Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning thread - Page 10

On February 09 2012 06:35 True_Spike wrote:


TB is absolutely right - IGN keeps giving mediocre games great marks, as long as they are a work of a huge developer. They are either corrupt or have no idea what makes a game good. It's not even about the high marks themselves, but how they are justified in the reviews. Look at DA2 review for god's sake - and there are many, many more examples.

On February 09 2012 05:53 crms wrote:



Thanks for putting to rest the ridiculous rumours that 'KoA QA testers are speed running the game and it's taking 200 hours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'. I can't believe anyone believed that.

On February 09 2012 07:17 Skilledblob wrote:


you might wanna reread the conversation in which the 200 hours number was stated. The developer clearly said that this big number comes together when you try to do every quest. I maybe you have problems understanding what every quest means but it does not mean rushing through the main storyline

On February 09 2012 06:30 IntoTheWow wrote:


Who cares, everyone knows IGN is biased/corrupt/whatever you want to call it.

On February 09 2012 04:14 Telcontar wrote:

I know man. I finally finished Demon Soulds last month. I had to call professional cleaners to wipe off all the blood, sweat and tears. I guess I should move on to Dark Souls, but I'm a little daunted.

Oh and I hope I don't have to wait until The Witcher 3 for the next good RPG on the PC. I guess I'll have to get by with modded Skyrim and the enhanced edition of The Witcher 2. I don't have much hope for ME3. I expect it to be closer to Uncharted with dialogue options rather than what ME1 was.

On February 09 2012 07:42 crms wrote:


I never read the source article because I don't think this game is particularly good. I only the ridiculous regurgitating of forum posters.

On February 09 2012 09:14 Tula wrote:
As far as i can see from the 2 hours i watched Totalbiscuit i wonder if he always plays games like this. It seems he absolutly refuses to become immersed in it, almost as if that was a conscious decision.

E.g. The boxes thing, honestly yes it is a bit silly that the NPCs ignore it when you destroy boxes in their houses, but honestly I'd ignore that aspect pretty fast.
I have no idea how catching the story will be, but so far (as in the Demo) it seemed like a pretty good game to me. Definitly better than Skyrim (which i played for nearly 60 hours) and that got 8.something on metacritics.

Btw: I don't know anyone who even considers IGN reviews usefull. They simply give notes depending on how much the developers spent on the game (at least that is what it looks like to me). The text of the review is sometimes insightfull and usefull, but the rating on the bottom is absolutly useless.

On February 09 2012 09:02 Jibba wrote:
I think TB was a bit sensational in the opposite direction in his review, mostly because he got caught up on minor things and refused to advance the story. The IGN review is ludicrous as well, but it's IGN and no one should take them seriously.

If it's actually a 5, then there's essentially no games that would be a 10, including Morrowind and DA1. It's more like a 7-8, which is exactly what it's getting on Metacritic right now.

Most of the gripes have already been covered, but just an additional one should be the price tag. Luckily I got it for $50 on Amazon (Origin version :|) but I think $60 is a bit steep for a first time developer, and while a lot of it seems great, it's not as polished as a normal AAA title would be. The armor, weapons and effects look cool but a lot of the NPC models are mediocre at best, and there's a lot of pop ups. The animations are pretty exceptional, though. And to be honest, I doubt most of us even paid $60 for Skyrim/Arkham City/DX3. Usually there's a pre-sale or something for like $40.

TB is a bit harsh on the lore/story, but I think he's largely right that all the characters are lacking some personality and they don't invoke reactions the way some other games have. It's just too bland and generic at times, which is surprising given the depths at which Salvatore spoke about their situations last night. This, along with the inventory, is probably what needs the most work.

As for the difficulty, I think it's a balancing issue with stuns and magic. Magic comes with a ton of mini-disables and huge AoE damage, which basically negates most of the enemies you'll face. At least with slow 2 handers, it takes some work and blocking precision to get to your AoE knockdown. And chakrams are just ridiculous. If you play as finesse though, you have to work a lot more to keep yourself alive. Your disables like smoke are fairly short and until your poison damage gets going, you're not going to kill people that quickly. Instead, you have to spend more time dodging attacks and projectiles ala Batman:AA/AC, which makes it a lot more fun.

On February 09 2012 09:48 Jibba wrote:
I don't know if anyone has been having issues, but from my perspective they do deserve a lot of credit on the coding. I'm not sure if it's utilizing my SLI or not but I have had literally zero technical issues thus far, which is sadly a rare occurrence these days, even among AAA titles. The controller/mouse/keyboard switching works flawlessly and I have no problems alt tabbing back and forth between the game. On top of that, it's taking up just shy of 500mb of memory which, again, is superb for a modern game.

On the technical side, the game runs better than any of the games I've played from Ubisoft, Eidos, id, Blizzard, Valve, Rocksteady, Bethesda and Rockstar this past year.

Of course this is a console port, but it doesn't have any of the problems that normally plagues them, besides some texture popping.