3 very good points about Amalur Raised on Podcasts this week…crossposting this to the Amalur thread as well.
- On JTS, Bill Abner made a brilliant observation on why the game is so easy. Many people have noted that in KoA:R, it is far too easy to “outlevel” the area you’re in and all too possible to end up doing quests that have you fighting greyed-out monsters. This event seems to have baffled the folks at 38 Studios and Big Huge, with Schilling himself mentioning that they never expected people to do every side-quest in each area.
What Abner noted was that this is entirely reflective of the MMO-mindset of 38 Games here. In an MMO, a player does content until the monsters and quests in an area start to turn green and grey (meaning: they get too easy and offer too little XP reward) and then the player moves on. Bill points out that this seems to be the way KoA:R was playtested and balanced, with the folks at Big Huge and 38 expecting that the overwhelming majority of players would play the game this way.
The problem, obviously, is that folks who play single-player CRPGs don’t play that way at all. People who play single player games tend to be completionists and thorough and that tendency seems to have taken the developer here aback.
I thought that was an outstanding point, well-expressed.
- Then from Gamers With Jobs this week, we get a two-fer of good observations. Both are from…gosh, I can’t tell the Seans/Shawns apart there. Both are from whichever of the two didn’t like Amalur much.
The first observation he made is easy, but spot on: the folks who are really liking the game are liking the stat-fiddling, gear looting, skill buildout optimizing part of the game. Again, sounds like the game was geared at MMO-players who tend to play that way and not towards folks who are looking for narrative and story beats in their rpgs.
- The second–and best–observation from Sean/Shawn had to do with the world of Amalur, one that I and so many other players have found to be dull and completely uninteresting “fantasy name generator crap”. I’ve gone on record here as placing the blame for this on Mr. Salvatore, but SeanShawn raises a much better point.
He notes that Salvatore created the world and history–one person on the podcast calls it the “bible” of the world–but that all the quests and narratives in the game itself were written by the developers at Big Huge, and notes that there clearly was a disconnect between the vision of the world and expressing it in the game through interesting quests and story beats.
In other words, think of Skyrim, a game that actually hits narrative pieces so much better than Amalur. The folks who built the Skyrim world are the same ones who designed the quests and figured out how to dole out the story bits; they’re intimately familiar with their setting and characters and world and it shows in the best quest lines in that game. In a game like Witcher 2, the developers are so immersed in and familiar with their game world that they just destroy everyone else’s CRPG by taking the narrative possibilities of the genre to new heights.
In Amalur, there seems to be a huge disconnect between the world designer and the people designing the quests and narratives. The quests and story pieces in the game itself feel like they were put together by guys reading off design documents and timeline/outlines, by guys who never got themselves immersed in their own game world…and it ends up showing in the blandness that leaves a gamer looking for story and character depth wanting.
