Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Previews

While we still don’t know much about the story, lore and quests, previews keep surfacing for 38 Studios’ ambitious first undertaking, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and we’ve rounded up three new pieces to help you form an opinion on the upcoming open world action-RPG.

Eurogamer thinks the title looks generic and wonders how it will fare competing with the likes of Skyrim and Darksiders 2:

Combat in Amalur, you see, is action-heavy comfortably sitting in the same members club as God of War or Darksiders. You roll, block, dodge, launch projectile attacks and juggle enemies and it’s in the smooth motions and visual heaviness of all this that you start to recognise Todd McFarlane’s involvement. Wiping those tainted Brigahall Caverns of giant gremlin/chicken hybrids (aka Niskaru Bloodhunters) looks solid and engaging stuff. If you’ve progressed in your stealth skills, meanwhile, then sneaking up on thieves and pickpocketing them before unleashing a trip-up-and-stab-chest takedown looks similarly satisfying.

All this is, clearly, built on top of deep roleplay systems too. You pour points into Melee, Finesse and Sorcery categories but within those are ability trees with a shrubbery’s-worth of branches. Add into this the Diablo dice-rolls as you loot corpses, the potions you can create through alchemy, the way you can break down and rebuild armour with its constituent parts and the environmental shards that can be plugged into weapons and armour alike and you’ve got yourself quite the hardcore offering – despite the button-tap overlay. This is a game built to appeal to the hard-edged gamer who likes to see the amount of time they’ve spent poring over their character build reflected in the visual power and intensity of their on-screen actions and in these terms Reckoning again scores a few points.

With Reckoning riding the coat-tails of Skyrim, and the endearingly batshit-mental Darksiders II taking on a surprisingly hardcore edge, the obvious question is whether or not the solid-if-uninspiring Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning can compete. Personally, to a degree, I believe it can. In the same way that people still enjoy vanilla ice-cream and in the same way that Pizza Express do a roaring trade in Margaritas, there is a definite and massive chunk of roleplay fandom that likes its accents faux-British and its fantasy delivered in a no-nonsense fashion.

IncGamers offers us more information on the factions, among other things:

The quest we witnessed took place in a system of interconnected caves and tunnels complete with fantastical fauna and flora of the otherworldly variety. Walking through bushes of luminous blue plants caused them to react to our character’s presence (by lighting up and reaching out towards him), something that only happens when you’ve concentrated on your magical abilities. It’s a nice touch that doesn’t add much (if anything) to the gameplay but breathes a little extra vibrancy into the world.

Rather than a main story mission (details on the story are being kept tightly sealed away), this segment is from a ‘˜faction quest,’ an optional thread included purely as a means of earning more loot, more gold and more background on the world and its inhabitants. Factions are never going to be directly opposed to one another so, no matter whose quests you embark upon, there’s no way of locking missions out by incurring the wrath of a rival tribe/group/posse/troop (a la Fallout: New Vegas). Again, we’re told, this goes back to the idea of not wanting to keep any content out of the player’s hands.

This quest was provided by the ‘˜Warsworn’ faction and involves you recovering the ‘˜Heart of Sibun’ which, unsurprisingly, is being guarded by a tougher-than-usual enemy. In this case instance, the tougher-than-usual enemy is a mid-sized fire-breathing dragon with a strong jaw line (we’re talking David Coulthard strong) and wings that have been ripped of everything but their bone structure. The long and short of it was that it was ugly. That’s all you need to know.

A few attack spells and skilfully dodges flame attacks later and the beast falls to its knees in a pathetic display of submission. Of course (this being an action-RPG), there’s no room for sympathy so our walkthrough host performs a ‘˜Fate Shift Kill’ on the beast a flashy finishing move made flashier depending on how many times you can smash the ‘˜A’ button in a given time limit. Boss vanquished, item found, job done.

And finally, NZGamer considers action-y combat “a surprisingly bold move”:

A large part of Kingdoms will seem familiar to RPG veterans. For example there is a typical leveling up system, an in-depth inventory setup that includes creating your own artefacts, and a standard dialogue tree with conversation sequences for interacting with other characters. But the one area that the game takes a massive berth from the norm is in the combat.

In a surprisingly bold move, the combat in Kingdoms is based on the timing of button presses, similar to the style of a more action based game. It features strong or heavy attacks, a blocking ability, parrying and even a detailed combo system. On top of this, there are occasional quicktime events for the bigger enemies like those in the God of War series, where hitting the right button at the exact right time will result in a successful attack. It felt like an RPG game evolved, but whether these more action orientated, quick-reflex controls will appeal to more traditional fans or not will be a matter of time. As lead combat designer Joe Quadara emphasized however, “Twitch skill is only going to get you so far. Strategy and proper RPG playing is going to get you farther.”