Why wasn't Kingdom of Amalur as praised as Skyrim or Dragon Age?

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I'm playing Kingdom of Amalur (KoA) now because it was made free to PlayStation+ members, and the game is just amazing. I really don't get why KoA wasn't loved as much or more than Skyrim, Dragon's Age, or even Demon's/Dark Souls. I understand Dragon Age being better in characters and story, even though I haven't played it but Bioware are the better writers. KoA though is probably just about the same with story and characters as Skyrim, one probably only has a slight edge over each other. I do like the premise of the story in KoA even though it's nothing too special; you come back from the dead and you can change fate.

KoA just has by far the best combat of probably any action RPG ever. It's the first game I ever played that I feel like an actual rogue. Skyrim can't even touch KoA. Even though I haven't played Dragon's Age, I've seen it played for a few hours by a friend and it definitely is going for a different type of experience so it's not really that comparable (Dragon's Age 2 is all action-y but people don't like that game for many other reasons). The combat is also way better than Demon's/Dark Souls, which was really disappointing for me as the game never made you do anything other than block and attack, the combat system was so simplistic and didn't have much depth at all. Not that KoA brimming with depth but you get quite a few new moves and abilities to really spice up the combat. You spend so much time fighting enemies in RPGs that if you don't do that well, the game just isn't fun, which is why I don't play many RPGs (WRPG or JRPG) because the combat usually sucks, JRPGs are mainly stuck in crappy turn-based combat while WRPGs have boring real-time action. If you are going to make me spend so much time in a game doing something, you better make that damn good. It's also why I don't play a game like GTA because the shooting is very lacking and you spend so much time shooting.

Another complaint I've seen for KoA that it's too easy. Normal difficulty is probably too easy but Hard is just about right. I've probably died more in KoA than I did in all my time in Dark Souls. I really don't understand why Dark Souls is considered to be a hard game because it's so easy, all you do is pull one enemy at a time to you and fight 1v1, a lot of the hard enemies can cheesed with the bow and arrow. Boss fights are joke easy in Dark Souls, I beat most of them in my first try. Back to combat for a second, KoA allows to competently fight multiple enemies at once whereas Dark Souls doesn't because you have to lock-on to fight enemies.

I've read that people have said KoA is generic fantasy. I don't understand this, pretty much every fantasy RPG is generic as shit. At this point, the only fantasy worlds using elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc. that have a pass on not being generic is LotR and DnD. I'm so sick of fantasy RPGs using the same fucking races over and over again; it's fantasy, you can literally come up with anything but yet every fantasy RPG uses the same races and enemies over and over again. At least KoA's world is nice to look at and actually a world I wouldn't mind living in. How KoA's art style so generic? There's more games using a more realistic fantasy art style like Dragon's Age, Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma, The Witcher, etc. compared to a more vibrant and colorful style like KoA, I can only recall World of Warcraft (which is over 10 years old I think) and Fable. KoA is less generic (and much more beautiful) than most fantasy RPGs.

Lastly, I saw a thread awhile back where someone was saying KoA wasn't that good because it felt like a single player MMO. I just don't get it. Just the game's mythology started out to be used in an MMO, not the game itself. Halo started out as a real-time strategy game, then a 3rd-person action game, and then a FPS. It doesn't matter how the game came to be but the final product. KoA feels no more MMO-ish than other open world RPGs, and I don't think any MMO plays like KoA either.

 

[hazabaza1]

...'Cos it's bad?
It felt like if Fable touched up on the combat but decided to remove any sense of charm of parody in the process. The camera defaulted to tilt downwards so no matter how pretty the game actually is you spend 75% of the time staring at the shitty floor textures.

Not to mention that it was easy as balls. On hard mode smithing is hardly needed, and potions dropped with such frequency that every battle devolved into "spam chakram attack, dodge to get range, spam chakram attack". Barely any of the attacks had a good feeling of impact or were even that useful since they either did so little damage or had so much wind up time the spam of 50 minor enemies would stunlock you to death for attempting to break away from the same repetitive dull grind.

Maybe the story and characters and dialogue make up for all this but after playing the demo and listening to the uninterested voice actors jabber on and on and on about "guuu destiny" and "huuur fateweaver" I decided I'd nip that one in the bud.

All my opinion of course. If you like the game then on your head be it but I thought it was kind of really shit.

 

[jehk]

The combat was wwaaaaaaayyy to easy for me even on hard mode. It could have been really good with an added difficultly level. Sadly the studio sunk before that happened.

I agree with most everything else. It was a pretty solid experience. I wouldn't call it better or worse than Dragon Age or Skyrim but it was fun.

 

[Windcaler]

Short answer: Because it wasnt very good

So why wasnt it very good? Well quite a few reasons. Lets start with mechanics, my first and only character was a Dokklfar pure mage and the thing that drove me crazy was the mages dodge mechanic had a delay on it before he actually dodged. In a game so heavily designed around avoiding hits this made playing my character nearly impossible for bosses. Spellcasting also had the same delays on it which made comboing various spells a chore instead of giving us fluid combat

Crafting was a bunch of nonsense as well. Theres actually a quest to retrive some magic rods but you need to salvage past pieces of equipment to reform them. When I played this and salvaged the items I only got the components needed to make 1 of those rods. The other two were lost, I assume for the rest of the game because I didnt make the arbitrary skill checks that I didnt know needed to be made when I salvaged them. Not only that but making equipment for yourself was a process in futility when you could never reliably make the stuff you wanted to make with the stats you wanted.

Then theres the story. I didnt even kill...I think his name was Gainsflow? before I learned that something else was controlling him from behind the scenes. That just kind of killed my interest in the games story and with unresponsive gameplay on top of that I but it away and havnt picked it up since. It would have been better to keep that a secret till after we defeated him

Now the lore, they make a huge deal about the fey being immortal and yet they arent because of arbitrary reasons. For example in the first town theres a situation where a fey got stabbed by a human and my first thought, because of the lore, was "Good thing shes immortal, it'll hurt till it heals up but at least she cant die from it". Oh wait, she could die from it because...reasons. I remember there being several other contradictions but I dont recall what they were.

The game just wasnt very good IMO because of broken gameplay mechanics, contradictory lore, and an uninspiring story

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

...'Cos it's bad?
It felt like if Fable touched up on the combat but decided to remove any sense of charm of parody in the process. The camera defaulted to tilt downwards so no matter how pretty the game actually is you spend 75% of the time staring at the shitty floor textures.

Not to mention that it was easy as balls. On hard mode smithing is hardly needed, and potions dropped with such frequency that every battle devolved into "spam chakram attack, dodge to get range, spam chakram attack". Barely any of the attacks had a good feeling of impact or were even that useful since they either did so little damage or had so much wind up time the spam of 50 minor enemies would stunlock you to death for attempting to break away from the same repetitive dull grind.

Maybe the story and characters and dialogue make up for all this but after playing the demo and listening to the uninterested voice actors jabber on and on and on about "guuu destiny" and "huuur fateweaver" I decided I'd nip that one in the bud.

All my opinion of course. If you like the game then on your head be it but I thought it was kind of really shit.

So you just played the demo then? The demo didn't grab me either because I'm not in the mind set to really get into a game when playing a demo and you kinda have to do that to play an RPG. Plus, the demo was very glitchy. I don't think I've experienced a glitch yet in the game outside of the occasional graphical thing. I'm playing the rogue and the rogue's attacks are probably the least powerful (from a damage standpoint) and they all have a good feeling to them. It's the interplay between the attacks/abilities that makes it all work. The rogue gets attacks and abilities that give you that opening to pull off a longer charged attack. I'd say try the full game before righting it off, it's damn good. I would've actually bought KoA at release but Mass Effect 3 came out within a month of KoA's release I think.

 

[Tanis]

Because people enjoy their buggy, lol-we-so-edgy-n-dark, hiking simulators?

Jabs aside...
I really enjoyed KoA as well.
But I'll admit there wasn't as much to DO as there was in Skyrim.
Not even when you remove those 'kill x here' quests.

Skyrim was REALLY well built from a side mission and map perspective.
-The game was/is buggy as hell, but that's kind of like complaining about whiny leads in a SE game.

Dragon Age isn't even in the same genera.
-Might as well compare to WarCraft 3 because they both have elves and play better on the PC.

Demon's/Dark Souls is the same.
-While it's presented as a '3rd action WRPG', it's more like a shoot-em-up or beat-em-up in terms of game play mentality.

I, personally, loved KoA and HOPE there's another game in the series.
Or, at the very least, the next TES game steals the game play from it and merges it into the mass world map.

 

[Longing]

It just felt so... empty. I was just running around stumbling upon quests that I'd forgotten about and everything was so bland. The characters were completely uninteresting as was the story and your own pc.

The combat was slightly better, it was competent and varied. The problem was that I don't play RPGs for the combat.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

I will say Amalur was one of those IPs that really deserved better critically and financially. The art style was great, the world was really cool and expansive, the class system was more about doing what you wanted rather than min-maxing, but probably the biggest deal was the fighting system which had more in common with hack and slash games than RPGs. However, I would say it just lacked the pretentiousness of its competition. Dark Souls admittedly has better atmosphere, Skyrim is one giant time waster, and Dragon Age has better writing. However, I would say Amalur has the better gameplay and is just FUN though it can get repetitive, and the writing and narrative could have been better.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Short answer: Because it wasnt very good

So why wasnt it very good? Well quite a few reasons. Lets start with mechanics, my first and only character was a Dokklfar pure mage and the thing that drove me crazy was the mages dodge mechanic had a delay on it before he actually dodged. In a game so heavily designed around avoiding hits this made playing my character nearly impossible for bosses. Spellcasting also had the same delays on it which made comboing various spells a chore instead of giving us fluid combat

Crafting was a bunch of nonsense as well. Theres actually a quest to retrive some magic rods but you need to salvage past pieces of equipment to reform them. When I played this and salvaged the items I only got the components needed to make 1 of those rods. The other two were lost, I assume for the rest of the game because I didnt make the arbitrary skill checks that I didnt know needed to be made when I salvaged them. Not only that but making equipment for yourself was a process in futility when you could never reliably make the stuff you wanted to make with the stats you wanted.

Then theres the story. I didnt even kill...I think his name was Gainsflow? before I learned that something else was controlling him from behind the scenes. That just kind of killed my interest in the games story and with unresponsive gameplay on top of that I but it away and havnt picked it up since. It would have been better to keep that a secret till after we defeated him

Now the lore, they make a huge deal about the fey being immortal and yet they arent because of arbitrary reasons. For example in the first town theres a situation where a fey got stabbed by a human and my first thought, because of the lore, was "Good thing shes immortal, it'll hurt till it heals up but at least she cant die from it". Oh wait, she could die from it because...reasons. I remember there being several other contradictions but I dont recall what they were.

The game just wasnt very good IMO because of broken gameplay mechanics, contradictory lore, and an uninspiring story

I got the mage's dodge as my rogue for a bit as I went rogue-mage (then went full rogue now) but the dodge was just fine for me, it was like the Asari's dodge from Mass Effect.

My friend that beat it said you can make awesome stuff just fine as we were talking about the game the other day as I was saying I didn't put anything in blacksmithing because I was finding great stuff anyways, he said he made even better stuff than what he found. I have dabbled in it myself yet.

The fey are immortal in the sense that their souls are immortal.

 

[LetalisK]

Well, personally, I dropped it primarily because the camera sucked. It was up the character's ass the whole time which made it feel claustrophobic, a bit nauseating, and would only zoom out during combat...and then zoom out too much. It made it difficult to enjoy much of the rest of the game.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Dragon Age isn't even in the same genera.
-Might as well compare to WarCraft 3 because they both have elves and play better on the PC.

Demon's/Dark Souls is the same.
-While it's presented as a '3rd action WRPG', it's more like a shoot-em-up or beat-em-up in terms of game play mentality.

I was mainly using Dragon Age for the purposes of complaints against KoA being generic fantasy when Dragon Age is the same in that regard. Dark Souls is all about the combat, and KoA beats Dark Souls at what Dark Souls is supposed to be all about, KoA is even a harder game to boot. That's why I brought up Dark Souls.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Dark Souls is all about the combat, and KoA beats Dark Souls at what Dark Souls is supposed to be all about, KoA is even a harder game to boot. That's why I brought up Dark Souls.

Wut? No it most certainly isn't.

And Dark Souls is NOT all about the combat. It's all about the ATMOSPHERE. Every single bloody thing in that game goes to service the main strength, which is the ATMOSPHERE. It gives Pripyat a hard run as one of the most atmospheric games of all time. The combat, frankly, is more than a little janky.

All that said, to answer your OP, KoA did not receive the same acclaim as Skyrim, Dark Souls or Dragon Age: Origins because it's nowhere near as good as any of those titles. It's a fun, slightly underrated action RPG with lots of polish and flair and a lamentable amount of bland flab...a casualty of Curt Schilling's everlasting hard on for Everquest and inability to keep MMO mechanics from slipping into a single player game (where they really have no business being). If it was a tighter, more focused experience it might have been received better. But it wasn't, so it wasn't, and now Curt is broke, and Amalur is a footnote in history and a cautionary example of how not to run your business.

 

[Kinguendo]

Because, as long as it isnt your first time playing a game of that genre, its boring.

It blatantly steals its mechanics from other games, the fighting is Fable, the lockpicking is Skyrim/Fallout and the story is... well, it just feels pointless.

 

[5ilver]

I personally didn't understand the story or like the characters. Hell, I'd go as far as to say there was no story and no characters.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Dark Souls is all about the combat, and KoA beats Dark Souls at what Dark Souls is supposed to be all about, KoA is even a harder game to boot. That's why I brought up Dark Souls.

Wut? No it most certainly isn't.

And Dark Souls is NOT all about the combat. It's all about the ATMOSPHERE. Every single bloody thing in that game goes to service the main strength, which is the ATMOSPHERE. It gives Pripyat a hard run as one of the most atmospheric games of all time. The combat, frankly, is more than a little janky.

All that said, to answer your OP, KoA did not receive the same acclaim as Skyrim, Dark Souls or Dragon Age: Origins because it's nowhere near as good as any of those titles. It's a fun, slightly underrated action RPG with lots of polish and flair and a lamentable amount of bland flab...a casualty of Curt Schilling's everlasting hard on for Everquest and inability to keep MMO mechanics from slipping into a single player game (where they really have no business being). If it was a tighter, more focused experience it might have been received better. But it wasn't, so it wasn't, and now Curt is broke, and Amalur is a footnote in history and a cautionary example of how not to run your business.

The only good thing about Dark Souls was atmosphere, I'm not sure if I would say that is what Dark Souls is ALL about. The game really tries to sell itself as having a great combat system (which it doesn't) and being hard (which it isn't). Gameplay-wise KoA succeeds where Dark Souls fails. A game needs more than atmosphere to be good especially when you spend so much of your time fighting enemies. Now if Dark Souls was like survival horror instead, then it would be a different story.

It blatantly steals its mechanics from other games, the fighting is Fable, the lockpicking is Skyrim/Fallout and the story is... well, it just feels pointless.

Not really, the fighting is way better than Fable. Before I even downloaded KoA for free, I watched Angry Joe's review as because just because the game is free doesn't really mean much; he literally said KoA is Fable 3 if it didn't suck.

 

[Raikas]

I was mainly using Dragon Age for the purposes of complaints against KoA being generic fantasy when Dragon Age is the same in that regard.

Eh, it's still a completely different animal.

That said, for most of the comparisons you're making it's more an issue of how high the high points are than a point-by-point comparison. I thought KoA was a decent enough game, but it just wasn't outstanding in any one way. You can argue that Dragon Age/Dark Souls/Skyrim are decent too, but they each had their outstanding bits (I'd say characters/mood/world, but of course opinions vary). So yeah, KoA is serviceable, but is there any element that does something that few other games can provide? Because those other games each have at least one (if not more) feature that really does push them onto the top of the heap.

And that's not to say that KoA was a bad game - I thought it was entertaining enough - but that's it. It was solid, but didn't really stand out.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

That said, for most of the comparisons you're making it's more an issue of how high the high points are than a point-by-point comparison. I thought KoA was a decent enough game, but it just wasn't outstanding in any one way. You can argue that Dragon Age/Dark Souls/Skyrim are decent too, but they each had their outstanding bits (I'd say characters/mood/world, but of course opinions vary). So yeah, KoA is serviceable, but is there any element that does something that few other games can provide? Because those other games each have at least one (if not more) feature that really does push them onto the top of the heap.

And that's not to say that KoA was a bad game - I thought it was entertaining enough - but that's it. It was solid, but didn't really stand out.

In the initial post, I said KoA's combat is probably the best of any action RPG ever, there's its outstanding aspect. In RPGs, you spend so much time fighting enemies and if that aspect isn't good, then the game isn't that good either. The Elder Scrolls games have no outstanding bits to me.

 

[default]

Dark Souls is all about the combat, and KoA beats Dark Souls at what Dark Souls is supposed to be all about, KoA is even a harder game to boot. That's why I brought up Dark Souls.

Wut? No it most certainly isn't.

And Dark Souls is NOT all about the combat. It's all about the ATMOSPHERE. Every single bloody thing in that game goes to service the main strength, which is the ATMOSPHERE. It gives Pripyat a hard run as one of the most atmospheric games of all time. The combat, frankly, is more than a little janky.

All that said, to answer your OP, KoA did not receive the same acclaim as Skyrim, Dark Souls or Dragon Age: Origins because it's nowhere near as good as any of those titles. It's a fun, slightly underrated action RPG with lots of polish and flair and a lamentable amount of bland flab...a casualty of Curt Schilling's everlasting hard on for Everquest and inability to keep MMO mechanics from slipping into a single player game (where they really have no business being). If it was a tighter, more focused experience it might have been received better. But it wasn't, so it wasn't, and now Curt is broke, and Amalur is a footnote in history and a cautionary example of how not to run your business.

The only good thing about Dark Souls was atmosphere, I'm not sure if I would say that is what Dark Souls is ALL about. The game really tries to sell itself as having a great combat system (which it doesn't) and being hard (which it isn't). Gameplay-wise KoA succeeds where Dark Souls fails. A game needs more than atmosphere to be good especially when you spend so much of your time fighting enemies. Now if Dark Souls was like survival horror instead, then it would be a different story.

It blatantly steals its mechanics from other games, the fighting is Fable, the lockpicking is Skyrim/Fallout and the story is... well, it just feels pointless.

Not really, the fighting is way better than Fable. Before I even downloaded KoA for free, I watched Angry Joe's review as because just because the game is free doesn't really mean much; he literally said KoA is Fable 3 if it didn't suck.

Are you really saying KoA is better than Dark Souls? Fuck, I mean that's your opinion, but JESUS is it misguided. Dark Souls combat is MEANT to be simple and slow, it's not about jumping around spitting sparkles from your magic sword. It's a methodical, more realistic boxing match between you and the enemies/environment, COMPLETELY different from the combat in KoA or any of those games you mentioned. It also takes brains and planning, not just mashing each ability as it comes off cooldown. And no, the game isn't as hard as it is hyped up to be, but in a market of games for dipshits that hold your hand through everything it's still a refreshing breath of air, and worth talking about.

If you think the atmosphere is the only good thing about Dark Souls you are very misguided. It's fantastic in its gameplay, aesthetic, design, amount of depth, the bosses, the enemies, locations, the characters and story. Far better than anything else I've seen in the past few years, and many would be inclined to agree with me.

 

[synobal]

It was basically a bad MMO with none of the dubious redeeming social aspects that is why.