Kingdoms of Amalur - A single player MMORPG

Kingdoms of Amalur managed to seamlessly merge MMORPG and single player RPG together. Is that a good thing? No. What it ends up is a game where the quests are stupid fetch quests, boring quest hubs, quests having nothing to do with the main storyline. Hell I had more fun doing MMO quests than the quests in KoA. MMO are about playing with others while single player RPGs are about the story and following the story of the hero as he/she does shit. When KoA was announced everyone was excited to see big names such as Ken Rolston, the lead developer of Morrowind and Oblivion, R. A. Salvatore an actual real fantasy writer, and Todd McFarlane a comic book artist. Such big names for such a small game. Too many chefs in the kitchen maybe. But the worst part of this is, to start this company the city of Rhode Island gave them a 75 million loan to make this game and another MMORPG based on KoA. Not only does this suck they are simultaneously making KoA and KoA:MMO at the same time not even sure if KoA would be a hit or not. If they do suck and go under, it would be Rhode Island that loses money. Too bad.

KoA plays like an action RPG. It sounds really nice because action RPGs are fun as shit but there is a flaw. All the ideas for KoA are alright, but every one of them is flawed in a way. There are many types of weapons and magic and you can reset your hero at any time by talking to an NPC. The monsters you fight in this game are the same from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. There is no variance other than boosting their health or damage. They do the same predictable moves and attacks. Difficulty does not rise. The game itself is the easiest action game I have ever seen. Blacksmithing breaks that game even more by making your character invincible. Even without blacksmithing it is easy. You keep learning new moves, the monsters never do. Big bosses you would think would be hard, but they made it so easy you can beat it with your eyes closed. Mainly because they don't want people who suck at games to not be able to finish! Even on the hardest difficulty a giant boss the size of a city would bite you for maybe 10 damage. While a regular Niskaru Bloodhunter would do 100-150 damage a hit and hit 10 times by the time the big boss takes to bite again. Why so easy? Its not like you have to fight the boss anyways. You automatically win when you go into fate mode because you automatically do an execution and kill it.

After playing around for an hour you notice that combat is boring and repetitive, what about the quests? Think of this game like an MMO. You have quest hubs where you can collect boring side quests. These include, killing 10 creatures, collecting boxes, deliver shit, and other boring fucking shitty quests you see in MMOs. You go into dungeon that are nothing but a long hallway as you stab your way though everything, reach the end and then turn around and go out back the way you came in. You must think not every quest is like that. No every quest is like that. There are like 500 side quests in the game and they are all exactly like that. I managed to get halfway into the game before I gave up on all side quests. They don't do anything but give you exp/rewards. They add nothing to the story, to the lore, to the world. They are just pointless exp/reward farms. Another thing about the game is loot is randomized. Like a MMO where you have random statistics on your gear. These drop randomly from monsters, looted from chests, or bought from NPCs. These can be broken down by blacksmiths and salvaged for parts to craft something. In the first quarter of the game I crafted a weapon that was stronger than anything I could find in the game already. And it was just a tier 2 dagger. When I reached the final tier I was so powerful that nothing could stand in my way. You don't really need to pick up those garbage to salvage anyways. The best crafting loot are from killing harmless crabs and cows. Apparently dried guts added to anything grants critical %. As a rogue I have bonus critical damage from talents, skills, passives, gears, everything. I crafted all my gear with bonus critical % and bonus critical damage. My backstabs were doing 98k a hit when monsters at the end of the game had around 2k-3k health. My regular swings had 100% critical rate and I was doing 1.5-2k a hit, 3k if I use my bow. I had a 15% chance to fully heal myself everytime I swing my daggers, which are fast as shit. Do I ever die? No.

The main quest has you traveling all over the world and you may find something called faction quests on your way. There are 5 factions in the world of Amalur. The House of Ballads of the summer fae, the Warsworn warrior guild, the Travelers thief guild, some dumbshit mage guild I can't remember, and the House of Sorrows of the winter fae. You would think these quests would be better than the average but it really isn't. The only decent one is the House of Ballads, the rest are just standard quests you find in any MMO. The mage guild ends suddenly for no reason and you become the archmage for no fucking reason. The real Archmage gets imprisoned in a prison and suffers for all eternity and no one gives a flying fuck to rescue him. They just replace him with you and you go on your merry way while he's imprisoned in the mage guild. Great story eh? Warsworn you follow some dumb random chick around all day and then suddenly a bad guy appears and is like "kill your friends and you get power!" I was like fuck off I don't wanna do more quests and I turned around and left and then suddenly I was the hero of the Warsworn, a Truesworn even though I didn't do anything to the fucking Niskaru Lord. Travelers you go around following orders from some dipshit until a fucking plot twist sends you to frame the Heirophant. GUESS WHAT!? She knows of your plan to frame her and what does she do? Tell you to frame your friend instead of her. What do you do? Frame her. She gets framed and the quests magically end. House of Sorrows you follow a bunch of dipshit winter fae around who wants you to find the guy who stole a milennia of sorrows and is going to use it to cause people to kill themselves from sorrow. Turns out the guy has been tricking you and you managed to kill the entire House of Sorrows from your dumb naiveté.  You go around find out that dumb chick that has been following you the whole time was the reincarnation of the weeping king and she uses her magical powers to seal the sorrow in the magical fae world and you become the last remaining member in the House of Sorrows. Way to fuck up everything asshole. Better to not bother getting involved in the first place.

These quests have you traveling all over the fucking world. The worst part is the zones are like MMO zones. Pretty to look at but really nothing there. You walk around with nothing to interact with and barely any monsters around. You find random quest hubs or quest areas and dungeons. Other than that traveling around is like going around in WoW without a mount or flight point. You get to fast travel by clicking the map on a location you've been to before, thank god, but that doesn't help when you only need to visit a place once because its far as shit away and take like 20 minutes to walk there. The main quest basically have you walk around and follow some dumb slut elf and some drunken loser around all game then fight and kill a God. The End.

There are also quite a few bugs I found. Using the reckoning mode before a cutscene will cause the monsters to freeze there forever unable to loot or kill them with just the F button highlighted when you walk close. Hitting F does nothing they are just stuck there in limbo for all eternity. Using different reckoning moves can get monsters stuck in walls or the sky where it is impossible to loot them, while other times reckoning mode makes you end up on top of a dead monsters making you unable to walk around like in ME2 where touching walls make you walk upwards and get stuck in the walls. Its like that for monsters instead. Backstabbing sometimes cause you to backstab a different enemy than the one you have selected. For example, there were two kobolds one at the other end of the room and one infront of me. I sneak over backstab and a mini cutscene appears where I grab the guy throw him on the ground and stab him on the neck. Next thing you know the guy at the end of the room explodes in blood and flies away and dies while the guy infront of me start stuttering fading in and out of existence like some kind of existence seizure. I go what the fuck? And I backstabbed again killing him this time.

The only positive thing I can think of in this game is that gear looks the same on men and women. You don't have chainmail bikinis. I made sure to play a female so I could see for myself. People said it was a positive portrayal of women. I thought that was a right step. Then you have the loser Alyn Shir the slut elf who walks around wearing nothing but leather bandages with half her ass exposed. The developers made sure to add ass jiggle physics like breast physics and its the first and only game to have ass physics in a game. What the fuck?

Overall the lore had potential, the combat was fun for the first hour then got boring, the quests were a mess, the storyline was interesting enough to finish but not memorable or good at all. Worst part is they claimed the game would take 200 hours to finish without doing any side quests at all. WHAT THE FUCK!? Its not even 200 hours if you do all the side quests in the world. Are the testers so bad that they fucking take 200 hours to do something or they shitting out their mouth. I think its the latter. This game felt more like a MMO that halfway went "you know people might not wanna pay 15 bucks a month for this" and changed to a single player. The worst part? They ARE making a KoA:MMO. It is currently in development and has been since KoA started. They are working on it simultaneously. Am I the only one that is going what the fuck? Why would you make an MMO version of a game where you have no idea if anyone wants to play. After this shitfest of a game what makes you think people would want to play KoA:MMO? Its like if Bioware decided to make a DA:MMO while making DA2. Looks like Rhode Island is going to lose 75 million.

Never ever trust reviews on EA games either. They are known for bribing the reviewers.