How Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Got the Single-player MMO Right

Rowan Kaiser’s latest WRPG column is a write-up on Kingdoms of Amalur: Recknoning, which he praises for having art on par with World of Warcraft without borrowing its combat mechanics. Here’s a snip:

As soon as you pop out of the short opening dungeon in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the game presents you with a lush, verdant forest setting to wander around. The trees are greener than normal trees, the plants vast and purple. The setting of the entire first act takes place in the cartoonishly gorgeous forest of Dalentarth. What Reckoning seems to get, that most of the games described as single-player MMORPGs do not, is that the aesthetics more than the mechanics are critical to conveying that idea of being a part of a huge world.

Instead, most of those single-player games have relied on adapting the mechanics of their massively multiplayer counterparts, which seems mistaken and backwards to me. The incredible success of Everquest and World of Warcraft made the MMORPG combat model easier to spot in single-player games. That form of slow, real-time battles of class-based parties with special abilities reliant on cooldown meters made its way to into some of the highest-profile single-player games of the last decade: Dragon Age: Origins in the west and Final Fantasy XII in Japan, for example. The flawed assumption in the translation of multiplayer combat to single-player RPGs is that MMORPGs are popular because of, not despite, that combat.

Specifically, there are a large number of compromises which are necessary to make massively multiplayer games accessible. Combat is real-time so that slow players don’t annoy everyone, but it’s slowly-paced with cooldowns so that players with better reflexes don’t dominate.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning avoids that combat mechanic trap by making its battles something that could only work in a single-player setting. These take their cues from action games like God of War, with fast-paced combos, dodging, and stylized executions. This makes Reckoning play smoothly combat is fast and fun, and appropriate to the solo, single-character structure of the game. Since the combat isn’t stressful or dissonant, it’s easier to focus on exploration and the world of Amalur.