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Shagger Says: Welcome one at all! Ladies and Gentlemen! Boys and Girls of all ages! I present to you the Shining Star of my first ever Steam Refund! First let me gush for a moment about how brilliant a game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is. A massive, fantasy western style RPG with some superb combat that allows you to use any of a vast array of weapons regardless of class and doesn't limit you to a specific class through the fate waver system. The graphics are colourful and vibrant, there's a great variety environments to explore and has an epic tale to tell. A must-play for any fan of the genre. So you see, I love this game and wanted to sing the praises of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning to high heavens, especially to people who haven't played the original. Unfortunately, and I hate to say it, but THQ Nordic and KAIKO, this is not good enough. Usually when I do reviews I go into a lot of detail about the game itself, but this isn't really a review of the game, this is a review of the re-master, and as you may have guessed, it's not going to be kind. Still, I should talk about the game itself at least to some extent. So sharpen your bows and string your swords because it's time to get it all wrong with Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning! A King Indeed Kingdoms of Amular: The Game Itself As previously stated, I'm not going to go into too much detail here as this isn't really the focus of the review, but here's what you need to know. Kingdoms of Amalur is a western style fantasy RPG with a strong focus of varied combat and player advancement options. There is a choice of typical three basic attributes of magic, warrior type and rouge/thief (defined as sorcery, might and finesse in Kingdoms) that any RPG fan will be familiar with. These attributes define the skill trees, an example below: As you level up, you acquire point to spend on these skill trees to either unlock new abilities or upgrade current ones, typical stuff. For example, as you see here on the sorcery tree, you can see new spells to unlock and upgrade as well as improvements to be made on you comat with certain weapons like Staves and Chakrams. That's right, there's Chakrams in the game; I'm not sure why the Chakrams are considered primarily a mage style weapon in the game, but that doesn't matter because, as aforementioned, you can use any weapon in the game regardless of your class or abilities. The controls are very intuitive, so easy to switch from a bow to war hammer or whatever. You can also any spell you have unlocked regardless of how you're advancing your character, and many spells are useful to multiple classes, so that's worth looking into when you first access the skill trees. As you spend points on these skill trees, you also unlock new classes with their own perks that get more beneficial the more points spent. You need not just spend your points one skill tree, you can spend them on two of even all three to unlock mixed classes if wanted: Whilst the variety and freedom this system offers is certainly a great thing, the best bit is that you don't even have to stick with it. There are persons in the game called Fateweavers, a kind of trades person if you like that can, for a price, reset the skills and abilities back to zero, so you redistribute them all over again. This is a very coinvient system, and convince to the player is a common theme in the game's design overall. For example, in other western RPG's (*cough, cough, Shyrim, cough*), selling your excess gear and loot is a pain in the ass. The stores have little money without the right high-end perks attained, so odds are you'll have to go to multiple store to sell each of your unwanted items mixed with all the stuff you do want, ONE. AT A DAMN. TIME. In Kingdoms, find am item you don't want to keep, but you would like to sell. You hit one button to put it into the "Junk" section of your inventory. When you get to a store, you start to barter, then once again with a single button press, you sell all of your "Junk" in one go. No fuss. I know it's a small thing, but once you see it you can't help but wonder why doesn't every game do this? The star of the show though, is the combat. Brilliantly animated, fluid, skill and timing based combat a great variety of enemies weapons with various threats, poisons and elements to imply enough strategy to keep your head in the game. Like I said, no weapon is locked of to you and the game controls beautifully with a controller or a mouse and keyboard. It might easier to show the combat the let it speak for itself. And yes, this player IS using the Chakrams, consider it an apology for my bad mood in not using the Xena clip earlier. And then, there's this; There's a purple bar just below your health meter that charges in combat. When full, you can trigger a fate shift. For a short time, time slows down, you become invulnerable and deal more damage. Take down as any enemies as you can in the time you have then performing a finisher with a QTE that will have you press a random control repeatedly to build up and XP boost. Not only is this visually very cool to watch with some great and brutal kill animations, but because of the XP boost and unlike supers in other games, you'll find yourself wanting to use it every chance you get. Story, well there is one obviously, and I like it. I'm not gonna lie, there are better stories in RPG games, especially more recently, but this is still holds up and keeps you interested, and has unique set up. First, there's a war, because of course there is. More specifically, a war between the mortal races of man and Alfar (A kind of Elf, I suppose) and the Fae of the Winter court. Now the Fae are amongst the most interesting elements in this world. Immortal beings tied to nature, they live, die then rise again to fulfil their never-ending, always repeating roles in "The Song", call it a pre-written fate. There are two types, the Fae of the Summer Court and the Fae of the Winter Court. For example, growth, like Summer and decay, like Winter. Neither are technically good nor evil, just represent different elements of nature The new king of the winter court and leader of the Winter Cour clan called the Tuatha, has abandoned his role in The Song and is now out to conquer. This war has been raging for over 20 years and the mortal races, according to fate, are destined to lose. As for you, you're dead. I mean really dead. So the games over before it starts, of course not. You are resurrected by something called the Well of Souls, but that's not all they well has done to you. You have become untethered from fate, so lets call the protagonist "The Fateless", and this makes you potential threat to the Tuatha because you possess the unique ability to control fate as you will, so even though fate says the Tuatha will win this war, you and you alone, can change that. You may have lost your memories from your previous life, but you can still find out who you are as well as turn the tide in this war. That's the goal of the game. So, this is a very good game, and it is massive, don't expect to spend less than 70 hours on a first play through doing side quests and stuff along the way. Unfortunately, this game is no longer available on PC because of a publisher change between the original and the remaster. What we have now for PC and current gen consoles, is this... Frame-Rate Weaver The "Re-Master" First thing first, it's important to know my PC specs before moving on. My Specs on my ASUS TUF Gaming FX505DV Laptop. CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H. Base Clock 2.3GHz, Boost 4GHz RAM: 2x8GB DDR4 (16BG total) GPU: GTX2060 with 6GB of V-RAM and up 1830Mhz boost clock. Game Installed on a Patriot P200 SSD 2TB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive 2.5 with up to 530MB of read rate and data transfer. To put it simply, that's well above the recommended spec's; And honestly, that isn't even that much more than the original, a game I can run at 50+fps at max setting just fine; And yet, when I try to run the game at settings I know this laptop can handle... And do you get a massive improvement in visuals? Well one of these screenshots is from Re-Reckoning, the other from the origonal game, can you tell which is which? Please answer in the poll I've provided and/or comment below. Number 1 And Number 2 The short answer is no, you don't get much of an improvement. Some people will still claim that it's my system not having enough guts to run the game better, but you're wrong. Now, I am most definitely not the resident tech sensei on this forum, I do think @Crazycrab or someone else might make a strong case for that, but I was monitoring the performance stats whilst getting these captures. Sadly, the overlay didn't appear in the capture itself, but what I found was the GPU and RAM usage was exactly the same in both games, only the CPU usage was higher on the re-master. What was really striking though was low these stats actually were. On the re-master between 45-50% of RAM, hovering around 40-50% on the CPU, and most importantly just 10% of GPU power, that went down as low as 3%. And remember, with the exception of the CPU (at 25% usage give or take of the original game), both were exactly the same. Like I said, I'm no expert and I'll never claim to be and I would actually ask someone reading this that has more knowledge to shed light on this, but I think that because both games are still using the same engine, that engine is only drawing what it needs to load the original game's textures. However, despite how it looks, the re-master is loaded with higher resolution textures (that's why the filesize is so much larger), but the engine isn't compensating for the extra time it really needs to load these textures, and that I think is that is what's affecting the frame rate. If someone with better knowlege wants to give input, I'll update this. In short, this is a software issue, and something KAIKO and THQ Nordic should have thought about when developing this. Or they just couldn't be bothered. As far as I can tell, some are having problems, others aren't as is the useual with these things, but that doesn't excuse this. I'm also a little disspointed that the new game isn't compatible with saves from the origonal, I honestly don't think that would have been much work to accomplish given that the inner software workings are basically the same in both. Apparetly there has been gameplay improvements (I did see a new very hard diffculty mode, so kudos for that), but I'll never get far enough into the game to know what they are. Besides, why fix what was never broken in the first place? Decide Your Fate: Conclusion Well, it's simple, really. Another great game ruined by a rubbish port. I put is togeather partly becasue I was pissed about this, but also wanted to warn people. It may work better for you on your set up than it did for me, but doesn't mean that this is OK. It's not like all hope is lost for this title, there will be patches and the re-master will get a brand new exclusive DLC expantion next year, but for now either avoiding this re-master or picking it up on console would be my, as always, humble advice.

These days every major game has some sort of data collection built into them that analyses and sends information on your playing habits and in game choices back to the developer. How do you feel about this? I have to say I don't mind it if it is used to bettering games. I look at it as if a poll or questionnaire that you constantly fill. But there are also very bad examples. Like recently when a developer used this data to publicly shame gamers for their in-game choices. This is unacceptable. This is like the chef coming out of the kitchen in a restaurant and slapping the client in the face for ordering two courses that don't match in the opinion of the chef.

Hello everyone, my name is Anders. I'm from Norway, and I've been playing video games pretty much my whole life. I haven't been part of a gaming forum in close to ten years, and I've been missing it a lot, so I look forward to getting to know you all!

Seriously though, hey. I'm a 38-year-old woman from a magical place called rural America and a massive success, having graduated high school and wound a grocery bagger, but let's get on to what you really want to know about: I've been gaming since I first played the original Metroid when I was 5. My dad had an NES he'd bought the year before, but he hadn't succeeded in getting me into games like Super Mario Bros. or Ghosts n' Goblins. Metroid's more exploratory nature though made me want to play and I've been gaming ever since. Well with some pauses here and there. Really I'd say you could divide my peak points of interest in gaming into two time periods: the fourth console generation period (essentially the early 1990s) and the last decade or so. The leap to 3D was actually tough for me to adapt to initially. Most of my favorite games these days are indies. Think I'm biased in favor of the often more free-spirited nature of those. In the old days when I was focused on pissing off my parents, I was mostly into tournament fighting games like Street Fighter II, Killer Instinct, and the classic Mortal Kombat games, brawlers like the Golden Axe and Streets of Rage games, and some first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. My parents wouldn't even let me buy a lot of those games, so I had to liberate some of them from the store (security wasn't what it is today) or aggressively borrow them from friends and hide 'em. But once I discovered Out of This World and Final Fantasy VI, I also began to see video games as a storytelling medium. I've also retained a soft spot for the Metroid franchise over the years, though I have...thoughts...about how it's been treated of late. Super Metroid remains one of my all-time favorite games to this day. Here are my favorite video games organized by year of (American) release: 1977: Surround 1978: Adventureland 1979: Adventure 1980: Zork I 1981: Utopia 1982: Zork III 1983: Kangaroo 1984: Girl's Garden 1985: A Mind Forever Voyaging 1986: Leather Goddesses of Phobos 1987: The Great Giana Sisters 1988: Phantasy Star 1989: The Guardian Legend 1990: The Secret of Monkey Island 1991: Out of This World 1992: Alone in the Dark 1993: Doom 1994: Super Metroid 1995: Chop Suey 1996: Tomb Raider 1997: Tomb Raider II 1998: Magic Knight Rayearth 1999: Drakan: Order of the Flame 2000: The Longest Journey 2001: Ico 2002: Metroid Prime 2003: Beyond Good & Evil 2004: Yume Nikki 2005: Psychonauts 2006: Okami 2007: Portal 2008: Mirror's Edge 2009: Muramasa: The Demon Blade 2010: Heavy Rain 2011: Portal 2 2012: Papo & Yo 2013: Gone Home 2014: This War of Mine 2015: Crypt of the NecroDancer 2016: Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor 2017: Butterfly Soup 2018: Celeste 2019: Knights and Bikes 2020: The Last of Us Part II Favorite Multi-Year Release: Kentucky Route Zero So that is me.

Just started playing The Medium. Game is really good. I am genuinely surprised with the atmosphere, graphics and gameplay. I like that they went back to the old Silent Hill/RE style fixed camera. It really adds to fear factor.

I don't think the renegade thing is that bad. I see it more as a disappointment than trying to guilt gamers. I was referring to this incident in my post but I didn't want to specify it in my OP because this topic shouldn't be about any specific case. The thing is that 90% of players will always go on the beaten path and miss things. Still that attention to detail which is only noticed by a handful of enthusiasts is what separates OK games from Great games.

Telemetry, my dear Watson. Sorry, couldn't resist. I think actual user data can be significantly more useful than feedback forums for bettering games. Seeing kill stats, achievements, and other milestones can provide much more to developers than subjective experience relayed during a heated forum discussion. However, data isn't entirely reliable as achievements can be doctored by cheat engines and exploits, and anti-cheat can be bypassed or outright destroyed. I concur. One such example is with Mr. John Ebenger, formerly of Mass Effect, said that only ~8% of users went into the Renegade content which they "put a lot of work into the [...] content too :(". If the intent was to shame it backfired, because statistically most people don't like being nasty even in video games and this isn't going to help. However I still found the statistic interesting all the same, and wouldn't have known that if not for them stating such on Twitter. But then don't try to guilt trip people into using the Renegade system; instead make a better system. One thing I enjoy is in episodic games you're often shown the choices players made, which sort of gives away that most choices don't matter. In Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishment you can see the player stats at the end of each chapter, and they're suspiciously skewed to look exactly like my results which came from a guide for easy achievements. Hmm.... Developers and publishers must be prepared to accept that they can't know how good their game is until they release it into the wild. That goes for Atlus flagging Persona streams and Let's Plays incorrectly for copyright claims due to spoilers. That goes for Ubisoft having review scores updated after microtransactions are added. And that goes for BioWare for not seperating morality from social attitude in Mass Effect. By all means they can collect data, but they can't complain when the data goes against their expectations. Ours is a fickle demographic, and is all the better for it. I don't think we can escape data collection without turning off our internet, changing our phone numbers and directly addressing our mailing lists, but we can do more to be wary of it, and I believe there can be fights for legislation over what data is harvested, how and with what consent from customers. ^^

I hope they do some of such medieval stories though. I like medieval plots in the horror. no idea what was their point for the village though. have to wait to play that.

This is one reason I am on android playing games which are more or less can be played offline and I am happy with that.. no need for the online always type of games.

I'm very sad to learn that one of the world's most talented 3D digital artists and the man responsible for creating The Thunderjaw and the other iconic robotic creatures in Horizon: Zero Dawn, one of my favourite games, has passed away aged just 36. Mike Nash was best known and most revered for his work on HZD, but has had shown talent in creating beautiful, realistic, futuristic designs for many years. The design of the machines in Horizon: Zero Dawn was such a huge part of the game's identity that it's impossible to understate just how critical Mike's work was to the game's success and a huge part of what we so loved about the game. It's a shame he won't see the last of his work published as part of Horizon: Forbidden West later this year and even sadder that's the last any of us will likely see of it. Here's a Game Rant article on the story. I thought I'd share some images of his designs as a little tribute. RIP.

If a game is well designed it needs no handholding at all, because you'll know intuitively what do to. The games where you have to guess the mind of the designer to figure out what on earth are you supposed to do are badly designed. What I find most annoying is when games don't even allow you to enter the game's main menu and adjust options before completing a tutorial / prologue mission. I also dislike when games start spawning hints at you when you step off the beaten path. Just let me explore at my own, pace OK?

It's not so much the amount but the quality of it. I don't want anything to do with quest markers, and telling me to turn them off often highlights the design problems with doing so: very rarely does a quest with quest markers come with enough information to find it oneself. Let's use two Elder Scrolls games as an example of what I mean: In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind I am given a quest to find a cave and clear it out. By the questgiver I am given the reason and the directions. My own character will decide to make a note of this in their journal so not to get lost on the way. By the world I am given landmarks and signposts, so I can identify my current location, surrounding areas to which I can map a route and my progress to the quest location. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim I am given a quest to find a cave and clear it out. By the questgiver I am given the reason. My own character will decide to make a note of this in their journal. By the world I am given signposts, so I can identify my current location and surrounding areas. By the user interface I am given quest markers which will point me to my destination as-the-crow-flies. I prefer the former because it makes sense that a new arrival in Morrowind won't know anything about the surrounding area. In Skyrim, most of the Dragonborn's knowledge comes not from the world, but the purely mechanical side. I didn't mention The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion because it's awkwardly stuck between the two at that regard. It depends on which quest writer was in that day, I suppose. Quest markers can have a place in a setting such as The Elder Scrolls because the entirety of it is penned by an unreliable narrator, and markers are the only thing that one can truly trust in the games. While it wasn't intentional there's an infamous quest in Morrowind that incorrectly guides the player via the journal and quest text, but given the setting's rumours, sketchy accounts of past events in later games and how their greater universe behaves, it's appropriate that people get information wrong. But that's still frustrating, however much sense it might arguably make in-universe. Sorry to blather on. Just because I'm more against quest markers than I am for them doesn't mean direction can't be obtuse. Games such as Dark Souls have 'natural selection' direction, which is to say 'screw around and find out', but the first game at least tells you your primary goals such as ringing the bells, reaching Anor Londo, and dealing with the four (technically seven if we count the Four Kings as seperate entities) main antagonists. Dark Souls II and III tell you to find "greater souls" and hope you can find your way via the breadcrumb trail of bonfires. If you can't, join the statistics. But in all, it depends on when I want it, not so much how much I want it. Not every game has to be as up-in-the-air as Dark Souls nor does every game have to use a journal. Sometimes you just want to turn off your brain, use a quest marker and get a sword. A bit like a familiar, easy to read toilet book.

Funny, I don't recall recording anything for a video game.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone specific. But what I can say, is someone that is a total opposite of me IRL. Someone that doesn't wake up pissed off. Pissed that they are still alive, that is. Maybe someone who sees value in life. Princess Zelda perhaps, but that's too easy a choice. Rinoa maybe.

I get a bit of an empty feeling when I reach a certain point in some games. Sometimes it feels like the characters have reached a point that they're not the same people you started out with. Like everything has changed and no one is left. I don't like reaching that point. It's why often these days, I play to a certain point in a game and keep it there. I don't advance the story anymore.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Maybe the way Mortal Kombat was hated by politicians and parental groups, but looking back, the content was relatively tame compared to today's standards. Oh, the big one that I can recall now, is Night Trap. That game where you have to trap masked vampires or something. It was a weird game, and people thought it was literally porn or a snuff film. It was far from that. It was more a corny interactive movie than anything else.

As far as games go that I played the most: DeusEx (2000) - This game should be obligatory to know for every game developer, it lays down the rules of game design 101 that every game should adhere to (sadly most does not, or only to a few of them) despite finishing it dozens of times, it still has secrets I'm yet to uncover. Mass Effect 2 (2010) - It is the most well rounded game I played, storytelling, gameplay, characters, it all comes together. XCOM2 (2016) - it's addictive, I've played it over 1100 hours and counting. With mods I can go on forever probably. Since most encounters are procedurally generated it never gets repetitive. Despite the fact that I've probably restarted the campaign over 100 times. Mafia: City of Lost Heaven (2002) - The game that brought together two of my favorite game genres, driving simulations and story driven action games. BeamNG Drive (? - Still Early Access) - Sure it's hard to call this a game yet, but for me as far as I can remember crashing cars in spectacular ways was always fun in of itself, and currently this has the best and most realistic damage model of all available driving games. Gran Turismo 4 (2004) - The best the series has ever been, sadly it's been all downhill since then, with sports being rock bottom But there is another category of favorites, that I might only have played once, but that 10-20 hours was such a ride that I'd not have wanted to miss them at any cost. The Last of Us Part II (2020) this is a very recent title but it quickly found its way to the top of my favorites. Beyond: Two Souls (2013) The game itself might have been dreadful, but the story and the sense of control you had over the fates of characters made this a thrill, I actually feared for the well being of fictional characters in a game. Alien Isolation (2014) - Fear itself, when it's not super scary, it's creepy, but danger always lurks around every corner, the atmosphere of this game is so ominous, that I think it beats the actual movie it is based on. Call of Duty Infinite Warfare (2016) - It's only fitting that the most universally hated instalment of the series would be my favorite. The contrarian in me rejoices. Peace to the fallen - the only time an end credits made me cry. Alpha Protocol (2010) - This is an objectively bad game, with serious flaws, but it gets some things right, that no other game did, it must be experienced at least once for this Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) - This is more of an honourable mention, because this is to appreciate the whole Splinter Cell Franchise with all its lows and ups, but this is the best part of the series so it gets on the list.

Scalps, toes, souls, the usual. Seriously though, no really. I've got a modest amount of retro gaming stuff and one or two bits of heavy metal memorabilia, but nothing I'd call a collection.

I had the same issue a couple weeks ago, and just said fuck it.