This is a game where you can feel the influence of Ken Rolston at every turn, and in my eyes it’s some of his best work. Which is a shame, because Amalur and its two DLC The Legend of Dead Kel and Teeth of Naros are quite frankly spectacular. But if being published so close to Skyrim wasn’t a boon for KoA:R, having your game studio disintegrate overnight in a scandal of mismanagement was like a hammer to the back of the head and the game never recovered. Then of course there’s the tale of the implosion of 38 Studios, which is a longer and sadder tale than I can go into here. Skyrim had a similar effect, whether you love it or hate it - the tsunami of its impact didn’t lift all boats, to put it mildly. Think about how many games got swamped when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out and seemingly overnight the internet fell in love with a dreary realism simulator that felt like making weird flexes about how lovingly it rendered horse testicles. One is, I think, the fact that it’s a CRPG that launched within a few months of Skyrim. It’s a lush, lavish game with hours and hours of questing and gameplay, a character progression system that’s flexible and robust, a satisfyingly and endearingly cheesy storyline about fate, destiny and heroism that manages to subvert quite a few ‘heroic fantasy’ tropes even as it plays them exceedingly straight, and in general is just an amazing game.
It’s on my top ten list for best CRPG of all time. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is one of the best CRPGs published in the past ten years.
And then there are games like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which are released a few months later and which just seem to miss people’s attention despite being, hands down, one of the best games of the past decade. There are some games that debut with a huge splash, such as The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim, which came out in November of 2011 and dominated pretty much every platform it was available on, with legions of loyal fans seemingly overnight.
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