Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Preview

The guys over at AusGamers have gotten around to posting a preview of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning after checking out Big Huge Games’ open world RPG firsthand at last month’s E3. A handful of paragraphs to get you started:

When you have a team that consists of the likes of Todd McFarlane, R. A. Salvatore and numerous industry RPG veterans from various RPG giants such as Bethesda, you’re not going to expect a casual game when they hit the drawing board. In fact, it’s highly likely Kingdoms of Amalur might very well wind up being one of the most in-depth fantasy role-playing games of recent time. The list of stuff they’ve included is very, very long, and they’re not shy to admit they’ve geeked the crap out of their game.

For example, there are more than 120 hand-crafted dungeons in the game, with no two alike. They don’t adhere to (rubber stamping) in Amalur, which incidentally is set across five different geographic regions, each with their own unique look and feel (they will need to load though – no full world streaming here). Throughout these regions, the game serves up a heady map of settlements, villages, towns and cities with the sort of pedestrian life you’d expect, and all NPCs have day-to-day tasks they perform, with most being interactable.

There are also six joinable factions available to you, and each has its own major quest-line, alongside the game’s main narrative quest. Outside of this there are still 100s of side-quests available to you as well, meaning this is no light RPG, and we’re expected to be able to play it in the 100+ hours realm.

There’s also a very robust looting system with 100s of different item drops. There are affixed items alongside hand-crafted unique epic pieces, though coupled with an equally robust crafting system, almost everything you find can be broken down (via Blacksmithing) and reconstructed as you see fit, giving you ample opportunity to truly customise your game and the way you play. You can also enchant items through the game’s Sage-Crafting component which sees you creating various gems to infuse with weapons and armour from found or collected crystal shards throughout the game-world. There’s also an alchemy system to craft various potions from obvious flora and fauna scattered about Amalur, all going towards filling out the obligatory hardcore RPG blue-print these guys have clearly followed.