HomeNewsKingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning
Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning, the MMO for misanthropes, barely needs updating at allSmashing stuff!
Smashing stuff!
I have long describedKingdoms Of Amular: Reckoningas one of my favourite games. It has also been a long time since I checked. And as you can see, despite its status in my gaming life, I still can’t spell its name correctly. AmAlUr. Am-ah-lure.
With the very welcomerecent announcementthat its most recent owners, THQ Nordic, are remastering it, I thought I’d return to give them a few pointers of what needs fixing. And that does not include the troll rolling.
The answer is: surprisingly little. KoA still just damned works. It’s still this utter peculiarity, a sort of solo MMO. It’s made as if all traces of the single-player RPG had been lost in an apocalypse, and had to be reverse engineered based on fossil records andWorld Of Warcraft. And that’s why I love it! It’s WoW for misanthropes, a massive open world RPG with dungeons and fetch quests and level chasing without the awful bother of dreadful other people.
I think the origins of 2012’s KoA have been retrodden enough that we don’t need to go over them again in any detail. In short, a baseball thrower called Curt Schilling borrowed a stunning amount of money from Rhode Island, and then somehow lost it all in the process of his 38 Studios' making a properly good game. That they were intending to make an MMO, and that it involved a gruesome bankruptcy,hundreds of job lossesjust a couple of months after release, and took out Big Huge Games with it, rather sours this further. I’ve honestly never quite gotten my head around what happened, but none of it seems like it was good or happy, and that such a massive and playable game was produced during it all seems miraculous.
Here’s the most important thing: the game barely needs changing. KoA was a third-person action game inside an RPG setting, which certainly confused a fair few on release, but holds up tremendously well. Despite some extremely silly and tiresome people pretending the graphics weren’t good enough on release, the game still looks great eight years on. It’d be lovely to see some texture improvements, and certainly HD versions of the cutscenes, but honestly, it’s a damned pretty game as it is. As for the action, it is a warm knife through soft butter, bursting with energy, and feeling great all the time. Too simple, yes, and gosh I’d welcome tweaking the combat to be a little more Darksidery, but it always feels splendid to bash the enemies to bits. The voice acting is almost all great (apart from some extremely dreadful “Scottish” accents here and there), and goodness me there’s an awful lot of it. Too much? Yes, probably. But too much of a good thing.
What Amalur needs isfixing.
I could write them out just the tidiest list of tweaks they’d ever seen. I’d even draw in little boxes for them to tick as the fixed them. We could be a team on this. Because if you wrongly decided you didn’t like KoA because it wasn’t exactly the same as some other game you liked, there’s no amount of fiddling that’ll turn this into something you’re going to let yourself enjoy. What we need here is for the giant pile of niggly irritants to be patched, so that proper decent people who already love it can return in glory, and a whole new audience of decent-minded folk will feel more immediately welcome.
For instance, creatures showing they’ve dropped loot needs to be instant. That sounds a tiny detail, right? But oh my, it’s infuriating. Kill five creatures in one area, none of them show the loot twinkles, and you run on, only to turn around and see that now three of them are glowing. No! Who’s idea was it to have a delay on that?! Instant twinkles. First item on the list.
Second is getting that quest log fixed. Something went very wrong there, and as soon as you’ve got more than about fifteen quests running (and you’ll likely have thirty at any time), they stop displaying properly, an ever-growing number of buttons and details disappearing the more quest names that are visible in the list. It’ssuchan odd bug, and requires collapsing the list every stinking time to be able to read any useful details about the one you’re pursuing. Bonkers.
Then third is the volume levels. There are all these shrines that tell you lovely poetic details of Amalur’s vast historic lore, but for some reason they’re voiced so quietly you have to crank your speakers, and then make absolutely sure you don’t wander near anything else that makes sounds.
After that, I’m not so fussed, honestly. Those three things are far, far more annoying than they sound when you’re playing. I mean, I suppose I could add a wish that scrolling down the list of new special moves didn’t mean erasing the “new” star before you’re able to see which move it was next to. That’s weird and stupid, but I can cope. What I find myself worrying about far more as I replay this mammoth game is what they might wrongly change for the worse.
And even more important than crate smashing is troll rolling! Please, if nothing else, keep the troll rolling. There’s this weird glitch in the game. Most creatures on their deaths lose their status as a physics-affected object. They freeze in place in their slumped form, and can be walked through, to prevent the player getting tied up in dead bodies during big fights. But for some reason the game’s larger creatures have about ten seconds of physics grace bestowed upon their corpses, and as such can be bumped and pushed and rolled. This is fun enough on its own, rolling a troll down a hill. But it gets even better because when that few seconds is up, they freeze in whatever position they’re in. So thus is born the game of trying to pose these creatures in the silliest form possible. It’s not simple, either! Not knowing exactly when they’ll freeze, and their being big, lumbering blobs, makes capturing the perfect moment a proper challenge. God I love it.
Can I still play Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning?
Yup! Works right out of the tin, no need for patching for modern resolutions, nothing. An odd choice for remastering, you might correctly note.
Should I still play Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning?
Yes! Don’t be like the awful people, be like the brilliant people who can’t stand the awful people! Amalur is a single-player interpretation of the MMO (albeit one that was originally intended to be an MMO), and has the best crate smashing in gaming history.
John Walker was one of the original creators of RPS, before he was fired for being too great. He now runsBuried Treasure, a site dedicated to unknown indie games. You cansupport his Patreon!
