I'm about to buy the game, but on steam it seems that only have the remaster available, are there any big differences? And what about optimization? I'm going to play it on my laptop, which has a performance of an rx 550 so i thought maybe the first version would be lightweight to play, would appreciate any tips!

Disclaimer: I'm a Japanese player, and English is not my first language. I'm using a translation tool to write this post, so I apologize if some parts sound unnatural or if I misunderstand any terminology.

EDIT: By the way, looking through everyone’s comments, I realized there was a mistake in the title. It should actually be “finished it after 10 Years.”
I had AI translate the main post for me, but it seems it got a little carried away. sorry.

After finally reaching a stopping point with Fields of Mistria, I decided to start working through some of the games sitting in my backlog.

That game was Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning.

I have a somewhat unusual history with this game.

I first bought the PS3 version when I was in elementary school. I had been deeply impressed by Oblivion, so I started looking for other open-world RPGs, and Kingdoms of Amalur came up. I bought it used, but eventually gave up because I couldn't get into its world or systems.

Years later, I bought it again on PS4 because of nostalgia and because I remembered never finishing it.

I gave up again.

Then I bought it on Switch.

I gave up again.

Now, with Steam being my main gaming platform, I bought it one more time.

And this time, I finally finished it.

So after all these years, I wanted to think about why I kept coming back to this game, but also why I kept putting it down.

What I liked

Amalur's unique world, its towns and landscapes, and especially its combat system are still excellent.

It has a very distinctive fantasy atmosphere, and I think it's rare to find an RPG with quite this particular aesthetic.

The combat is also surprisingly fast and fluid. Compared with Oblivion, Skyrim, and Dragon's Dogma, which I think were some of its most obvious points of comparison at the time, Amalur has a combat system that I personally prefer.

The Reckoning Mode is especially satisfying.

The feeling of suddenly becoming overwhelmingly powerful is great, and the finishing animations are genuinely cool. My favorite is probably the two-handed axe finisher against humanoid enemies.

The story is fairly conventional: a chosen hero, an enemy threatening the world, and so on.

But I actually like the way it justifies the protagonist being special.

In Amalur, fate is absolute. If fate says you will die, you die. If it says you will succeed, you succeed.

The protagonist, however, becomes an existence outside of fate because of a certain event.

So while "the chosen one" is a very familiar concept, using fate itself to explain why the protagonist is special was, in my opinion, a clever idea.

I also found the game relatively stable. There were some minor bugs in side quests, but I never encountered anything that completely blocked my progress through the main story.

Where I think the game has problems

Unfortunately, Amalur also has some very noticeable problems.

The first is the size of the map.

The world is simply too large for a game without mounts or jumping.

Towns and dungeons also feel like they were made one or two sizes larger than necessary. Even though the protagonist can run fairly quickly, there is an enormous amount of time spent simply running from one place to another.

And this becomes even worse with the dungeon design.

One thing I like about Skyrim and Oblivion is that their dungeons are generally designed in a very player-friendly way.

You fight your way through a dungeon, defeat the boss, and then often find a shortcut back to the entrance or an exit that naturally leads you onward.

Amalur often doesn't do this.

There are many dungeons where you defeat the boss and then have to walk all the way back the way you came.

That would already be somewhat annoying.

But remember that everything in this game is huge.

So in a game where your main method of movement is running, the game is effectively making you repeat a long stretch of completely uneventful travel.

It becomes exhausting.

Side quests and exploration

The main story is pretty good, but I have a much harder time defending the side quests.

There are a huge number of them, but most seem to boil down to variations of fetch quests.

Because the world is so large, these quests also create a lot of repetitive travel.

Another problem is that I often couldn't see how completing a side quest actually changed the world.

The game might tell you that something has changed, but when you return to the area, there often isn't much visible evidence of that change.

This also interacts badly with the dungeon design.

Almost every dungeon seems to be connected to a side quest in some way.

So when I discovered a dungeon while exploring, I often felt that entering it immediately wasn't actually useful. There was a good chance I would simply have to come back later when a quest sent me there.

Because of this, exploration gradually stopped feeling like exploration.

It became more like:

Find fast travel point → unlock it → move on.

By the later parts of the game, especially after crossing the sea, I almost completely stopped doing side quests and focused on finishing the main story.

The worldbuilding problem

This is probably one of the biggest reasons I had trouble getting into Amalur when I was younger.

The world itself is very rich and distinctive.

The problem is how the game communicates that world to the player.

There is an enormous amount of lore, and there are proper nouns everywhere.

The Lorestones, for example, explain the history of the world in a theatrical, almost dramatic style.

I understand what they were trying to do, but I found it very difficult to absorb.

There is already so much unfamiliar information coming at you, and then you're expected to remember names, factions, places, events, and history through spoken or text-heavy exposition.

And since I'm a Japanese player playing the game in English, this obviously makes it even harder for me to process everything naturally.

So although I think Amalur has an excellent worldbuilding foundation, I don't think it does a particularly good job of introducing that world to the player.

It tells you about the world much more than it lets you discover the world.

I also found the lack of memorable NPCs disappointing.

There are certainly some memorable characters—the DLC's captain and the drunken mage in the arena come to mind—but outside of the major characters in the main story, surprisingly few NPCs left a strong impression on me.

Crafting and balance

The combat is great, but the balance is another story.

If you want to become as strong as possible, you will eventually discover that crafting your own equipment is ridiculously powerful.

The system allows you to compensate for almost any weakness an item might have.

Low critical chance but high critical damage?

Add components to fix the critical chance.

Want more elemental damage?

You can build for that.

Want more physical damage or defense?

You can build for that too.

The crafting system itself is actually quite impressive.

The problem is that it is too effective.

Eventually, crafted equipment completely outclasses most shop-bought and unique equipment.

Unique weapons and armor often look much cooler, and I wanted to use them, but their stats were frequently so much worse than my crafted gear that I had very little reason to do so.

This also makes most shops almost pointless.

Aside from merchants selling things like backpacks and lockpicks, and certain healers, there isn't much reason to visit most merchants.

Why buy equipment when you can craft something better?

And why buy equipment when the game is constantly throwing gear at you through chests and enemies?

Many shops end up feeling like little more than places where you sell junk.

So why didn't Amalur become another Skyrim?

I know this is a somewhat unfair comparison, but I kept thinking about it while playing.

Amalur reportedly sold over a million copies, so it wasn't some complete commercial failure.

But Skyrim is still being played and discussed today, while Amalur is much less commonly brought up.

Why?

My personal theory is that Amalur simply tried to put too much into one game.

The map is huge.

There are tons of side quests.

The lore is huge.

There are tons of items.

There is crafting.

There are multiple regions.

There are a lot of systems competing for your attention.

Almost everything feels excessive.

If I were designing Amalur as a series, I would actually split it into several games.

The first game could focus only on Dalentarth and the Plains of Erathell.

If that succeeded, the second game could introduce Detyre and Klurikon.

Then the final game could take place in Alabastra.

The worldbuilding could also be revealed gradually, giving players time to understand the setting and making them genuinely curious about what lies beyond the areas they already know.

In other words, I think Amalur needed more time to let the player digest what it was offering.

Final thoughts

After finally finishing the game after all these years, I think the best word I can use to describe what Amalur needed is:

"Condensation."

The world needed to be condensed.

The fields and dungeons needed to be condensed.

The systems needed to be condensed.

The game balance needed to be refined.

I don't think Amalur is a bad game.

But I also don't think it's an especially great game.

It has so many genuinely good ideas that I can understand why I kept buying it again over the years.

At the same time, it has so many things working against those good ideas that I can also understand why I kept abandoning it.

Maybe that's what makes Amalur so interesting to me.

It's a game with an unusually strong flavor—but perhaps there was simply too much of it.

I'd be interested to hear what other people think, especially people who played the original game around the time it was released.

Did you have the same experience with the huge world and side quests, or did those things work for you?

Hi everyone! First time player here. I’m looking for some help.. I was chilling in the tavern in Canneroc (Silken Seat) and I loved the music that was playing. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Yours, a 31 year old from Scotland ✌🏻

Hi everyone. Just a couple of questions:

1 I've just entered the plains and I'm incredibly overpowered (no grinding, I just got though the Detyre first and I'm level 28). Is it normal?

2 How should I explore the region? How should I move? Detyre was actually pretty easy to explore

Do spiders respawn? Killed all of them before obtaining the quest and I can't find others. TIA.

Hello all! Finally got around to playing this game (remaster) after it being sat on my pile of shame for too long, and absolutely loving it.

Just curious about how shield mods work. Let's say I make a shield with the +12% DR mod, does that apply all the time it is equipped, or only when you're actively blocking with it? Is this also true for all mods that appear on shields?

Many thanks in advance ☺️

I posted a month back about how frustrated I was with this game’s combat, to the point where I called it a turn-based game. I just put in 100+ hours into a completionist run in which I finished the base game and all three DLCs and I got a few things to say. Some milestones to see how my playthrough was paced:

• I did a clean sweep of the side quests in each map before moving on to the next area, finishing the Dalentarth content by level 20 before moving on to Plains of Erethall.
• Hit my first million at level 25 just doing side quests and selling loot while leaving the main quest at ‘The Great General’.
• I finished the Plains of Erathell/Rathir content by level 31 and moved on to Detyre. Some faction quests that started in Dalentarth/Erathell ended in Detyre, but once the quest marker sent me back to Detyre while I was still cleaning up Erathell, I stopped tracking them and moved on.
• I moved on to Mel Senshir at level 36.
• I reached level 40 at around the 80th hour. After reaching level 40, I skipped the side quests in Klurikon/Alabastra and went straight for the endgame.
• I moved on to Teeth of Naros and Dead Kel DLC after finishing the main storyline. Those added another ~10 hours to my gameplay. I wasn’t particular about doing all the side quests for the DLC, only enough to get the achievements.
• By the time I got to Fatesworn, I was about done with the game but as a trophy hunter, I grinded through what turned out to be some of the most difficult and frustrating achievements in the game.

I’ll follow up on the combat first, minus the sensationalism.

Re-Reckoning with the Combat, a month later

Here’s my thing: when you take damage in a game, that, to me, is the game giving you a signal that you did something wrong. So what frustrated me about getting stun locked was that I was never given a chance to recalibrate. You’re just forced to sit there marinating in your mistake, to the point where I would’ve preferred taking one big hit that dealt the same amount of damage as the entire stun lock. As an Archmage, I eventually learned to “cancel up” with Mark of Flame to interrupt the finisher, which did make combat feel a lot smoother, so I eased up on the finisher animation lock as a bad thing. Still, I’d count the stun locking as a negative, especially when you’re constantly fighting against mobs.

Heavy are these bags

Encumbrance felt awkward in this game. I maxed out Detect Hidden early to get the most out of each map and find hidden loot, but that also meant constantly maxing out my inventory because the maps are just SO big. Selling items at Star Camp, stashing Unique/Set items in Canneroc, and salvaging components at Silken Seat got established early as part of my core gameplay loop and never really went away even as I unlocked more areas. You spend a lot of time micromanaging your inventory, and the friction takes too much away from the fun of exploring the world.

So, spoiler alert, just kill the widow. She can’t give you what the villagers give you.

Inventory management pretty much became a non-issue by the time I got to Mel Senshir. The glitch where you can keep rebuying backpacks from Illyn Doldran worked until he stopped respawning on me at 200 inventory space which was more than enough.

Big world, invisible walls

Then there’s the exploration itself. The game is big and feels open world, until you realize you can't even run off a cliff unless there's a designated jumping point because of the invisible wall syndrome. If you’re just trying to get down, the game will make you walk all the way around using the developer-approved path instead of simply letting you take the shortcut. The visual geometry doesn’t really communicate where you are on a map, so this had me looking at the minimap more than the world itself, which I’m pretty sure is a sign of design failure. It gets worse when maps start going vertical in the mid game. Detyre was particularly bad about this.

Grindsworn (Look at what they did to my boy)

After I beat the base game, I went straight to Teeth of Naros and then Dead Kel (great DLC btw. I might go back and replay it). Everything felt Amalur until I got to Fatesworn.

I first noticed it when I was unlocking doors to find levers that unlocked other doors in the Madding Wind prison quest.

The feeling got stronger when I had to trial-and-error a bunch of houses in Gale Crossing to find the correct Smuggler’s Bolthole.

And then, I got to the part where I had to close the chaos portals.

Yes, they did - they privately equitized this game.

There's just SO. MUCH. BLOAT, and the Chaos Portal quest makes this especially blatant. Before entering the Chaos Realm, you have to close the surrounding portals. Once you get in, you're greeted by an already complicated maze with levers (plural) that don’t appear on the minimap. Those levers are hidden on one side of the map and open doors (plural) on the other before you get to the Chaos Heart and exiting.

Then you’re supposed to do that at least seven times.

I did all 25.

It got to the point where I had to use a guide to find the secret dev room because I couldn’t tolerate the grind without the movement speed ring, and it still took me four hours to get the achievement.

They also do this thing where they gatekeep certain NPCs, quests, and progression of quests locked behind an evening world state, but this deserves more nuance. If the vision was to make the world feel more alive by making the passage of time more consequential, I can actually respect this direction.

The problem is that it works better on paper than in practice. Without any convenient way to pass the time, the actual experience is fast traveling to an inn, entering, walking to a bed, sleeping, exiting, and fast traveling back—suffering through every loading screen along the way, so you can imagine how much this breaks momentum. Still, I respect that they took a risk here; it just didn’t pay off because it added too much friction to a game that didn’t need any more.

But was it all bad?

Of course not. There had to have been something to it for me to put 100+ hours into the game. Some of the things that kept me coming back were:

• The art direction. The stylization genuinely makes the game aesthetically unique and gives it a personality distinct from the photorealism of that era’s Crysis or Skyrim.
• The sound design. The finisher on the lightning staves makes my ears bleed but everything else has an oomph to it. And the glass breaking crit sound was chef’s kiss to the point where I crafted my mage gear to increase crit.
• Meteor spamming never got old.
• The OST. Dalentarth, House of Ballads, and Gardens of Ysa has this PG fairytale vibe that defines the sound of Amalur for me.
• The lore. The world of Amalur is extensive and well thought out. There’s a small issue with how that lore is delivered through tell and tell instead of show and tell, but the lorestones are a clever way of telling the larger story without stopping the game in its tracks. You can tell the devs were eager to tell you everything about this world because they worked so hard on its mythos, but the NPCs just have so much to say.
• Rast Brattigan, my lovely manic pixie dream elf
• The THEME. Associating the chakrams with the traditional brainy-mage archetype is creative. It’s new. And you know what, it works.

All in all, fun game. 7/10, rounded up.

Hey all after a bug bricked my last sorc/finesse run I’m finally getting a new sorc/finesse character back up and running.

Technically they’re a prodigy right now, I always start runs as universal destiny for the + to all skills and shift over around 20ish when I feel that I have plenty of skill points without it, and more importantly when tier 4 abilities come online for dual spec hybrids.

anyway, I mainly use weapons(chakram +daggers or fae blades) and shadow flare along with lunge here and there. I’m getting to the point where I have points to spice things up more. I do plan on using smoke bomb once it’s a thing, and have my passives on my off-bar so I have room for 1-2 more abilities

Mark of flame has a cool ninja-ey vibe, and fire seems very good at panicking enemies- which means auto-crits and eventually potentially a great mana generator for large fights.

I’ve always heard about people using frost trap but I’ve just never been a fan as I tend to play aggressively. If anyone can sell me on it or elaborate on ways it can be used aggressively or point out something I’m not seeing I’d appreciate it.

Speaking of ice, I think maybe I read something once upon a time about ice barrage being amazing from stealth? But maybe im misremembering.

On a related note… with the level 50 cap from the dlc dual spec builds can actually manage to max out 2 top tier abilities in each of their specs (with some +ability points help), which is kinda insane. I’m definitely leaning parallytic poisons and execution on finesse.

On sorc though I noticed winters embrace does piercing damage, and sphere of retribution does physical damage…. Do either of these benefit from execution, or even envenomed edge? xD I’ve already had a ton of fun with ethereal splinters proccing stuns on my might/sorc conquerer main file.

Is meteor good enough to drop sphere of protection for so I can actually use it? I can see the appeal of just nuking & panicking everything, especially with some of the pack sizes in the dlc.

Thanks for any insight! I know this is generally the most popular spec so looking forward to any cool tricks people have pulled off with it!

From random clips I gathered. Even though it is very rough around the edges I enjoyed my time with it.

I have been playing this game for a while now and really enjoying it. So, I have collected some random books while doing quests or just by wandering around. Some seem like a collection of series of books some are stand alone ones (if that makes sense). Am I alright to just sell them or is there a purpose to them?

Any site, document or other source I can search for more lore about the game outside the game itself?

I must say this. When I meet Agarth on either version, the cutscenes show me a man who's face and teeth give the impression of loving cheese, strong cheese. He also has teeth that remind me of a person who likes to say things like, "The way of the world is Spackled. I sniff my teeth for the weave!"

I want to do the main questline as much as possible before i turn back and finish off teeth of naros dlc and every other side quest and major faction questlines. but i dont want to finish off the main questline before i finish off everything else i listed here.

is there a part of the main quest where im locked into completing the game up to the finale 'reckoning'? if not, lore wise, where do you think it makes sense to stop and go back to complete everything before finishing up with the main questline?

Ive already cleared delantrath and erathir (I know I spelt them wrong, sorry). i just completed enemies in high places.

No spoilers please, its my first run through of the game

I'm playing the game a third time, the last 2 play through I've been playing on casual and then very hard, not realizing switching could fuck everything up. Now I'm level 15 with a (mostly) might build, without any good items I managed to get through all mel senshir until I arrived at Ventrinio's Island and the enemies are much higher than me. Any place, besides gravehal, where I can farm XP? And which build do you guys recommend?

This is my opinion. No offense to anybody, and I would like pure philosophy on this. Here is my claim: people who think KOA is a boring, nascent mmo that never happened are usually people who play as tanks. Before you stop reading and pummel me, just hear me out. I have this thing like the Skyrim thing where stealth archer is a natural path. In KOA, I find myself going into finesse (rouge) mostly, but putting points into Sorcery (magic) only so that I can max out the midrange weapon called chakrams. It allows you to be very fluid and it requires you to dodge and move all the time. I find that my goal is usually to use chakrams and line up enemies as single file as I can, and then move when they move, very quickly. At the same time you can quickly deploy active powers to help out, instead of using a shield. Is this a good way to play for others? Is it as satisfying to you as it is to me? if you are a happy koa player who is a tank, how is it awesome to you? I want to have fun being a tank, as well.

Would anyone be willing to share a PC Re-Reckoning save file just before or after the final boss in the main game? I would like to play only the new expansion Fatesworn (which is available after killing the final boss) because I have already played the old version of the game. Thank you in advance.

So I'm in St.Hadwyn's Mission and trying to buy the gem unbinding service from the guy but I can't choose to get the gem from unbindable gear. Only the item can be chosen. And yes, these are socketed gems, not crafted gear.

Edit: Apparently the problem was that for some reason I couldn't choose it with controller (tried every single button) but KB+M worked.

I remember playing it on PS3 but almost at the end of generation so I didn't finish the story back then. Later I bought the Re-reckoning remaster on PS4, played for 20 some hours but still didn't completed the campaign, finally i bought it for switch so I could play on the go during lunch time and everywhere I could.

Finished the main story, about to start the DLC and the expansion, loved it, still nothing else quite like it, it reminds me of Fable 1 and 2 and the classic God of War trilogy.

Maybe the story could've been a bit better but overall great action RPG, hope we get a sequel someday.

since the last time i posted how enthusiastic I was about this game, I have put in another 15 hours or so. and...this game really doesnt disappoint. im almost 20 hours in and im still not sick of it. its repetitive and all but for some reason i love the hell out of it. i dunno how or why but i love this game so dang much.

i admit, at the start i really did struggle because my gear sucked, but now im having a blast. im about level 15 and the game still doesnt feel as imbalanced as people say it is. i enjoy hitting higher levels constantly and having to be resourceful enough to somehow quickly find better gear so i wouldnt struggle with every encounter.

i dont dread any aspect of it, which i start feeling for any game once i hit the 30 hour mark, we shall see...

this is the first game that i am seriously considering replaying haha. when i was a kid i always replayed my fav games, but ever since im an adult, ive stopped. but i wouldnt mind replaying this. this game is so underrated. if they ever make a sequel i hope they invest more in marketing.

So the best example i can give is in Yolvan right near the road that takes you down to Webwood, there’s a area to the left that usually spawns sprites and wolves but in my current playthrough it’s spawning bears and wolves instead.

Also in Southern Yolvan/Northern Webwood i got ambushed by a rather large group of spiders, i have passed by that area countless times and NEVER has that happened.

There’s a lot of randomness to this game and tbh whilst i ain’t a big fan of how few enemies drop loot or gold, the sheer seemingly random stuff that happens makes this game faaaarrrr more interesting than i had originally thought it would be.

Has anyone else noticed this randomness or am i just not understanding the game mechanics right now?

Either way this game keeps entertaining me in so many ways!!!!