Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning

I was thinking the other day that playing Borderlands 2 was getting a bit repetitive. It's a great game and the DLC has been really strong, but I hit the level cap over a month ago and I've got more weapons than I know what to do with. RPGs lose a bit of their appeal when you can't get any stronger, so I started looking for something else to sate my RPG hunger.

Then I saw this. Yes, it's not a new release now - it came out at the start of the year - and it's developers have now gone bust, so any sequel is unlikely ever to see the light of day, but one thing it does have in its favour is value. Twelve quid for seventy plus hours? Yeah, that'll do. Anyway, I'm a fair way in now, around twenty hours, and while I'm enjoying it it's not quite the sum of it's parts. Graphically it is fine, everything's smooth, there's a lot of detail but some of the character models leave a bit to be desired. They're fairly generic and the lip synching is sometimes off, which sounds fairly minor but does ruin any sense of immersion.

I don't doubt the seventy hour claim either - there's loads to do, it's difficult to walk twenty feet without finding another side quest that needs to be beaten. In fact, there are probably too many. Most of them are fetch quests, which involve the usual RPG trait of walking somewhere (mercifully quite nearby) collecting an item and returning it. They're easy EXP, but boring. They'd be more interesting were they fewer in number and more varied. That's not to say all of them fall under that banner; there are six faction questlines (think Elder Scrolls Thieves' Guild / Mages Guild / Dark Brotherhood) and while not as complete as their TES equivalents, they feature some fairly unique characters, locations and tasks. The main storyline is so far a little lacklustre. There's a huge lore which you are thrown amongst and it's hard to know or care much about the various factions, and the narrative never has the urgency to really drive you on. Yes, that's partly because the game world is huge - and it is absolutely frickin' massive - but perhaps a little less would be a little more...?

The game's real strength is it's combat. When you level up, you get one skill point (for things like Persuasion, lockpicking, blacksmithing etc) and three ability points which are your basic RPG attribute / ability points. These can be spread over three disclipnes; Might, Finesse and Sorcery -Yes, that's warrior / rogue / mage in effect - and each has three or four skill trees, starting off with basic weapons specialties (swords for warriors / daggers for rogues etc) and moving on to bigger things (summoning storms as a sorceror). Depending on where you put the skill points you can unlock "destinies" which are a bit like Final Fantasy jobs, offering sepcial bonuses dependant on your build. I've gone pure mage and I've evolved from initiate mage, through three more sub-classes to Sage, where I get bonuses to magic point regen, reduced magic costs and my dodge is replaced with a short range evasive teleport that leaves ice in my wake that can freeze any foe in the immediate vicinity, which is pretty cool.

So, yeah, the combat is where it's at. Thing is, Dragon's Dogma also did that extremely well, and had a similar class system. Yes, DD had a smaller game world and fewer quests, but it felt more focussed as a result. Oh, and Reckoning also suffers from a lack of difficulty. I'm playing on hard, and I've died only a handful of times, usually when a boss gets close enough to my squishy mage to one-shot him. On normal or easy it'd be downright insulting.

If it sounds like a terrible game, then it isn't. It's a very competent RPG with strong combat. It's just that everything it does well has been done better elsewhere, amd the rest of it never seems to gel.

how's the enemy variety?

I downloaded this when it first came out, I thought it felt like it had been developed as a MMO and changed to a single player game at the last minute. Way too many fetch quests, the map was done in zones (snow zone, fire zone etc) that didn't flow into each other at all and just the general feel of the game really turned me off.

I played the demo when it came out, and it was certainly fine; but it was either this or Skyrim and so Skyrim won out for me.

Quote :

how's the enemy variety?

Reasonable.

Each area seems to have a preffered selection of enemies, from bears, wolves and the obligatory giant rats early on, through to monstrous trolls and goblins and a fair bit in between. They have elemental weaknesses to, which being a mage makes easy to exploit. They behave differently to; some will run away as soon as they see you, others are incredibly aggressive. The variety is what keeps combat interesting.

Quote :

I downloaded this when it first came out, I thought it felt like it had been developed as a MMO and changed to a single player game at the last minute. Way too many fetch quests, the map was done in zones (snow zone, fire zone etc) that didn't flow into each other at all and just the general feel of the game really turned me off.

As I understans it, that's exactly what happened; it was going to be an MMO, and was changed about halfway through, hence the lack of direction in the narrative and inane side-quests.

Skip wrote:

I played the demo when it came out, and it was certainly fine; but it was either this or Skyrim and so Skyrim won out for me.

This has better combat than Skyrim, but Skyrim has more variety, a better story, a better game world... Oh, and werewolves. Anything with werewolves = instant win.

Actually, Reckoning reminds of Fable in several ways. The stylised, almost cartoony, art design, the way magic, sword etc are handled, the rather awkward inventory and menu systems... Fable 2 and 3 were both fantastic games but were also criminally short, kind of like they burned the wick at both ends, Reckoning is half lit on one side. It lasts longer but doesn't shine anything like as bright. Again, it's not a bad game, and I'm enjoying playing it, but it could have been even better.

I'm around the forty hour mark now (yes, it's a really big game) and was starting to tire of it. I'm playing as all-out mage, meaning that I had access to top tier spells around level 25 (out of forty) and could one shot most enemies, even bosses, on hard difficulty. This is fun for a while, but gets boring especially on a game so reliant on it's combat mechanics to keep you interested.

I'm just accessed the second main continent following the first really good narrative set piece in thirty odd hours (a scrap against a colossal slug/crab monster that dwarfed the castle I was standing on. I still won, of course!) and suddenly the difficulty has jumped. Even my top tier spells are only inflicting reasonable damage on the vanilla enemies, and once again I find myself being killed quite easily if I try taking on three or four foes at once. The drops have increaed in quality as well. At around the twenty hour mark I used the blacksmithing/sagecrafting skills to build myself a few pieces of armour with stats miles ahead of the in-shop gear at that point, and I've still seen nothing to surpass it... now though, I'm seeing a few pieces of much higher quality, even if there's not enough yet to make a full weapon out of, I know there's potential here for far stronger gear at last. As a result of all that, the game is suddenly interesting again. Hurrah!

So which weapon style have you been using? I think chakrams looked the most fun of the 3, though beating people down with a wizard's staff is always badass.

Also you no longer get to be the grammar nazi here.

Quote :

a game so reliant on it's combat mechanics

I've started with staves but now use chakrams because they can stun lock even larger mobs and have great range. Also I'm still the grammar whore: blame my phone auto correcting my text entry for thatone !

don't cross into too many areas or you will level cap enemies and basically make the game boring as fuck.

I restarted this to focus on magic rather than swords and crap. Swords got boring.

I probably should finish this at some point.  I got bored just after reaching the last area of land, because it got so repetitive.  Chakrams are still the best weapon by far.

Don't have any chakrams yet. I'm just rushing through the early quests to get back to where I was.

You know, it's really cool that the game creates an untouchable save file just after the tutorial, so you can restart from there whenever you want with the same character and do different builds.

This should be a cakewalk now that I have a spell to heal myself. The cool down on it is pretty short and my mana regenerates stupidly fast for how low-level I am.

I quite like this game now that I'm getting into it. I do wish each weapon had more moves though. I've already unlocked all the moves for the magic weapons.

It's not a bad game, it was just a little over-long and just hasn't got enough ideas to keep you entertained for its entirety.

Finished the Scholia Arcana faction missions. The full Dark Empyrean armour set along with the archsage ring and that last Twist of Fate I got add a total of 4 points to all my sorcery abilities, which is bullshit levels of overpowered at the moment. Abilities that max out at level 5 are pushed to level 9. The AoE lightning spell kills just about everything in one hit (minus stuff with lightning resistance) and only uses about 8% mana. It has no cool down either.

Finished the House of Ballads missions and decided to let the Maid live. The Fae really bug me with all their Telling nonsense so I mess it up whenever I get the chance. But I hit a glitch that means I'm stuck with the House of Ballads armour set in my inventory forever with no way to remove it.

Alchemy seems like an utterly pointless skill to invest in. I never need to buy potions, let alone make my own. I find far more than I need just looting enemies. Health and mana potions are pretty much pointless for me now because my spells only use about 5% of my mana and that regenerates before I need to use them again. The only spell that uses a lot of mana is the healing spell, which I never use now because I can summon a minion to fight with me that has a 75% chance of leeching health for me every time it hits something.

If I'm ever in any slightly real trouble Reckoning mode is pretty much a win button.

Actually, with the Dark Empyrean armour set over-leveling my abilities, the minion has a 100% chance to leech health with every hit. It takes bugger all mana to summon him and since my dodge roll has become an ice-teleport and I can just teleport through people to slow them down with ice so the minion can hit them, giving me health I don't particularly need all the time.

Or I can just summon a giant flaming meteor from the sky that kills just about everything. That costs a whopping 65 mana (of my 752 mana).

Something tells me I shouldn't be this powerful, but maybe the game is supposed to be really really easy. I'm sitting on 3.5 million gold that I don't need either. Buying armour and weapons has become pointless because no where I've been so far sells anything better than what I have at the moment.

The enemies do get tougher once you beat the huge siege monster and cross to the final continent, but by then I was getting bored anyway.

I should be nearly at the point. The next thing I have to do for the story is sail to the next area. I'm just finishing the last few side quests in the desert area.

Finished the Warsworn faction missions and got a +1 to my Might abilities, which is useless because I don't have any Might abilities. I'm guessing the Traveler missions are going to reward me with +1 to Finesse, which again is useless to me. I wish this had been made clearer about 30 hours ago so I could have just ignored all the factions except the magic one.

First time around I tried to pick the evil ending of this quest, but it glitched or something. It was telling me to go to a certain place but in reality I had to go somewhere completely different, and when I got there nothing happened. So I reloaded and took the nice option.

Don't think I'll ever finish this game. After spending about 80 hours on my mage character, fateweaving a bunch of times to learn all the ins and outs, I got bored of the mage weapons. Rather than fateweave to change my character again I started fresh and I'm playing two different characters. One pure Might type and one pure Finesse. Focusing on crafting with the Might character because they can get the most out of it. You need blacksmithing and sagecraft skill to make the best stuff. Finesse is better focused on other things and the mage doesn't benefit much from crafting because the mage weapons use some unique components and you can't combine them with weapon gems.

Investing in lock-picking is a waste because you can just buy lots of lockpicks. All the skill does is make your picks more durable. Sure it guarantees you can force locks at a high enough level but forcing always wastes one pick so you might as well try it manually.

Still can't see the point of learning Alchemy unless you just want to make tons of EXP boosting potions to over-power yourself, but the game's easy enough as it is.

Just beat the main quest and that Gradius final boss...game was fun, more to say later...