Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning - remaster from THQ Nordic with Fatesworn expansion

[sullynathan]

I remember wanting to play this one and before you know it almost a decade has passed.

 

[Zeriel]

To think they could have kept making alright singleplayer games if Curt Schilling hadn't bankrupted himself making a shit MMO that would never see the light of day.

 

[Infinitron]

To think they could have kept making alright singleplayer games if Curt Schilling hadn't bankrupted himself making a shit MMO that would never see the light of day.

Well IIRC, they might have shut down before that if Curt Schilling's company hadn't acquired the developers (Big Huge Games) to make their a game a tie-in product for his MMO. So maybe they were always doomed.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Will GOG get to pick up on this. Steam collection is big enough.

 

[Tavar]

I just stumbled over some more details on the steam community page. The most interesting parts are:

Will old save games work?
There might be a use at your own risk converter tool but we cannot promise anything yet.

Will you rebalance the game or "only" focus on delivering a remaster as close to the original game as possible?
We are still working on this but we are aware of some imbalances and want to fix those.

What exactly does "refined gameplay" mean?
Mostly balancing tweaks to make the game ‘feel’ better.

So, they are at least doing something on the balance side. Still very wishy washy, though.

 

[Zeriel]

Frankly I think they'd be better off making two rulesets and being able to switch between them in the menu, but I suspect that would be too much work. It would solve the problem that will exist otherwise, though, which is that there will ALWAYS be purists who prefer the original version and want the new graphics.

 

[DalekFlay]

I vaguely remember this game having really bad pop-in, even at high settings, so hopefully they extend that out along with whatever texture shit they're doing.

 

[Mexi]

I played the demo. Fuck me, what a piece of shit game.

 

[IDtenT]

Playing this again because of the remaster, and there are certainly a lot of bugs that were never squashed. The game had zero post-release support.

I was a fan of the idea at the time, but I never got very far. It takes the same content / time consumption is everything philosophy of Sacred 2 and is just way too long with too many side quests.

I'm interested to see what THQ does with it. There is definitely scope for improvement, but I suspect that they will not tweak the game hard enough for my liking.

 

[IDtenT]

So it actually plays better than I remember, but maybe I was just burned by the hype.

I really hope they fix the level scaling. Been playing on Hard and just entered an area I previously entered by accident and it's a chore to kill one-shot enemies that pose no risk.

 

[Tavar]

Yes, that's without a doubt the most pressing issue they need to address. Sadly, it is not clear yet if/how they will solve it. I just noticed that the game is listed on GoG which makes me very happy as I hate steam with a burning passion.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[V_K]

I love how the trailer says "Play your way" and then shows nothing but melee combat.

 

[PirateScum]

Looks same as the original but with less bloom.

 

[Narushima]

They really called it "Re-Reckoning"? I thought that was a joke...
And it's as ugly as the Fable games.

 

[Silverfish]

All of the Nordic re-releases have stupid names "Warmastered Edition", "Deathinitive Edition" and the like.

 

[Tavar]

So, as we only have one more week until the game is released, I did some hunting for some more information on the planned gameplay changes. I found the following on the game's discord:

Graphic changes are very hard to see on the current gameplay out there that is for sure and i agree with you on that, that being said KoA to start with didn't have bad graphics so the fact we made things sharper, more clear, textures and lightning touches and so on won't really show up on a video due to a spectrum of reasons.

What you should look at is all the other things we have done on top of that such as new mode Very hard, fixed Loot issues, fixed lock level issues, added 8 skills instead of just 4, Hud scaling and much more. So when you DO play the game you will notice all the extra nice stuff that you cannot see in the videos yourself but you got the game due to all the things we did improve specially QoL´s

Still quite vague, but it's progress. The graphic improvements are of limited interest to me as the original game still looks fine in 4K (which sadly breaks the HUD in the original version). The ability to play it properly in 4K is all I need in terms of graphic improvements.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Mastermind]

I hope they add more skills, the game's biggest issue was that the skill trees were way too small considering its size and scope. I also hope they return the difficulty to the demo difficulty, which should be easier to swallow with the popularity of souls-likes these days.

 

[Mastermind]

I love how the trailer says "Play your way" and then shows nothing but melee combat.

It's the might trailer, it says so in the title.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

This game doesn't need a remaster. It needs a remake where the whole thing is different and called something else.

 

[Gerrard]

Did they change the camera to a normal 3rd person one? I actually tried playing this again recently and I just can't get over how bad the camera feels with mouse and keyboard.

 

[Sykar]

I just read that owners of the original must still pay full price. For essentially some graphics updates and some balance and bug fixes.

 

[Bara]

Full price from original owners for only minor graphical tweaks and small rebalancing without any new content (unless you never bought the dlc) is such a hard sell.

I guess they really just wanted to sell the base game all over again and then the new expansion on top of that instead of bundling them.

 

[vmar]

The addition of a very hard mode and fixed scaling issues has me interested, I remember having some fun with this but giving up because it was piss easy.