Originally posted by Czanrei
I don't know why some gamers insist on flaming and trolling a review just because the game is not perfect for them. Those gamers need to get a grip. No game is ever perfect, period. I like the game and recognize its flaws, but I still like the game. I look forward to future dlc and games from 38 studios.

Just checked your post history, I think you can answer that question really well :)

Interesting review. 

But it is a review, *not* a preview!

good read,

now going myself a bit out of topic, in terms of graphic visuals this is how World of Warcraft should look today. A massive visual overhaul.

i wish games here in australia were 60 bucks. try paying 90-110 bucks for a console game and 90bucks for a new pc game lol. steam and cd key sites ftw!

ive heard that the FOD from the demo never got sorted out :(   i had it on max settings and i was staring at his back most of the time unless enemies spread out, then it would zoom out. any know if theres a manual fix to change in the code? just until theres a patch.  cheers :D

The game is amazing on a pc, the combat and moves you do leveling are just fun as hell. Reckoning mode gives you finish moves just like Mortal Kombat. The world is not linear at all with up to 400 hours of content. KOA > Skyrim any day of the week to me.

While I think the comparisons with Skyrim are a bit misleading; this game is more a combination of a lot of games. As far as openworld-ness, it sits somewhere in between Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls. It has a lot more freedom than Dragon Age, but isn't as open world as Elder Scrolls. That being said, there is an abundance of side quests and dungeons to explore, granted, I'm not that far in and I'm basing this off of what I have seen thus far. The art style reminds me a lot of WoW, the combat reminds me of God of War and the skills/talents remind me of Dragon Age or a simplified Neverwinter Nights. I like all those games that I've mentioned, so for me, this game is kind of like a happy medium of all of those games. I'm not saying it's better or worse than any of them, but there are little things that remind me of some of my favorite games and I find it kind of refreshing.

All things considered, I'm enjoying the game a lot and am looking forward to the mmo/other games from 38 studios.

Originally posted by Rogosh

The game is amazing on a pc, the combat and moves you do leveling are just fun as hell. Reckoning mode gives you finish moves just like Mortal Kombat. The world is not linear at all with up to 400 hours of content. KOA > Skyrim any day of the week to me.

I have no idea where you getting " up to 400 hours of gameplay". Even on the official site the testers who did every single quest in the game were around 200.

Some of the game review sites have finished the main story line and finished the game in 30-40 hours ( main quest line play through).

This game may be good or bad but making up numbers like 400 hours is not even close to accurate.

Originally posted by MarlonB

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by MarlonB

If this game is meant as a "step up" for the MMO ... wouldn't it be smart to release it for free?

You give your new addicts the goods for free .. untill they depend on it :)

Maybe they would like the additional funding to help them finish their mmo?

 

If they have enough faith in their MMO, they don't need it ;)

At least they can reuse a lot of things.

 

 

If you knew what you were talking about you might have a point.. but alas you dont.  The mmo is going to take place in the future of the same world as Koa  so the world will have changed citys may be just ruins etc...etc  This is a prelude  to what is going to happen in the mmo...

by the way faith has nothing to do with it people dont work for free.

maybe he died alot and took twice as long :P

Originally posted by Lobotomist

You can adjust camera settings and slow it down.

What I allso had to add that i miss ability to zoom closer or further.

 

But all in all , with all shortcommings - over 200 gameplay hours ! Wow !

Well worth the buy :)

 

Its only been out for 24 hours.

Invisible walls turned me off

Originally posted by nontact

This game should be discussed on an MMO site because obstensibly it is an MMO that was made into a single player game. Sorry if I'm repeating known info.

38 was making this game an MMO and somewhere along the line they decided they couldn't or didn't want to compete, or the big huge engine couldn't hack the requirements of a AAA mmo, or for what ever reason it became a single player game. The guy who started the project and brought everyone on board is a massive Everquest fan. He dreamt of making his own for years, and being a rich guy was able to get other people to come on board one at a time as big names are attracted to the idea of working with other big names. This company has had some major publicized ups and downs. Hirings and firings, starts and stops etc etc.

If this game came out 5 years ago I might have been more impressed with what I was playing. Today however it is a colection of borrowed mechanics all wound together by dated looking graphics and features that are watered down versions of ones from larger better titles. I can't find anything original in this title.

This game IS Fable. It IS everquest. It IS god of war. It IS Dragon Age and it IS every hit game released in the last 5 years. And that's the key problem. It's kinds like how you can like all the ingrediants in a certain food seperately but when mixed all together it just tastes wrong. It plays like a console game, so yes it is responsive and snappy (too much so, turn that camera down!), and it comes with a console UI which we all know how much that pisses us all off. We didn't give Bethesda the pass when they failed in that regard and this game shouldn't get a pass either with it's Fable meets Dragon Age UI.

This game does NOT feel alive. The characters while well voiced are flat and depthless. Their conversation options are all the same like it's Morrowind all over, but eveyone has a different opinion of the same topics. A trend they put into everything. Redundancy redundancy redundancy. Or as I call it 'working to play the game'.

I haven't posted on these forums in a very very long time and I feel so strongly about this game that I feel I must, nay need to post a response.

Some people will like this game. Kids might like this game who've never played any other game before, or kids that watched their older siblings play fable I II or III and longed to play it too but weren't allowed.

OK, into the actual critism from a game design standpoint. The opening level is HORRIBLE! My gort. You get multiple copies of all the starter gear in the starter area...why? Because they dumbed it down for the idiots who run through levels ignoring content and have to force feed them the gear again just so they can handle the game. CAN YOU SAY LOADING SCREENS BATMAN!!!!? There is even poorly placed floating assets in the first level which make it look just rookie. Floor assets poorly placed that show the world below. Like an MMO beta where they said, "we know we have presentaion bugs, just ignore those for now, they are on our list and we will fix those soon." This game says "heck no! We ship with rookie bugs" because apparently they didn't have EA's massive QA department test this game.

The game is retardedly easy even on hard mode. Why is it easy? Because you've played this game before. You could play this game in your sleep and you probably have. It certainly put me to sleep once my eyes stopped rolling at the savage copy cats I saw everywhere I looked.

The areas are all corridors. I'm sorry but whoever at their studio that thinks a bunch of linked corridors is an OPEN world needs to be slapped with something heavy. Did no one at their studio play GTA? They stole features from Bethesda, yet managed not to see how an open wolrd is built. Being able to complete quests in the order you want is also not enough to call a game open world. Not saying you can, but it gives some flexibility in each area.

The buldings in the towns are jammed together just like in your favourite second tier Free to Play MMO except even more so. There are multiple vendors even in the same buildings that sell the same types of gear. In fact most all sell a bit of everything forcing you to go to them all and check each section against each other. Sorry I do enough pricing when I buy groceries. I don't want to do work in a game as well. Maybe that's for people who like shopping? Why do I want to go to loading screen, walk 10 feet to adjacent door and go to loading screen again?

Oh and did I mention that it was easy? In fact it is so easy that it makes character choices seem pointless. You get some fancy new animation if you invest points. But don't be prepared for any surprises, because just like fable we give you a nifty preview animation. Though at least in Fable those awesome abilites scaled, had tiers and you could pull them off at will practically. This game gives you broken over-powered gear that you can just spam and kill everything, without having to spec in one single skill.

All the details just feel like work. The bottom up skill trees all spread out and lacking any visual acuity or ergonomic design structure. The inventory system ripped from fable that if you double click you mistakenly drink or eat stuff from your bag when you're just opening up tabs.

EVERYTING IS FLAT!!! WTF! not a single normal map in the damn game? At the very least I will give them credit for having decent head rigging for lip synching even if I think the models look like POS. Unless you think WOW models are good looking and not just quirky and funny.

Tab menus at top of windows don't show all available options, but just 3. So if you are not the type ( I am, but the general audience wouldn't think to check) to habitually try to scroll past the options to see if something is hiding you'd never know the options existed. Who thought that was a good idea in a game so obviously watered down for the masses? And I really do hope that some producer at one of the studios to blame reads these posts, because I know they do, they have little else to do besides scheduling, and they want to know who to blame when the actual consumer reviews come in. By the way. Producers often post as normal users on web sites like these. Just saying.

Gack I'ma have to stop,I'd go on for hours with this game. Honestly try the demo. Maybe you'll pick it up. My guess is you'll pass for much better realized titles. This is just another example of EA putting their name on something and comming to "rescue" (hire fire and outsource) the developement financially then totally riuing it.

TRY BEFORE YOU BUY!

i'd go one better and say watch the youtube videos of the gameplay, it will save downloading the demo, and probably be just as informative.. i really don't understand why this game is even remotely hyped.. its.. dated, its quite frankly.. rubbish. i didnt see anything in the videos that made the game look even slightly interesting.. honestly.. a few months time you'll be able to pick this game up on steam for £5 ... or less.. paying AAA prices for this kind of stuff just doesnt make sense.

May give this game a whirl. The cons make it sound like I'll enjoy it a lot more than Skyrim which is sadly gathering binary cobwebs. I didn't even last 20 hours in Tamriel!

Originally posted by Leodious

Interesting review. 

But it is a review, *not* a preview!

 Um.. it's not a review and it is a preview according to Bill Murphy who posted just that a few posts back in this thread, the full review will be posted in a week or two.

*edited for corrections.

Originally posted by greyed-out

Originally posted by nontact

No I am not. Try following gamasutra for years or being in the industry. From a design standpoint this is an MMO. R.A. and Todd with Shilling all came together to make an MMO. One that Shilling could be good at I guess. Those drives translated into what we have here. There may be two teams that may all be fine and well. But why do you think they bought the team/game? Because they were further along then they were. It came down to being cheaper ergo 'safer' to buy something constructed, and then throw the creative anergies they had already developed into something with staff and ability. The dream of the MMO may still be there and in development but this was a stop-gap to stroke some egos apease investors that need to see a title every quarter and put something to market before the whole op folded on itself.

 

werd

 

This game has been in development at Big Huge Games for nearly seven years, way before 38 Studios bought them.  They were working on an action-RPG called "Ascendant".  Since they were a THQ studio, they had financial problems because THQ is a poorly run, mismanaged Publisher.  However, BHG is a great studio with past, proven successes like Rise of Nations.  So they decided to sell of the studio or shut it down entirely.

 

This is when Curt Schilling stepped in with 38 Studios and bought them.  The Kingdoms of Amalur universe was planned from day one to be a Trans-media IP, and a single-player RPG was always envisioned.  However, when the opportunity to purchase BHG from THQ came up, they did so.  Before this opprotunity came up, the single-player RPG was a project planned for after the MMO.

 

At that point, the engine and core mechanics of the game were already developed, and they dropped the "Ascendent" stuff and used the Amalur IP instead.  You can see an early video gameplay of "Ascendent" here which shows the game before it was retooled for the Kingdoms of Amalur Universe.

 

Meanwhile, 38 Stduios had moved their studio to Providence, Rhode Island, secured a loan from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.  This loan is entirely to create jobs for the State of Rhode Island, and the MMO studio, which never ceased its work, and is still in development under close scrutiny by the State of Rhode Island itself.  None of these funds were used to finish development of Reckoning.  Whether Reckoning is a success or failure the MMO will still come out.

 

This is where EA came in.  In order to finish up the single-player RPG, they secured a publishing deal with EA Partners which gave the MD studio the funds needed to finish the project.  EA will receive the lions-share of the profits on Reckoning.  However, had they not took a chance on the single-player RPG it would never have been made.

 

 

Edited to Add:  Actually, technically speaking, the deal with the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation isn't even a loan.  It's a good-faith guarantee that the State will back a privately-invested loan should 38 ever default and its incremental payout is based on performance mile

From what I am hearing on the official site, they may have to redo the difficulty because even hardmode isn't all that challenging either. I like the game alot but they need to fix things....

Originally posted by nontact

This game should be discussed on an MMO site because obstensibly it is an MMO that was made into a single player game. Sorry if I'm repeating known info.

38 was making this game an MMO and somewhere along the line they decided they couldn't or didn't want to compete, or the big huge engine couldn't hack the requirements of a AAA mmo, or for what ever reason it became a single player game. The guy who started the project and brought everyone on board is a massive Everquest fan. He dreamt of making his own for years, and being a rich guy was able to get other people to come on board one at a time as big names are attracted to the idea of working with other big names. This company has had some major publicized ups and downs. Hirings and firings, starts and stops etc etc.

If this game came out 5 years ago I might have been more impressed with what I was playing. Today however it is a colection of borrowed mechanics all wound together by dated looking graphics and features that are watered down versions of ones from larger better titles. I can't find anything original in this title.

This game IS Fable. It IS everquest. It IS god of war. It IS Dragon Age and it IS every hit game released in the last 5 years. And that's the key problem. It's kinds like how you can like all the ingrediants in a certain food seperately but when mixed all together it just tastes wrong. It plays like a console game, so yes it is responsive and snappy (too much so, turn that camera down!), and it comes with a console UI which we all know how much that pisses us all off. We didn't give Bethesda the pass when they failed in that regard and this game shouldn't get a pass either with it's Fable meets Dragon Age UI.

This game does NOT feel alive. The characters while well voiced are flat and depthless. Their conversation options are all the same like it's Morrowind all over, but eveyone has a different opinion of the same topics. A trend they put into everything. Redundancy redundancy redundancy. Or as I call it 'working to play the game'.

I haven't posted on these forums in a very very long time and I feel so strongly about this game that I feel I must, nay need to post a response.

Some people will like this game. Kids might like this game who've never played any other game before, or kids that watched their older siblings play fable I II or III and longed to play it too but weren't allowed.

OK, into the actual critism from a game design standpoint. The opening level is HORRIBLE! My gort. You get multiple copies of all the starter gear in the starter area...why? Because they dumbed it down for the idiots who run through levels ignoring content and have to force feed them the gear again just so they can handle the game. CAN YOU SAY LOADING SCREENS BATMAN!!!!? There is even poorly placed floating assets in the first level which make it look just rookie. Floor assets poorly placed that show the world below. Like an MMO beta where they said, "we know we have presentaion bugs, just ignore those for now, they are on our list and we will fix those soon." This game says "heck no! We ship with rookie bugs" because apparently they didn't have EA's massive QA department test this game.

The game is retardedly easy even on hard mode. Why is it easy? Because you've played this game before. You could play this game in your sleep and you probably have. It certainly put me to sleep once my eyes stopped rolling at the savage copy cats I saw everywhere I looked.

The areas are all corridors. I'm sorry but whoever at their studio that thinks a bunch of linked corridors is an OPEN world needs to be slapped with something heavy. Did no one at their studio play GTA? They stole features from Bethesda, yet managed not to see how an open wolrd is built. Being able to complete quests in the order you want is also not enough to call a game open world. Not saying you can, but it gives some flexibility in each area.

The buldings in the towns are jammed together just like in your favourite second tier Free to Play MMO except even more so. There are multiple vendors even in the same buildings that sell the same types of gear. In fact most all sell a bit of everything forcing you to go to them all and check each section against each other. Sorry I do enough pricing when I buy groceries. I don't want to do work in a game as well. Maybe that's for people who like shopping? Why do I want to go to loading screen, walk 10 feet to adjacent door and go to loading screen again?

Oh and did I mention that it was easy? In fact it is so easy that it makes character choices seem pointless. You get some fancy new animation if you invest points. But don't be prepared for any surprises, because just like fable we give you a nifty preview animation. Though at least in Fable those awesome abilites scaled, had tiers and you could pull them off at will practically. This game gives you broken over-powered gear that you can just spam and kill everything, without having to spec in one single skill.

All the details just feel like work. The bottom up skill trees all spread out and lacking any visual acuity or ergonomic design structure. The inventory system ripped from fable that if you double click you mistakenly drink or eat stuff from your bag when you're just opening up tabs.

EVERYTING IS FLAT!!! WTF! not a single normal map in the damn game? At the very least I will give them credit for having decent head rigging for lip synching even if I think the models look like POS. Unless you think WOW models are good looking and not just quirky and funny.

Tab menus at top of windows don't show all available options, but just 3. So if you are not the type ( I am, but the general audience wouldn't think to check) to habitually try to scroll past the options to see if something is hiding you'd never know the options existed. Who thought that was a good idea in a game so obviously watered down for the masses? And I really do hope that some producer at one of the studios to blame reads these posts, because I know they do, they have little else to do besides scheduling, and they want to know who to blame when the actual consumer reviews come in. By the way. Producers often post as normal users on web sites like these. Just saying.

Gack I'ma have to stop,I'd go on for hours with this game. Honestly try the demo. Maybe you'll pick it up. My guess is you'll pass for much better realized titles. This is just another example of EA putting their name on something and comming to "rescue" (hire fire and outsource) the developement financially then totally riuing it.

TRY BEFORE YOU BUY!

Your ARE wrong sir,

This was the single player game to set the lore up for the MMO they have coming out. This was not the MMO turned into a single player RPG.  Curt schilling has said as much a live radio show yesturday. There MMO is still in development.

Originally posted by Mephster

From what I am hearing on the official site, they may have to redo the difficulty because even hardmode isn't all that challenging either. I like the game alot but they need to fix things....

They're listening.  There's an official thread  on the forums concerning the camera.  And the difficultly issue has been ackowledged and is being discussed.  They listen to and read all the feedback, so if you've got any good or bad be sure to voice them over in the official forums or the feedback email.

I haven't heard of the game before i run into the futz about it on this website.

Last night i've had a long gaming session and i'm really surprised and like it alot. I find the overall arts and design very appealing (matter of taste i guess) and the combat fun.

First game in a while which i can't wait to come home and play.

The classes thing is a bit irritating to me though. As far as i've played it, i got to choose my fate an picked sorcerer. Below the fates there are a couple more options looking like you can mix classes basic abilities up a bit, i.e. Sorcerer/Finesse. These have serveral level as well, but i can't pick any of them.

Played the demo, that crap saying it is better than Skyrim = me not purchasing the game. Yeah right better...