Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Preview

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is an upcoming open world action RPG. Cheat Code Central was fortunate enough to get into a closed-door demo session for the game, and we took extensive notes. So far, it's looking pretty interesting.

In RPGs, story is king, and our demo began with an introduction to the plot of Reckoning. At the start of the game, your character is resurrected from the dead in the Well of Souls. While this sounds pretty neat, it comes with some consequences. The worst drawback is that the resurrection process has left your character without a fate.

From a gameplay standpoint, however, this is the perfect place for a character to be. Having no fate means that you will forge your own path, and Reckoning is definitely designed with this in mind. When you begin the game, you don't select a class. Your skills and abilities are your choice, but they are influenced by the decisions you make throughout the game. There is the equivalent of a skill tree, divided into three sections: might, sorcery, and finesse. You get to choose how your character advances up this tree, completely unhindered by the class restrictions that normally come with the skill tree structure.

Aside from combat skills, there are skills that help you accomplish various things throughout the world. For example, there is the persuasion skill, and a more rogue-ish skill that lets you open locks. Since some of the treasure chests you'll encounter are locked by magic, you will need to learn to dispel them. Dispelling a lock opens up a minigame, similar to the way hacking works in BioShock.

Your character's appearance is also completely up to you. Reckoning features a fairly deep character creation menu, where you can modify things like hair color, and even add tattoos and piercings.

The real meat of the game, though, is its open world. And this thing is enormous. Reckoning has over 125 dungeons, 4 major cities, and countless smaller villages scattered across its five regions. No matter which aspect of role-playing games you enjoy most, you're going to have a lot of content to play with.

Of course, with such a large area to explore, there will be vast amounts of loot to collect. This will translate to some elite gear, and we were even told there would be armor sets that give players set bonuses. Having multiple pieces of armor in the same set will give you various stat boosts.

The combat in Reckoning is action-based, with a heavy emphasis on hack and slash. We saw some of the common hack and slash elements, like juggles, dashes, and slow-motion finishes. If hacking and slashing aren't necessarily your thing, there are also chances for stealth kills. In fact, we were shown a couple stealth kills in action, and they are absolutely brutal. The game character snuck behind a guard, grabbed him around the neck, and quickly stabbed him repeatedly in the side as blood spurted out. It was a little bit over the top—and hardly what you'd call silent—but still very satisfying.

There will be crafting as well. Some of your options include blacksmithing and sagecrafting. (Apparently sagecrafting has to do with collecting gems, and it sounds like these gems can be slotted in your gear to give it additional enhancements.)

We were eventually shown a very tiny snippet of what is being called "Reckoning." This is a state your player can enter, during which time slows and attacks become more powerful.

At the end of the demo, we were shown a video of one of the bosses in the game. To prepare us for what we were about to see, the video began with an overhead shot of a battle. After we got a sense of scale, an enormous Cyclops entered the fray, smashing soldiers as if they were ants. As impossible as this fight may seem, we saw the game's protagonist standing atop a cliff, attacking the creature's single eye whenever it was open.

Of all the things we got to see during this demo, one recurring theme stood out: the choices you make matter. Whether it's strategy, gear selection, skill tree advancement, or morality, every decision you make will affect the way this game plays out.

Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface of this enormous game, but I'm sure there will be more information on this game in the months leading up to its 2012 release.