I’m not usually dazzled by graphics but KoA looks amazing. If its anything close to Skyrim, I think I would enjoy it very much. I wished Skyrim had a bit more color and KoA seems to be similar in gameplay but the developers actually used the full color palette.
Wow.
I’m not disagreeing, but you’re about six months late to the party. That game came out, did well, and outlived the doom of its own company amid infighting and the fury of the Rhode Island. (Or maybe Delaware. Whatever. Don’t care enough to look it up.)
However, you’re right. It’s actually a very nice-looking game, and one which uses a vibrant color scheme and some quite varied scenes. The only difficulty is that the game does get kinda tedious at points, as the auto-scaling means it’s rarely too difficult but often lacks intriguing challenge. Plus the game is really long if you actually go through everything. The DLC isn’t great, although Legend of Dead Kel may be worth it.
All said, it’s a great first effort - but we’re never going to see anything else from the studio.
I’ve heard several people opine that Legends of Dead Kel is fantastic and throw around phrases like “Best DLC I’ve played for any game”. I haven’t played it myself though. KoA is one of those games I bought cheap (you can find it on sale for $7-$10 these days if you wait) and sits waiting for me to really get into it.
I still have games I bought a year ago that I haven’t touched. I’m a slow gamer :o
I bought it recently on a deal and still haven’t played it. When I got the demo (prior to game launch) I was disheartened to see that the difficulty level was locked at “normal” because I couldn’t get past some big monster in it, and I’m not the best gamer. Now I get the whole game - and there is no difficulty level setting at all?! 
I mentioned this in another thread - when I was downloading it from Green Man Gaming, my Avast AV software flagged it as potentially dangerous because there were few to no previous instances of their users downloading it before. :smack: (I clicked “allow” and it continued fine.)
i got it when it first came out for xbox 360. it just felt like i was playing the world’s loneliest MMORPG.
Exactly this. The game is very pretty and the combat is cool, but the quests are pulled straight from the pages of old MMO tropes. Gather these, go here, drop these off. Over and over. I didn’t play much.
I’m a cultural masochist who pretty much refuses to put down a book, movie or game until I’ve finished it, on the reasoning that if I do, the piece of crap wins. This one came very close to winning. World’s loneliest MMORPG is a nice and accurate summary. On the plus side, it is very pretty and the soundtrack is excellent.
I tried it for about a couple hours at a friends’ place. It really did feel like playing *WoW *solo, both from a plot standpoint and from a game mechanics standpoint.
This is not a glowing endorsement.
Had way more fun with Risen 2 or* Divinity 2*, as far as colourful RPGs go. I’d stay away from Two World 2 though - that’s another solo MMO I put down after a couple hours at the most.
Out of curiosity, did any of you play Final Fantasy XII? That game felt like they were trying to emulate an MMO, successfully, at least for me, and I loved it. Did any of you who felt like KoA was lonely feel the same way about FFXII? If its anything like FFXII, I think I would like it a lot
I did, and I actually liked it (even though I never finished it, although I’m not sure I could tell you why).
I’d say the difference is that FFXII betrays its being “just” a solo MMO via attempting to either remove/streamline the repetitive bullshit aspect of MMOs or refine it, make it as seamless as possible or even injecting some tricks to the works (e.g. series of the same enemy yielding more loot, enemies not strictly tied to the average level of a zone…). Plus as an amateur programmer, I gotta say I loved toying around with gambits and trying to make them do more and more elaborate stuff, stomping “bugs” etc… Yes, FFXII had *some *aggravating unfun bullshit like the 1/200.000 chance chest drops, the obtuse hunt & rare monster conditions, the ha-ha-you-fucked-yourself grinding towards bazaar packages - all things apparently designed either to piss off completionists or to sell gameguides ; but all these things were (and felt) strictly optional - you didn’t need to wade through them to engage with the game and doing so didn’t even really make you that much more powerful or efficient. There was a good game underneath the bullshit.
KoA on the other hand felt like it positively revelled in the “joyless grind” aspect of MMOs. Plus FFXII had an interesting plot and cast (yes, even whiney weird-textured Vaas) when KoA felt like a perfect storm of bland clichés, once again deliberately revelling in its blandness for maximum calculated appeal as assessed by beancounters and marketroids.
Finally, while most of the combat in FFXII was a mindless slog (which is where automated gambits truly shined), the bosses and hunts and so forth did require some good, old-school FF tactics ; some had neat gimmicks and so forth. KoA is pretty much just mindlessly spamming buttons, cycling through the same attack routine over and over and waiting on cooldowns. Very much like WoW combat that way :p.
I dunno - maybe I’m just being unfair to the game, I really didn’t play it all that long, but that’s what it felt like to me at the time.