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

[bjj hero]

I'm guessing you got wrapped up in hype. Personally I don't get hype or how it affects a game. I can get excited for a game but still judge a game on it's own merits. I don't hold an illusion of what to expect, but I take a chance based on other peoples recommendation.

I can see why people say it's hard, but I think that misses the point. It's punishing is more of an apt description (and it's sad that this is considered as an element of difficulty... it isn't, it's for atmosphere). You don't get anything for free and forces caution, with consequences of significant losses. A poorly timed or overly zealous attack could put you back to an early checkpoint in seconds. A poor strategy will have you flattened by mid to late game enemies. It's quite possible, for example, to face those skeletons right from the start, but not without knowledge of how the game works and how the enemies act. Taking the more difficult route is for future playthroughs... there is a very strict path for beginners, usually indicated by serious ramps in enemy aggression and damage.

It's trial and error, risk and reward, distilled and purified and made into a core feature, not just some byproduct of a poorly tuned difficulty curve or gratuitous use of loot drops. Death is a mechanic, grinding is a learning tool.

In this sense, it's not a difficult game. You don't lose your items or gear when you die, just the progress to your next level and a reset of enemy mobs in that area. Checkpoint are evenly spaced to accommodate beginners in the early game, while more widely spread in late games, with distinct routines to follow to pass an area, you just need to find a formula that works for you.

The only true difficulty is Invasions, especially in early games where the invader is likely geared to kill, while your just working with what you have on hand. In later games you will find yourself keeping PVP weapons handy for quick access in the event of an invasion.

Just for clarity: Kitting is the term for pulling enemies one by one to fight on your terms. You string them along until it's safe to attack them without assistance from enemies... this isn't possible everywhere though. Doing this to lure enemies to geometry traps are clever (like the ones scattered around Sens Fortress).

As for enemies jumping off cliffs. I only see that commonly happening with no input from myself in undead burg, where the enemies generally just go directly for you. Your example with the drakes however seems like gratuitous use of exploits... they are slow and lumbering and their flight attack will always land them back where they started. They won't ever fall off a cliff themselves unless you pull them into a space where their pathing and the geometry conflict. Doing this once is a funny accident, doing it repeatedly is an exploit that spoils the game for the perpetrator.

Another thing you should know is that the lag in PVP is consistent for everyone, even with top of the line connections. I'm not sure about the PC crowed, but this is a common problem on consoles. The thing is, it's the same for them... it takes time to adjust, but you do. It requires a different mindset for timing and to prioritise evasion over defence. A major issue with PVP is parry or riposte spam, for quick crits. You won't see the parry but you will connect with it when you swing and get hit hard for it. It can get frustrating. I dealt with it by pumping up my characters vitality and strength, equiping an item set that offered high damage resistance and stability and moderate agility, and gave myself a huge fucking sword to swing and a giant shield. The people who backsab or riposte generally have low dam resistance and no shield, so getting hit by a big sword is liable to knock them down. Then you stun attack them until they feck off.

PVP, much like the core mechanics of the game, requires trial and error. But it is very jarring for many. I didn't dabble in PVP until my 3rd playthrough, and on my 2nd I warmed up to it by co-oping. Warriors of Sunlight FTW!

I guess it was hyped as mega hard. I got it in a sale late on so had read DS threads talking about the difficulty. Then when the skeletons smashed me my thought was "they werent lying". I got into the catacombs, damn right I kicked, tricked and exploited as many of them as I could into pits. In the catacombs I had too, the things were unkillable (at the time). I gave up when I realised I couldnt fight these things 1:1 and tried a different route.

Even when I returned tooled up those skeletons seem to try their best to dive though. Blocking too long (a friend had to tell me that shields really work, I think my reliance on dodging meant that I never got to grips with parrying though) seemed to encourage them to fling themselves to their doom. The drake, I didnt plan for. It was when hed do that lighting straffing run and I was near a cliff hed fall to his death. Saw it twice but wasnt able to recreate it with the frequency of skeletons, zombies and those mutant things.

As I never beat the game and I was a fairly agile build the PVP lag was too jarring for me to really get into it. Its a shame as I thought that might grab me. I tried, even getting the invisibility ring from the cat but I didnt like being threshed when I thought I was way out of range and couldnt get the backstab down. I didnt know lag was equal for everyone though.

When it was good it was good ( I remember feeling really good after beating the dog with the sword). But other times it was just cheap. Most of the traps were signposted if you were observant, the ambushes relied on a dodgey camera for the most part but you got a "feel" for when they were coming after a while. Being one shot killed with no "tells" by the first mimic was a real cheap shot. Id probably opened 15/20 chests without incident until then. Then to open an identical chest in a dark room that doesnt just badly hurt me but killed me with one shot. It was cheap and I lost hours of souls and humanity on that one. I felt my enthusiasm waine from there.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The MMO complaint comes from the fact that most of the quests seem there just for you to level a character. They have little or no importance for any story or faction. Fetch quests and kill X monsters.

And the thing is, with just doing the main quest you'll skip half the game world. That's the conundrum I had. There's an interesting world to explore, but when you do you'll find that there's very little of substance there. Skip the sidequests and you'll miss the world, do the sidequests and find out how awful they are. Whichever I pick, I'm not happy with it. And the story itself was quite short and pretty dull, so no win there either.

What RPG doesn't have quests merely for the purposes of leveling? Why is this complaint leveled at KoA and not other RPGs?

It's kinda obvious when you got up to a NPC and the quest is a fetch quest or something more. You have the option do the "main" sidequests (that tell more about the world) and the quests just there to give more EXP or gold.

Most games make you learn the advanced mechanics like say Bayonetta with dodge offsetting. Dark Souls doesn't make you do anything but block and light melee attack ALL game.

I'd like to know how you beat Ornstein and Smough or Artorias by simply blocking then light attacking, smells like more bullshit to me.

Right but you said you beat him in just rags, how would you get passed his crystal attack if you didn't have high curse resistance armor or without dodging them?

Outside of a very select few bosses, all you have to do is block and light attack. There's more encounters in Bayonetta on fucking Normal that make you use dodge offsetting than the encounters in Dark Souls that force you out of just blocking and attacking. I shouldn't be able to block the Knights with a light shield, I shouldn't be able to block most of the bosses with a light shield either (you can block the Gargoyles near the beginning and Quelaag for example). I actually died a lot in the beginning of the game because I thought as a thief, I'd have to dodge to avoid attacks but that wasn't the case.

All I had was my curse resistant clothes on (they were basically tattered rags by their looks). I never wore armor the whole game.

I don't ever talk bullshit, you can totally not block or dodge at all while fighting Seath the Scaleless. You can literally just stand in front of him meleeing the whole fight, I know because that's what I did. Check my trophies if you want, I played the fucking game, my PSN is Phoenixmgs.

But you can't do that, like, you actually can't; Seath uses his crystal breath and fails his tails around if you get too close. Either you're talking bullshit OR you exploited a bug, either way it doesn't mean the game's bad or shallow or whatever you seem to think about it.

Also, a few other things; you can fight multiple dudes at once with larger weapons so what you said about that is bullshit, you can't get through the whole game just blocking and light attacking, you can't even get through the first area just doing that let alone all the bosses, and you certainly wouldn't be able to do it with the "thief" build you claimed to be playing, so you were talking bullshit there.

Look, can't you just admit what you said about Dark Souls isn't true; I'm not telling you to like the game, if you didn't like it that's fine, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Dark Souls actually does have a lot of shity design choices, especially compared to Demon's Souls, but a lot of what you said about it wasn't true. And it seemed you were saying them just to be mean spirited too.

Everything I said about Dark Souls is true and what happened when I played it. Seath attacked me but his attacks did very little damage (I wasn't overleveled either, maybe slightly, but I never grinded in the game) so there was no point in blocking or dodging. It wasn't even one glitched instance of what happened with Seath either, the 1st try I almost beat him but he cursed me with like 25% health left, then I put on all my curse resistant stuff and just stood in front of him attacking. The combat is dependent on locking on to enemies so you can't effectively fight a group of enemies, you can even back pedal while holding a shield up if you aren't locked-on to an enemy.

I'm not the only one that went looking for a hard game with a good combat system and got the exact opposite:

And many would disagree. I boughtDS on sale for £6, if Id bought it at full price I would have been deeply disappointed. I liked the atmosphere but everything else was lacking. Ill start by sayingI dont do guides and try to get through things by myself. Thats why I thought shields were boken and didnt use them forthe first 10 hours or so. I went straight to the graveyard and found bog standard, generic fantasy skeletons would kill me whether I blocked or not. There were no indicaters I shouldnt be there until much higher level so guessed shields werent up to much in this game.

Combat was a joke. The enemies could be taunted out 1 at a time to be easily dispatched. Most of the enemies didnt need hitting because I could wait until they jumped off cliffs instead. Even drakes that can "fly" were coaxed into falling to death. Plenty of boss enemies would happily sit there while I kill them with 300 arrows. This is short of fantastic for monsters combat and bosses. Most of the ambushes only work because the camera is awful. That town on stilts was awful, Id get chopped up while the camera showed me a board.

Story was weak too. So you are a charecter with no history, backstory, interests, voice, culture, no reason you learned magic/fighting etc... you wake up in a cell then escape. You end up in a magical land where some guy youve never met and have no reason to believe says if you ring 2 bells something might happen. Is this what passes for story now? The world is good. If you take time to read everything its engaging but the story is garbage.

So to me the world and atmosphere were great. The rest was lacking.

---

KoA locks entire enemy regions to the level you DISCOVERED them at. This is the worst implementation of a mechanic I have ever seen in an RPG in my entire life, and that's saying a lot. Locking every enemy in an entire region to the level you fucking DISCOVERED the region at? This is an open world fantasy RPG game that "punishes" you to the point of ruining the game by locking every enemy in the first five zones at level 6 if you decided to go exploring.
That is embarrassingly bad game design.

You can kill bosses on Hard with one use of your Reckoning bar the very first time you encounter them.
You craft craft the most powerful weapons in the game around level ~16.
There's an absolute pile of loot to discover and find, but here's what will hapen: You explore a dungeon. Your gear looks like trash. During the exploration, you'll be excited when you find two blues and a purple throughout your journey. Too bad they're all terrible in comparison to your greens. Rinse/repeat for the entire godamn game.
Whoever designed the way the loot drops work should have been fired. There was so much potential in that aspect alone and it was completely squandered.

The part that ruined the majority of the gameplay experience was, despite all of these things, that it WAS actually far too easy. Hard mode in any game should be actually hard. The fact that most people that regularly play games on Normal difficulty felt obligated to play KoA on Hard should tell you something. The game was a joke. There was zero challenge on Hard difficulty. That pissed so many people off that the launch of the game was destined to fail right from the start. There was an absolute shitstorm on how easy the game was and the devs failed to address it, despite their forums being ravaged for weeks by angry gamers with buyers remorse.

Many RPGs have the exact enemy level issues. Borderlands (in both games) it's easy to get overleveled and become way too powerful. You actually have to read a guide to know when to properly play through each piece of DLC. JRPGs are all the same in that regard too. Skyrim is just as easy as KoA. Again, why are these same flaws leveled more at KoA than other games?

Bypassing levels should be a standard feature for every platformer. You don't have to bypass if you don't want to, I don't see how that is hurting your play experience.

Setting dialogue options on autopilot like in ME3 should be a standard feature for every dialogue-heavy game. You don't have to autopilot if you don't want to, I don't see how that is hurting your play experience.


More options is not always better. You can totally ignore Fateweavers, just as I did. But the existence of that option devalues the experience. A big part of RPGs is that as your character progresses, you make choices on which abilities and skills to improve. Once you make those choices, they stay with you. They have gameplay consequences. Do you improve your weapon skill to fight better with the gear you have, or do you improve your lockpicking, so you can steal better gear? Do you take an ability consistent with your character concept, or do you select a more useful one, not really fitting with it? Every choice opens some new options at the expense of others, that's an important part of the RPG experience. Deus Ex: HR got quite a bit of flack because you could max out all your enhancements before the end of the game, for example.

Putting in an option to completely respec your character makes your choices meaningless. Any time you encounter an obstacle you cannot surpass due to lack of some ability, you can run back to a Fateweaver and respec. Then respec back to your standard playstyle. Character progression, the defining feature of computer/console RPGs, is devoid of value.

So yeah, you don't have to take advantage of Fateweavers. But their existence in the gameworld means that you're fully aware that you don't have to face the consequences of your choices, that all of the choices you've considered every time you gained a level can be made meaningless with one flip of a switch.

Seriously, who actually goes to Fateweavers to get by an obstacle you can't bypass? All I've done is play a rogue so far and there's never been an obstacle I couldn't bypass. So what if you see a very hard lock, go to a Fateweaver to max out your lockpicking skill, then go back to your previous build? You can already save scum in RPGs, why would anyone do that? And, it doesn't affect your experience. The point of respeccing is not to get by one spot and go back to your old character, it's to play as a different class or character build without starting the game from scratch. It's fucking bullshit when you have to play the game X amount of times to experience every class and build. People don't have all the time in the world to play games you know.

The problem with Deus Ex: HR is that there are no character builds, not that you can respec (Hell, I don't even know if you can as there is really no point).

Plenty of boss enemies would happily sit there while I kill them with 300 arrows. This is short of fantastic for monsters combat and bosses.

As far as I am aware you can't do that to a single boss in the whole game.

I just shot the Gaping Dragon with arrows... And pretty much all of those mid-boss Titanite demons too...

I agree Mass Effect 2/3 are better shooters than KoA is a hack and slash. However, what other action RPG has better hack and slash gameplay? I should've reworded that line as a shooter is very different gameplay-wise and I had in mind all the fantasy RPGs like Skyrim in my head when I wrote that.

I'd have to say that Mount and Blade has the best combat system in an Action RPG without magic. Sure its not high fantasy but its melee combat hasn't been beat in my opinion. The game constantly throws you in situations that aren't boring, unlike KoA.

For Action RPGs with Magic its either Dark Souls or The Witcher 2, and it really depends on the kind of game you like better. I'd have to give it to The Witcher 2 because its more comparable to KoA overall.

OP:This is a thread we've seen many times here. KoA is a mediocre ARPG that borrows way too much from other successful franchises to be called unique. It also doesn't help that the "amazing combat" hits its peak very early in the game. KoA reminds me a lot of Neir on the consoles. The combat was awesome for the first 3 hours and then it turned into sidequest mania.

I don't PC game and only have a PS3 so I haven't played Mount and Blade or Witcher 2. I hard for me to see Mount and Blade having great melee combat as it's in 1st-person. It might work like how I thought Mirror's Edge wouldn't work since it was 1st-person platforming. Witcher has that standard realistic fantasy art style that I'm so sick of and I've barely even played many fantasy WRPGs. It's like the WWII shooters of last gen, I think I only played 1 of them and I was sick of them already. I'm very interested in their cyberpunk RPG though.

I literally just played Nier, that game's combat was never good at any point in the game. Also, just like Nier, you don't have to do the sidequests. I don't get why people complain about sidequests, every RPG has shit sidequests.

I went down the rogue path as well but found the game to be quite a slow starter meaning that I essentially had to play as a warrior for a long time before there was any use being a rogue. I think this was due to the fact that enemies were always in groups OR bosses that had already seen you meaning trying to play as a rogue (my favourute class in most RPGs) wasn't much of an option most of the time. It certainly didn't help that you level SUPER gradually (even if frequently initially) which left me wondering how you could play the game as anything other than a hack and slash to begin with.

I've played a rogue the whole time (on Hard) and I've never had an issue with combat. The early Shadow Flare skill (throw out a puff of smoke, then throw out small knives I think) is great with the bleeding damage. And the early Envenonmed Edge sustained skill makes that charged dagger attack where you dash around attacking several enemies awesome as they are then poisoned. The rogue is all about the damage of time effects. Then, later on smoke bombs make stealth awesome. The abilities all play off each other.

 

[bjj hero]

You have your points and I really appreciate that this didn't turn into a slinging match; I can't really say the AI is amazing in Dark Souls, because it is very simplistic if you look at how the enemies work. And for that boss that jumped off, I assume you're talking about the Taurus Demon (more or less the first boss you'll encounter and the first boss of the undead burg) and I don't really know what to say; he does have a backwards dodge, so yeah he very well could have jumped off, but I still wouldn't strike that uniquely against the game since a bug like that can happen in any game.

I'll still debate a lot of what you said, but it's not my show here; I've made my point to/about what the OP said and he's yet to respond. Thanks for this, though; I actually really enjoyed talking about a game instead of yelling about it like everyone is so quick to do around here.

This is our hobby, why shout? Its ok to disagree, I wish more people could see that.

 

[bjj hero]

Hated blight town with a passion, mainly for the slow down

There was no slow down on PC! Mwahahahaha! Master Race!

Seriously though it was one of the best areas in the game. Positively oozed atmosphere.

It oozed slowly like sludge on the 360. I also got tired of fighting the camera with all of the boards and walkways. Why view the creatures trying to skin me when I can have a screen full of wooden planks instead?

 

[Twitchy Wyche]

Everything I said about Dark Souls is true and what happened when I played it. Seath attacked me but his attacks did very little damage (I wasn't overleveled either, maybe slightly, but I never grinded in the game) so there was no point in blocking or dodging. It wasn't even one glitched instance of what happened with Seath either, the 1st try I almost beat him but he cursed me with like 25% health left, then I put on all my curse resistant stuff and just stood in front of him attacking. The combat is dependent on locking on to enemies so you can't effectively fight a group of enemies, you can even back pedal while holding a shield up if you aren't locked-on to an enemy.

I'm not the only one that went looking for a hard game with a good combat system and got the exact opposite

But it's not; you just contradicted yourself, there is literally no way Seath's attacks did "very little damage" to you when you said earlier you beat him in rags and you say now you weren't over-leveled. You keep saying you were a thief but that you didn't need to dodge, which isn't right either because if you were lightly armored and didn't have a large shield, you wouldn't have been able to block your way through the game. I can only assume you keep saying you were building a thief when you really weren't, because you keep saying you turtled through the game which isn't a viable option for a light-unarmored build.

And I still don't know what to say about the multiple enemies thing; you can fight more than one at a time. A Thief or Assassin build will have a lot more trouble, but it is something you can do in the game and with little difficulty with some builds.

I don't know what you mean by "you were looking for a hard game with a good combat system and got the exact opposite", because you're acting like that's some sort of indisputable fact, which it isn't. Maybe you just didn't like it, but that doesn't mean the game was easy and had a bad combat system. And you were comparing it to KoA which has an ENTIRELY different kind of combat in it; they are so different that the comparison doesn't make sense. It's like saying "I don't like soup because you don't eat it the same way you would chicken."

Like, you're blowing my mind dude, I don't know what else to tell you, this isn't a difference in opinions; me liking the game and you disliking the game is a difference in opinion, but you keep claiming things that can not have happened the way you claimed them to have.
Please, just try to meet me half way here and admit you're just bashing on the game; I promise I'll go away and let you tell everyone else in this thread how right you are.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

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.

Might as well address this first. The enemies did not scale with you. It "felt like an MMO" because the enemies spawned regularly, and with little to no regard for your level. I recently re-picked it up out of having little else to do, and because I heard one of the pieces of DLC is very good (and it kept me amused for longer than I expect from most DLC, so that was a win.) After having run through the second "region" to start the DLC, when I came back to it, everything was so under-levelled that having to fight them was a major annoyance, rather than a threat or an opportunity for experience. Conversely, some areas such as caves would then spawn enemies which WERE levelled to me.
It's not just an issue with new regions, but with old ones as well. I don't want to get dragged into a fight with an enemy at a far lower level than I; but rather than level them up to you, giving you random encounters with levelled enemies, or at least having enemies a certain amount weaker than you ignore you, they would chase with dogged determination. Fine if they had no ranged attacks AND were too slow to keep up, but frustrating with, well... Anything else. Which was almost everything.
THAT is the MMO issue. The lack of scaling enemies to you makes it feel like there should be other people fighting them, as in an MMO- but they're just an annoyance to you.

Another issue that has been mentioned: Camera angle. That's something that impacts your primary- sometimes even only- way of immersing yourself in the game. If it's off, it can ruin your entire experience- and it is off.

Levelling up was an exercise in frustration for me. I don't know if other people had that issue, or if it was just me (I was playing a "Jack of all trades"), but I was having to take abilities I had ZERO interest in just so I could unlock the next rank of abilities. If I had been playing as a different "class" (such as they are), I would have had the same issue; between only having four ability slots, and not wanting to level up my ability in weapons I wasn't going to use, I couldn't see why I would take as many of the abilities as needed to unlock the next rank. A better idea would have been to lower the cost to unlock the next rank, and implement more ranks- and maybe a couple of class-specific abilities (such as combat-magic, or stealth-magic, etc.) It could have been interesting (although, yes, more work.)

How is level scaling not an issue with other RPGs? Borderlands is like the exact same thing.

The camera is a bit wonky. I don't have a major issue with it though.

Isn't that leveling up issue the same with other games? Almost every RPG you just can't handpick every skill and ability that you want, you have to go down trees to get things.

I'm not saying KoA is really better than most RPGs, but why are other RPGs praised while having the same exact issues? That is my main question for the topic.

DArigins on a console is a horrible mess of a clusterfuck too, but the game belongs to a different subgenre so it's hard to compare the two, let alone if you consider the PC version, which plays more RTS-lite like during combat.

I was comparing DA to KoA just in setting. KoA is said to be generic fantasy but DA is just as generic with an even more bland art style.

It can't be true because that's not how the game works; it's not set up that a thief build with little to no armor, a small weapon and shield or dual weapons can tank through the game. I'm not talking about what class you choose at the start, I'm talking about what build you went with throughout the game; he said he was using a thief build and blocked his way through everything, including the bosses which his build does not allow for.

And you seem to be really over exaggerating things, because I've logged well over 400 hours into this game and never seen enemies jump to there deaths with the frequency you say it happens in any area of the game. I don't think the AI was broken, I'm pretty sure you just looked for ways to break it, since, from what you said, you clearly put more energy and effort into kitting enemies off cliffs then you did actually trying to fight them and learn how the game's mechanics work.

I did tank pretty much all the game's enemies as a thief build (I only leveled Dex, Vit, End, and Faith). I always had less than 25% of my weight limit equipped so my dodge was as fast as possible. I didn't even go get that ring that allows you do ninja flip around, which thereby makes my build useless. That's another issue with the game, broken items.

Dark Souls puts you in the mindset to exploit and break the game as the game itself will kill you in the cheapest ways so you look to find the cheapest ways to exploit the game back. The enemy AI is really horrid. It's not that enemies will jump to their deaths normally, it's that you can make them if you know how.

 

[jollybarracuda]

I really liked KoA for what it did as well. Combat, as others have said, might have been a bit too easy, but it was certainly fun mixing up all the different weapon types and seeing what worked for you. I think one of the biggest things that might have turned a lot of people off was the very MMO-style of questing. Exclamation and Question Marks denote quest givers, having a list of things to do in a certain area, running back to turn it in, etc, just made it feel very MMO without actually having any other players around. On top of that, the game didn't really encourage exploration like Skyrim did. Sure, there were caves and some things scattered about, but for the most part they were mostly just tied to a quest at some point, so you'd end up seeing it anyways.

But overall, it was a very good, but not great, experience. A bit lukewarm in the wake of what Skyrim was doing at the time (it came out quite close to Skyrim, for some reason, if I remember right), but it had it's own thing going for it, and it's still a game I plan on picking up and playing again sometime.

 

[Battenberg]

Much needed snip

Personally I didn't feel like I was playing a rogue class at all, more like a slight variation on warrior. A rogue class is, to me at least, all about either sneakily dispatching enemies without ever raising the alarm or taking them out from a distance (as rogue and ranger are occasionally used interchangeably). Either way like I said there was really nothing in the game special enough to make me go nuts for it, it was simply above average.

Given how many people you've replied to so far on this thread I do hope you're not one of those people who simply refuses to accept a differing opinion to your own. You seem to be on some kind of mission to tell everyone just how great the game is even though you have specifically invited people to give reasons why they didn't think it was so good. Perhaps I am misinterpreting your responses however if not trying to change people's minds seems like an exercise in futility to me. By all means debate the game (after all what's more fun than talking about video games apart from playing them) but you have to accept it's going to be subjective and that means not everyone will agree with you, some of your responses are coming across as slightly aggresive.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Everything I said about Dark Souls is true and what happened when I played it. Seath attacked me but his attacks did very little damage (I wasn't overleveled either, maybe slightly, but I never grinded in the game) so there was no point in blocking or dodging. It wasn't even one glitched instance of what happened with Seath either, the 1st try I almost beat him but he cursed me with like 25% health left, then I put on all my curse resistant stuff and just stood in front of him attacking. The combat is dependent on locking on to enemies so you can't effectively fight a group of enemies, you can even back pedal while holding a shield up if you aren't locked-on to an enemy.

I'm not the only one that went looking for a hard game with a good combat system and got the exact opposite

But it's not; you just contradicted yourself, there is literally no way Seath's attacks did "very little damage" to you when you said earlier you beat him in rags and you say now you weren't over-leveled. You keep saying you were a thief but that you didn't need to dodge, which isn't right either because if you were lightly armored and didn't have a large shield, you wouldn't have been able to block your way through the game. I can only assume you keep saying you were building a thief when you really weren't, because you keep saying you turtled through the game which isn't a viable option for a light-unarmored build.

And I still don't know what to say about the multiple enemies thing; you can fight more than one at a time. A Thief or Assassin build will have a lot more trouble, but it is something you can do in the game and with little difficulty with some builds.

I don't know what you mean by "you were looking for a hard game with a good combat system and got the exact opposite", because you're acting like that's some sort of indisputable fact, which it isn't. Maybe you just didn't like it, but that doesn't mean the game was easy and had a bad combat system. And you were comparing it to KoA which has an ENTIRELY different kind of combat in it; they are so different that the comparison doesn't make sense. It's like saying "I don't like soup because you don't eat it the same way you would chicken."

Like, you're blowing my mind dude, I don't know what else to tell you, this isn't a difference in opinions; me liking the game and you disliking the game is a difference in opinion, but you keep claiming things that can not have happened the way you claimed them to have.
Please, just try to meet me half way here and admit you're just bashing on the game; I promise I'll go away and let you tell everyone else in this thread how right you are.

If I was overleveled, it wasn't by much, I don't think I even finished the game at the level that everyone PvPs at (I forget what it is). I just played through the game without grinding. Seath's attacks barely do any damage, that's just a fact. I used the Spider shield pretty much the whole game (I got something slightly better maybe in the last quarter of the game), I think I leveled it up to 5 at most. I just posted in another reply I only leveled Dex, Vit, End, and Faith. One thing I hate about Dark Souls is that when you press back (to move backwards) with a shield up (but not locked-on), your character turns around instead of backpedaling. I got hit by enemies so much that were around corner because I couldn't lock-on and then my character turns his back to the attack and gets hit instead of blocking. Other builds are most likely better for fighting multiple enemies but having to be locked-on to backpedal with a shield up make facing multiple enemies way more frustrating than it should be.

In any combat focused game, the combat should evolve over the course of the game. Bayonetta, for example, forces you to learn dodge offsetting. In KoA, you get new moves and abilities that change your combat experience. In Dark Souls, it's just block and attack in every scenario outside a select few boss fights, that is a poor combat system. It's not about KoA being faster and more flashy or Dark Souls being slower and more methodical, it's about the combat evolving.

Everything I say about Dark Souls is what I experienced in the game when I played it. I literally haven't exaggerated or made up anything. I enjoyed Dark Souls for only atmosphere and level design. But the difficulty and combat system HUGELY disappointed me.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Personally I didn't feel like I was playing a rogue class at all, more like a slight variation on warrior. A rogue class is, to me at least, all about either sneakily dispatching enemies without ever raising the alarm or taking them out from a distance (as rogue and ranger are occasionally used interchangeably). Either way like I said there was really nothing in the game special enough to make me go nuts for it, it was simply above average.

Given how many people you've replied to so far on this thread I do hope you're not one of those people who simply refuses to accept a differing opinion to your own. You seem to be on some kind of mission to tell everyone just how great the game is even though you have specifically invited people to give reasons why they didn't think it was so good. Perhaps I am misinterpreting your responses however if not trying to change people's minds seems like an exercise in futility to me. By all means debate the game (after all what's more fun than talking about video games apart from playing them) but you have to accept it's going to be subjective and that means not everyone will agree with you, some of your responses are coming across as slightly aggresive.

You can't play all stealthily in KoA due to it not being a stealth game. Once you get smoke bombs, the stealth aspect is a lot better. You are an arcade-y, flashy rogue in KoA for sure. The attacks and abilities are very rogue-like; the charged dashing dagger attack, the sneak attacks, the smoke bomb, the shadow flare attack, the lunge, and all the poison, bleeding, and critical hit buffs you get.

My point isn't that KoA is so awesome and stands above all other RPGs, but that it's flaws are the same as other RPGs yet it gets knocked for them when other games don't and get praised. Skyrim/Dragon Age/etc. are generic fantasy, Skyrim is easy too, all RPGs have a bunch of bad fetch questy sidequests, most RPGs have bad stories and characters, etc. I think KoA is better in some ways like art style and combat.

 

[Twitchy Wyche]

Cool dude

Hey, gives those back; those were the words in my mouth that you're using!

 

[JasonBurnout16]

I loved KOA, it had a few problems but I completed the game satisfied with what I had paid for - which is saying something compared to half the crap that comes out.

And those Chokras/Chakras? Damn, I want a pair of those. Some of the weapons were AMAZING.

 

[Psychobabble]

Well if I had to sum up all of KoAs features in one word, that word would be "average". I just didn't find it a very entertaining game. Looks like I'm not alone.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

your comment about dark souls bosses only requiring block and light attack is so stupid it pulled me out of lurkertown, but you're saying you've played the game which really confuses matters. it's stupid in so many directions, because if you've beaten DS you have to be aware that there are not only bosses that will absolutely crush you without precise timings if you just want to 2-button them to death, but that if you really want to you can do exactly what you're saying with a tanky END build. the point is that the game's combat is flexible and allows you to build that way to achieve victory, but earlier in this quoted post you say you were "tanking" with a dodge build, which then leads into dodge as one of the most important and skill-based features of the game but you conveniently haven't mentioned anything about that. generally you don't seem to enjoy the universal aspects of DS, such as knowing the essentials allowing you to dodge and parry your way to the end of the game with nothing but solid knowledge of timings; I'm taking this from your strange rebuttal that you shouldn't be able to block things with a light shield. why the fuck not if you can time it correctly and manipulate your character's endurance without being risky? this is the reason that KoA is boring tripe and people will be talking about DS a decade from now, because in KoA there is no progression outside numbers. DS trains you with the weapons and the style of the game until you're a godslaying badass and it barely needs inflated stats and progression to achieve that, as is proven by the sheer amount of people who have cleared DS at SL1.

I died a lot at the beginning because I thought I HAD to dodge to avoid attacks with a Dex build, but I learned I could block almost every enemy's attacks just fine, which I thought was stupid. Most bosses you can block like the Gargoyles and Quelaag and that Wolf. I actually fought that wolf way underleveled as none of my attacks did much damage (beside for my Lightning Spear), but you know what I could do? Block his attacks. LMAO, my rogue at the beginning of KoA was more badass than my thief at the end of Dark Souls.

I'm sure people that beat DS at SL1 have all this awesome equipment they got from a previous playthrough.

 

[Estelindis]

I only played the demo of KoA, but I found the world, plot and characters so clichéd and trite - sometimes to the point of cringeworthiness - that I had no interest in playing the full game whatsoever.

 

[votemarvel]

Combat and weapon crafting was great fun but unfortunately that is really where the goodness stopped.

The main story and side-quests were forgettable and swiftly became repetitive.

As good as the combat was, it simply wasn't good enough to make me forget about the rest of the game.

it is a shame there is likely never to be a sequel because that, if they strengthened the story, could have been brilliant.

 

[JazzJack2]

There is nothing particularly memorable about it, Koa is just bland, middle of road meh and it has to be one of the most forgettable games I have ever played.

 

[Battenberg]

Personally I didn't feel like I was playing a rogue class at all, more like a slight variation on warrior. A rogue class is, to me at least, all about either sneakily dispatching enemies without ever raising the alarm or taking them out from a distance (as rogue and ranger are occasionally used interchangeably). Either way like I said there was really nothing in the game special enough to make me go nuts for it, it was simply above average.

Given how many people you've replied to so far on this thread I do hope you're not one of those people who simply refuses to accept a differing opinion to your own. You seem to be on some kind of mission to tell everyone just how great the game is even though you have specifically invited people to give reasons why they didn't think it was so good. Perhaps I am misinterpreting your responses however if not trying to change people's minds seems like an exercise in futility to me. By all means debate the game (after all what's more fun than talking about video games apart from playing them) but you have to accept it's going to be subjective and that means not everyone will agree with you, some of your responses are coming across as slightly aggresive.

You can't play all stealthily in KoA due to it not being a stealth game. Once you get smoke bombs, the stealth aspect is a lot better. You are an arcade-y, flashy rogue in KoA for sure. The attacks and abilities are very rogue-like; the charged dashing dagger attack, the sneak attacks, the smoke bomb, the shadow flare attack, the lunge, and all the poison, bleeding, and critical hit buffs you get.

My point isn't that KoA is so awesome and stands above all other RPGs, but that it's flaws are the same as other RPGs yet it gets knocked for them when other games don't and get praised. Skyrim/Dragon Age/etc. are generic fantasy, Skyrim is easy too, all RPGs have a bunch of bad fetch questy sidequests, most RPGs have bad stories and characters, etc. I think KoA is better in some ways like art style and combat.

It doesn't have to be exclusively a stealth game to have stealth in it and that argument holds no water when you keep bringing up Skyrim as a benchmark (I haven't played Dragon Age so I comment on that) - is Skyrim a stealth game? No. Can you play as a stealthy character? Yes, you bet your shadowy dagger wielding butt you can. In fact a point I didn't mention before is that Skyrim really gives you more freedom when creating your character than Kingdoms did. There are more races and more skill trees and the way that levelling is structured there are just more options and more encouragement to build a more refined character. Also you describe Skyrim as too easy but have you tried changing the combat difficulty? At its standard level its not going to be a challenge to an experienced gamer (much like KoA) but if you bump it up as high as it goes it's a whole different ball game from start to end game.

I'd be annoyed that you completely ignored my second paragraph questioning your motives for responding however I am increasingly getting the impression this is exactly the situation where "fanboy" is appropriate ("KoA is so awesome and stands above all other RPGs" - you're taking this as objective fact, if it were then you wouldn't be so outnumbered by people with differing views). I'm not telling you you're wrong to like this game or that you should like it less however you seem intent on telling everyone else they don't love this game enough based entirely on subjective good points that you specifically enjoy. Either you are indeed essentially a fanboy desperate for validation of your own opinion or you're secretly promoting ahead of a KoA sequel. Either way I don't really see any point in anyone responding to this thread since you're clearly taking the (perfectly relevant and specific) criticisms of this game far too seriously and are not willing to accept that others see this matter differently.