It’s truly every bit as engrossing and massive as the best of the Elder Scrolls series, albeit with better combat and a more “walled in” feeling world at times.
Oh. My. Goodness. I highly doubt that but I'm sure we'll see 9+ ratings thrown around here once again.
Yup...
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
I thought the combat in the game was pretty good, I liked the art style and voice acting...but one huge negative.
I don't like Fable-style designed worlds. At least in the demo, everything was so linear...quests...the world layout...everything. It didn't feel like an open world RPG, but more of a linear rpg. Which I guess is fine for those who like that...but there was mostly linear paths and a few open areas in the game. That pretty much made me decide the game wasn't for me. I think if I went in expecting it to be like Witcher or Fable...I would have enjoyed it more. But I went in expecting it to be an open world RPG and was disappointed.
Once past the first village game goes sandbox and really opens up. I took off exploring, I did do some of the webwood quests simply because the whole spider queen story is amazing. However once I got my fill of that moved on skipping past two other villages I found and have moved into new lands with towns.
Lately I've been playing mostly SWTOR and some Skyrim with a bit of Diablo 3 beta thrown in. All that ended when I tried this demo and then bought it last night.
Played it til 2:30 AM before dragging my butt in to work @ 8 this morning. I'm picking up a wired XBOX360 controller tonight on my way home since this game supports it and is just begging for a better control system than mouse + keyboard.
Some people are knocking the colorful art style but personally I see it as a big plus. I've never been a big fan of oriental RPGs --which tend to be over-the-top colorful--but frankly, I'm a sort of tired of the muted earth tones that seem to be the rage in western RPGs (Skyrim, Fallout, etc.) these days and this bright and colorful (but not too much) world hits the spot. The bright colors and pixie dust work well in the world and doubly so with combat FX.
Fast paced combat and loot are so plentiful I'm sort of thinking of this game as a cross between the Elder Scrolls and Diablo franchises with a sprinkle of Fable animations thrown in for good measure.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I just watched the Sessler's X-Play review and he nails down the reason why I left the demo dissapointed. There is no sense of unity between the function of the play and design of the world. It seems slap-dashed together. I didn't feel tethered to this world. There was no compulsion to invest time in this. I didn't want to find out more about Amalur like I did Azeroth or Norrath or, more recently, Skyrim.
In fact, I was surprised that this was Schilling's game. I had been excited to see what a huge fan of MMOs, who isn't composed of the garden variety geek DNA (e.g. he's a Major League Baseball pitcher), would bring to the table. Particulary so because he's a WoW player. I wanted him to knock one out of the park with this. This game would have been an excellent buffer between the impeccable Skyrim and the promising Guild Wars 2, as there is nothing out recently RPG or MMO wise to bide my time.
Was looking forward to this game until I saw the grahpics style, tried the game anyway with the demo... was "meh" and I will probably not get this until its maybe 50-75% off.
I agree 100%...ill wait till this is like 5-10$ on steam
Great game who cares if its not Skyrim? Go ask the ps3 players how there Skyrim experience is and see what kinda reviews you get on that great game.Far as G4s review Adam Sessler is a moron/
Played the demo and was completely turned off by the character art style and the running animation. It's like the artists tried to copy WoW's "cartoony" look but didn't copy the charm. Even though I am a bit of an R. A. Salvatore fan, I'll wait until this game is in the bargain bin.
[quote]At level 5, my character is a “Duelist” with six points in both Finesse and Might. You can spread the wealth to all trees, or focus on one, or just two.[/quote]
Grats on leve 5 Bill. Is that the highest you ever gotten in any game? I am always amazed how you can write so much about a game you only play for 30 minutes. Nice job again, that is a special talent. But one day I would love to see you actually play one of these games you pretend to write about.
ROFL ok I just backstabbed a poor guy that was standing there with his pee pee in his hand taking a whiz in the bushes, running water sound effect and the whole deal. If that doesnt illustrate how cool a game this is nothing does. : )
Why is this being covered on an MMORPG website? if I wanted to talk about single player games there's 1000 websites for that.
I think it is because they also are working on a MMO set in the same world. Both 38 studio and Undead labs decided to give out a none MMO first to try the technology and world and to get in some money while they work on the MMO, MMOs takes many years before they actually start to earn in some cash.
If nothing else this game will tell us a bit about Copernicus, 38 studios upcomming MMO.
Why is this being covered on an MMORPG website? if I wanted to talk about single player games there's 1000 websites for that.
I think it is because they also are working on a MMO set in the same world. Both 38 studio and Undead labs decided to give out a none MMO first to try the technology and world and to get in some money while they work on the MMO, MMOs takes many years before they actually start to earn in some cash.
If nothing else this game will tell us a bit about Copernicus, 38 studios upcomming MMO.
They started working on Copernicus well before this game. This game is an engine which was built by Big Huge Games and used by 38 studios after they bought them from THQ when they devested themselves from all 3rd party studios. Curt Schilling has stated that the engines for this game and the mmo are in no way related
Why is this being covered on an MMORPG website? if I wanted to talk about single player games there's 1000 websites for that.
I think because alot off MMO'ers enjoy RPG's. MMORPG.com has done a nice job of also giving us "General Gaming" forums,pc or console related. To be honest I prefer to read discussions here, over,say, IGN boards.
This game should be discussed on an MMO site because obstensibly it is an MMO that was made into a single player game. Sorry if I'm repeating known info.
38 was making this game an MMO and somewhere along the line they decided they couldn't or didn't want to compete, or the big huge engine couldn't hack the requirements of a AAA mmo, or for what ever reason it became a single player game. The guy who started the project and brought everyone on board is a massive Everquest fan. He dreamt of making his own for years, and being a rich guy was able to get other people to come on board one at a time as big names are attracted to the idea of working with other big names. This company has had some major publicized ups and downs. Hirings and firings, starts and stops etc etc.
If this game came out 5 years ago I might have been more impressed with what I was playing. Today however it is a colection of borrowed mechanics all wound together by dated looking graphics and features that are watered down versions of ones from larger better titles. I can't find anything original in this title.
This game IS Fable. It IS everquest. It IS god of war. It IS Dragon Age and it IS every hit game released in the last 5 years. And that's the key problem. It's kinds like how you can like all the ingrediants in a certain food seperately but when mixed all together it just tastes wrong. It plays like a console game, so yes it is responsive and snappy (too much so, turn that camera down!), and it comes with a console UI which we all know how much that pisses us all off. We didn't give Bethesda the pass when they failed in that regard and this game shouldn't get a pass either with it's Fable meets Dragon Age UI.
This game does NOT feel alive. The characters while well voiced are flat and depthless. Their conversation options are all the same like it's Morrowind all over, but eveyone has a different opinion of the same topics. A trend they put into everything. Redundancy redundancy redundancy. Or as I call it 'working to play the game'.
I haven't posted on these forums in a very very long time and I feel so strongly about this game that I feel I must, nay need to post a response.
Some people will like this game. Kids might like this game who've never played any other game before, or kids that watched their older siblings play fable I II or III and longed to play it too but weren't allowed.
OK, into the actual critism from a game design standpoint. The opening level is HORRIBLE! My gort. You get multiple copies of all the starter gear in the starter area...why? Because they dumbed it down for the idiots who run through levels ignoring content and have to force feed them the gear again just so they can handle the game. CAN YOU SAY LOADING SCREENS BATMAN!!!!? There is even poorly placed floating assets in the first level which make it look just rookie. Floor assets poorly placed that show the world below. Like an MMO beta where they said, "we know we have presentaion bugs, just ignore those for now, they are on our list and we will fix those soon." This game says "heck no! We ship with rookie bugs" because apparently they didn't have EA's massive QA department test this game.
The game is retardedly easy even on hard mode. Why is it easy? Because you've played this game before. You could play this game in your sleep and you probably have. It certainly put me to sleep once my eyes stopped rolling at the savage copy cats I saw everywhere I looked.
The areas are all corridors. I'm sorry but whoever at their studio that thinks a bunch of linked corridors is an OPEN world needs to be slapped with something heavy. Did no one at their studio play GTA? They stole features from Bethesda, yet managed not to see how an open wolrd is built. Being able to complete quests in the order you want is also not enough to call a game open world. Not saying you can, but it gives some flexibility in each area.
The buldings in the towns are jammed together just like in your favourite second tier Free to Play MMO except even more so. There are multiple vendors even in the same buildings that sell the same types of gear. In fact most all sell a bit of everything forcing you to go to them all and check each section against each other. Sorry I do enough pricing when I buy groceries. I don't want to do work in a game as well. Maybe that's for people who like shopping? Why do I want to go to loading screen, walk 10 feet to adjacent door and go to loading screen again?
Oh and did I mention that it was easy? In fact it is so easy that it makes character choices seem pointless. You get some fancy new animation if you invest points. But don't be prepared for any surprises, because just like fable we give you a nifty preview animation. Though at least in Fable those awesome abilites scaled, had tiers and you could pull them off at will practically. This game gives you broken over-powered gear that you can just spam and kill everything, without having to spec in one single skill.
All the details just feel like work. The bottom up skill trees all spread out and lacking any visual acuity or ergonomic design structure. The inventory system ripped from fable that if you double click you mistakenly drink or eat stuff from your bag when you're just opening up tabs.
EVERYTING IS FLAT!!! WTF! not a single normal map in the damn game? At the very least I will give them credit for having decent head rigging for lip synching even if I think the models look like POS. Unless you think WOW models are good looking and not just quirky and funny.
Tab menus at top of windows don't show all available options, but just 3. So if you are not the type ( I am, but the general audience wouldn't think to check) to habitually try to scroll past the options to see if something is hiding you'd never know the options existed. Who thought that was a good idea in a game so obviously watered down for the masses? And I really do hope that some producer at one of the studios to blame reads these posts, because I know they do, they have little else to do besides scheduling, and they want to know who to blame when the actual consumer reviews come in. By the way. Producers often post as normal users on web sites like these. Just saying.
Gack I'ma have to stop,I'd go on for hours with this game. Honestly try the demo. Maybe you'll pick it up. My guess is you'll pass for much better realized titles. This is just another example of EA putting their name on something and comming to "rescue" (hire fire and outsource) the developement financially then totally riuing it.
Comments
It’s truly every bit as engrossing and massive as the best of the Elder Scrolls series, albeit with better combat and a more “walled in” feeling world at times.
Oh. My. Goodness. I highly doubt that but I'm sure we'll see 9+ ratings thrown around here once again.
Yup...
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Does anyone remember the Onimusha games?
That's all I could think about while playing this--very similar in the presentation of the combat, and the linear exploration (oxymoron, I know).
I wouldn't be bothered by this game at all if the developers hadn't touted "open-world"--that kind of false advertising really gets under my skin.
Ok this game is getting better and better the deeper I get..
The webwood story line is just the right amount of creepy..
and the fatalities are getting better and more frequent too.
" they said I have no music, and so I laughed... "
Once past the first village game goes sandbox and really opens up. I took off exploring, I did do some of the webwood quests simply because the whole spider queen story is amazing. However once I got my fill of that moved on skipping past two other villages I found and have moved into new lands with towns.
Will be honest and say I think Im about to restart havent seen a way to respec and not happy with the way I choose my skills : )
Need to play deeper into the game it is open world once you get outta the tutorial starting areas.
I am about 12 hours in now and pretty much just left the starter lands.
Head west just keep moving thru maps until you leave the forest.
I dont know about anyone else but I really enjoyed the demo.
The world was fun to run through, the way the quests are setup similar to how mmos are was very cool, it only left me wanting more.
Having a blast with this game.
Lately I've been playing mostly SWTOR and some Skyrim with a bit of Diablo 3 beta thrown in. All that ended when I tried this demo and then bought it last night.
Played it til 2:30 AM before dragging my butt in to work @ 8 this morning. I'm picking up a wired XBOX360 controller tonight on my way home since this game supports it and is just begging for a better control system than mouse + keyboard.
Some people are knocking the colorful art style but personally I see it as a big plus. I've never been a big fan of oriental RPGs --which tend to be over-the-top colorful--but frankly, I'm a sort of tired of the muted earth tones that seem to be the rage in western RPGs (Skyrim, Fallout, etc.) these days and this bright and colorful (but not too much) world hits the spot. The bright colors and pixie dust work well in the world and doubly so with combat FX.
Fast paced combat and loot are so plentiful I'm sort of thinking of this game as a cross between the Elder Scrolls and Diablo franchises with a sprinkle of Fable animations thrown in for good measure.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Find a Soul mender I think they are called. Allow you to respec
I just watched the Sessler's X-Play review and he nails down the reason why I left the demo dissapointed. There is no sense of unity between the function of the play and design of the world. It seems slap-dashed together. I didn't feel tethered to this world. There was no compulsion to invest time in this. I didn't want to find out more about Amalur like I did Azeroth or Norrath or, more recently, Skyrim.
In fact, I was surprised that this was Schilling's game. I had been excited to see what a huge fan of MMOs, who isn't composed of the garden variety geek DNA (e.g. he's a Major League Baseball pitcher), would bring to the table. Particulary so because he's a WoW player. I wanted him to knock one out of the park with this. This game would have been an excellent buffer between the impeccable Skyrim and the promising Guild Wars 2, as there is nothing out recently RPG or MMO wise to bide my time.
Re: SWTOR
"Remember, remember - Kakk says 'December.'"
game is basically a single player MMO, so TOR players should love it
... its you're fate man..fate,...the weaves of fate .. (just talk to youre drunken buddy) ..
" but you can’t just freely bunny hop around the world and it’s a little disappointing. "
Why is this a problem?
lol Is it just me or is this just one of the silliest complaints in anything ever?
I agree 100%...ill wait till this is like 5-10$ on steam
This ^
Its not as good a Skyrim. You can only play one game at a time So get Skyrim.
EA advertising lies thats nothing new.
Great game who cares if its not Skyrim? Go ask the ps3 players how there Skyrim experience is and see what kinda reviews you get on that great game.Far as G4s review Adam Sessler is a moron/
Played the demo and was completely turned off by the character art style and the running animation. It's like the artists tried to copy WoW's "cartoony" look but didn't copy the charm. Even though I am a bit of an R. A. Salvatore fan, I'll wait until this game is in the bargain bin.
[quote]At level 5, my character is a “Duelist” with six points in both Finesse and Might. You can spread the wealth to all trees, or focus on one, or just two.[/quote]
Grats on leve 5 Bill. Is that the highest you ever gotten in any game? I am always amazed how you can write so much about a game you only play for 30 minutes. Nice job again, that is a special talent. But one day I would love to see you actually play one of these games you pretend to write about.
ROFL ok I just backstabbed a poor guy that was standing there with his pee pee in his hand taking a whiz in the bushes, running water sound effect and the whole deal. If that doesnt illustrate how cool a game this is nothing does. : )
Why is this being covered on an MMORPG website? if I wanted to talk about single player games there's 1000 websites for that.
I think it is because they also are working on a MMO set in the same world. Both 38 studio and Undead labs decided to give out a none MMO first to try the technology and world and to get in some money while they work on the MMO, MMOs takes many years before they actually start to earn in some cash.
If nothing else this game will tell us a bit about Copernicus, 38 studios upcomming MMO.
They started working on Copernicus well before this game. This game is an engine which was built by Big Huge Games and used by 38 studios after they bought them from THQ when they devested themselves from all 3rd party studios. Curt Schilling has stated that the engines for this game and the mmo are in no way related
Oh no! 2 more positve reviews!
RPGFan
Gamerevolution
Let me guess, these were paid off too? since clearly no one could like this game without being paid off /sarcasm.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling"
Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
I think because alot off MMO'ers enjoy RPG's. MMORPG.com has done a nice job of also giving us "General Gaming" forums,pc or console related. To be honest I prefer to read discussions here, over,say, IGN boards.
This game should be discussed on an MMO site because obstensibly it is an MMO that was made into a single player game. Sorry if I'm repeating known info.
38 was making this game an MMO and somewhere along the line they decided they couldn't or didn't want to compete, or the big huge engine couldn't hack the requirements of a AAA mmo, or for what ever reason it became a single player game. The guy who started the project and brought everyone on board is a massive Everquest fan. He dreamt of making his own for years, and being a rich guy was able to get other people to come on board one at a time as big names are attracted to the idea of working with other big names. This company has had some major publicized ups and downs. Hirings and firings, starts and stops etc etc.
If this game came out 5 years ago I might have been more impressed with what I was playing. Today however it is a colection of borrowed mechanics all wound together by dated looking graphics and features that are watered down versions of ones from larger better titles. I can't find anything original in this title.
This game IS Fable. It IS everquest. It IS god of war. It IS Dragon Age and it IS every hit game released in the last 5 years. And that's the key problem. It's kinds like how you can like all the ingrediants in a certain food seperately but when mixed all together it just tastes wrong. It plays like a console game, so yes it is responsive and snappy (too much so, turn that camera down!), and it comes with a console UI which we all know how much that pisses us all off. We didn't give Bethesda the pass when they failed in that regard and this game shouldn't get a pass either with it's Fable meets Dragon Age UI.
This game does NOT feel alive. The characters while well voiced are flat and depthless. Their conversation options are all the same like it's Morrowind all over, but eveyone has a different opinion of the same topics. A trend they put into everything. Redundancy redundancy redundancy. Or as I call it 'working to play the game'.
I haven't posted on these forums in a very very long time and I feel so strongly about this game that I feel I must, nay need to post a response.
Some people will like this game. Kids might like this game who've never played any other game before, or kids that watched their older siblings play fable I II or III and longed to play it too but weren't allowed.
OK, into the actual critism from a game design standpoint. The opening level is HORRIBLE! My gort. You get multiple copies of all the starter gear in the starter area...why? Because they dumbed it down for the idiots who run through levels ignoring content and have to force feed them the gear again just so they can handle the game. CAN YOU SAY LOADING SCREENS BATMAN!!!!? There is even poorly placed floating assets in the first level which make it look just rookie. Floor assets poorly placed that show the world below. Like an MMO beta where they said, "we know we have presentaion bugs, just ignore those for now, they are on our list and we will fix those soon." This game says "heck no! We ship with rookie bugs" because apparently they didn't have EA's massive QA department test this game.
The game is retardedly easy even on hard mode. Why is it easy? Because you've played this game before. You could play this game in your sleep and you probably have. It certainly put me to sleep once my eyes stopped rolling at the savage copy cats I saw everywhere I looked.
The areas are all corridors. I'm sorry but whoever at their studio that thinks a bunch of linked corridors is an OPEN world needs to be slapped with something heavy. Did no one at their studio play GTA? They stole features from Bethesda, yet managed not to see how an open wolrd is built. Being able to complete quests in the order you want is also not enough to call a game open world. Not saying you can, but it gives some flexibility in each area.
The buldings in the towns are jammed together just like in your favourite second tier Free to Play MMO except even more so. There are multiple vendors even in the same buildings that sell the same types of gear. In fact most all sell a bit of everything forcing you to go to them all and check each section against each other. Sorry I do enough pricing when I buy groceries. I don't want to do work in a game as well. Maybe that's for people who like shopping? Why do I want to go to loading screen, walk 10 feet to adjacent door and go to loading screen again?
Oh and did I mention that it was easy? In fact it is so easy that it makes character choices seem pointless. You get some fancy new animation if you invest points. But don't be prepared for any surprises, because just like fable we give you a nifty preview animation. Though at least in Fable those awesome abilites scaled, had tiers and you could pull them off at will practically. This game gives you broken over-powered gear that you can just spam and kill everything, without having to spec in one single skill.
All the details just feel like work. The bottom up skill trees all spread out and lacking any visual acuity or ergonomic design structure. The inventory system ripped from fable that if you double click you mistakenly drink or eat stuff from your bag when you're just opening up tabs.
EVERYTING IS FLAT!!! WTF! not a single normal map in the damn game? At the very least I will give them credit for having decent head rigging for lip synching even if I think the models look like POS. Unless you think WOW models are good looking and not just quirky and funny.
Tab menus at top of windows don't show all available options, but just 3. So if you are not the type ( I am, but the general audience wouldn't think to check) to habitually try to scroll past the options to see if something is hiding you'd never know the options existed. Who thought that was a good idea in a game so obviously watered down for the masses? And I really do hope that some producer at one of the studios to blame reads these posts, because I know they do, they have little else to do besides scheduling, and they want to know who to blame when the actual consumer reviews come in. By the way. Producers often post as normal users on web sites like these. Just saying.
Gack I'ma have to stop,I'd go on for hours with this game. Honestly try the demo. Maybe you'll pick it up. My guess is you'll pass for much better realized titles. This is just another example of EA putting their name on something and comming to "rescue" (hire fire and outsource) the developement financially then totally riuing it.
TRY BEFORE YOU BUY!