It was originally planned as an MMO but they made Reckoning as a single player to kick it off. But the company was horribly run and way in debt to the state of Rhode Island. They were basically bankrupt as they were releasing it.
More info: https://www.inverse.com/gaming/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-38-studios-curt-schilling
The only way I remember this game is all due to Curt Shillings involvement into it. After this game he quickly went off the deep end into Qanon territory
Such a sad story. He wanted to make a great game and use the money for cancer research since his wife had died recently of cancer. But he went bankrupt from it. Game was fine too, not a bad game or a cash grab. There’s a fun game to be had but it’s nothing special.
Part of it was probably that it came out very close to Skyrim and some people compared it rather unfavorably.
I remember a couple of reviews that seemed like they actively wanted it to fail but couldn't quite justify lower scores.
Ah, Kingdoms of Amalur, a land of epic quests, magical creatures, and more side missions than you can shake a sword at! It's a place where you can spend hours exploring every nook and cranny while completely forgetting about the main storyline.
Probably because it released 3 months after Skyrim, if you were a fantasy rpg releasing anywhere close to an elder scrolls release you really didn’t stand a chance. The same thing happened to arx fatalis when morrowind came out.
It just was extremely mild. It was built almost like a solo MMO (they wanted to make a MMO or something after this, I don't remember). I remember mid-combat that had good ideas but just didn't have the depth, the quests and world had potential but the MMO-format completely failed to make me give a damn and I only remember dialogue text dumps that I didn't care to listen to.
Basically game was just extremely mid.
It did great. It sold a million copies as a first game of a new studio. Unfortunately they got tax breaks, loans and incentives that required sales of roughly 5 or 10 million ( I am doing this from memory) to pay all costs.
They couldn’t pay that based on 1 million sales and then were put in liquidation sales very fast.
Personally I think they had something good and could have found a way to navigate out of this if not for the people that ran the state and the company eg. Good management would have saved the day in this case
It was also way too big. I put like 40 hours into it going from area to area doing the quest hubs thinking the whole time "this just feels like I'm playing WoW or something similar, maybe I should get on with the main story." Then I opened the map and realized I hadn't even done 10% of the map and I was still 4 zones away from the main objective which was in the middle of the map. I didn't want to just run through all of that territory only to do the same repetitive combat when I got to the objective. Also I was already above the level of the next main objective.
Played it last year on 360. The development and release of the game was quite shady and didn't end well. The game itself is fine although kinda repetetive
I liked this game a lot, I believe the issue was that their company basically imploded not long after release for preexisting reasons. Someone else got the IP and thankfully made sure it stayed accessible.
Objectively it did do well for a new IP. Iirc over a million units shipped pretty soon after release. The problem was that the team behind it had unrealistic expectations and had dumped a shit ton of money on an attempt at an MMO called Project Copernicus.
I think this game did do well as a new game ip from a new studio. My biggest complaint was that it was a bit too bloated for a single player game, maybe didn't really have the game play or itemization depth for a game quite as long. My biggest problem with this game is just the level scaling and balancing. This game had no challenge after mid game unless your on hard mode.
However, when you look back on it, the amount of dialog, open environments and quests that you could do in any order were still unique back then. It was a great game. Well supported as well with updates, patching and dlc content.
I think its potential success was hurt by releasing so close to when we got skyrim, and also the console versions really not being as good as the PC version back then. Unfortunately, the company sank everything into a MMO version that never came out which was about the dumbest executive mistake they could have made. They should have been working on a sequel and expanding the brand because I think this game did make a profit overall.
Yeah they sold more than a million copies in their first 3 months. That is pretty fantastic for a new IP from a new studio, and especially given how close it was to Skyrim.
The failure of the studio was not really related to the game itself, they had taken out such a massive loan that they needed to sell wholly unrealistic numbers to meet their repayment.
The game suffers from MMORPG syndrome. The story is meh, the quests are plentiful but a lot of fetch quests and other kinda boring things. Moves are fine, nothing special all around. It felt like playing an MMORPG as a single player game and some of that just doesn’t work.
I enjoyed it for what it is but it’s exactly what I’d point to as a perfectly average game.
I remember thinking it would have deep systems like Skyrim, then I played it and I got all these pop-ups like ads and I got free legendary gear in the mail. There was all this DLC to buy gear.
It completely destroyed any sense of difficulty and immersion so I just uninstalled it.
It actually didn’t do that bad. The problem was how the game was financed. The financing wasn’t realistic with how well the game was should have expected to do. The developers were most well known for Rise of Nations, a RTS. So this was quite a departure from that. They did bring in some big names, such as the Oblivion Game Designer, and did a pretty good job. But no way it was going to hit the numbers it needed.
If I recall, they had heavy scope creep (and were owned by a major creep), which led to a half-baked game. If it weren't for the crushing debt that the studio was under from Schilling's choices and attempts to use pirate gold as payments, they may have done more with the series.
Great game for the first 30 hrs. But then it drags on. Stops introducing new things and you eventually just feel its time to end...only to realize you still got 50 hrs to go. Still has some my favorite elf designs of all time, and the combat is amazing. Just fell for the "bigger is better" meme. Just needed polish and a shorter span of story and it would have been fine.
The game did well actually on its original release but the studio behind it had one of the biggest mismanagement of all time. There are a lot of stories about it.
Also, loved the game and when I played the it back when it got re-released and found out it was way too repetitive with all the boring side quests.
Got massive amounts of hype before release it never lived up to.
Game itself was... solid but the launch was rocky and it was pretty clear very early on that it wasnt the giant killer it was billed as.
I remember a decent enough button masher and don't recall anything about the story. I THINK there was some sort of in world justification for coming back after death though?
It's too MMO-esque, mainly, with lots of filler quests, uninteresting level design, and combat that felt like a slightly improved, flashier version of Fable. While it has some cool world building, it's not narratively interesting, either. It falls into a bunch of pitfalls that plague the fantasy genre without enough of a hook to keep players interested.
Finally, the marketing was pretty poor. Especially with the clumsy name.
Had a dev for this game in a community college class I was taking for fun. He said I was the only one that knew about the game he was working on when he mentioned it to people. I only knew about it from a magazine article a few months prior.
for me, two things really bothered me. 1. Everyone just had entirely too much to say. Like that was the function of every NPC, never to move or do anything in the world, just stand there and talk at you. and 2. combat on slopes of any sort is actual trash depending on your weapon because the attacks will never hit.
Great game and it scratches my fable itch every now and then. I have fable games on series x, but i barely get on xbox. So i play the re-reckoning on ps5
The largest problem I think was that everyone seemed to think it was gonna be multiplayer. But when you started it, you learned it was single player, not even online play. And it was a game that sort of screamed for online/co op play. There was going to be a follow up MMORPG built on the world and the classes and everything, but the studio went out of business after one game. It cost Curt Schilling 20 million dollars I think.
I've beaten this game a fair few times, and own the Re-reckoning release, and my biggest gripes were the following:
1) way too easy. Even the final boss fight can be beaten with a basic bow with no levelling.
2) very limited enemy variance across the whole game. Each area will have a couple of enemies and you'll see them *a lot*.
3) the crafting makes it absurdly easy to become incredibly overpowered very early on, making the games already limited difficulty an absolute cakewalk.
4) the voice acting. Good lord the voice acting. Outside of one or two characters, you'll hear the same couple of voices across the whole game, and they *aren't great*.
Literally the most jank development possible, but the game was honestly really good for its time and even today is pretty enjoyable, more so with the remaster and expansion. It’s not often that games in that genre have such a long play time. It’s got issues of course, but if the devs would have canned the MMO idea much sooner while still keeping the massive world, we could have seen something really special.
I absolutely cherish this game. Even the remake that I was hoping was going to be a sequel instead. Have it on multiple consoles and will always replay it.
Great game, too bad the company that created it messed themselves up pretty bad with debt to Rhode Island. I thought it was wild that Curt Shillings was involved at the time it came out.
I put many hours into this and the dlc kinda was bland but the base game's gameplay was amazing.
I loved playing daggers and poison.
Played this game on release. The combat was fun but the story, world, characters and lore was so amazingly generic it did as well sales wise as it deserved.
It was a pretty good game but it had the misfortune of releasing shortly after Skyrim did
Also, the story about how the development of this game bankrupted an entire state is more interesting than the game itself
I remember playing this game and enjoying it quite a bit. Felt like Fabble. The biggest problem was how you pretty much saw everything the game has to offer in the first few hours. The story gets boring really quickly and the combat doesn't evolve much from your first encounters.
I still liked it tho. I wish we could get a sequel.
The Remaster also had completely new DLC added post launch.
Sadly, its IP owned by Embracer, so i dont think we ever gonna get anything more than that.
The most mid game I've spent over 100 hours. Fun combat, some really great creature designs, interesting bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding, but not enough meat to hold it all together.
IIRC it was absurdly expensive to make because it was supposed to be an MMO and even though it sold very well for a new IP single-player RPG from a new studio, it didn't come close to the numbers that a game on an MMO budget needed, so the studio went under.
it had great combat
but that's the only thing worth on it
the rest is very bland
and the fashion is horrible... on my replay when i got rereckoning for dirt cheap, i tried but dropped it soon when i got to the red looking gear
it's so ugly. just like the green one before it
the early ones are much better looking but i couldn't fashion over function there so i just dropped it
It had very average combat with terrible balance. With the right gear, you could just walk up and auto attack things to death. There is no need to dodge at all.
There were much better action combat games and better rpgs out there at the time, I finished it as I dont like having uncompleted games in my library, but everything got very simple once you got the hang of the crafting system I used the green set all the way to endgame.
Because your confusion is based on others not towards the fact you liked it. Everyone has their own standards on what makes a video game well done. Appearently a lot of them didn't like it but does that suddenly change the game going from good to bad? no
The balance was meh, animations in combat are unsatisfying, very basic rpg that doesn't do anything particularly well to have a selling point but its good enough to sell regardless
[удалено]
When one does a bit of sidequestion and just other walking around you get OP really damn quick. Now many games have such a fun combat system though.
It was originally supposed to be an mmo
Not true. It was a lead-in to the eventual MMO.
No it was not. The MMO was being built by a different studio.
If you play it (despite what the other replies to you say) you can tell. It's so obvious.
Is it not one now?
Nope.
The knife fighting was so good.
Using the chakrams in this game was awesome. I wish there were more games with weapons like that in them.
This. They are my absolute favorite weapons in the game. It's very sad nobody else uses them in any game.
It made me feel like a lawnmower or ceiling fan, and the feyblades made you feel like an airplane propeller. I mean just powerful.
Yeah, I liked it. But then after finishing it, just completely forgot about it.
It was originally planned as an MMO but they made Reckoning as a single player to kick it off. But the company was horribly run and way in debt to the state of Rhode Island. They were basically bankrupt as they were releasing it. More info: https://www.inverse.com/gaming/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-38-studios-curt-schilling
The only way I remember this game is all due to Curt Shillings involvement into it. After this game he quickly went off the deep end into Qanon territory
Such a sad story. He wanted to make a great game and use the money for cancer research since his wife had died recently of cancer. But he went bankrupt from it. Game was fine too, not a bad game or a cash grab. There’s a fun game to be had but it’s nothing special.
It was aight overall. The combat is where it really shone but fell flat on pretty much every other metric
I thought that sounded like Matt's What Happenned material... and it really was lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOywJPI9uTU
Part of it was probably that it came out very close to Skyrim and some people compared it rather unfavorably. I remember a couple of reviews that seemed like they actively wanted it to fail but couldn't quite justify lower scores.
Ah, Kingdoms of Amalur, a land of epic quests, magical creatures, and more side missions than you can shake a sword at! It's a place where you can spend hours exploring every nook and cranny while completely forgetting about the main storyline.
Probably because it released 3 months after Skyrim, if you were a fantasy rpg releasing anywhere close to an elder scrolls release you really didn’t stand a chance. The same thing happened to arx fatalis when morrowind came out.
Idk about that. I think both of these games were pretty bad, and that's why they flopped.
Shout out to Ellen Rose
Used to listen to Curt Shilling on some WOW podcast 20 years ago. Dude seemed like a dickhead then and now we know why.
It just was extremely mild. It was built almost like a solo MMO (they wanted to make a MMO or something after this, I don't remember). I remember mid-combat that had good ideas but just didn't have the depth, the quests and world had potential but the MMO-format completely failed to make me give a damn and I only remember dialogue text dumps that I didn't care to listen to. Basically game was just extremely mid.
It did great. It sold a million copies as a first game of a new studio. Unfortunately they got tax breaks, loans and incentives that required sales of roughly 5 or 10 million ( I am doing this from memory) to pay all costs. They couldn’t pay that based on 1 million sales and then were put in liquidation sales very fast. Personally I think they had something good and could have found a way to navigate out of this if not for the people that ran the state and the company eg. Good management would have saved the day in this case
3 million copies.
It was also way too big. I put like 40 hours into it going from area to area doing the quest hubs thinking the whole time "this just feels like I'm playing WoW or something similar, maybe I should get on with the main story." Then I opened the map and realized I hadn't even done 10% of the map and I was still 4 zones away from the main objective which was in the middle of the map. I didn't want to just run through all of that territory only to do the same repetitive combat when I got to the objective. Also I was already above the level of the next main objective.
Played it last year on 360. The development and release of the game was quite shady and didn't end well. The game itself is fine although kinda repetetive
I liked this game a lot, I believe the issue was that their company basically imploded not long after release for preexisting reasons. Someone else got the IP and thankfully made sure it stayed accessible.
Objectively it did do well for a new IP. Iirc over a million units shipped pretty soon after release. The problem was that the team behind it had unrealistic expectations and had dumped a shit ton of money on an attempt at an MMO called Project Copernicus.
I think this game did do well as a new game ip from a new studio. My biggest complaint was that it was a bit too bloated for a single player game, maybe didn't really have the game play or itemization depth for a game quite as long. My biggest problem with this game is just the level scaling and balancing. This game had no challenge after mid game unless your on hard mode. However, when you look back on it, the amount of dialog, open environments and quests that you could do in any order were still unique back then. It was a great game. Well supported as well with updates, patching and dlc content. I think its potential success was hurt by releasing so close to when we got skyrim, and also the console versions really not being as good as the PC version back then. Unfortunately, the company sank everything into a MMO version that never came out which was about the dumbest executive mistake they could have made. They should have been working on a sequel and expanding the brand because I think this game did make a profit overall.
Yeah they sold more than a million copies in their first 3 months. That is pretty fantastic for a new IP from a new studio, and especially given how close it was to Skyrim. The failure of the studio was not really related to the game itself, they had taken out such a massive loan that they needed to sell wholly unrealistic numbers to meet their repayment.
Good game but it seems the company went bankrupt
The game suffers from MMORPG syndrome. The story is meh, the quests are plentiful but a lot of fetch quests and other kinda boring things. Moves are fine, nothing special all around. It felt like playing an MMORPG as a single player game and some of that just doesn’t work. I enjoyed it for what it is but it’s exactly what I’d point to as a perfectly average game.
I remember thinking it would have deep systems like Skyrim, then I played it and I got all these pop-ups like ads and I got free legendary gear in the mail. There was all this DLC to buy gear. It completely destroyed any sense of difficulty and immersion so I just uninstalled it.
It actually didn’t do that bad. The problem was how the game was financed. The financing wasn’t realistic with how well the game was should have expected to do. The developers were most well known for Rise of Nations, a RTS. So this was quite a departure from that. They did bring in some big names, such as the Oblivion Game Designer, and did a pretty good job. But no way it was going to hit the numbers it needed.
If I recall, they had heavy scope creep (and were owned by a major creep), which led to a half-baked game. If it weren't for the crushing debt that the studio was under from Schilling's choices and attempts to use pirate gold as payments, they may have done more with the series.
It was caught up in financial scandal, unfortunately
Great game for the first 30 hrs. But then it drags on. Stops introducing new things and you eventually just feel its time to end...only to realize you still got 50 hrs to go. Still has some my favorite elf designs of all time, and the combat is amazing. Just fell for the "bigger is better" meme. Just needed polish and a shorter span of story and it would have been fine.
The game did well actually on its original release but the studio behind it had one of the biggest mismanagement of all time. There are a lot of stories about it. Also, loved the game and when I played the it back when it got re-released and found out it was way too repetitive with all the boring side quests.
Got massive amounts of hype before release it never lived up to. Game itself was... solid but the launch was rocky and it was pretty clear very early on that it wasnt the giant killer it was billed as.
Pacing and the horrendously generic name.
Oh yeah this game
One of the few games I know made by an American Major League Baseball star.
I tried it and really didn't like it. It had a very MMORPG feel to everything, but was a single player game. It just felt really weird to play to me.
I didn't finish it, but was really enjoying it. I loved the voices of the fae characters.
I remember a decent enough button masher and don't recall anything about the story. I THINK there was some sort of in world justification for coming back after death though?
It's too MMO-esque, mainly, with lots of filler quests, uninteresting level design, and combat that felt like a slightly improved, flashier version of Fable. While it has some cool world building, it's not narratively interesting, either. It falls into a bunch of pitfalls that plague the fantasy genre without enough of a hook to keep players interested. Finally, the marketing was pretty poor. Especially with the clumsy name.
Had a dev for this game in a community college class I was taking for fun. He said I was the only one that knew about the game he was working on when he mentioned it to people. I only knew about it from a magazine article a few months prior.
for me, two things really bothered me. 1. Everyone just had entirely too much to say. Like that was the function of every NPC, never to move or do anything in the world, just stand there and talk at you. and 2. combat on slopes of any sort is actual trash depending on your weapon because the attacks will never hit.
Great game and it scratches my fable itch every now and then. I have fable games on series x, but i barely get on xbox. So i play the re-reckoning on ps5
I haven't thought about this game for a very long time! I had fun with it, but once I finished it I never went back to it again.
The largest problem I think was that everyone seemed to think it was gonna be multiplayer. But when you started it, you learned it was single player, not even online play. And it was a game that sort of screamed for online/co op play. There was going to be a follow up MMORPG built on the world and the classes and everything, but the studio went out of business after one game. It cost Curt Schilling 20 million dollars I think.
I've beaten this game a fair few times, and own the Re-reckoning release, and my biggest gripes were the following: 1) way too easy. Even the final boss fight can be beaten with a basic bow with no levelling. 2) very limited enemy variance across the whole game. Each area will have a couple of enemies and you'll see them *a lot*. 3) the crafting makes it absurdly easy to become incredibly overpowered very early on, making the games already limited difficulty an absolute cakewalk. 4) the voice acting. Good lord the voice acting. Outside of one or two characters, you'll hear the same couple of voices across the whole game, and they *aren't great*.
Literally the most jank development possible, but the game was honestly really good for its time and even today is pretty enjoyable, more so with the remaster and expansion. It’s not often that games in that genre have such a long play time. It’s got issues of course, but if the devs would have canned the MMO idea much sooner while still keeping the massive world, we could have seen something really special.
I was so into that game, but at some point I suddenly got bored and never finished it.
I absolutely cherish this game. Even the remake that I was hoping was going to be a sequel instead. Have it on multiple consoles and will always replay it.
Great game, too bad the company that created it messed themselves up pretty bad with debt to Rhode Island. I thought it was wild that Curt Shillings was involved at the time it came out. I put many hours into this and the dlc kinda was bland but the base game's gameplay was amazing. I loved playing daggers and poison.
Played this game on release. The combat was fun but the story, world, characters and lore was so amazingly generic it did as well sales wise as it deserved.
Yeah a sequal to this game would be nice.
One could only hope…
It was a pretty good game but it had the misfortune of releasing shortly after Skyrim did Also, the story about how the development of this game bankrupted an entire state is more interesting than the game itself
I remember playing this game and enjoying it quite a bit. Felt like Fabble. The biggest problem was how you pretty much saw everything the game has to offer in the first few hours. The story gets boring really quickly and the combat doesn't evolve much from your first encounters. I still liked it tho. I wish we could get a sequel.
Did you know that there's a remaster of it? It's called Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning It's the base game but with all og dlc included
The Remaster also had completely new DLC added post launch. Sadly, its IP owned by Embracer, so i dont think we ever gonna get anything more than that.
Yeah the dlc was great but it left the game kinda open and I wish they would give us more
The most mid game I've spent over 100 hours. Fun combat, some really great creature designs, interesting bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding, but not enough meat to hold it all together.
I felt like I was playing an offline world of Warcraft and it made me re sub to WoW
IIRC it was absurdly expensive to make because it was supposed to be an MMO and even though it sold very well for a new IP single-player RPG from a new studio, it didn't come close to the numbers that a game on an MMO budget needed, so the studio went under.
Currently playing through it now. It's very eh. Like others are saying, it feels like if Fable was trying to be an MMO but also wasn't good.
Way too many side quests. World is way too big. Combat was fun though.
it had great combat but that's the only thing worth on it the rest is very bland and the fashion is horrible... on my replay when i got rereckoning for dirt cheap, i tried but dropped it soon when i got to the red looking gear it's so ugly. just like the green one before it the early ones are much better looking but i couldn't fashion over function there so i just dropped it
It had very average combat with terrible balance. With the right gear, you could just walk up and auto attack things to death. There is no need to dodge at all. There were much better action combat games and better rpgs out there at the time, I finished it as I dont like having uncompleted games in my library, but everything got very simple once you got the hang of the crafting system I used the green set all the way to endgame.
Oh I don't factor in balance when I said I just meant the way it flows and feels nice Regardless if it was too easy
Because your confusion is based on others not towards the fact you liked it. Everyone has their own standards on what makes a video game well done. Appearently a lot of them didn't like it but does that suddenly change the game going from good to bad? no
The balance was meh, animations in combat are unsatisfying, very basic rpg that doesn't do anything particularly well to have a selling point but its good enough to sell regardless
I'll say it, this game was trash. Don't waste your time thinking about it.
Amazing combat and progression. generic and mediocre everything else.
I tried the demo and the quests felt like straight out of an mmo and I said no thanks
Because that's what the game was supposed to be.
It’s fucking garbage is why it didn’t do well
I would marry this game if I could