Sunday 19 August, 2012

I don't think I've ever written this much on one game, but it's such a long one. After I finished it, I looked online to see what else you could do since you get to keep playing after you've beaten the main quest, and people were talking about spending 200 hours and stuff on KoA. Like they tried all three classes and the hybrids, crafted all the best weapons and armor for each class, found all the lorestones, did all the quests, etc. I think there are so many better (action)RPGs out there, I couldn't justify doing anything after the main quest that wasn't challenging. Unfortunately there aren't any special secret hard bosses, and I reached the level cap of 40 before beating the game which means nothing would ever be difficult (nothing was ever difficult in the first place either), so there really wasn't anything left for me to do.

Kingdoms of Amalur was a really solid experience. It didn't innovate anywhere. Just a jack-of-all-trades action RPG with what I think is an excellent story in an excellent universe. I've talked about how average every system in the game is in previous entries, and it stays that way to the end. For skills, I ended up maxing out or near-maxing out a bunch of them, and they simply aren't that useful. For the talent tree, I got all the sorcery spells maxed out, and then went into the might tree for some nifty bonus health and a cool berserk mode for when I dropped below 25% (which never happened, lol). So I ended up unlocking a couple levels of the warrior destiny for going through the might tree and a few levels of the battlemage destiny for having sorcery/might talents.

As far as the leveling goes, I've mentioned how unbalanced it is, your level/zone for example. Simply by doing quests, I outleveled all the zones. When I decided to quit doing side quests, the zones caught up a little bit, but even by skipping virtually all side quests in the Plains of Erathell and Klurikon and Alabastra, I STILL hit the level cap of 40 before the end! If someone could please explain to me how that should even be possible, I would love to hear it. What that says to me as a consumer is "Hey, we inflated the amount of content in this game so we can say it has 200 hours of gameplay, when really you'll hit the level cap and beat the game in 50. But do go around and needlessly do 100 more quests because they're there." And I swear, the entire zone of Detyr needs to be wiped from the game. The others were magnitudes more interesting. I really disagree with the people who called the story generic and forgettable. There is SO MUCH detail behind the Fae and much of their culture is very fleshed out. I feel these people didn't spend much time chatting with the NPCs, because that's where you really feel the depth of the lore. Again, EVERY NPC in the game says DIFFERENT things. It's amazing. Alternatively, people who degrade the story definitely have grounds to do so if Detyr is their main source because the gnome mining operations in the desert is such a played out thing in fantasy.

Turns out I was correct in predicting how the game would flow through Klurikon and Alabastra. You do indeed travel south through these zones with your powerful 4 or 5 super-allies to the heart of the Tuatha. It is much faster paced, less side quests (there is one more faction, which was a fun story to play through), less crap to explore. I do question how there are so many little camps of humans and good Fae in Tuatha lands. If they've had Mel Senshir under siege for 10 years and their army has been growing becoming more fierce, then I'm not sure I believe that there are so many human and Fae camps in Klurikon and Alabastra. I believe the Tuatha would have pretty much exterminated them all. But I guess you gotta have side quests. No, actually, you don't. It is possible to make an even more interesting main quest without 'fetch me 3 pineapples' or 'kill 8 garden snakes' or whatever variety, in order to use all the space and cool places in these zones.

Here's my biggest thing at the end though. This whole game is about your character being fateless. Everyone else is bound by fate. You, however, can actually change other peoples' fates since you don't have one and are free of it. So throughout the game, they play on this idea so you get some different outcomes by choosing one way or another for parts of the main quest and for faction quests. It's typically basic light side/dark side type stuff, but I always appreciate the effort. But at the end of the game when you have to go stop the God that Gadflow is summoning, you have no choice! You have to stop it! You can't say "I will ally myself with the evil god and herald the destruction of everything! Hahahahahaha!" WHY!? You've let me make some important choices throughout this game which is ABOUT changing fate and changing the world, yet you won't let me change the final outcome?! I mean, technically then you couldn't continue to play the game afterward because the world would be destroyed, but maybe then they could have just replaced all the NPCs with Tuatha or something. And I wouldn't mind it if they'd let me destroy the world and then put me back in the normal world after beating the game. Like, I can deal with that inconsistency. Anyway, sort of lame there.

And there you have it.

Most games (I think pretty much all of them) don't allow you to play in the aftermath of a major end-game decision. I think a major part of RPG design should be to create these modified worlds for the players to explore after making a critical ending decision. At that point the player should be allowed to drone on doing random new side quests in the "new world".. It would certainly be much more interesting than being forced back into the world pre-end-game to finish side quests.. When I finished New Vegas, the narrator was explaining this huge power shift amongst all factions in the area, and he spoke of new battles and all these cool events/battles. But all these were shown on still images. I really wish I could go back into the world and see it unfold for myself, but nope!.. I had to load the game from a SYS save from the point just before I started end game. Playing in the aftermath of an RPG's end game would be the ultimate reward for the player.

You're totally right. How much better would it be to get to play in the world you changed instead of just being told what it is like or thrust back into some weird post-end-game limbo where most of the NPCs aren't aware that anything happened at all. Talk about motivation for finishing the game too!