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

[Casual Shinji]

Wow OP, you really are looking for a scuffle, aren't ya!

It seems every example that gets brought up, from Dark Souls to God of War, can't stand before the might of Kingdom of Amalur.

Did you only make this thread to shoot down everyone with a different opinion?

 

[nuttshell]

I played KoA when it just came out. At the time I had no internet but I wanted to get into MMOs. It had the boring fetch and kill quests but also a few good ones. I still remember the wolf caught in a mans body. It was also fully voiced and looked beautiful then on my sub-par machine. I also like hack and slay from time to time and the combat looks really flashy. It also had a pretty big world and even though I grew tired of it somewhere in the middle, I still completed every quest in every area I could find. I also had a lot of fun leveling and crafting, trying out different things. It's a great game and I don't understand why nobody liked it. Yeah, the combat is harder and more involved in Dark Souls but it looks better in KoA and you really feel like a badass. Yeah, the writing is better in DA:O, but just by a tiny bit - if you remember older games, you understand that DA:O and KoA are pretty much in the same category of "quite allright overall, sometimes great, sometimes stupid writing". Skyrim...I don't know...Skyrim and Oblivion (Morrowind didn't have that much of a problem with this) have one thing in common where your environment "levels up" with you. This really, really pisses me off but mods can change this. I still thought Skyrim was a darker, more serious KoA with a bigger budget.

 

[Abomination]

I stopped playing after I was out of the... I don't know. I actually can't remember that much as it didn't inspire me at all.

There was a lot of poetry and it was voice acted by a guy with an Irish accent? I remember a town attacked by spiders...

It just felt like Fable meets MMO then you repeat the same combat moves over and over again. It felt GRINDY so I couldn't get into the story because I would get bored between sections. It even felt pretentious trying to design this massive world and deep deep lore and everyone talks like you should know everything already. I understand that's probably to kill any potential exposition dump but at the start I didn't understand half of what was going on... and that meant later on I had no idea what was going on either.

Some immortal dudes are killing people and they can't be stopped because they're immortal but now you're a mortal who is immortal now so they're scared of you and... I get how it could be interesting but the world just didn't seem "right". It wasn't very immerse due to the towns being small but the houses being HUGE but only two stories.

Everything just felt off.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

While I enjoyed Amalur, there are some problems with it. My biggest one was that it was just too big a world for what was in it. Most of the areas were just filled with needless nonsense quests that seemed to be there just to distract you from the main story. That made the game very tedious. As people said, it felt like a single-player MMO. I quit the game for months before finally finishing it over the summer.

I don't get the MMO complaint. It just seems like an open world type game to me. Is it the fact it has "zones" or something? I'm sure Skyrim is even bigger in area and most likely filled with even more needless quests, all RPGs usually have that. I just played Nier and only did a couple sidequests the whole game, I pretty much just ran to the red X the whole time. You have the option to, you know, not do them.

Being able to remap your entire character through Fateweavers was also a bad, bad idea.

Why? Respeccing should be a standard feature for every RPG. You don't have to respec if you don't want to, I don't see how that is hurting your play experience.

once you figure out the game, it's a cakewalk.

You mean like most games?

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.

The bosses are a total joke in Dark Souls, I beat most on my first try. I literally beat a DRAGON just standing in front of it meleeing over and over without blocking or dodging once with nothing but rags on and I wasn't overleveled either.

You're just making up bullshit, there are only two dragon bosses in DS neither of which you can just stand in front of it and hack it to death, you'd be killed in seconds.

Yeah, he's actually very clearly making up a lot of shit about Dark Souls; if you've played the game for any length of time you can tell almost nothing he's said about it true. I think he just wants to be a hipster by saying one game not a lot of people like is good and another game a lot of people like is bad.

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.

 

[Snowblindblitz]

once you figure out the game, it's a cakewalk.

You mean like most games?

The bosses are a total joke in Dark Souls, I beat most on my first try. I literally beat a DRAGON just standing in front of it meleeing over and over without blocking or dodging once with nothing but rags on and I wasn't overleveled either.

You're just making up bullshit, there are only two dragon bosses in DS neither of which you can just stand in front of it and hack it to death, you'd be killed in seconds.

I missed when he said that part. Dragons in the Souls games are extremely brutal and are usually only beating with cheese. The cheese being a bow and arrow and hiding under a bridge.

When you do fight them, stacking fire resists and getting the most heat resistant shield you can find, it is infinitely more satisfying than the thousands I've slain in Skyrim, out side of a few that played out in a dramatic fashion (usually not involving me-I once saw Lydia and a dragon go into kill animations at the same time, with it slinging her around in its mouth while she stab-stabed, and she came out the victor)

Plus, good lucking blocking Smough's electric powered butt slam.

 

[aozgolo]

Wow I'm rather surprised by the amount of hate this game gets. I really enjoyed it, I haven't played it a whole lot yet but what I have seen has been loads of fun. I wouldn't call it better than Skyrim and it's hard to compare it to Dragon Age which I wouldn't call an action RPG (at least not Origins). KoA I felt had a great combat system, not because of the complexity or the difficulty associated but for the sheer fact that it was FUN. I mean I pretty much start any open world Sandbox RPG where I can pick classes as a straight up warrior, simple, to the point, no fluff, easy to learn. The prologue alone made me reconsider when I found out how easy it was to backstab people or how fun it was to kill things using a staff.

I admit it has it's failings, I can see comparisons to an MMO with it's immense amount of quests, obvious map zones, and crafting system, but I fail to see how that's a BAD thing? People hate on MMOs blindly with little to no reason other than "it's not their cup of tea". Personally I feel all of those things are a strength to the game. The failings I saw were more in the storytelling being a little ho-hum, not so much the story itself but the delivery felt very dry. I still want to play through and experience all of it but I don't feel it was by any means a bad game, it just didn't do as well mostly because it wasn't marketed as well and it didn't have a lot of brand recognition behind it. Skyrim could have made profit off The Elder Scrolls name alone, and Dragon Age, well Bioware is certainly no stranger to great RPGs so it already had a cadre of fans.

 

[GundamSentinel]

While I enjoyed Amalur, there are some problems with it. My biggest one was that it was just too big a world for what was in it. Most of the areas were just filled with needless nonsense quests that seemed to be there just to distract you from the main story. That made the game very tedious. As people said, it felt like a single-player MMO. I quit the game for months before finally finishing it over the summer.

I don't get the MMO complaint. It just seems like an open world type game to me. Is it the fact it has "zones" or something? I'm sure Skyrim is even bigger in area and most likely filled with even more needless quests, all RPGs usually have that. I just played Nier and only did a couple sidequests the whole game, I pretty much just ran to the red X the whole time. You have the option to, you know, not do them.

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.

Also, don't get me started on Skyrim. I heartily dislike it and you won't ever hear me claiming it's better than Amalur. Skyrim really depresses me. Again a game with a beautiful world, with nothing of worth in it.

 

[MrBaskerville]

I didn't even make it through the demo, just found it to be boring and quite generic. To be fair, i really don't like rpgs in this style, but i couldn't find anything interesting in the demo. Boring run of the mill artstyle, generic fantasy music and same old gameplay with plenty of boring quests. Just felt like an rpg template...

 

[JazzJack2]

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.

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.

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?

 

[RedmistSM]

Because it was boring and mediocre. Rather than providing either a huge open world or a tight metroidvania kind of world, it had huge open areas of mostly flat terrain connected with corridors, and you could not jump from anything other than predetermined areas. You could just walk in one direction till you stopped like Skyrim, but it wasn't as interesting to explore. The story missions are few and far between. None of the characters are engaging, and there are a ton of uninteresting or alright quests instead of interesting ones. The lore is certainly miles deep, but the characters are definitely not.

The combat is decent as far as action games go, it's better than Origins Wolverine or whatever, but it isn't as good as something like Bayonetta and lacks the boss variation and enemy patterns of a God of War. And those games don't need to keep their systems interesting for the length of an RPG campaign, yet you learn way more moves and new abilities in Bayonetta than you ever do in Amalur. Even at its biggest boss fights, Amalur is bad. Now, some action RPGs have worse boss fights and action systems, like Fable 2. But if you compare Amalur, Skyrim and Dragon's Dogma, who all have a powerful dragon as one of their final bosses, what is the fight like? Amalur has QTEs and fighting clones of your classes that the dragon summons while hovering outside the stage, occasionally sticking it's big head in for a bite. Skyrim has a dragon which is similar to every bloody other dragon you've beaten in the game, save for a new spell. In Dragon's Dogma? You run from it, you fight its head, you platform while it's shooting fire at you, you QTE on its back, and then it's down to a huge arena and you can fight it however you like. And you get to jump and climb on it's back, not just roll around on the floor. That game has a ton of problems on its own, but the combat beats Amalur.

I played ninety hours of Amalur, including DLC, but I'm not going to celebrate it. It started out winning me over with it's nice look and first area, but in the end it was a simple game to play while listening to podcasts. Around the 40 hour mark I got so tired, like DanielBrown, and just ran through the last continent. Maybe hard mode would fix the easy gameplay, but it wouldn't fix the enemy variation in an area, the boring writing, the boss fights or the lack of fighting moves or exploration options. It isn't exactly bad, I think it has way better combat than Dragon Age 2 for instance(and 1, but that's not action, it only looks like it is). But I totally understand why other RPGs got more recognition. Maybe everyone were dissappointed that the creator of Spawn and the musician behind Banjo-Kazooie made something this generic, too. Even the intro music sounds more like Spider-Man than Grant Kirkhope.

(I liked how Amalur handled the class system. It meant I could be a wizard with a huge hammer that was actually effective.)

 

[Twitchy Wyche]

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.

 

[tehroc]

I see this is one of those threads. The OP states his opinion and then asks others for theirs. If the OP doesn't get the answer it wants, it proceeds to tell you how you are wrong.

It's a single player MMO. MMOs only saving grace is the fact that they are supposed to be massively multiplayer. I already played WOW for over 5 years. KOA is not better then WOW. If I want to play a WOW-like game, I'll just go play WOW.

 

[Rack]

For me it was the map design. In Skyrim as soon as you get out of the tutorial you can head in any direction and each of the areas has quests layered in. KoA was designed like an MMO, you go into an area and that area has quests of a specific level, it's only possible to go through the areas in order with occasional branches. It completely destroys any fiction of being in a world and starkly illustrates you're just playing a sub-par action game.

 

[Noly]

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.

Also, I find it funny that you compare the combat of KoA to Dark Souls. KoA is basically Dynasty Warriors when it comes to combat bud. Absolutely atrociously bland. Spam weak attack, use a spell, spam weak attack, maybe use your Muso-err, Reckoning mode.

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.

KoA doesn't get more attention because it sucked.
*EDIT* KoA doesn't garner more positive attention because it's basically like you started a character on Easy difficulty in Dynasty Warriors, then picked that character up and dropped them into the universe of vanilla WoW but you were forced to play alone. An MMO universe that punishes you for exploring by locking the enemies at low levels, with an overpowered Dynasty Warriors character. I think that just about hits the nail on the head.
*EDIT2* Also, OP has shit taste.

 

[Lawnmooer]

Why isn't KoA as praised as Skyrim or DA?

Because it's not as good as them...

I kinda liked KoA (I was also fairly interested in what would happen when the developers mentioned they might make a MMO out of it) but there was a lot that took away from it:

1) Difficulty, even on Hard the game was pretty easy if you set yourself up correctly. Heck, I killed the last boss in 3 hits... On Hard... Not at max level, without good gear...

2) Skills were awkward, since at the start of the game you'd get access to new skills at a decent pace but later they come a lot slower and the huge gaps between tiers typically meant that reaching some of the higher tiers meant putting a lot of points into things you don't really want (One of the reasons I ended up playing hybrids... Mage/Rogue Chakram build early on and Warrior/Rogue Greatsword from the middle-end game)

3) Quest Saturation, there was just way too many quests in KoA... During the first 2 zones, I tried to complete every quest I came across, but this just meant I got bored fighting greys since only the instanced dungeon areas scaled with level and doing all the quests meant you'd quickly outlevel the zone you were in (Though, the scaling seemed slightly better than Skyrim's "Give everything a billion health" approach... Until late game when my build just decimated everything in one hit)

So while the combat system was pretty fluid and held my attention throughout the game, the lack of characters that I actually cared about and the awkwardness of leveling via the tediously large amount of simple quests put too much of a negative on my memories of the game.

Also, crafting seemed a bit... Weird...

Then of course there's those skill points, where putting points into Stealth seemed useless for the most part due to quests being either in the open world (Where it's much harder to sneak up on things) or everything spawns facing the direction you come from... To the point where after maxing out my stealth skill, I decided it was better to start again and put points into something much more useful.

 

[Noly]

Then of course there's those skill points,

Oh, almost forgot. If you went Sorcery, you get Mark of Flame in the second tier of the tree (ie around level 7) and once its maxed (ie around level 9-10) it one shots every normal enemy (actually, entire groups of them) found in the first few areas on Hard. And it's spammable. That's ridiculous.

 

[Bato]

I'll tell you my beef with it.

The Elves. They are Marry Sues of the highest caliber, they are annoying, pretentious, and it doesn't seem to be a parody. Because when humans start regarding them so highly it's left the realm of them thinking too highly of themselves to being special little snowflake syndrome.

Now I kinda liked the concept of the story. With some tweaks I think it could even be very interesting.
Replace the good elves with Zealots of the God of Fate or whatever, and they have the same function. And replace the Evil elves with an invading nation or something, anything else.


Otherwise I like the combat as long as I don't invest into the Rogue Tree.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Honestly, while I enjoyed the game, it had two fundamental problems. The first is that the game just loses it's own plot fifteen feet out of the starter dungeon. You get an exposition dump and then the game just lets the story hang there while you run around doing nonsense for hours and hours thus ensuring that you have absolutely no idea what's going on by the time the story advances. At any time I only had a tenuous grasp on who any particular character was, or what their part in the story was.

The other fundamental problem was that the game was padded with lots and lots of meaningless garbage which made it feel needlessly grindy in the style of an MMO. This meant the game was forced to stand purely on the strength of it's rhythm based combat which, while competent, simply wasn't capable of carrying a franchise.

Basically, the second problem, while bad enough in it's own right, lead directly to the first problem leaving the game to stand purely on the strength of the mechanics which were insufficient to carry interest for the length of that massive game.

 

[GundamSentinel]

Then of course there's those skill points,

Oh, almost forgot. If you went Sorcery, you get Mark of Flame in the second tier of the tree (ie around level 7) and once its maxed (ie around level 9-10) it one shots every normal enemy (actually, entire groups of them) found in the first few areas on Hard. And it's spammable. That's ridiculous.

Heh, I played full Sorceror. Meteor, Tempest, spam Mark of Flame and see if there's anything left standing. Rinse and repeat. Worked for pretty much the entire game.

 

[Not Lord Atkin]

I think you answered yourself when you compared it to four different fantasy RPGs. People already have their skyrim, fable, dragon age and/or dark souls. Why buy yet another fantasy RPG that does nothing to stand out from the crowd?

I've only played the demo which I didn't enjoy much (although that might not be a testament to the game's quality), but apparently, it's also mediocre at best. That is not to say that your enjoyment of it is invalid, but you asked why the game wasn't popular and that right there is probably the reason.