.

But then the actual game started and I had to reconsider. Didn't even finish the demo, got to the Generic Starter Village and quit because fuck do I have Generic Starter Villages with a passion.

My thoughts are this is like a poor man's DKS. It has all the cool and funny derpy stuff removed, but a truckload of negative derp stuff added. The writing is so fucking INANE that listening to those dialogues was an utter PAIN, which was the main reason why I quit after getting to Generic Starter Village. Don't know what 'combos' pop up later, but CLICKCLICKCLICKROLLCLICK to win didn't look too auspicious. Neither did 'HOLD X, RAEP FACES AND GO BERSERK ON RMB FOR MAXIMUM MAJESTY!!!!!'. And did I mention the inventory is shit? Because it is.

All in all - derp/10.
 

DraQ

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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
At first, I thought this game was p cool because it allowed me to create the ultimate Potato Protagonist

2rr7708.jpg


Yup. Meet Boleslaw (originally was supposed to be Gromosław, but this sucky game allows only 8 characters in names).
:salute: : x :bro:


My thoughts are this is like a poor man's DKS. It has all the cool and funny derpy stuff removed, but a truckload of negative derp stuff added.
So it's sort of like with :obviously: face.

DKS was :obviously:, but remove the monocle from :obviously: and you'll just end with something derpy and looking sort of constipated, even though the difference doesn't seem all that significant.
 

WalmartJesus

Learned
Joined
Apr 26, 2011
Messages
294
Location
Jew York
When playing the KoA demo,I never once was put in a situation like I described above.I was able to get through by mashing away at the attack button.Sure,the combat was fun in that "instant gratification sort of way"...but it was also shallow and simplistic.
It's not shallow and simplistic. The problem is that enemies don't force you to make full use of the tricks you have in your disposal. That said, wolves may be a sign that the enemy AI gets more interesting later on. KoA wolves have only one attack (they stop for a second, then jump at you), but they come in packs and they work as a pack. The trick to them is that they take turns attacking. Immediately after one wolf jumps, the next one gets ready to follow. Basically, as long as there's more than one wolf around, long combos become impossible. You're only given a second to deal some damage to the wolf that just attacked you. After that, the next wolf comes, forcing you to roll, block or take damage.

Although it was only a Demo.

I somehow doubt the full game will have the same tactical depth as the games I mentioned.

But I really dont feel like going into a 5 page neckbeard circle jerk over this....so agree to disagree
 

Mastermind

Cognito Elite Material
Patron
Bethestard
Joined
Apr 15, 2010
Messages
21,144
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Finished the demo well above the Skyway recommended 7 times. Probably a first day buy for me. I like the fact that the combat runs so smoothly, and it doesn't seem particularly popamole. I like it when RPG developers put some effort into the actual gameplay, so I'm gonna reward that with some of my hard earned jew gold.
 

Icewater

Artisanal Shitposting™
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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2
Game is banal shit, boring.

Why can we not negative brofist posts? I'd love to do that to Mastermind's above me.
 

Mastermind

Cognito Elite Material
Patron
Bethestard
Joined
Apr 15, 2010
Messages
21,144
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Game is banal shit, boring.

Why can we not negative brofist posts? I'd love to do that to Mastermind's above me.

Feel free to play a more traditional style RPG instead.

Oh wait, they don't make those anymore. :smug:
 

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