Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Oh. The 60fps was a real draw for me. It made the game more fluid and easier to follow. Are the visuals tweaked to compensate? If not, it'll be a relative weak graphics performer. I can understand the simple MMO look when aiming for 60 fps, but at 30 fps it take a bit of a knocking IMO.

It looks the same as the demo. I agree that it's not a great looking game. Plenty of low res textures, and I don't care for the art style either.
 
I've been playing for 17 hours now. The game is still way too easy. I've made a gem that regenerates health at a rate of 1.5 per second. Haven't used any healing potions since. And I can make and equip a few more of those gems if I want to.
 
The framerate is now capped at 30 fps. Some of the skills have their stats slightly adjusted. And most of the bugs are gone. No more holes in the ground, or missing audio. A few more options in the options menu.

The gameplay is pretty much the same.

Is 30 fps for sure? Doesn't feel any different from the demo, from what I can tell. I think I have the demo installed still. Maybe I'll compare.
 
Yeah, it's at 30fps. The framerate problems with the demo weren't because it was slowing down, it's because it was speeding up.. hitting 60fps in certain areas, which made it look like it was bogging down when it returned to 30fps. Having a stable framerate, even if it is "only" 30fps, is far better than a wildly variable framerate any day, IMO.

I definitely need to get back to playing this.. I started it, barely got out of the tutorial area, then went back to playing Diablo 3 beta, and I've been hooked on that all week.
 
It's worth playing, I've got about 10 hours into it and I'm enjoying it a lot.
I still don't like the art style and the voice acting is mostly horrid, but overall it's still an enjoyable experience.
 
Yeah, I'm probably between 5-10 hours and I'm thinking it's been pretty good so far. The atmosphere is a bit lacking, but the gameplay is great.

Also, I heard Normal is too easy, so I'm playing on Hard. So far, not too bad, but I've heard it will start to ramp up the difficulty soon.
 
I really like this game. But there are so many things wrong with it, or could have been done better.

- Alchemy, Blacksmithting and Sagecrafting can all individually easily make the game too easy. And of course you can have all 3 if you want to.
- But don't put any points in Alchemy because you'll find more potions then you'll know what to do with.
- 99% of all loot is useless. You constantly get things that are worse then what you already have, even when you find rare items or unique armour sets. You can either sell your items for gold to add to your giant money pile, or salvage them to add to your giant duplicate blacksmithting parts pile.
- The inventory is very small, forcing you to make frequent trips back to shops to get rid of it all. Or you can store it in your house.
- You can only store 155 items at your house, and those are shared between all your houses. There are well over 155 unique weapons and armour sets in the game.
- This is a world without consequence. The story is very linear, and even when you do get to make choices your actions matter very little.
- You easily level up way too fast if you complete a lot of side quests. I'm level 18 out of 40, and I'm almost done with the first of the 5 major regions in this game. At this rate I'll be level 40 well before reaching the end.

So many things are made completely redundant because of how overpowered some things are. My rogue is almost indestructable. I have a ton of cash, but there are few things I want to buy because what I already have is better and too good to begin with.
 
I am really enjoying the game also, about 20hours in now.

To me it's not the mechanical issues that bother me, it's that the world seems to be caught between trying to be interesting and not taking itself seriously, resulting in you not really feeling like you're a part of it, or care much about it.

The loot drops are what they are, I seem to get useable drops often enough that it feels like progression.

Difficulty is hard to gauge, I actually ran into an issue where I missed a bunch of side quests making the area was in very difficult. But I also swapped talent trees, and it took me a long time to gear back up adequately which probably contributed.

I both like the combat (though I wish I could lock onto targets) and hate reckoning mode, it breaks the game. They can't tune Boss' for both, and they seem to mostly fall into the category of both hard and trivial depending on whether you have reckoning available, it's a dumb oversight.
 
To me it's not the mechanical issues that bother me, it's that the world seems to be caught between trying to be interesting and not taking itself seriously, resulting in you not really feeling like you're a part of it, or care much about it.

A lot of it does seem to be pretty forgetable. The world is quite bland. The faction quests seem to be the most interesting. The House of Ballads quest was pretty good for the most part. It gave some good insight into the Fae.
 
I really like this game. But there are so many things wrong with it, or could have been done better...
To be fair, I think most of the points you've raised are applicable to most action RPGs. It's usually only in the early parts of a game where loot drops are exciting. Later on I find I typically buy better gear in shops. Money is always available to excess. I always become overpowered long before the end, especially where gear crafting is possible. It's a shame no-one's progressing any of the gameplay in the genre, which seems well and truly stuck in a rutt stretching back to last gen.
 
To be fair, I think most of the points you've raised are applicable to most action RPGs. It's usually only in the early parts of a game where loot drops are exciting. Later on I find I typically buy better gear in shops. Money is always available to excess. I always become overpowered long before the end, especially where gear crafting is possible. It's a shame no-one's progressing any of the gameplay in the genre, which seems well and truly stuck in a rutt stretching back to last gen.

That's true. But the devs did talk a lot about how they were going to do some things differently, and how their game may perhaps not be as open as Skyrim, but because their world was more "handcrafted", it would allow them to do some better then Skyrim. Of course much of that is just PR talk. Although they did get some things right that most RPG's don't. Like the balance between the 3 skilltree's, and any combination of those. I am hoping they fix at least some of the problems with a patch.
 
Anyone find all the Lore stones in the Cradle of Summer yet? Don't read the spoilers unless you're also that far into the main storyline.

It's best bit of the game yet. You unintentionally cause some problems for the Fae, and despite your best efforts the make it right again, a Fae ends up dying. It's a perfect parallel to the story of the Fae in the main storyline, but on a much smaller scale. And because I don't know if the Fae will end up dead, even though that has been predicted, that makes this quite foreboding. And it ties in nicely with your own story of being the fateless one, that while you can make changes no-one else can, you can't change everything you might want to either.

I wasn't expecting this much depth from what basically a side quest. One you have to do some exploration for to find. This exactly where I want story in games to go. A perfect mix of both the gameplay and story.

It also made for the most difficult fight I've had so far.

Meanwhile in the main storyline I've been sent on a fetch quest only I can do, cause only I am the fateless one. :rolleyes:
 
I thought the boss battle at the end of the house of Ballads quest line was hard enough. Must have taken me 10 attempts, I think it would have been hard even if I'd had reckoning mode up.
 
I rarely use reckoning mode, so it's usually available when I need it. I did use it in that fight.
To clear out all the smaller enemies. Spamming you with attacks is a rather cheap way to make things more difficult.
 
Anyone find all the Lore stones in the Cradle of Summer yet? Don't read the spoilers unless you're also that far into the main storyline.

From what I've been told some of the lore stones are behind hidden doors. So you need at least 5 levels of the detect hidden skill or something like that.

Not sure if that applies to those ones though.

Regards,
SB
 
From what I've been told some of the lore stones are behind hidden doors. So you need at least 5 levels of the detect hidden skill or something like that.

Not sure if that applies to those ones though.

Regards,
SB

I don't think those required that, but I'm not sure. I've had 5 levels of detect hidden for quite a while now.


Side quests seem to vary greatly in quality. I had one about finding treasure, sounded promising enough. But most loot is randomised, so I got nothing good out of it. Another asked to go kill X amount of monster Y, which I immediately declined. Then I got one with a nice little story behind it, ending in a moral choice that really made me think before I decided what I wanted to do. It's a shame you have to go looking for the good stuff between all the filler.
 
Completed the Warsworn faction quest line.
What a ridiculous ending. Another choice between saviour or cartoon villain.
 
PLayed the PC demo today and I am mighty mighty hooked and impressed. It seems like the perfect balance of a action and an RPG game. it got me totally hooked even though I don't like the environments. I love the character art style, but don't dig the environments at all. And yet it hooked, which says a lot as my biggest pull towards playing a game is its environment/world.

I would like to get it for the ps3, though not PC. How does it perform on the ps3? Are there any huge differences?
 
About the Travellers faction quest ending.
Another terrible ending. The whole storyline seemed rather silly to begin with. The Travellers are about freedom, so do what the Hierophant says, no questions asked. :rolleyes:

Are there really no good looking armours in this game? I suppose that's one way to get around the mix matching problem if your going to look bad regardless.

I would like to get it for the ps3, though not PC. How does it perform on the ps3? Are there any huge differences?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-kingdoms-of-amalur-face-off
 
The sound is bad in this game, not to mention buggy. The sound delays, a characters lips are moving before they start talking. If a character starts talking in one place, and then walks away, the sound will still come from the direction of his original position. And like everything the music is really generic.

All the characters in the world are also made with the same, very limited, character creator you used to make your own character with. You constantly run into people that look alike, or look the same as your own character. The only characters with unique models seem to be Agarth and Alyn Shir. Which makes them stand out like a flare, like they don't even belong to the world they are in.

Those are probably 2 of the reasons why I can never get immersed in this world.

I'm 70 hours in right now, I just made it to Klurikon. The difficulty has been a bit better, but that mostly because I severely limited my use of Sagecrafting and Blacksmithing. I have one accessory that gives me 1,5 health regen per second. Not enough to out health any damage I take during battle, but enough to fill my health bar back up between battles. And using mostly purple weapons and gold armour sets. Even though I like using Sagecrafting and Blacksmithing to further customize my character.
 
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