Eight Long Weeks of Roling - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

So after a couple weeks of playing shooters, more shooters, even more shooters and a few random games mixed in between more manshooting than I've ever done before, I feel like it's time to return to my roots - Or rather what eight years of World of Warcraft (or maybe just what felt like eight years of WoW) have left me as the only type of game I'm any good at besides Magic the Gathering.

Kingdoms of Amalur has one of those weird stories - Well, I mean development stories, though it's got a pretty weird in game story too - Where it bankrupted its studio but was also a mmorpger that didn't end up as one. It's also a game that is much easier to obtain outside Steam, so I'm actually playing the Origin version of the game instead. After sort of realizing you can either not use Origin and uPlay, or play their games cheaper, I just sort of gave up on avoiding it. I don't know anything about how poorly the studio did - I know a bunch of people lost their jobs and apparently Rhode Island suffered to make this game, which sucks to hear, but the software industry is a very odd one to break into. I always feel like a studio, even one with lots of venture capital lined up, should try to break into the market with a series of games to get their name and brand out there.

But what would I know, about anything...

To talk about Origin briefly, the client looks fine, but isn't anything special and the overlay feels rather primitive while a bit more visually pleasing. I prefer the orange gradients of Origin to Steam's grey to grey downer, but once you get away from the slickness it's just a fair bit jankier and it feels like it is missing features, or links to elements that Steam provides. Though I do like that it specifies which DLC are installed in a group as opposed to Steam's iffy implementation. I don't have any friends on Origin though, since I use their client rarely, so maybe it has really nice voice chat and I just don't know. Origin itself doesn't take screenshots - A steam feature I adore - but KoA itself does just by hitting printscreen, which is pretty nice. It took me a little bit to figure out where the "time played" display is, but it's there.

Weirdly enough, KoA itself gets excited about achievements, but of games on my account (about ten or so) only Dead Space 3 has any reference to achievements. I guess Steam does this from time to time as well, but it seems a little weird that an EA published game put out recently wouldn't integrate achievements into the client. I looked it up, and apparently Steam does? What?




Opening impressions: This game's introduction is bizarre. You're a corpse, then you're not a corpse, then everything is blowing up. Oh no, dying gnomes! This is terrible, you're standing on the shoulders of giants little people! Then you're ... Out in some fairy tale forest fighting wolves? Wait, what just happened - Weren't there uh, whatever these guys that left Morrowind and got lost? And I was fighting them? Where did they go? Oh fine, time to collect wolf butts... This game totally has that really strange feeling MMORPGs have, or at least WoW, where the game has no concept of tone or narrative or arc or anything. You're the fateless one. The fated fateless ... Oh, but now I need to go rough up some bandits? Well that's fine.

Well better than Morrowind anyway. Step off the boat, child of prophecy, and get ranched by a mudcrab. Speaking of Morrowind, as much as this game is trying to feel like WoW clone - And it is trying very, very hard - It actually feels like it has some stronger references to more traditional fantasy and Morrowind. Much like Morrowind, you get the feeling there was a ton of lore written and dreamed up for this game, an aspect I never really got out of WoW. Oh sure, World or Warcraft has a stunning history you can sum up in nine or ten paragraphs, but Metzen has no ability to really flesh out people, places or relationships in anything above a juvenile level.

On the other hand, unlike Morrowind which remains one of my all time favorite RPGs, KoA is a bit too overt with its lore. People talk and talk, but there's too many nouns and too much history being thrown at you constantly. There's stones that sing when you click them, people with their life stories and endless parades of just rather mundane stuff. Stories in games go on a spectrum and KoA feels like it goes way too far in the other direction. It's not even a question of writing quality, the game very rapidly ramps you into its world and gives you very little time to appreciate the little details. I mean, look back at Morrowind - Yes, it does immediately say you're "the fated one" or something from the Elder Scrolls, but it does not explain what that means or even treat it seriously. This one, hoboy, kinda reminds me of the start of Erfworld, except Erfworld is somewhere between parody and satire...

Moving along to better topics, if this game had a huge budget - And I think it did - the engine both shows and doesn't show. The art assets and engine in this game are evocative, pleasing and while they do show their influences the quality of the work is mostly quite high. Although it does feel derivative to modern gaming, it also has an odd little fairy tale touch to it that feels surprisingly creative in our tolkien jam on warcraft bread sandwich fantasy genre. The engine does falter in some points; animations break and some stuff just looks rather off. The fateshifting kills don't look quite right, and more than once a stealth kill resulted in broken animations with mangled, flickering models.

Still, other than models bugging out here or there it's a really robust and interesting looking game world. There's not overly much under the surface, but it's a neat world to just run around in and take in the sights, which I think is a measure of success in a RPG of any kind. I look forward to going to new areas to see what they've brewed up.

Combat in the game is somewhere between chore and not great. It's reminiscent of playing Dark Souls, but it's much easier on normal and at the same time far less forgiving. Yes, I understand how strange that sounds. I rolled a finesse/caster character in the hopes that the combination would open up a larger body of options, so I spend a fair amount of time dodging enemy attacks. Dodging leads right into the same issues that I had while playing Sacred Citadel, only even worse.

Dodging has to be done at absolute precise points - too early, and the enemy instantly snaps to your position, no matter how far you traveled in their arc and belts you before you can dodge again. Simply put they telegraph 'an attack' and if it's coming, it's hitting you. Too late and often attacks hit far earlier than you'd expect. Enemies do not truly stun lock you, but attacks do negate your control over your character, meaning a string of attacks results in long periods of doing nothing. It's actually a bit hilarious when you think of what you're coming to this from genrewise. Certainly World of Warcraft's mmorpg push button combat didn't attempt to be "high energy", but here you can see why. What was supposed to be fast paced and graceful is actually extremely clunky, as enemies connect with a single hit, resulting in a good 4-6 seconds of doing nothing. Dodging in a selected direction instead results in randomly zipping wherever, often splattering your face into an enemy attack. Honestly, playing a single player dagger rogue in TBC was much more enjoyable to me, whereas this is just mildly annoying and not well designed. It's not really all that punishing a game, so taking those hits doesn't give you a feeling of being in peril, but rather just waiting for the game to allow you to play again.

Many enemies have attacks you need to chain dodge or that they'll spam as you dodge, meaning it's often less time and effort to simply take the hit to the face and move on rather than constantly dodge around.

On the note of playing a rogue in WoW, while I was never a huge fan of stealth in just about any game, I think stealth here may very well be at its worst. I'm not entirely certain how many abilities I'm supposed to split my skills over, so maybe my stealth is just monstrously underleveled but it's simply terrible. You move at an absolute crawl, get knocked out of stealth instantly, usually can't stealth kill an unwary enemy if there's an alerted foe nearby even if you... Basically, it isn't rewarding and doesn't work. On top of all that, many enemies can't be special attacked out of stealth, but you never really know if stealth broke, didn't work or if stealth just doesn't work there. It's bad. It should feel bad. Eventually I just respecced out of stealth. Hurray!

The talent trees as well are very primitive and not well thought out. My character initially specialized in daggers and bows. It's nice that the game fluidly allows you to switch between different attacks and weapon types, which the game does very well when you're not being stunlocked by whirling kobold combos. Unfortunately, the talent trees are tiered and you must spend an increasingly large number of points in order to advance. The trees do not have enough points that you can spend these on useful skills, because you're limited to four skills on the main radial and the two trees I'm working on are both 50% weapon mastery. I guess I should switch up and use another ranged weapon, one that doesn't use the same tree as my main weapon? Doesn't that seems like kinda bad design? I can't imagine how the "spec in all trees" spec would work.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the character is doing so many things - gathering herbs, using magic, using daggers, shooting a bow, throwing things, dodging and weaving, so on - that the talent trees should have a veritable smorgasbord of  options. Instead they're half weapon specializations, half skills that go on the radial or buff the skills on the radial. I mean let's consider some common options they could have added - increased stealth speed or run speed in general, longer dodge range, faster cast time, resistance talents (though there are a few) or procs on hit instead of buffs that you have to cast that use up mana... I feel bad for deriding the Path of Exile talent tree, since this is just so much worse. This is worse than the 2005 WoW talent trees, and those were horribad. You will at points in this game level, spend talent points entirely to open up new tiers, fail to do so because the gaps are so huge and then realize you have spent talent points to no gain whatsoever.

I don't want to talk too long about weapon specialization, but I consider it largely one of the worst mechanics in gaming to introduce early on in RPGs or MMORPGs. Yes the idea of the elite "swordsmaster" who had dedicated his life to the blade is an evocative one, but specialization at level 2 just punishes experimentation and narrows down your weapon selections. It's something for the end game, never the early game. Again, the box here is you want people to be constantly replacing their gear or at least thinking about it. With weapon specialization, you get a better sword and you can't use it. Doesn't work. Oh sure, you can respec, but then you're piling a chore on top of the player experience.

The loot system, even beyond issues with weapon specialization adding a giant chore onto weapon re-gearing (why do I have to unspec ALL of my specs? Why not just say, an option to break it down so it's less of a chore?) just feels immensely too random for a single player game. You can play for long stretches of time without replacing any of your gear at all, but you will still sort through giant piles of garbage that you have no use for. It's poorly thought out and reminds me of playing Diablo - But Diablo is a multiplayer game and even in Diablo or its derivatives I don't think you'd go 4-5 hours of play time without replacing either of your weapons or half your armor. The whole "it drops loads of garbage" thing is more hassle than anything. The inventory system is generous with space, and the ability to add junk to a junk category to be batch sold it something that all RPGs of any type should have, but you still spend a ton of time flipping through menus to clean your bags out.

As for questing, which is a mainstay of RPGs for better or worse, Kingdoms of Amalur might better be described as "Amusement park that is Amalur". The best way I can describe the mmorpg “amusement park” feeling is to divide it between two major elements of this, and what I imagine many real MMORPGs feel like though I've only played one and bits of a couple other. First, mmorpgs have a certain poverty of story in which much of the game's content feels at best loosely and at worst absolutely divorced from the overarching narrative of the game. You may not think this is a big deal, and maybe it isn't, but games generally do stick to this rule. Everything you do in most games does feel like it's getting you forward in your goal of beating the game. I don't mean in the sense of leveling, which I guess is sort of a meaningful element. Admittedly, RPGs have always had side quests, but these are often used to flesh out the world in a story driven way. The best side quests as well offer an opportunity for the writers to bring out elements of your character, their past or how they relate to the world, or just the world in general. MMORPGs on the other hand tend to have this feeling of entering a circus tent each time you get to a zone. Everything under the tent mostly relates to what is in the tent, which may relate to the larger world but not really in a localized sense. Which is to say – the circus moves elsewhere and it still relates to the world, but it lacks a certain connection to where you are. You never really get into the world, you don't sit down and eat, you don't discuss local news in a meaningful way and there's nothing really changing a way that grounds the experience.

This has a lot to do with leveling and travel time, both of which put restrictions on the designers. You need to keep everything in a “level 33-37” sandbox, because the player going to a level 38 zone when he's level 33 will be uncomfortable. There's solutions to this, but without getting into them, that feeling of progression – Of being denied the level 38 zone because you're level 33, then overcoming the block and getting past it – Is part of what makes MMORPGs so addictive. That feeling of opening up "a new area" is just huge.

The amusement park idea is one I've seen brought up elsewhere, and it does tie into the circus idea in much the same way. Essentially you travel from ride to ride, completing quests, but I think there's more to it than that. You never really feel like you can or can't do a quest in a MMORPG – it is essentially a ride, after all, that you pay your tickets to enter and get on with. Quest givers rarely have their quests buried in a dialogue tree or beyond some checkpoint you need to cross to obtain and far more rare is actually being unable to go back to a quest. They just look you over and then send you out to do something which is invariably both extremely important and extremely dull. Their life's work, a monster threatening to blow up the planet, a gang of hoodlums who have pilfered nuclear weapons or whatever, that's basically how it reads. The dissonance between the two coupled with the fact few quests really feel like you're doing anything all that important leads to that certain flavor of MMORPG.

Does KoA have this? Absolutely. The game feels so mmorpg-like with a vaguely more action oriented combat system it's hard to really describe the game as anything beyond “mildly amusing”. That's generally what a MMORPG is, you see – mildly amusing. It's something to pass the time, but it's rarely anywhere near as awesome as playing other genres of game. On the other hand, KoA is very problematic about defining when and where you should be in certain zones, and there's no feeling of opening anything up since there's no big difficulty spikes. I have died in KoA, but it's rarely in the way you die in other MMORPGs because the combat is less "by the numbers" and more spiky, stunlocking shite.

The other big problem with the game is there's ... I don't know, either too much Tell not enough Show, or it just shows so much of the back story in massive chunks that no sense of mystery is ever built up. There's a bunch of different races and different politics, but between the overabundance of nouns and unrelenting misnamed elements you just end up blinking your eyes at much of. They're also not all that discrete - I know one of the human tribes is "the Varani" but I couldn't tell you where the tribe is from, where they inhabit in "the Faelands" or which one they are visually. The other different groups, which may or may not be human, are all given weird names and aren't introduced in a way that you can divide them up mentally.

The writing is cute and funny in parts, mind you. There's a couple little jokes I smiled or laughed at, and the gnomish dialogue especially is really solid. The gnomes are not really written for comedy and have the most serious angle to them compared to the other, blithering idiots, mind you. For example there's a quest in the north where you meet an absolutely bizarre hippie - uh, I still can't tell the races apart - who is desperate for some "Sativa fibers" then blisses out and forgets she gave you the quest.  One Elf or whatever he is goes "I would raise a cup to your honor but ah, well, raising too many cups is part of what got me into this mess". I like the 'unrelated' quest text. The main quest is just so confusingly unrelated to the rest of the game, but the sidequests are often cute or silly enough I enjoy doing them.

And, for our last big set of complaints, my character's skills were Alchemy, Detect Hidden, Lockpicking and Stealth. As I said earlier, stealth is garbage so I got rid of it, and replaced it with Sagecraft. Detect Hidden is good; it's essentially your "finding traps" ability, but it has other stuff to go with it, including getting bonus gold from enemies,  Sagecraft is gemcutting or whichever whatever you want to call it, it's been in several Blizzard games and elsewhere. Sagecraft should have been rolled into Dispelling and Mercantile into Speechcraft, but whatever. It's largely fine - It feels a little busted that crafted gems sell for a ton of gold, but gold is so background it didn't matter. Lockpicking is fine - it is hard not to break picks in the lock picking minigame, but lockpicking has never been done well in any game I can think of anyway. The skill system is fine. It's a major hassle to find and use trainers, and it's really dumb that spec out of the skill system when you re-spec talent trees, but oh well.

But Alchemy, hoboy, what a damn stinker. The best alchemy system to my recollection is the Witcher's - You are limited in which potions you can stack, and potion reagents overlap in an interesting if somewhat complex manner. There was always a balance between which potions, so forth, so on, but once you equipped a potion it would take ages for it to wear off. This is a good system. Why? Because it rewards consideration but balances it against cutting out busy work. You measure out which potions you use and then they'e set.

Alchemy here is mostly fine - You can't batch manufacture potions, but you can slam the button, so that's fine. There are way too many potions and too many ingredients, but you can imagine it was supposed to be more of  mmorpg thing, so that's ok as well. What isn't fine - what destroys the entire system and brings it down so hard, is that potions last something like 30 seconds. If that. You get maybe one fight, if you're lucky - You can quaff potions in some fights and they actually run out during the fight as you're stunlocked repeatedly by wolves jumping on you. Yes, you can re-use them, but basically the skill is balanced around spending 30 seconds at the start of each fight rebuffing. There's just no reason for this and it really highlights how much crap the game puts in your way. You sort through your potions before you fight, you sort through your abilities while you try to keep from getting stunlocked, you sort through your multiple screens of bags after you fight and then you sort through the towns to try to find people to repair (most vendors can not), places to make your potions and places to socket your gems.

Oh, and a final straw - the top level alchemy potions require "Essence of Fate"; a rare drop which only occurs in the fateshift mode. Four Essence of Fate make a Fate Potion, which fully recharges the bar, meaning you never use those recipes. They're all useless - They don't last long enough and a full fate bar unleashed is x2 speed and x4 damage. It's just perfectly encapsulates how poorly thought out the system is.

Anyway, regardless of how much I played Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, I don't think I was especially near the ending. The game is, on the most part, pretty mediocre but I was really enjoying each zone. You don't get new enemies per zone - mostly
the same idiots zone after zone - but you do get to see some gorgeous landscapes with oodles of variety. The art team really knocked it out of the park, and although the game feels like it has "WoW zone analogues" they're still really fantastic looking. The voice acting and side quest dialogue is all pretty fun too. I found the main quest tedious and archetypical to the point of just chain skipping dialogue, but I found much of the dialogue away from that to be pretty good.

I stopped, however, because either the game's loot system is repulsively terrible - Ok, it is, but I mean to the point of actually repulsing me from playing the game - or it is has terrible scaling issue. After finishing "the Battle of Mel Shinshir" or whatever the name was, I spent my coin on upgrading my gear and switching specs. The result of this was threehold. First, I seemed to get ahead of enemy damage, with most enemies no longer threatening me. So I'd bonk them, they'd bonk me, eventually they'd die. Second, in spite of changing to better weapons and leveling my damage did not improve past that point and after an hour in this zone, fights were taking 2-4 minutes each. It's partially an issue of dps, partially an issue of enemy stuns, partially an issue of having to keep moving around constantly ... Third, I could no longer afford my repair bills. My gold supply steadily drained away until I returned to town with an entire pack full of loot and found selling everything extra I had couldn't cover the repair bill. I considered respeccing again to boost my mercantile/blacksithing then realized, honestly, I just don't want to play the game anymore. That isn't going to fix the issues with combat taking forever. Combat against enemies who block or enemies with whirling stunlock combos just goes on and on, and isn't charming or cute.

It isn't hard to see why Kingdoms of Amular: Reckoning didn't do very well. It isn't a very good game. The environmental art, as I said earlier, is really good and the screenshots don't do it justice. On the other hand, the combat and underlying systems just aren't well thought out. You spend too much of combat without agency and many of the skills are just awful. One of my later talent points unlocked a whirling attack that "follows" a dodge. Do you know what dodging tends to do in this game? Move you away from the enemy. So you'd think you were going to hit the enemy and then, oh, I'm twirling in the air like a ballerina. Then, because enemies snap to and perfectly swing into you, they hit you as you come out of the twirl.

I really can not emphasize how terrible the talent trees are. I'm struggling to think of a worse talent tree system in any game I've ever played. I've seen better trees in free flash games.

In conclusion, I think this game is very much a pass. For everything it gets right, it gets a great deal wrong and the longer you played with the mediocre systems the less willing you are to give them a pass. The loot system and talent trees, especially, are just terrible. If you wanna play a game like this, honestly just pick up Darksiders 2. It has vastly superior combat, a properly thought out loot system for single player, better talent trees and just as much variety to the game world. And if you've played Darksiders 2, do you need more of that game? Because as much as KoA:R wants to be a WoW clone, it's actually more like a mediocre Darksiders clone without puzzles.